"I have decided to stick with love; hate is too great a burden to bear."

Pentecost  A   2020

Come Holy Spirit.  Fill the hearts of your faithful and kindle in them the fire of your love.

Pentecost arrived for the disciples after fifty days of uncertainty.  True, Jesus had risen.  Overjoyed, they had seen him, listened to his words and even shared a meal with him.  Yet they had not overcome their doubts and fears.  They still met behind locked doors.

On the Day of Pentecost those locked doors were thrown open; the fear in the disciples was replaced with a Spirit-filled courage and enthusiasm.  They were now fearless proclaimers of the Word of God.

What had changed for the disciples?  They received the Holy Spirit.

The great truth of Pentecost – for the first disciples and for us as well – is that the Holy Spirit has the power to enlarge and expand the human heart if we allow the Spirit of Jesus to grow and enliven us from within.

In today’s first Scripture reading, we hear how the Holy Spirit was given to the followers of Jesus.   Listen again: “When the time for Pentecost was fulfilled, they were all in one place together.  And suddenly there came from the sky a noise like a strong driving wind, and it filled the entire house in which they were.  Then there appeared to them tongues of fire, which parted and came to rest on each of them.  And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in different tongues, as the Spirit enabled them to proclaim.”

For the first disciples, the Holy Spirit did not make things easier for them, he didn’t work spectacular miracles, he didn’t take away their difficulties and their opponents.  Rather, the Spirit brought into the lives of the disciples a harmony, that had been lacking, his own harmony, for he is harmony.

The great meaning of Pentecost is that it was time for God to be born again not in one body that was Jesus, but this time in a body of believers who would receive the breath of life from their Lord and pass it to others.

We see how the growth of the Church took place with the influence of the Holy Spirit in the Acts of the Apostles.  The Book of Acts is the story of the incredible growth of the first Christian communities.  The Acts of the Apostles is kind of like a Gospel of the Holy Spirit.  In the first four books of the New Testament we learn the Good news of what God did through Jesus Christ in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.  In the Book of Acts of the Apostles, we learn the Good News of what God did through the Holy Spirit.

The first and foremost attribute of the servant church is its daring openness to the Spirit.  It is our prayer that we the Church make room for the release of the Spirit in the life of the community and the courage to act when it does.  We are not to fall back into being the safe and self-absorbed church, but rather a place of miraculous hope and extravagant hospitality.

God chose a young virgin named Mary to bear God’s Son, and Jesus chose a bunch of Galilean fishermen to share in His ministry.   God chooses you and me to hear and witness to His message of hope and promise and love in this place and in our world this day.

We seek to experience Pentecost as the feast of locked doors.  Where are the locked doors in our lives?    For us, we are under extraordinary precaution to wear masks, to socially distance from one another.  We are potential threats to each other’s health.

But for me and for all of us, it is not a time to abandon trust in Jesus as the Lord and Savior of our lives.  It is not a time to abandon our commitment to be a Church of brothers and sisters who stand for one another.  It is not a time for us not to be fearless proclaimers of the Gospel.  But yes, out of love of love for one another, we need to socially distance, wear masks and respect each other’s health.   We so much want to go forth to evangelize and serve but recently serving the greater good has meant doing nothing.  This seems to go against our Gospel DNA.

So, where does that leave us?  We are led to prayer:  Come Holy Spirit.  Fill the hearts of your faithful and kindle in them the fire of your love. 

Now more than ever, we invoke the Holy Spirit to wipe away the darkness of anxiety allowing us to be guided by the light of Christ and to trust in God’s promise of new life.

Our Gospel today takes place on Easter evening.  On that first evening they were gathered in a house with the doors locked, because they were afraid – afraid of being killed, just as Jesus had been killed three days before.  But Jesus was among them and He said: “Peace be with you.”  To this scared group of former followers, the Risen Christ begins by bringing the peace of God.

