Jesus would claim victory by being defeated; he would establish his reign by serving and dying.

 

 

PALM SUNDAY  2021

 

 

Today begins the most sacred week of the Church’s entire liturgical year.   We   will walk with Jesus through Holy Week in the pattern of his death and resurrection.  Once again we renew the commitment that was made on the day of our baptism, perhaps many moons ago, when our parents and godparents desired that we become disciples of Jesus and enter into the mystery of our sharing in the dying and rising of Jesus.  The week we call holy invites us to enter into the heart of our faith. 

 

 

In our sharing of the paschal mystery of Jesus, I invite you to think about dying.  I don‘t mean this in a morbid sense, but I invite you to reflect on a most important component of our spiritual journey.  God wants us to die before we die.  The dying we embrace during these days is the dying to our demons, our sinfulness, and our self-centeredness.   For us to share in the risen life of Jesus, we need to die to all that is in us that does not reflect the Gospel message of Jesus.  Plain and Simple, how do I live more fully in the service of others, how do I wash the feet of God’s poor?

 

In the midst of our grappling with this pandemic that has turned our life upside down, may we have the grace to die to our fears and anxiety so that we can live trusting in Jesus as the Lord and Savior of our life.

 

St Paul in the second Scripture reading reveals who Jesus is: “Christ Jesus, though He was in the form of God, did not regard equality to God something to be grasped, rather he emptied himself taking the form of a slave…he humbled himself.”

 

Who are we as the disciples of Jesus?  Our God wants us to embody the humble actions of Jesus:  The God who emptied himself, the God who humbled himself, the God who sat on a donkey.

 

Traditionally during Holy Week, we focus on the sufferings of Jesus.  But it is not suffering, not even the sufferings of Jesus, that makes this week holy.  Rather it is holy because of love -- the reconciling love of God who has come to live among us in the person of Jesus Christ.

 

 

For me, where I stand, God’s love is the only thing that stands between utter chaos and an attempt to stand whole and complete in the middle of this pandemic crisis.  God’s love is the only thing that makes sense out of suffering, conflict, and tragedy. God’s love does not do away with suffering; the very fact of the cross should teach us that.  God’s love makes it possible to deal with suffering, to remember it, to share in it, and, yes, even to celebrate it.  God’s love is the essence of the story of salvation.

 

In the passion account, Jesus looks like a victim.  He is not triumphant as we understand triumph.  Instead he appears to be a failure.  Judging by one set of standards, Jesus has not met our expectations.  But according to another standard – the standard of unconditional love –he has far surpassed our expectations.   At once regal and lowly, he brought healing and holiness to others through his own pain and brokenness.  He would claim victory by being defeated; he would establish his reign by serving and by dying.  His crown would be a weave of thorns.

 

As we gather in prayer on this day, may we be very conscious that Palm Sunday is not about ancient history.  It is about NOW.  As we reflect upon the Passion account, we see the first apostles, despite their closeness to Jesus, do not stand by Him in His suffering. 

 

They wrestled with the truth that Jesus refuses to save the world by what we recognize as power.  He still does not use divine power to wipe out this pandemic, poverty, crime, oppression, injustice, or error. 

 

Yes, our life has been turned upside down by Covid-19 but as the disciples of Jesus the mission given to us by Jesus Himself has not changed.  We still need to be faithful to this mission and so we ask:  Will we the followers of Jesus be still willing to turn the other cheek, walk the extra mile and forgive seventy times seven times?  Will we the followers of Jesus evoke from our contemporaries a comment like that was paid to our ancestors in faith: “See how they love one another.”  Will our parish community be a beacon of God’s merciful love in the community of Penfield and Webster?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On the first Palm Sunday, Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey with palm branches being spread on the road. When he entered Jerusalem, the whole city was in turmoil: “Who is this?” people asked.  In Jesus, God is the one who identifies with and enters into the experience of the people He loves.  Today God is sending us a message through Jesus in this Palm Sunday celebration that states that Jesus once again accompanies us in these days of the pandemic.  God wishes to be in solidarity with us.  All of life –even the confinement of our social distancing – is so precious that God wishes to be in solidarity with us.  God will embrace and transform our sufferings so that we may enter more fully into the risen life of Jesus.

 

Have a blessed day.

 

The new covenant: instead of giving the Israelites rules to follow, God wants to infuse their hearts with the fire of divine love.

 

Fifth Sunday of Lent  B  2021

 

From today’s First Scripture reading from the prophet Jeremiah we read:  “The days are coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah…I will place my law within then and write it upon their hearts; I will be their God, and they shall be my people.”

