Sunday Readings

Christ and King

Today, we sit in an area of the Bronx on property settled first by people who lived under a king and later became land-grant rewards to those who fought that king. All these years later, we remain fascinated by the high jinks of the children of our former government. And when they are quiet and behave, we turn our inquiring minds to our native brand of royalty – the Red Carpet Crowns, I mean crowd. Before the might of political change and media saturation, authority has devolved into celebrity. Yet even as the sword of royal prerogative has been sheathed, the star power of reputation has conquered the attention of the world. We in the United States may be free, but we are not without our royalty.

Obviously, we consider this on the Feast of Christ the King. At the end of our liturgical year, we celebrate the kingship of Christ which was a feast established during the rise of Fascism in the last century as Hitler, Mussolini and the like were emerging on the world stage. They may be gone, but their successors are not. The earthly claims of man-made authorities reign as powerfully as ever. Even religion has been co-opted into this human usurpation of God’s will as the Muslim world falls victim to those who see the kingdom of God become the kingdom of human hate. Yes, the Christian world has experienced this as well and we’ve never fared well under it.

But these do not hold a candle to the dominance and the domination of the media empire of modern life. Unelected and powerful, there is a concerted effort to shape public opinion from the trivial to the basic fabric of society. Let me give a simple example: you often hear the question, “Do you believe in global warming?” Or vitamins? Or any other social topic of the day. Forget the science, don’t mention the data – but doubt it, and you’re a heretic and a bad person. Fall out of line, use the wrong language or question what is forbidden and you’ll know where you are on the food chain! You think in this world that you’re free to do as you want? Just wear bell-bottoms with a plaid jacket!

Okay, there is an authority and a power that we, by social contract, can acknowledge even without a jeweled crown. That’s life and that’s the way it is. Fighting it is like fighting to keep Advent and ban Christmas decorations till the 25th of December. These are noble but useless fights since to win, we have to be in a utopia. If we proclaim “Christ is king” are we just giving permission for a doomed rebellion? No – and the 60’s proved that! As Christians, we need to take a different perspective if we are ever going to take a stand that actually matters. And God knows how badly we need both. Cardinal O’Malley in Boston recently called the so-called Catholic politicians in Massachusetts to fidelity and he was mocked by some and ignored by most. The coming year of campaigns will be similar.

The Christian who acknowledges the kingship of Christ must do so by looking at Christ, not the crown. It was from His weakest and most painful condition that He promised and gave what no other power could. It was in the face of insults and belittling – some the same as the Devil himself used at the Temptation in the wilderness – that He made His greatest statement. In the place of the immoral law, He declared the triumph of mercy. God’s final word was that ours is not.

So as the crowns of media and politics are tossed and caught, here is my ‘voters guide’ to living in the Kingdom of Christ the King:

- If there is no mercy, it is wrong.
- If there is no forgiveness, it is wrong
- If it says there is no hope, it is wrong.
- If it avoids sacrifice, it is wrong.
- If involves the ego, it is wrong.
- If takes the easy way out, it is wrong.
- If it replaces pleasure for happiness, it is wrong.
- If it says that this world is all there is, it is wrong.
- If says that we need to deal only with our own pain, it is wrong.

But if it sees in Christ the King a revolution of true freedom, it will see

- The bad things of life may be bad, but God can use them to make us saints.
- The things we’ve done wrong are not good but may be transformed to make us holy.
- The weakness of our control on this life can give us an authority to change the world.
- The power of this world in any form is never final and never stronger than God.
- The cross, for those who share in it, is the most powerful weapon of God’s justice that makes a nuclear bomb look like a sparkler.

So there you have it; a little summery of the Constitution of the Kingdom of Christ. We may say “Long Live Christ the King” only because in Him, we will live forever.

Sunday Readings

Already There - Already Here

“Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?” Are you tired of this homily yet? Human beings get very tired, very quickly, of the same thing - whether children on long car rides or adults paying their taxes – again. The thrill of new things wears off very soon and the same old things begins to hurt. Given this tendency, the idea of eternity does not seem all that appealing. Doing the same thing, even if a great thing and a holy thing, forever and ever is not often our idea of bliss. And if this sounds cynical, it’s not. Vampires live forever but at least they are a part of new (even if evil) things. The good are doomed to the tedium of fluffy and heavenly clouds.

And let’s take this one step further. If eternity is everlasting boredom, why care about anything but this life? Why be good when, for now, at least we can move around a bit? This is why the good people (like me) keep warning folks of the coming eternity and the judgment preceding it. These warnings are correct but can only be effective if we’re talking correctly about the same thing.

What is this promised (or threatened) everlasting life?

First of all is not simply a matter of life extension. It is not a sip from the fountain of youth. The Sadducees had an image that it is the ‘Big Part II of Life’ and keeps the first part going – just longer. Some take this to mean a kind of reincarnation which just can’t handle an end to earthly existence.

Secondly, it doesn’t mean that we beat the clock. Leave that to the anti-aging creams and diets. Sure we can dress and make our selves look a different age, but that only means that we are trying to control the clock. So many try to look and feel young as if that is in itself a worthy goal of life. And so many do it to such a point that they miss being alive. This timelessness is the second thing Jesus deals with when presented with pagan concepts of what happens after death.

And these ideas have not gone away with the glory of the Easter Mystery. We live today with a great confusion of this hope of eternal life because hope is not the virtue our contemporary world will be known for. And God cannot be known without hope.