  Filled with inner peace  that only God can give, our hearts are like a deep sea, which remains peaceful, even when its surface is swept by waves.

The Holy Spirit does not bring only harmony within us but also among us.  He makes us Church, building different parts into one harmonious edifice.  We need the Spirit of unity to regenerate us as Church, as God’s People, and as a human family.

There is always a temptation to build “nests,” to cling to our little group, to the things and the people we like, to resist all contamination.  The Holy Spirit, on the other hand, brings together those who were distant, unites those far off, brings home those who were scattered.

For us the faith communities of St Joseph’s and Holy Spirit, as we reflect on how we are called to collaborate and be for one another, our locked door may be our fear of losing a bit of who we are.   And  we all need to acknowledge all that keeps us from trusting in the grace and the blessings of spirit-filled collaboration.

On this day of Pentecost, as we celebrate the outpouring of the Holy Spirit of God in our lives, can we trust in each other and in the grace of God that St. Joseph’s and Holy Spirit can be sister parishes that love and serve and support one another?

As the first disciples on the Day of Pentecost were transformed from fearful disciples who wanted to live behind locked doors to become fearless proclaimers of the Word of God, can we the faith communities of Holy Spirit and St. Joseph’s on this Day of Pentecost welcome the opportunity of having a sister parish that will help us live according to our better angels?

As we are well aware during these last few days, across the country protesters took to the streets to express anger over the death of George Floyd, a black man after a Minneapolis police officer kept his knee pressed to his neck for more than eight minutes.  Peaceful protests have at times turned to violence.  Racial tensions have exploded with the claim that promises of freedom and justice have not been met.

May we invoke the wisdom and prayer of Martin Luther King Jr who said:  “ I have decided to stick with love.  Hate is too great a burden to bear.”

On this day of Pentecost, may we pray for healing and unity for our Church and our nation as we now come to the Table of the Lord in spiritual communion.  May we all commit ourselves to using our God-given giftedness in the service of one another.  To quote Martin Luther King again:  Life’s most urgent question is:  What are you doing for others?”

Have a Blessed Day.

What is the work (mission) God has given you to do today? How are you to make the Lord's name known?

Seventh Sunday of Easter A  2020

In today’s Gospel, we are entering upon very holy ground.  Throughout the Gospel of John, we see the compassionate heart of Jesus as He brings healing to sick people and food to the hungry.    In the Johannine Gospel, we find the love of God demonstrated and explained as nowhere else.  Then in John’s 17^th chapter, we are allowed to glimpse into Jesus’ very soul.

Perhaps we never get any closer to someone else than when we know about their prayer life.  As we eavesdrop on the prayer of Jesus in today’s Gospel, we are indeed entering holy ground.

The setting for this prayer of Jesus is the upper room on the eve of Jesus’s passion and death.  Jesus had just celebrated the Last Supper with his disciples and had washed their feet to give them an example of how they were to continue the mission of Jesus in the life of the Church.

Jesus’s impending death is not a disruption of God’s plan but part of God’s mysterious providence.  Jesus had accomplished His work, revealing the love of the Father for us.  Now it is the time to teach the meaning of that love by His willingness to lay down even His own life.  His dying is his greatest act of giving.

The Lord prayed for his disciples gathered around Him.  At the same time, he looked ahead to the community of disciples of all centuries.  In His prayer for disciples of all time, he saw us too, and he prayed for us.  He prayed that we be consecrated in truth.

“Jesus raised his eyes to heaven and said, “Father, the hour has come.  Give glorify to your Son, so that your Son may glorify you…I have glorified you on earth by finishing the work you gave me to do…I have made your name known to those you have given me…They were yours and you gave them to me…Consecrate them in truth…I have made your name known to them so that the love with which you loved may be in them, and so that I may be in them.”

The prayer of Jesus to his heavenly Father was a prayer of gratitude that Jesus had finished the work that the Father had given Him to do.  He had made the Lord’s name known to His followers.