There is so much beautiful humanness that can be found in the faith journey of the prophet Jeremiah.  I recommend that we can find our own faith journey in the story of Jeremiah.  In the first chapter of the book we learn that God shaped Jeremiah in his mother’s womb for this important work.   The prophet’s first reaction was fear and said that he was not qualified.  He was much too young.  We might say just the opposite of Jeremiah: “we are too old.  It’s someone else’s turn.”  But God was able to break through the resistance of Jeremiah.  With the simple yet powerful faith assurance that “I will be with you,” God was able to break through the resistance of Jeremiah, and he opened himself up to the mission that God had for him.  I wonder what would happen if all of us opened ourselves up to the plan that God has for us.  My hunch is that the whole community we live in would experience the love, the service, the friendship that would radiate out from us.  We would value the dignity of each and every person.

Jeremiah used the awesome image of clay in the hands of the potter as a way of describing God’s desire to shape and form us into a community that has a spiritual center of trusting in God’s plan for us and how we are called to be for one another as brothers and sisters.  God’s plan is to fashion us into a people who trust and care for one another.  But like clay unresponsive in the hands of the potter, the people of Israel remained unresponsive to the Word of God.  Is this true also for us at times?  Even in the season, we can be deaf to the voice of God in our lives.

To call the Israelites back to their original mission as a people of God, Jeremiah uses the expression “new covenant.”   The Scripture says the “Days are coming when I will make a new covenant with the House of Israel.”  What makes this covenant new is not its content because God still speaks of my law, but the newness of the covenant refers to the place where it can be found.

 

 

  The old covenant was associated with commandments written in stone.  The people had to match to standards that were outside of them.  But this proclamation from Jeremiah says the covenant is written in their hearts.  Instead of giving them rules to follow, God wants to infuse their hearts with the fire of divine love.  When the covenant is scripted in their hearts, they will share the very passion of God.

They will experience the presence and the forgiveness of God written in their hearts.  They would be a people no longer commanded by external standards, but God’s love and God’s law is to be found with them.  By faithfulness to God’s covenant that is within, we become our best selves, the people we are called to be.

It is so important to hear that God will pardon sin and no longer remember them.

As we reflect on this Jeremiah reading, this leaves us with one question.  Are we willing to risk the cost of having God’s law written on our hearts?  Our covenant with God is written in our hearts.  Our spirituality is part of our DNA.  Yes, we all have demons that can throw us off-center, which can derail us from being our best selves:  our self-centeredness, our greed, our lust, our need for power and control.

But if our covenant is written in our hearts, it is not even enough to set aside an hour a week to give thanks to God at Mass, or even to tithe 10% of our time, talent, and treasure;  it is not enough to be a part-time disciple of Jesus.  We need to be all in. Everything we say and do is part of our spirituality and our covenant with God.  God is present to us 24/7.

The Letter to the Hebrews, the second Scripture reading, then points us to the new covenant.  The new covenant is the mystery of Jesus that is written in our hearts.  The spirit of Jesus is within us, the community of the baptized.

This Letter to the Hebrews points to the mystery of Jesus within us and also the shocking truth that “Jesus learned obedience through suffering.”  Jesus had to struggle to live his vocation.

 

As a man, Jesus become conscious of fulfilling his Father’s will through suffering, the cross, and the crucifixion.  Jesus revealed God’s merciful love for us and became the source of eternal salvation to all who believe in Him.  Jesus had already gone to the heart of the human struggle for meaning, and by his suffering he learned obedience through suffering.

In the Gospel, Jesus describes his own paschal mystery with the imagery:   ”Amen, Amen, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls to the earth and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat; but if it dies, it produces much fruit.”  The grains of wheat need to die to be reborn.  Jesus died out of love for us and rose again in His risen life so that we might share in the Lord’s eternal life. 

Jesus explains in the Gospel that his moment of glory is about to arrive and does not hesitate to say that he knows what it will cost.  He then teaches his disciples what it means to hate the life this world offers.  This is not an easy message to grasp.  I bet we all agree to that.  We are left with the question can we abandon the love of this world for the sake of life in God?   This makes sense only we embrace the covenant of God’s love that is written in our hearts and we see that this covenant is our pearl of great price.

How do we die to ourselves in order to regenerate?  We know that our “daily deaths” exhaust us but strengthen us spiritually.  So many of our present values want us to act as though this life is the only life, that there is no life other than the one we know now.  Today’s scriptures invite us to live with values that will last forever.

To summarize, I go back to my friend, the prophet Jeremiah.  He too resisted the call of God in his life.  Plain and simple, God was asking too much of him.  The point of conversion for Jeremiah was when he become convicted of God’s promise: “I will be with you.”  May we too be convicted of God’s promise to us: “I will be with you.”

Have a Blessed Day.

 

ALL FORGIVEN. WE ARE NOT LUCKY. WE ARE LOVED.

 

 

 

Fourth Sunday of Lent  B  2021

 

For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life.  For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.