The Christian idea of resurrection is not about us living forever; it is an article of faith that we live in God for ever. The difference is that this is about God, not us. We are taken up into the eternal nature of God. St. Paul uses the word ‘transferred’ and that is not bad even as we use it in everyday speech. Any one who has transferred from one school into another, from one job into another, or from one neighborhood to another knows what this means. We are the same but everything is new. The rules are different and the situation is more than a matter of friends and schedules. We see a shift in the mode of existence and perception. We adjust, evaluate and integrate these small but all-encompassing variables.

The eternity promised in the hope of our faith is so similar. We detect that our lives are not just a matter of here and now but seem to aimed for something way beyond. We get hints of a greater vision that are embedded in the ordinary things of daily life. Cleaning windows may be dull but if we look up and catch a rainbow out the same window, we are caught up in more than the optics and light. We can follow the rules of fashion and decorating, but beauty goes deeper. We can mourn and feel the pain of loss, but we still carve the marble of the headstones. As the prayers of a funeral Mass say, “the sadness of death gives way to the bright promise of immortality.”

Please notice that it does not take it away or merely annihilate it. There is no switch that God hits to set us to “go on forever.” Christian hope is about the transfer into God Himself. And this is something that begins in the present. In the movie Gladiator, Maximus says that “what we do in this life, echoes in eternity.” From the Christian viewpoint, we put it differently: “Since we have begun to echo eternity, life matters.”

And that’s it right there. Those things we profess in the Creed – the resurrection of the body and the life of the world to come – are about life, not death. They are about who we are, not when or for how long we are. These are not gloomy matters best suited only for the dark of a world approaching the barren landscape of winter. They interlace every prayer we pray by saying “for ever and ever. Amen.” They are the background noise of every appointment we make and every good-bye we really don’t mean. We live in a world soaked with eternity because we live, despite our best efforts, in a world of implicit hope. As Christians, that rumor of eternity is explicitly spoken in the Word made flesh which makes our hope of eternal life very real.

I know a homily can sometimes mimic the threat of never-stopping life. But raise your hopes and look a little farther. There really is something much greater.

Sunday Readings

Oops, God did it again!

Oops, she did it again! She can’t be left alone with her own children but now Brittany is gravitating toward anti-Catholic social commentary. Sorry, Brittany, but Madonna’s been there, done that. When talent and career start to fade, a star feels the gravity of standard shock behavior. Human beings are so typical and celebrities are just more so. Now before any of you go on YouTube and start crying to leave Brittany alone, let’s agree that we can all see our standard operating procedure at work. We fall into our regular patterns of taking the easy route, lining up the virtues and vices and trying whatever may work to get ahead. Pop culture is not only full of this; it exalts it. This little anti-Catholic trick seems to have worked – the record has done very well and the money keeps rolling in.

If we can be so easily convinced to do and just go along with wrong, we also seem to have an inbuilt ‘reverse mode’. We believe that if we give up the wrong, we will get into God’s good favor. All those bad folks have to do is clean up, straighten out and God will be happy. And while some can be convinced of the futility of their wicked ways (and some should be), avoiding wrong is only a step in the right direction.

Take our friend Zacchaeus for example. A weasel in a slime-ball profession. And he was the chief of the weasels who worked for the Roman invaders. If we had to advise him we’d say to knock it off, get a respectable job and say some prayers. It’s the same thing we’d say to a thief, a swindler or even a rock star. We’d actually be right to say that, especially if the person was in danger of something serious.

But is this really conversion? Is that what Jesus did? What did He tell a low-life like Zacchaeus?

The interesting thing that stands out is that Jesus did not look at Zacchaeus and demand that this sinner reform. He did not condemn him or humiliate him. He basically invited Himself over for dinner. And because He did, because Zacchaeus hosted this celebrated holy man, something more than a usual dinner happened. Zacchaeus found the one thing human beings need most and do everything to find – even in all the wrong places. Zacchaeus found redemption. It was from this discovery that he reformed – not the other way around. And the gawkers hated it. They didn’t understand why the usual route was being changed. Jesus, with a bite to eat, turned religion on its head. It was now for the sick and the sinful. And He was the doctor who found the patient, the Shepherd who followed the straying sheep.

We call this grace. It means the free and initial activity of the God who looks for us when we are looking away. When we are looking at our sins, God is looking for our heart. We may go to Church, but God comes to us. We offer Him our best efforts; He gives us His very Self. And He offers this to us at our worst.

Grace is like that. It is surprising, disturbing and even amazing. This is a faith that appeals to scoundrels, hypocrites, and the dregs of society. Sure, it embraces the generally good, the mediocre and the plain-old boring. It even holds the affections of the occasionally holy and usually saintly. In other words, because this is a faith in the God who comes to us, He seems to come to all. God seems to visit and interact with us despite our worst or our best actions.

Why is this important? This makes all the difference. If God’s love depended solely on our moral behavior, we’d be in serious trouble. If our virtues determined God’s mercy, we’d never receive it. And the great freedom of grace is that judgment is left to God – and God alone. No, wrong actions are wrong and it is very wrong to say they are not or are right. But if religion is now a matter of grace, morality is a matter of gratitude. In that same grace and thanksgiving, we offer this supreme act of worship to the God of all mercy. We begin and we end with ‘thanks be to God’ because we have need and reason to say so.