Jesus then prayed for us His disciples.  Jesus prayed that we would let God love us and live in us.  To do that, we need, first of all, to trust that God truly does love us.  As John says, we need to know and to believe in the love God has for us.  When we let the reality of God’s love for us sink deeply into who we are and what we believe, 

something dramatic happens.  We begin to love one another.  We become witnesses to God’s love by letting everyone else see what that love looks like when it is alive in a person’s life.   By being loved so deeply, we become lovers.  We become witnesses to the God whose love brings eternal life -- witnesses to the resurrection.

Jesus finished the work the Father had given Him to do.  What about us?  Do I have a sense of the work God has given me to do?  In other words, what is the purpose of my life.  As a parent, as a sibling, as a leader, as a parishioner, as a member of the community of the baptized, what is the work that God has given you to do.  We are very grounded in discipleship if we try to make the prayer of Jesus our own prayer.  This very evening, I invite you to reflect on the day and with a prayer of gratitude may we say in prayer that we have finished the work God has given us to do for this day.  If there is room for improvement, we ask for the Holy Spirit to be with us tomorrow.

Of course, it would be naïve to think that this is a simple process.  The first followers of Jesus knew all about the resistance to the extraordinary good news about God’s love that Jesus had brought to them.  They knew about the betrayal of Judas, about their own abandonment of Jesus, and about Jesus’ death on Calvary.  God created the world and everything in it good.  But in ways that are hard to understand, there is sometimes abandonment and betrayal of this goodness.  There is hostility and resistance in our world to the message of God’s love for us –  in the political warfare that takes place in the halls of our Congress, in the Church itself there can be hypocrisy and disillusionment, and in our personal and family relationships there can be too much brokenness.  We know all too well the demons we have within ourselves that keep us from witnessing to the forgiving love of God in all circumstances of life.

Jesus in His prayer to his heavenly Father prayed for us with the words:  This is eternal life, that they should know you, the only true God, and the one whom you sent, Jesus Christ.

What is so important for us as we seek eternal life with God is that eternal life is not just for the future:  it a gift partly given now in our faith.  To be in touch with Jesus is to be in touch with a rich and full eternal life.  Something is given which will last forever – the mysterious life of God.  We touch into that life in prayer.  We are enlightened by Jesus, the light of the world.

Being a witness to the resurrection is not just telling people what they can hope for after death.  Yes, such hope is so very important.   God will raise us from death to live with God forever. God’s love is stronger than death.   But being a witness to the resurrection begins in the here and the now.  Being a witness to the resurrection means letting people see in our lives what it looks like when we live in the God who is love.  It means making visible what happens when the God who is love lives in us.

John’s Gospel tells us that Jesus prayed for His followers.  He prays that His Father consecrate them in truth.  The truth he refers to is the truth of God’s love.  To be consecrated in the truth means being consecrated or made holy in God’s love.    God’s love is like the air we breathe – all around us, giving us life, sustaining us.    When we do this, we may experience some of the resistance and hostility that Jesus experienced, but Jesus has promised that God’s Spirit will be with us and will never abandon us.  This will enable us to be witnesses to God’s love even in a sometimes-hostile world.  Let’s trust in that love as we come to the Table of the Lord in spiritual communion.

Have a Blessed Day.

All of us have a vocational story to discern.

Fourth Sunday of Easter A   2020

The fourth Sunday of the Easter Season is always Good Shepherd Sunday.  This is how Jesus identifies himself: “I am the Good Shepherd.”   As the Good Shepherd, Jesus comes to his sheep and is recognized by them.  The sheep recognize His voice as He calls them by name and they follow Him.

We seek to recognize the voice of Jesus as our Good Shepherd and to follow him.   Hearing and trusting and recognizing the voice of Jesus in our lives is our path of discipleship.  In our Catholic tradition, our vocation is our response to the call of God in our lives.  The root meeting of the word “vocation” goes back to the Latin word vocare which mean to call.  Responding to God’s call is our vocation.   This vocation we all have is never a solitary vocation; in some God-given way, we share in the mission of Jesus in leading others to become more aware of God’s love for them.