This is a Gospel within the Gospel….the famous John 3/16.  The core of the Gospel’s Good News is that God so loved the world that he gave his only Son to this real and very imperfect world…so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life.  God’s plan for us is not eternal death but eternal life.  It is time to unleash the power of the Good News that is contained in this simple passage and allow it change people’s lives.  The image of God that today’s Scripture reveal is a God who is relentless in reaching out to lost humanity.  God never gives up on us.

On this Laetare Sunday, halfway through the Lenten season, the Church invites us to reflect on God’s love for the world, and to be joyful because of it.  The Church invites us in the middle of this penitential season to rejoice?  Why?  Because God loves each and every one so much that he gave his only Son.

Even though all of us know the weakness of sin in our lives, God’s love for us is without end. 

Today in the first Scripture reading we see the effects of the weakness of sin very dramatically with the Israelites.  The situation depicted is one of the darkest chapter in the history of God’s chosen people.  The Jews fell away from their attachment to the Temple worship and practices, the nation suffered; the Temple was destroyed and many were exiled into Babylon as servants and slaves in what is called the Babylonian Exile.

How could lax religious practices lead to the fall of a mighty nation?  Simply put, without meaningful prayer the Jews lost a sense of who they were.  In their behavior they compromised their way toward defeat and destruction by letting themselves believe that their spirituality did not matter.

Thankfully, thankfully God did not give up on the Israelites.  At the end of the sacred book of the Chronicles, we hear God calling His people to put their Temple back as central to their lives.

Through the Old Testament Book of the Chronicles we can visit our own faith history and thus are challenged to examine our own “Temple practices,” our own attachment to the center of our Faith -- The Table of the Lord.  The Altar is the Christian Temple.

We are challenged in this Lenten season to ask ourselves if we have been faithful to discipleship of the Lord Jesus or if we have fallen into a malaise of half-hearted spiritual practices?  Have we polluted our Temple – our Church – by having forgotten reverence?  Do we remember who we are, or do our spiritual practices suggest we have forgotten?

At this halfway point of the Lenten season, may we do a spiritual inventory of our Lenten spiritual disciplines.  We do this inventory in the light of God’s unending love for us.  Yes, the Lenten season invites to reflect on who we are as the disciples of Jesus and the priority we place on who God is in our lives.  Pope Francis calls us out of a life of spiritual indifference and seeks to immerse ourselves in the joy of the Gospel.  Why?  God so loved the world that He sent His only-begotten Son for our salvation.

What is going to catch our attention? What is going to shake us out of the busyness of life that keeps us from focusing on our relationship with God?  I can easily lament about the pandemic is putting the brakes on my social life, but what keeps me from experiencing the Spirit of Christ that lives in the spirit of each one of us?

I can be very successful in my career, in my business, but have I lost touch with my soul in the process?  My family may have accomplished much in the way of achievements, but do we have time as a family to pray together, simply to be with one another.  The psalmist tells us:  “Be still and know that I am God.”  Are we too busy for any stillness in our lives?

As St. Paul tells us in his Letter to the Ephesians, “God, who is rich in mercy, because of his great love he had for us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, brought us to life with Christ -- by grace you have been saved….For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus for the good works God has prepared in advance, that we should live in them.”

St Paul was vividly aware of grace in his own life.  He was in touch with his own conversion story.  He wanted the Ephesians to also know in the depths of their hearts that they were God’s handiwork.

In one way or another, we all need to have the conversion experience of the apostle Paul.  Our experience probably won’t be as dramatic as Paul’s, but we need to experience the love of God in our hearts.

As always, Jesus, in the Gospel offers both comfort and challenge.  Jesus said to Nicodemus:  “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.”  The lifting up signified not only crucifixion but also exaltation, more precisely, the exaltation of us all to eternal life through Jesus’ death by crucifixion.  Jesus transforms a sign of condemnation for sin into an instrument of healing.  The cross is both a symbol of the suffering that is part of our spiritual journey, but it is also the symbol of the love of Jesus that brings us eternal life.

What is the cross but the revelation of a God loving enough to suffer death without revenge, powerful enough to overcome death.

Jesus has come into the world to reveal our sins so that they may be forgiven.  As we live in the light of Christ Jesus, we become more aware of what is not of God.  In the light of God’s love, we all humbly, as we do in the penitential rite and as we did in being marked with ashes at the beginning of Lent, acknowledge that we are all sinners.  There is no place for pride or arrogance or judgmentalism in the spiritual life – we are all sinners.

On this Laetare Sunday, we make bold to rejoice that we are loved and forgiven sinners.  I leave with the inspiring words that are on the bulletin of St Joseph’s School that I pass by each day.  ALL FORGIVEN.  WE ARE NOT LUCKY. WE ARE LOVED.

