+Jesus is the great teacher of gratitude.

 

THANKSGIVING DAY 2022

 

 

As we gather on Thanksgiving Day, this national holiday that expresses very well the spiritual roots of our nation.  We are at our best as Americans when we are grateful to God, grateful to one another, and grateful for the blessings we enjoy as a nation.  We are at our best as a nation not by the force of our military might, but when we in humility give thanks for the incredible blessings that we enjoy.

 

In the words of the psalmist:

 

          Let all your works give you thanks, O Lord,

          And let your faithful bless you.

 

Gratitude is always our best response to the blessings of life.

 

The great St Augustine preached: “When you say, ‘Give us this day our daily bread,’ we profess ourselves to be God’s beggars.”  May we never be ashamed as seeing ourselves as God’s beggars.  No matter how rich we may be on earth, we are still God’s beggars.  And gratitude puts us in right relationship to our loving and giving God.

 

In our prayer on Thanksgiving Day and every day, may we be dripping, even drowning, in our focus on grace and gratitude.  Human life is a gift.  This gift is made in the image and likeness of God.  All life is created by God, not by us.  We must treat each other and the world we share like the precious gift it is. 

 

From the Book of Sirach:

 

          Bless the God of all, who fosters people’s growth, from our mother’s womb.  May God give you joy of heart and may peace abide with you.

 

Joy and Gratitude are our response to God’s blessings.

 

As we gather with our families and as we gather now as a parish family, joy and gratitude are our posture in which we live our lives.

 

I look forward and treasure time with family today as do you.  May we have the genes of gratitude and joy throughout the day.  I can predict that everything won’t be perfect.  Resist the flight to a bevy of “could have been or should have done” and stay in the blessed lane that we are grateful for the giftedness of life and the giftedness we share with each other today.

 

May we and especially the mothers in our midst be conscious of the gift of life that has come from your womb and how you have shared in the mystery of life that comes from God.

 

In the second Scripture reading from St Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians: 

“Grace and Peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.  I give thanks to my God always on your account for the grace of God bestowed on you in Christ Jesus.”

 

Paul is giving thanks for his parish family in Corinth.  We too give thanks for our parish family of St. Joseph’s.  We are so blessed with so many loving and giving families that enrich and inspire each other.  In Eucharist, we give thanks to the Lord our God as a community.  We pray best as a community of believers.  This is God’s plan for us to be a parish family invested in the life and holiness of each other.

 

In the Gospels, Jesus is the great teacher of gratitude.

 

May we be mindful that Jesus is the great teacher of gratitude – grateful for the love of His heavenly father, and he showed that gratitude in his living and dying witnessing to the Father’s love.

 

In the stories that Jesus told and in the story that Jesus lived, gratitude to His heavenly Father was at the center of the Lord’s life.  Jesus was always grateful for his disciples.  We are among the disciples Jesus is grateful for.

 

Jesus’ message in today’s Gospel passage is that gratitude is the way to find and experience true joy of heart.  The grace of gratitude, the life posture of gratitude creates an open and truly receptive heart.

 

In the Gospel in the healing of the ten lepers when only one came back to give thanks, implicit in this episode is the idea that something is missing.  Giving thanks is a vital and necessary part of our relationship with God.  For thankfulness is a measure of faith, a measure of our dependence on God and of our own humility.

Physical healing of leprosy is a great blessing no doubt.  An even greater blessing is the healing of relationships and experiencing the friendship and the salvific love of Jesus that is offered to us.  The Samaritan received a healing far greater that a physical healing when he came back to Jesus to give thanks.  Yes, we desire physical health, but may our greater desire be for spiritual health that comes from encountering the Lord with grateful hearts.

 

 

We express our gratitude in the context of the Eucharist in which we give thanks to the Lord our God.  This day expresses our spiritual roots not only as a nation but also as a Church, as the disciples of Jesus.  This day is not a holy day of obligation; rather this day is a holy day of opportunity.  It’s an opportunity to think back on what we have been given…and to give something in return:  thanks and gratitude.  We are here to honor with grateful hearts what God has done for us.

 

On this Thanksgiving morning, may we as a faith community ask for the grace that our community life will always be marked by a radical gratitude to our loving God.   May we be mindful that Jesus is the great teacher of gratitude – grateful for the love of His heavenly father, and he showed that gratitude in his living and dying witnessing to the Father’s love.

 

God give you peace and have a Blessed Day of Thanksgiving.

