Sunday Readings

More, More

One of the great quotes of the 1980’s was in the movie Wall Street when a character said that “greed – for lack of a better word – is good.” And every generation since and before nods in agreement. Sure in public we say how unfair and how nasty our misuse of money can be. We’ve seen how greedy executives can wipe out ordinary people’s life savings. But thank God, we’re not like them, are we? I mean not many of us have the opportunity, never mind the inclination, to be greedy for what little money the poor people of this world can claim. And armed with the Gospel, we hear some religious types warning that any one who is less than a full-blown socialist is going to hell. Everyone can see that the rich are rich because they are greedy and the poor are not afflicted with this vice.

But tell me why then lottery tickets are marketed heaviest in poorer neighborhoods? Why do government regulations allow easy access to casinos for the poor? Explain how expensive mass-produce fashions reign in the inner cities? It’s easy to tag the wealthy as greedy because of what they have rather than who they are. And it is a modern crime to call some one of lesser means ‘greedy’ because they live with a great amount of envy.

But these are sociological and political themes. And they are not the point of the Gospel. We all have met some very generous people – with and without a lot of money. And we have all met some stingy cheapskates of those same categories. So who is Jesus going after? And what is in us that needs to be rooted out as recipients of God’s generous mercy?

The rich man, known as Dives, makes three mistakes. The first is that he knew Lazarus but never saw him as a person in need. He threw this beggar some leftovers but nothing more. The second mistake is that even in hell, Dives is acting superior. Because of the material goods he had in life, Dives is arrogantly trying to make a glorified beggar his servant. So Dives thwarted makes the third mistake; he tries religion. He asks Abraham to work a miracle and by-pass the role of faith. Abraham says that what God has revealed is more than enough. All of these mistakes have little to do with money. They are issues of the soul.

The trap of greed has some real teeth. It says that the good things of this life are so good they reflect the infinite goodness of God. And that is true. But as things, they carry a message that “too much of a good thing, is a good thing.” The ego has a fleeting feeling of satisfaction and craves more. At first it gains what it can in ordinary human interaction. But then it begins to ignore people who we would have felt compassion for before the mad dash for more began. Then we begin to use others and degrade them to instruments of our personal gain. And the final illusion becomes a god who bends to our will. And when life is over, all those desires remain and go out towards nothing. Yes, we take nothing with us when we die but we do enter eternity with our heart’s desires. So it’s not how much or how little we have, it’s a matter of the heart.

I think this is obvious. After all, Jesus said that ‘where your treasure is, there also is your heart.’ But why is this important?

I’m sure many of you would agree that we live a blessed life in a prosperous country. We owe a debt to our ancestors and our society for things like water, sanitation and domestic tranquility. And we should cherish and enjoy the small luxuries and conveniences of our life. The question we have to ask is what has happened to our selves in the process. Let me offer an example.

Now that cell phones, Facebook.com, email, IM, and a host of new technologies have put us into contact, we seem to have less to say. Distracted by texting, people sit at a dinner table with thumbs moving but no conversation. Long gone are the days when a single telephone had its own furniture of a chair, a table and even a lamp. So we have more but I think less. The more connections we have the less personal it seems to have become. We could say the same about fast food, medical services, and a host of others. Advances are not bad in themselves. But greed for them is. The loss of the soul, and all that strengthens it, is never an advance.

Personally, we have to watch ourselves. We can appreciate and value the good things we have. And we equally have to examine ourselves to make sure that these good things never take over our lives. Poverty is not good; dehumanizing ourselves or others is worse. That was Dive’s fatal flaw. He never saw the value of his soul or anyone else’s. He preferred a spectacular religion that needed little faith. We all have the opportunity to value the good we have in proportion. We can all choose charity over luxury. We have the grace to live our faith each day rather than expect extraordinary miracles in the bad times.

A heart free of greed is a soul full of charity. And the worth of that is a lasting treasure indeed.

Sunday Readings

Who And How

The other day I saw a preview of a film about a young man who gives it all up and goes into the wild because he was trying to find the meaning of life. Everyone was enraptured by this quest and pondered the ‘meaning of life.’ Next came a story of one of today’s celebrities and their high-jinx involving fast cars, expensive toys and costly beauty. But no one pondered the meaning of life with this crowd.

Welcome to the modern world. We are in awe of those who have it all and those who throw it all away. We are searching for happiness and we like to see those who seem to have found it. But the celebrities are simply that – they’re just celebrated. Happiness is clearly elsewhere. And this poor kid looking for something died trying to find it. And these two extremes – did they ever pass a church or open a Bible? Here’s the meaning of life: to know, love and serve God in this world and to be happy with Him forever in heaven. But it seems that many are not satisfied with it or just don’t agree with this as the meaning of life. Actually, there is no earthly way to know the meaning of life, only meaning in life. The Gospel today is a confusing one because we look at from a morality viewpoint. We ask if the steward was good or bad? Should we do the same or not? But this is about so much more. It is a question of who we serve and that is the answer to who we are.