Good Shepherd Sunday is also the World Day of Prayer for vocations. In discerning one’s vocation as a disciple, my first message is that all of us have a vocational story to discern.  While I would like to consider how you discern God’s call in your life from the vantage point of three lenses, my hope is that you claim in one or more of these lenses your own vocational journey.

The first lens perhaps is the more familiar one when we pray for vocations.  We pray that young men will respond to the call of God in the vocation of an ordained priest.

I had the great privilege of serving in our diocese for ten years as the Director of Seminarians and for five years before that as the spiritual director and the rector of Becket Hall – our diocesan discernment house for candidates to the ordained priesthood.  It is very humbling to mentor young men in discerning whether God is calling them to serve in the Church as ordained priests.  This has been a treasured part of my ministry for many years.

May we as a faith community of Holy Spirit and St Joseph’s mentor, foster, pray, and encourage young men from our parishes to serve the Church as ordained priests.  This would be such a great blessing for our parish communities.  While I said young men, I should correct that.  God can call men of any age to consider the vocation to the ordained priest.  Praying for vocation needs to a consistent part of our prayer.

I also would invite us to look at this World Day of Prayer for vocations with a wider lens.  We are to pray that each and every one of us claim the vocation, the call we receive from God.  In our Baptism, God calls each of us to witness to His love in this world.  There are as many vocations in this parish as there are baptized parishioners.

The second vocational lens in ministry within the Church.  Our parish community is blessed with permanent deacons, vowed religious women, and lay ecclesial ministers.  These are valued and faith-filled ministers of the Gospel that breathe a Spirit-filled vibrancy to our parish ministries.  Following the example of these men and women, I would ask that you pray over God’s call in your life:  Is God calling you to make this kind of commitment in the service of the Church?  As we are grateful for our permanent deacons, our vowed religious men and women, and our lay ecclesial ministers, may they inspire others to serve in the ministry of the Church for generations to come.

In our parish life, we are grateful for parishioners who have responded to the call of God to be catechists, to be involved in youth ministry, to engage in liturgical ministry, music ministry, pastoral care, social outreach, and parish governance on our parish council, our finance council, and our stewardship council.  We are grateful for the young men and women who will soon celebrate the Sacrament of Confirmation and then witness to their faith by the way they live their lives.

The same Eternal Word that became flesh in Jesus longs to become flesh in our lives—in our home, workplace, parish, global marketplace.  Indeed, there is no shortage of need for compassionate people who continue Jesus’ mission.

On this World Day of Prayer for Vocations, we pray that the church may be provided with the leaders needed to its work of spreading the Gospel.   

Our third vocational lens is probably what we are now doing -- be it as spouses, parents, teachers, doctors, civil servants, running a business, salespersons… or whatever.

On this World Day of Prayer for Vocations, each one of us should be asking ourselves today:

·        Is what I am spending my energies on every day my real vocation?

·        Is this what God wants me to be doing with my life?

·        How is what I am doing giving witness to my Christian faith?

·        What contribution am I offering to making this world a better place for people to live in?

·        To what extent am I a spreader of truth, of love, of justice, of freedom, of tolerance and acceptance…?

·         Is God calling me to greater service of my Church and my community?  Am I giving something through my life or am I just using society (and even the Church) to get what I want?

God is calling every single one of us to work for the Gospel.  For a small number it may be as a priest or religious – and that call can come at any time in one’s life. I asked you to pray for vocations to the ordained priesthood, but may your first prayer today be for the grace to discern your own vocational call. There are hundreds of other ways of serving the Church and helping to build up the Christian community.  Where is God calling me to make my own unique contribution based on the particular talents God has given me?