 

 

 

 

 

 

With Jesus as Christ our King, His power is the power of love.

 

FEAST OF CHRIST THE KING   C   2022

 

The priest was blessing and congratulating this couple in his parish who had been married for 50 years.  The priest was asking Mary what was their secret that sustained their marriage relationship in good times and bad.  Mary explained that they agreed on the day of their marriage that Mary would make all the small decisions and her husband would make the big decisions.  The priest wondered about this a bit, and then Mary further explained, with a twinkle in her eye, that they haven’t needed to make any big decisions.

Today on this the last Sunday of the liturgical year, we celebrate the Feast of Christ the King.  We ask is Jesus the King of your life – over both the small and big decisions of life?  What is the power, the dominion Jesus exercises over your life as Christ the King?

 

The Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe, is the crown of the liturgical year.  The Gospel in fact presents the kingship of Jesus as the culmination of his saving work, and it does so in a surprising way. “The Christ of God, the Chosen One, the King” (Lk 23:35,37) appears without power or glory: he is on the cross, where he seems more to be conquered than conqueror. His kingship is paradoxical: his throne is the cross; his crown is made of thorns; he has no sceptre, but a reed is put into his hand; he does not have luxurious clothing, but is stripped of his tunic; he wears no shiny rings on his fingers, but his hands are pierced with nails; he has no treasure, but is sold for thirty pieces of silver.

 

Today we proclaim this singular victory, by which Jesus became the King of every age, the Lord of history: with the sole power of love, which is the nature of God, his very life, and which has no end (cf. 1 Cor 13:8). We joyfully share the splendour of having Jesus as our King: his rule of love transforms sin into grace, death into resurrection, fear into trust. It would mean very little, however, if we believed Jesus was King of the universe, but did not make him Lord of our lives: all this is empty if we do not personally accept Jesus and if we do not also accept his way of being King.

 

 

I would ask you to be mindful of the image of Christ the King as proclaimed in the Gospel today.  It is the story of how Christ died on the cross.  Recall the scene:  his throne was a cross, his crown was made of thorns, his ushers were his executioners, and the people closest to him were common criminals.  What kind of king is this?  Why do we call him a king at all?

 

The cross shows the kind of King Jesus is:  he is one who cares for us right to the end. He cares enough to suffer and die.  He cares enough to be misunderstood and rejected.  He cares enough to seem a failure.  He is a King who cares and is prepared to make any sacrifice for the sake of those he loves.

 

So here we see Christ the King, dying on the cross.  And at this moment he is at his most God-like.  He is the man who showed us -- fully and uniquely -- what God is like, because he gives, and doesn’t count the cost.

 

The power of Jesus can be seen in his loving forgiveness of the thief on the cross:  “This day you will be with me in paradise.”  How often do we exercise this power? -- the power of forgiveness.  Yes, it is hard to forgive when we are innocent.  Yet none of us is innocent as Jesus was.

 

The words of the thief:  “Remember me when you come into your kingdom.”    It is amazing where you find faith.  The thief saw in Jesus what religious leaders, government authorities, soldiers and onlookers could not. 

 

What about us?  What do we see in Jesus?   As we celebrate this feast of power, the king is revealed to be a broken, dying man.  The sign of this feast -- the cross of Christ -- is traced on our foreheads in baptism, over our bodies as we gather in worship and on our coffins in death. 

The temptation before our Church is the temptation that faces our culture:  it is so much easier to command than to persuade;  it is so much more efficient to ignore the weak and  the outcast than to serve them.

Yet, the God we believe in confuses the proud and lifts up the lowly.  Yes, God accomplishes our salvation through his broken yet baptized people.  Here there is no envy.  There is only mercy. 

I go back to the words of the good thief in the

Gospel:   “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom” (v. 42). This person, simply looking at Jesus, believed in his kingdom. He was not closed in on himself, but rather – with his errors, his sins and his troubles – he turned to Jesus. He asked to be remembered, and he experienced God’s mercy: “Today you will be with me in paradise” (v. 43). As soon as we give God the chance, he remembers us. He is ready to completely and forever cancel our sin, because his memory – unlike our own – does not record evil that has been done or keep score of injustices experienced. God has no memory of sin, but only of us, of each of us, we who are his beloved children. And he believes that it is always possible to start anew, to raise ourselves up.