Yes, people are always looking for meaning. They are always asking where they fit in the world. It is natural for people who detect a supernatural quality within them. Ambitious people have a 5 and 10 year plan to their lives. Successful people have figured out how the game is played. We tell ourselves that goals are good and dreams are essential. But where is God is that? How can people – ourselves included – live without reference to God? Whether having it all or living without material things, what good is it without a reason? At the Easter Vigil, we ask this question: What good would life have been to us had Christ not come as our Redeemer?

It is not a matter of what you lack or what you have. It is a matter of who you serve. If we cannot know the meaning of life, maybe God has given it meaning beyond ourselves. If it is in giving that we receive, maybe taking more or taking less is not the answer. In our searching, I believe the greatest surprise is that Jesus alone is the meaning. Imitating His trust in the Father’s will becomes our mode of life. Sure, drop the baggage that holds us down but never be fooled that this self-denial is self-improvement. Take care not to believe that the more you have, the more of God you get. The steward of today acted out of self-fulfillment and not service. His charity to others didn’t cost him a thing even if it fooled others into believing that it did. And the owner praised this steward for his cunning even if it ripped him off. Jesus is merely pointing out that the interaction of people in the real world is quite different from the way people of the kingdom should act. It’s a message to us to wise up.

The question of who we serve is more than an act of charity around Christmas. Nor is it merely a matter of more and less. It is about the heart because where the heart is will give us an idea of who we are. Be wise with what God has given you. Your strengths and your weaknesses are there for a reason. You will never find the meaning of life in how large or small your bank account happens to be. But the Gospel promises us the abundant meaning in life lived in the way of the Cross.

Who you serve is far more important than how you serve. God will let you know how, usually by using what it in front of you. And there is never something more meaningful than doing the will of God. After all, in the end, won’t that be all that mattered anyway?

Sunday Readings

Deal With It

A reporter asked the New Orleans minister if God was punishing that city for its world-famous wickedness. The minister replied that God was not because if He did that, the sin throughout the United States would be so bad that God would have to wipe this nation off the face of the earth. The reporter’s question is not unique. I remember people asking me the same thing after Katrina. My response was similar: If God was punishing New Orleans, how could His aim be so bad? He hit the poor and the Churches but missed the bars and nightclubs! How did we ever get to point that a God who created the world would be equally disposed to throw it all away?

Let me propose an idea here: We apply the worst human characteristics to God in order to justify ourselves. Our anger, hurt and envy seem bigger than ourselves so we need something bigger to act on them. Like humanity inventing the pulley or the lever, we discover that we can manipulate the greater when we are so clearly too small. Turn the little key and the monster truck roars to life. Hit the button, and the evil is wiped away. This is a human tendency that has been with us since the Garden of Eden. We blame the devil when we can and call for wrath when we’re annoyed. We even go so far as to think that God is like this. He sends bolts of lightning and waves from broken levies when it is convenient for us to think that He should.

And then we come to these three stories. In place of our false God of bitter justice, this is a God who is happy that a lost sheep is found. This is a God who throws a party because He has again a misplaced coin. This is a Heavenly Father who forgives the children who humiliated and hurt Him. There are no lightning bolts here, no disasters of wrath. Sure, this took some time to get through to His people and they still think of Him wrongly, but Jesus is showing more and more the true nature of God. And when we see this quality of mercy, we don’t always like it.

I remember someone interviewing a priest who had been called to Timothy McVeigh’s cell only hours before his execution for the Okalahoma City bombing. The priest said that he had been called and had visited McVeigh. The questioner was shocked and asked if God could forgive some one like that. The priest said, “yes.” “So you believe McVeigh could be in Heaven?” Again, the priest said yes. And with disbelieving acid on her tongue she demanded, “and with the children he killed?” The priest said yes one more time. The interviewer was clearly disgusted. This is not how God should work, is it? A few minutes later, after the execution, a witness stood up and said, “God will judge Timothy McVeigh and Timothy McVeigh will burn in Hell.”

Do you see what happened here? Divine anger is determined by angrier human beings. In fact God is a mere substitute for respectable people who are morally justified in their desire for vengeance. Do those Pharisees of today’s Gospel now seem so different? Feed the hungry but don’t eat with them. God is love but He hates those who do wrong. As Homer Simpson said as he predicted the Apocalypse, “God loves you and now’s He is going to kill you.” It doesn’t make sense to us and I doubt it does to God. Something is clearly wrong when we think that God is more like us so we don’t have to be like Him.