If every single one us were to answer that question sincerely and to act upon it, I am confident that our Church would have all the leadership it needs.  There would be a new Pentecost, a spiritual awakening that would be part of the life of the Church in the aftermath of Covid-19.  What do you think?

Have a Blessed Day.

On Divine Mercy Sunday, we trust in Jesus who is the face of God's Divine Mercy.

Divine Mercy Reflection

In the 1930’s, Jesus chose a humble Polish nun, Sister Maria Faustina Kowalska to receive private revelations concerning Divine Mercy that were recorded in her diary.  Sister Faustina became the herald of one powerful message:  God is mercy – the truth of the merciful Christ.  Jesus said to Sister Faustina as recorded in her diary: “Mankind will not have peace until it turns to My mercy.” Then in the year 2000, Sister Faustina was declared a saint and is known as the great apostle of mercy.

Then on May 5, 2000, Pope John Paul II decreed that the Second Sunday of Easter would henceforth be known as Divine Mercy Sunday.  On the eighth day of the Resurrection, the octave day, we celebrate God’s solemn commitment, his covenant of merciful love.

In the very familiar Divine Mercy Image, the red and white rays emanate from the heart of Jesus symbolizing the blood and water that was poured out on the cross for our salvation and sanctification.  The red rays recall the blood which is the sacrifice of Golgotha and the mystery of the Eucharist.  The white rays symbolize the water of baptism and the gift of the Holy Spirit.  Through the wounded heart of Jesus, His merciful love is showered upon us.  The wounds of Jesus are the wounds of mercy to us.  In the revelation recorded by Sister Faustina, the Lord requested that the words: “Jesus, I trust in you” be inscribed under the image.

As we gaze upon the image of Jesus, this Divine Mercy image, Jesus is the visible face of the invisible Father, of the God who manifests his power above all by forgiveness and mercy.

In the first Scripture reading from the Letter to the Ephesians, St. Paul writes:  “God, who is rich in mercy, because of his great love for us, brought us to life with Christ.”  The first and only step required to experience mercy is to acknowledge that we are in need of mercy.  I call to mind the prayer we say before receiving Communion, “Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter my roof, say but the word and my soul shall be healed.”

In the responsorial psalm., we sang of the Lord’s mercy -- the medicine of mercy.  The Lord is kind and merciful…Slow to anger, abounding in kindness.  God’s anger lasts but a moment, his mercy forever.

The Gospel is taken from the first seven verses of the 15^th chapter of Luke’s Gospel.  This chapter with three beautiful parables of Jesus could be considered the Gospel of the Divine Mercy of God.  These parables reveal the heart of God towards sinners.  The best known of these parables is the Parable of the Prodigal Son.  This parable could be renamed the Parable of the Merciful Father.

I call your attention to the first two verses of Luke 15.  They speak to the reason Jesus told these parables.  The Pharisees and scribes began to complain, saying “This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.”

Jesus knew that the attitude of the Pharisees to sinners was not God’s attitude to sinners.  The idea of God seeking our sinners shocked the scribes and the pharisees.  Jesus teaches in his words and his actions that God desires all of us who are sinners to encounter the merciful love of Jesus.  As in the parable of the prodigal son, the father embraced his son and showered him with mercy and forgiveness and welcomed back home.

In the parable of the lost sheep, we see the love and the care of the shepherd who continues to look for the lost sheep until he finds it.  The shepherd values the life of an animal so much that he continually searches until he finds it.   The Gospel message is how much more is a person valued in the sight of God.  As God’s shepherd, Jesus is seeking and saving that which is lost.    The God of heaven actively seeks lost sinners in order to bring them back to Himself, and the God of heaven rejoices over a lost sinner and showers that sinner with God’s merciful love.  What a saint is a loved and forgiven sinner.

As we pray these beautiful Scriptures, we ask ourselves what is our part in all of this?  We who are the recipients of God’s divine mercy are to be the Church, the people of God, we are to be the visible face of God’s divine mercy in the world.  In our parish communities, may everyone feel sought after, loved, and forgiven.  We are to be the ambassadors of God’s divine mercy in our parish communities.