 

Let us ask for the grace of never closing the doors of reconciliation and pardon, but rather of knowing how to go beyond evil and differences, opening every possible pathway of hope. As God believes in us, infinitely beyond any merits we have, so too we are called to instil hope and provide opportunities to others. The true door of mercy which is the heart of Christ always remains open wide for us. From the lacerated side of the Risen One until the very end of time flow mercy, consolation and hope.

 

What are you willing to die for?

 

Thirty Second Sunday in OT  C  2022

 

 

I recently heard two teenage girls commenting on a rather good-looking guy that had their undivided attention:  “Isn’t he just gorgeous?  He’s to die for.”  (They weren’t talking about me.)

I would like to take that comment to another level.  So my question for you today is:  “Just what are you willing to die for?”  I realize this is a rather heavy question, especially if you haven’t had your first cup of coffee this morning.  This is the question the Scriptures invite us to consider.  Just what is big enough, important enough that I would give my life for it?

 

The Sundays of November bring us to the conclusion of the Church Year.  Today’s readings also call to our minds the conclusion of our own years on earth.  The mystery of life and death reside within each one of us. 

 

 

In  Bette Midler’s The Rose, she sings, “It’s the soul afraid of dying, who never learns to live.”  She is right.  Unless we have identified our ultimate values, we have not begun to live fully, for we are locked behind the bars of fear. What

This past Wednesday, I brought Communion to a woman dealing with significant cancer.  She was just given the sobering diagnosis that statistically she had only another year to live.

Understandably this is frightening news.  This challenges us to dig deeply into our faith and trust in God. What does it mean to be given a statistical timeline on the length of one’s earthly life, and in faith how do we believe that yes one day all of us will enter into a different kind of life – our life in union with Christ for all eternity. It is in dying that we are born to eternal life

 

In the first Scripture reading from the Book of Maccabees:  “It happened that seven brothers with their mother were arrested and tortured with whips and scourges by the king to force them to eat pork in violation of God’s law.  One of the brothers, speaking for the others, said:  “What do you expect to achieve by questioning us?  We are ready to die rather than transgress the law of our ancestors.”

The brothers and their mother had drawn a line in the sand.   Their trust and faith in God was that important to them.  Their trust in a resurrection faith was non-negotiable.  It was to die for.

Bette Midler was not singing about these brothers and their mother with the words:  “It’s the soul afraid of dying, who never learns to live.”

The Scriptures today invite to reflect on the lives of people who place God first in their lives.

Today’s Gospel passage comes late in Luke’s Gospel and late in the liturgical year.   In the Gospel, the Sadducees were the religious leaders who denied that there was life after death.  To prove their belief, they asked Jesus a trick question about a woman who ended marrying seven brothers.  Then they Jesus the absurd question:  whose wife will this woman be in the resurrection?

The Scriptures calls us to reflect on the last things – on death and the mystery of the resurrection of Jesus.

The resurrection of Jesus is the linchpin of Christian faith, the source of our hope, the cause of our joy.  In the light of a resurrection faith, we seek to place God first in our lives.

We do not know with any empirical certainty; nevertheless we anchor ourselves in the sure faith that ours is a living God and a loving God who has accomplished our salvation in the dying and rising of Jesus.  In this faith is also founded our hope, and this hope gives meaning and purpose to our days and nights until such time as death takes us beyond time unto life everlasting.

We have to live with the reality that we don’t all the answers about the mystery of eternal life.  What we have is our faith that God’s love leads us onto a fuller sharing in life everlasting.

 

It is true because we trust in the power of the resurrection of Jesus.  Through and through, as the disciples of the Risen Lord, we are a people of hope.  Our hope is rooted in our trust that the risen Lord goes with us in all experiences of life.  The risen Lord is with us in our parish community.  Yes, we still are a sinful, stumbling group of people who make mistakes.  But we believe that the risen Jesus is with us in this celebration of the Eucharist.  We believe that the power and grace of the Risen Lord enables us to trust our God never abandons us.  Our God cares for us.  We are a people who can sing Alleluia.

 

 

The mystery of life and death, like holy twins, reside within each of us.  Both of these holy twins have voices for those who have ears willing to listen.  Death speaks of the urgency of growing one’s soul larger and larger by acts of love.  Death constantly admonishes us not to take for granted those we love and not to miss the countless opportunities to live well.  Listen to death.  Your death is only a door that leads to home; do not fear the hour it will open.  Live watchful of that Grand Opening and prepare for it with prayer.