So how do we get to that point where mercy is more than a feeling and forgiveness is wrath-free?

We have to go back to the beginning. If the desire for Divine Retribution is located in our own anger and sense of “justice”, maybe that’s where things went wrong. Maybe our understanding of God is just that – ours. God is revealed to us by God Himself. Sure, we each have our own understanding of God. And get ready for this one, that understanding can be wrong. If the God of mercy is not our image of God, we have the wrong idea. We can respect a false belief, but we will never buy it. They’re free to follow it and we are free to reject it. The ‘fire and brimstone’ crowd are like a good war movie: we love the special effects so long as they are not happening in our backyard. And I’m not talking just about the ‘gloom and doom’ preachers on TV. We have them as well. And we have that within each of us. Like kids who afraid that the parent or teacher will punish them, we fear our wrongs will be greater than God’s mercy.

Yes, we fear. And fear, as you know, is a powerful thing. Good fear, the fear of doing wrong and causing destruction, makes life more livable. But the bad fear, projected on to an all-powerful God, is a cold idol of a false religion. Each Christian must ask themselves if they see hints and shadows of this in their own heart. Are we ‘sinners in the hand of an angry God’ or are we loved by Him with all our faults and virtues? Do we worship a God who is ready, willing and able to condemn us to hell or do we worship a God who desires us to be with Him for eternity?

The Christian life is often a matter of figuring this out and moving from fear to love. In that same mercy of God, He allows us to move slowly and patience is built-in to the program of grace. I’ll conclude with something the producer of the series ‘Touched by An Angel’ once said. When asked her if that show was overtly religious, she replied that it was because ‘God loves you. Deal with it.’

Well, God is merciful. Deal with it.

Sunday Readings

Fail-Safe

A parishioner once lived by a very wise motto: ‘Fail to plan and plan to fail.’ It remains very true that it is a good idea to go through life with some definite goals to accomplish. Even in the little tasks, see that there is order and progress. But things are never that neat, are they? Something always gets in the way of that precise way of living. Despite our best plans, things go wrong and we fail. We come, once again, to a sad anniversary of that. Try as we might, we have trouble wrapping our minds around an event that was the result of a very well laid plan of incredible evil. Clearly, organization and efficiency are not the greater virtues in and of themselves.

The First Reading is a lovely meditation on a very simple fact: God’s way of doing things is often not all that clear. The counsels of the Most High can be most confusing. The ‘godly way’ can seem like a dead end. So if God’s ways are so mysterious, isn’t it a little strange that Jesus would preach a decisive message of counting the cost of discipleship? It seems as if He is presenting a program of self-giving that is fairly straight-forward. Sure, it is a high cost (basically everything) but at least there seem to be few variables.

Let’s take a modern example. Some one who proclaimed and lived the Gospel attracted millions and inspired countless more in the way a Christian life could be lived in the modern world. This person gave up everything and did so joyfully. And now, we are discovering, that she lacked the consolation of feeling the nearness of God for more years than any one could imagine. Mother Theresa was engaged in a project that was inspired by a faith that was pure and one that was very unclear and dark. God had a set purpose which she carried out in a remarkable way, but to her, the ways of the Lord seemed so murky.

If it sounds like a contradiction, it is. There is a paradox here that says God has a definite plan for each of us and at the same time, we can be sure that we will never be able to figure it out completely. To put it another way, God desires us to know He has plan for us and tells us at the same time that this plan is none of our business. What is going on here? Why can’t God just come out with the bottom line and just tell it like it is?

Remember last week when we heard those readings on humility? Remember that humility is the truth that God is God and we are not? This week we apply that to one of the fundamentals of human life and Christian discipleship. God’s ways are God’s, not ours. Jesus prepares us – by His word and His grace – to offer ourselves without counting the cost. But what and how God asks this of us is nothing we can pre-plan. We can’t demand clarity of a mystery. Try as we are able, we can figure the answer to a puzzle but can never solve a mystery.

Again, why all the game playing? That ‘lack’ of an answer is the Holy Grail. It is an engine of the deepest power to keep us searching. Face it: we’re lazy. Give us the answer and we’ve already forgotten the question. In constantly asking God for direction and reasons for living, we are in the spot He intended us to be in the first place: before Him, speaking with Him, praying to Him. If we found all the answers to life written in a book – even the Bible – we may stop looking for the Author of that book. When the Bible goes into the reference section of our lives, God gets put on the shelf as well.

The cost of discipleship that Jesus gives is not a spirituality of the quick grace before meals or the fewest possible minutes on Sunday morning. This is a covenant of life and not a contract of pre-disclosed agreements. Jesus was very clear that the way will not be clear. This is the cross itself for us because everyone faces the obvious challenge of the mystery of God in their lives.