 Thanks be to God; mercy is the central teaching of Pope Francis.  The pope wants the Church to be a field hospital.  He says: “I prefer a church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security.”  Indeed, the Church is a field hospital that dispenses the divine mercy of God to the bruised, hurting and broken people in our communities.

We need to honestly ask ourselves: could our parish faith community be described as a field hospital in which the poor and the hurting people of our community feel very much welcome?

Living in the dark cloud of COVID-19, we implore God’s divine mercy to bring healing to our world.  We pray:  Lord God, we trust in your Divine Mercy to bring healing to our lives.  We seek to be anointed with your merciful love in discovering your healing presence for our lives and for our world.  Help us to wait in joyful hope for the coming of the Risen Jesus more deeply into our hearts.  Amen.

This is the day we celebrate God’s mercy.  His mercy is infinite.  His mercy is greater than sin, than evil, than suffering, than death.  In His mercy, we have eternal life.

For your take home message on this Divine Mercy Sunday, I invite you to remember your ABC’s.

A.     Ask for His mercy.

B.     Be merciful

C.     Completely trust in Jesus.

Have a blessed day.

This week is holy because of love -- the reconciling love of God for us.

Palm Sunday  A  2020

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. 

Even with our confinement and social distancing, may we enter into the mystery of the dying and rising of Jesus during these days of Holy Week.  .

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 disease, 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 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 and safe day.

In our discipleship of the Lord Jesus, may we respond to the voice of God the Father: "Listen to Him."

Second Sunday of Lent  A 2020

In this homily, I would like you to focus on three simple words spoken by God the Father in the Gospel account:  Listen to him.

As the apostles experienced the transfigured glory of Jesus, Peter says: “Lord, it is good that we are here.”  While he was still speaking. Behold, then from a cloud came a voice that said, ‘This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased, listen to him.”

To this point, the apostles have been unable to understand Jesus’ predictions about his upcoming suffering, death and resurrection. They have not listened.  In fact, there was no need to listen because they already knew what they wanted the Savior to be like – a successful, prestigious, powerful Messiah.  Now the voice of God commands them to listen.

How about ourselves:  Are we good listeners?   How well do we listen to the call of God in our lives?  Do we do more speaking than listening in our prayer life?  We certainly want God to listen to us in our prayers of petition.  Are we sometimes like the first apostles who had no need to listen because it was already clear to them what God should do?

Are we good listeners?  At our St. Josephs’ First Friday School Mass, I asked our students if they were good listeners.  They responded with considerable enthusiasm that they were good listeners.

It did make me wonder that we probably need to ask their parents, their siblings, and their teachers if they would with the same enthusiasm that these students are good listeners.

Are we good listeners?  Do others know us as good listeners?  Are we able to listen to the voice of God when things aren’t going as we planned?

Do we hear the cry of God’s poor?  Are we responsive to the needs of people locally and around the world?

From the first Scripture reading in the Book of Genesis: “The Lord said to Abram: ‘Go forth from the land of your kinsfolk and from your father’s house to a land I will show you.  I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you.’”

What was asked of Abram sets the stage for us to reflect on our own cost of discipleship.  The detachment that was asked of Abram is this:  Abram is commanded to leave his country, his kinfolk, and finally his father’s house, that is, what we would call his entire support system, material and psychological, the whole deal, and depend on God alone.

Does this not challenge us to reflect on our cost of discipleship during this Lenten season?   Lent’s call to stark honesty compels us to ask if our discipleship of Jesus is too comfortable.  Our Lenten conversion process requires some measure of detachment from self-centeredness and attachment to values and priorities and preferences that may be countercultural.