Have a blessed day.

 

Who or what are the money changers in the temple of your heart that Jesus wishes to drive out?

 

Third Sunday of Lent  B  2021

In today’s Gospel, Jesus throws the money changers out of the Temple.  Jesus literally upsets the temple customs of his day and then invites the people around Him to change their idea of where God’s true dwelling is soon to be found.  Rather than a holy place of prayerful encounter with God, the temple precincts had begun to resemble a marketplace, and Jesus’ actions registered loudly and clearly as a prophetic protest against the exploitation of the temple and the people of Israel.  Jesus is clear about “His Father’s house” being a place of prayer and covenant, a place where God dwells.

 

As this Gospel is proclaimed in our hearing, we are prompted to wonder what the returning Jesus may find needs cleansing or replacing both in our personal spirituality and in our celebration of Sunday Eucharist.

 

First, in our personal spirituality, what attitudes, preoccupations, or desires do you bring to your prayer and life that Christ would “drive out” if you would let him?

 

In other words, what needs to be driven out of your inner temple for you to have zeal for God?  From what do you need to repent in this Lenten season?  As we pray over the Gospel, can we listen to the echo of the confrontation of Jesus that addresses the temples of our present day lives?   Who or what are the moneychangers in your Temple?  Is it greed, an excessive preoccupation with our possessions, is it the way we deal with the setbacks in our life, can we let go of an anger we feel toward a particular person, or is it our inability to focus on what is really important in our life?  

 

This gospel passage illustrates the anger of Jesus.  Most of us were taught that anger is a negative emotion and therefore wrong.  At our best, we are to count to ten and hope the anger in us subsides a bit.

Jesus is raising the question of justifiable anger.  When is it ok to say enough is enough, and we need to stand up for what is right.

What do we do with our own anger?  Is it part of our spirituality or is the result of a lack of spirituality?  The saying:  he is an angry young man.  This usually the person is a bit off-center.

Now mind you many times our anger throws us off center and there is nothing virtuous about that, but on the other hand there is appropriate and justifiable anger that should not be swept under the rug.    

  

Jesus purified the Temple.  During Lent He invites us to purify the temples of our hearts.

In our Lenten journey, we seek to repent and be faithful to the gospel.  We pray that our spiritual disciplines lead us to the conversion of knowing Jesus more deeply in our hearts and to glorify the Lord in the way we live our lives.

Secondly, what kind of cleansing does Jesus wish in do in the celebration of our Sunday Eucharist?

Perhaps Jesus would suggest there is room for improvement in having more lector training, would he suggest that the homilists are a bit long winded at times, or the choir music could be reviewed and improved?

 

Or would Jesus be convicted that there are bigger fish to fry in evaluating our liturgies?

 

Would he point out the discrepancies between the prayers we say and the way we live our life?   Do we walk our talk in witnessing to the love of the compassionate Jesus?  He might ask if we come together to be entertained or to be edified.  I sometimes hear the comment:  “Father I don’t get anything out of Mass.”  Do we gather at Sunday Eucharist to get or to give?  Should our focus be on our desire to give praise and thanks to our God?   I wonder if there is a direct connection between God’s predilection for the poor and our own?  Would he see us translating this concern for the poor into generous giving and authentic service toward God’s least ones?   This needs to be the defining characteristic of ourselves as a Eucharistic community.

 

For many parishioners during these Covid days, when is it time and when can you safely return to the in-person celebration of the Eucharist?  Gradually, more and more people are feeling safe and find our in-person celebration of the Eucharist to be done in a safe and blessed way. I trust this has been your experience.  Can you share your experience with one other person this week and then invite this person or this family to come to the Eucharist next Sunday and join you in giving thanks to the Lord our God for the many blessings of our lives.  Is the Lord asking of you to be an evangelizer and invite someone or some family to Church next Sunday?  Does this take you out of your comfort zone?  Could it be that sometimes it is a grace to go out of  our comfort zone.

 

 

But the dramatic action of Jesus – driving out the merchants and moneychangers – is not the most shocking feature of this Sunday’s Gospel.  Not only does Jesus cleanse the Temple, he declares that he himself replaces it.  The place of God’s presence among His people is not a building but ‘the temple of his body.’  In Jesus, in the Sacrament of the Eucharist,  we encounter the living God.  The real priority of our lives is our covenant relationship with God.  Our relationship with God is measured by how well we pattern our lives after Jesus in dying to ourselves for the good of others so that we might rise with the Risen Lord.  As believers and followers of Jesus our own bodies are also temples of the Holy Spirit.  God dwells not only in this building, but also in us who are the living Temples of the Spirit of Jesus.  May we always reverence the presence of Christ that we experience in our sharing with one another.

 

Have a Blessed Day.