So, relax. It’s okay to wonder and fine to not know. Knowledge may be power but mystery is so much more. My life has gone on even if I can’t figure out (or for that matter remember) the Quadratic Equation. Life goes on even if we can’t figure it out. If can’t be the master of the universe, at least I can have the decency to worship the One who actually is.

Today’s Psalm has a line I used to put on top of our class schedule: Teach us to number our days aright that we may gain wisdom of heart. Our prayer today is similar: Teach us, O Lord, to look to You when the days get confusing and the reason behind them makes little sense. Instruct us to see You when the things that happen darken our view. Help us to offer better when life takes so much away. And during this long, strange trip, may we find that You walking with us all the way.

That journey may be many things, but one thing is certain: this mystery will never be boring. So fasten your seat belts; we are sure to keep meeting the unknown.

Sunday Readings

Get Real

I am very proud to have yet another chance to preach upon an aspect of the Christian life essential to all of us!

Clearly, today’s homily is about a virtue praised by most, preferred by few and disliked by all. It is the key to the other virtues and the foundation of all true success.

That’s right; it’s humility. Oh goodie, you might say, we’re getting one of those pious rants on how good God really is to people who can be really awful. After all, isn’t that what humility is all about? I mean God really is good. And do we need still another Lent to tell us how nasty we can be? Here in the middle of ‘Ordinary Time’ we are given readings that seem out of place. Don’t we save the self-flagellation for Lent when we give up the chocolate and dognuts?

Well maybe this far from Lent we have a chance to see this sad-faced ideal from a different angle. And maybe we can throw off all dour affectation and get to the heart of the virtue.

Let’s begin by understanding why humility is so key. Children today are raised by people who were themselves raised to believe they could do anything they set their minds to. Every popular image in school, media and culture says this is true. Only a killjoy (like me) would say otherwise. But forgive my impertinence, it seems to me that claims of omnipotence and omniscience are countered by little things like grades, the economy and the laws of physics. Let me try an example. I can put every drop of thought and planning and conviction into am attempt to breathe water rather than air. But none of that will ever help me regardless of how much I put my mind to it. None of my best wishes or best efforts will allow me to do this. Perhaps I can build a truly portable breathing device that will revolutionize human existence, but I still will have failed the original goal and would have to settle for an analogy. Settling for this or failing outright to breathe water rather than air, I will have encountered reality. I will have discovered reality itself and the great surprise that I am limited by it.

Like silver-bullet cures known only by a select few or get-rich quick schemes, the diamond-hard wall of reality sets up a roadblock to the human enterprise. We build the towers of Babel and rage against the law of gravity. And what happens? Nothing; absolutely nothing. The mansions of clouds and sandcastles on the beach just vanish.

Reality is often called cold and stark. Perhaps we should just call it what it is: real. And for all the talk of real change or real progress, none of it can happen in any place but the real world. This is no insult nor is it taking away from anything we have. It’s merely the truth and it is one we do not like. But if we can grudgingly agree to it, we have what those lacking in reality seem to crave most. We end up with vision.

And that is what Christ wants us to have. He desires us to have a clear view of things as they are, as we are. If the Gospel is going to change us, we have to see what is going to change. Yes, every human being changes the world whether they were promised this at graduation or not. The question of history, and the challenge of the Gospel, is whether this change will be for the better or not.

But isn’t this too negative? What about all our dreams for a better world? People who are dreamers are asleep. Guided by dreams is to be guided by our greatest desires and our worst tendencies. And these are not real. Our greatest desires are products of the ego. Our worst tendencies are things we avoid - and for good reason. Pride convinces us that we are good enough or too bad for God. We are never that good and we over-estimate our wrongs. Reality says that our good is usually no more than okay and our evil is bad but rarely monstrous. Reality says we’re not that creative and we grow bored with things too quickly.

Yet still we reach for higher and better even as we dig deeper furrows in the mud and the muck. Humility sees that. And when it does, something amazing happens. It doesn’t over-estimate our achievements or despair because of our sins. Humility is simply the truth of who we are before God, each other and ourselves. Humility rejoices that we were able to do something good. It has no problem acknowledging that we have failed when we do. It is always moderate and honest. And as a virtue, it is something that is exercised and strengthened with use. Like all the other virtues, it is active and not dusted upon us when we’re asleep. To accomplish anything lasting, it has to be real. To do anything that touches things ever-lasting, it better be.

You know what is the difference between being humble and acting humbly? One-tenth the effort and all the same praise! Watch out for the appearance of humility and be wise with self-deprecation. We are wonderfully made and God rejoices in the things we do well. And you and I, weak creatures prone to sin, are the ones God has chosen to really change the world and to do so for good.

Be humbled by the pride we ought to take in this great vocation to be nothing less than saints.

Humility demands it.