The call of Abram who was later named Abraham was to leave home and settle in a foreign land.  God asked and so Abram went.  He had trust and hope.  How do we respond when God asks us to move beyond our comfort zone and to more fully trust in the plan of God for us?  We are all used to what we are used to.  There is the tendency in all of us to say my way or the highway.  But if our call to discipleship is any way similar to God’s call of Abram, we will need to revisit that old wisdom.  In some way, the Lord asks of you and the Lord asks of me to let go of some of my comfort zone and to trust more fully in God’s plan for us.

Jesus message is that his disciples must be willing to join Him in His passion and death.  The disciples had difficulty hearing this reality.  We too have difficulty listening to Jesus when our discipleship involves dealing with the crosses of life – the cross of sickness, the cross of the death of a loved one, the cross of coping with a relationship that has gone wrong.

It’s easier to listen to the Lord on the mountaintop when the blessings of life are very apparent.  It is more difficult to listen when we come down from the mountain and are in the midst of the valley of loneliness, of fear and of anxiety.

The apostles were given the vision of the transfigured Lord to overcome their resistance to listening to Jesus in moments of suffering.  What the apostles experienced in this beautiful Transfiguration experience was like the end of the story appearing in the middle.  Why?  The apostles needed their faith to be strengthened to have a faith and hope in accepting their Savior as one who was going to be crucified in his journey to resurrection and new life. The apostles had balked at the future Jesus was insisting upon.  The privilege of witnessing Jesus’ Transfiguration was for the purpose of confirming Jesus as someone to whom they must listen to.  They have, as of yet, not understood the mission of Jesus.  They must open themselves up to what Jesus is saying about his suffering, death, and resurrection.

The real action of discipleship is not just on the mountaintop but in the upcoming events of death and resurrection in Jerusalem.  As we pray over this Transfiguration Gospel, know that the message for us is not just the identity of Jesus in his transfigured glory but it is a story for us to reflect on what it means to be a disciple of Jesus.  In the words of the Father:  Listen to him.   As with the first disciples, we need to let go of old notions of discipleship that get in the way of listening to the message of Jesus.  We need to accept the cross in our own lives and to trust more fully in God’s plan for our lives.

Please God we all can identify with Transfiguration events that put us in touch with the glory of the Lord.  For me the glory is revealed in the sacredness of the ocean as well as on the mountaintop.  The glory of the Lord is revealed in the friendships of my life that are so life giving and I so deeply treasure and need.  The glory of the Lord is revealed in sacred moments of ministry.  Recently I vividly recall being in the hospital room at Strong and praying with patient who was about to go home to the Lord.  I was praying with his wife and son as well.  It was apparent to all that God was with us and all will be well.

We all need those treasured moments of faith to strengthen us for the times we will be vulnerable and fragile and wonder why God is asking to embrace this cross in our life.  The crosses in life we will experience as individuals, as families, as the faith community of St. Joseph’s, and as a nation.  There will be no dimension of our lives in which we get a free pass from the cross.

May our journey of faith have those beautiful Transfiguration in which we say with the apostle: “Lord, it is good we are here.” And may we be able to listen to the call of God in our journey of faith when we need to lead go of our familiar comfort zones and embrace the cross and Gethsemane in our lives.

Have a Blessed Day.

Into what Lenten desert are we being led by the Spirit to be tested and tempted to validate our faith and trust in Jesus?

First Sunday of Lent  A  2020

  “Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted by the devil.”  Jesus finding himself in the desert being tempted by the devil was not the result of bad luck or being at the wrong place at the wrong time.  Rather, this was by divine design.  Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert.

Sometimes we can find ourselves in the desert of disappointment or failure, not led by the Spirit of God’s love but rather they are the result of bad choices we have made.  Our desire for pleasure, power, or greed can sometimes get the best of us and lead us into the wilderness. 

But with Jesus, he is being led by the Spirit of God’s love into the desert to be tempted by the devil to use his power in ways that are not in God’s plan.  The devil was tempting Jesus to become the Messiah without the cross.  The devil was tempting Jesus to take the short cut to achieve his power as the Messiah.

Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert to be humbled, to be tested and tempted, to struggle with the forces of evil and thereby fully trust in God’s plan for His life.  The Lenten journey of Jesus was for 40 days and 40 nights in the desert wrestling with the forces of darkness.

My question for you and for me is what desert are we now being let into by the Spirit of  God’s love to be humbled, to be tested and tempted to validate our faith and trust in Jesus as the Lord and Savior of our lives?

As you have grieved the loss of someone you dearly love, as you have dealt with illness in your life and the in the life of a dear family member, as you have been hurt and your confidence has been betrayed, as you struggle with the temptation of pornography, as you have had to deal with more than your fair share of challenges, can you see these experiences as being led by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted by the devil.  Can these life wrenching experiences be example of how you are being led by the Spirit into the desert?

This I know:  God’s loves you with an everlasting love.  You are precious and glorious in the sight of God.  Yet, as with Jesus himself, the cross and the desert are a part of your life and mine.

A fundamental temptation for us is forgetting the Lord and the ways He has blessed us.  All of us wrestle with the Lord a bit on our spiritual journey.  In one moment, we turn our lives over to the Lord.  In the next moment, we are tempted by food or power or recognition.  We can too easily lose our spiritual footing.

The way the tempter dealt with Jesus is how the tempter deals with us – offering us discipleship of the Lord Jesus minus the cross in our life.  The cross is part of who Jesus is, and it is an enduring sign of His unconditional love for us.  The Lenten season invites us to recognize the cross in our spiritual journey.

The Stations of the Cross describe the stages of the suffering and death of Jesus.  As we experience the stations of the cross of illness, of death, of brokenness in our own stories, may we too get the help of Simon of Cyrene and be strengthened by the love of Mary our mother.  As for Jesus, our own stations of the cross are our way of discipleship of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Let us pray…, Lord God, it is risky to let ourselves be led by the Spirit.  We make an act of trust in you today, letting ourselves be guided by you, confident the devil will eventually leave us and angels will appear to look after us. Amen.

Lord, our faith community of Holy Spirit also is led into the desert to be tempted by the devil.  We would like see more people in the pews each and every Sunday; we would like to have more priests to serve the needs of our diocesan parishes; we would like our youth to be more involved in our faith formation initiatives, and so forth and so forth. 

We would like simple solutions to each of these challenges – perhaps just a simple resolution of the parish council -- preferably without the cross and the accompanying struggle.  May we always remember that we are led by the Spirit into the desert.  This is true of us as individuals and as a parish community.  However, there is a method to the divine madness.  As with Jesus, we need to trust in God’s plan even when we lose a bit of control in the outcome.

You may ask why in the world need we to choose spiritual disciplines in the Lenten season as our life circumstances provide us with enough desert experiences that are not of our choosing. 

The Lenten journey of our choosing is a quiet, humble, simple journey that was begun with ashes being placed on our foreheads. 

These Lenten disciplines help us to encounter Christ and to live our lives trusting in God’s plan for us.  Discipline and discipleship go together as surely night follows day.  May we value each of the Lenten disciplines of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. 

As disciples of Jesus, our prayer is placing ourselves in the presence of our God.  It is the gratitude we express for the blessings of life we enjoy.  May your Lenten prayer include a desert solitude – simply slowing down, being quiet, being still in God’s presence, and prayer without words.  May our Lenten prayer include the Sacrament of Reconciliation in which we return to the Lord our God.

May we embrace the discipline of fasting to simplify our lives in some way – through fasting from food or fasting from some activity – in order to more fully rely on Jesus being the nourishment that we seek and the moral compass of our lives.

May we embrace the discipline of almsgiving to share what we have been given with those in need.   Our discipleship of Jesus can never be divorced from the needs of God’s poor.

For the desert experience that we choose  and for the desert experience that have been chosen for us, may we be led by the Spirit of God’s love to trust more fully in God’s plan for our lives.

Have a blessed day.