November 4, 2012

Deuteronomy 6: 2-6 + Psalm 18 + Hebrews 7: 23-28 + Mark 12: 28-34

There is a deep and offensive wound that infects our faith and our lives in this age of the world. It is a split between the faith that many Catholics profess and their daily lives. This deserves to be counted among the most serious troubles of our age, and at the heart of this incident in Mark’s Gospel this trouble is being addressed by Jesus. Perhaps it is the frantic pace of life today in our culture that allows us to deny or avoid healing this wound and acknowledging what it is doing to us, but for this moment we sit with this Gospel, it will be undeniable.

Many think that religion consists in acts of worship alone, and they plunge themselves into earthly affairs in such a way as to imply that these are altogether divorced from religious life. I am quoting here the Second Vatican Council’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World. The document is almost fifty years old, and it is as though it were written last week. You would have thought in 1965 that the Council would have named Communism, materialism, individualism or a host of other ideologies as candidates for the most serious error, but it does not. Instead, it names the divide that we maintain between the faith we profess and our daily lives in this world: between what we do here for an hour each week and what we do the rest of the time.

A compartmentalized lifestyle is one of the first and clearest symptoms of narcissism, and you do not have to be around long in this life to recognize that we are living in an age of narcissism. It is an un-integrated life-style that puts events and issues into separate little categories that often separates people into little groups in order to keep them apart, manage, or control their interaction so that the fragile “self” can be protected, admired, and be content. This is a self-justifying kind of life free of challenge free of change, proteted from critique, and ultimately very lonely. It is not a life-style compatible with Jesus Christ proclaimed in this Gospel.

The excuse that keeping things separate, dealing with them one at a time, and never mixing religion and life or bringing our faith to bear on our lives between Sundays is lame and useless. It is not acceptable, and it will not reconcile with what is happening in these verses of Mark’s Gospel. Failing to address poverty and the violence it breeds from frustrated unemployed young people who see great wealth in the rest of the world while concentrating on the horrible violence of abortion is a compartmentalized life. These issues cannot be separated. Not connecting the moral issue of capital punishment or war and abortion to a disregard for human life so obvious among us reveals the split that has wounded us; While leaders tempt us to argue about which issues is more important, nothing gets done. The argument itself continues to divide us, and of course, divide and conquer has long been a tool of those in power to secure their ideology. We will make no progress as long as we compartmentalize these issues and fail to see that they connect and then recognize how the immoral gap between poverty and wealth breeds violence, hatred, and war. We will make no progress toward peace as long as we do nothing about respecting all human life We have no persuasive voice as long as we choose who lives and who dies or tolerate “Collateral damage” which really means dead women and children. We will have no credible voice as long as we have money for weapons and nothing for the poor. When Jesus and this scribe talk about being close to the Kingdom of God and the commandments that once kept will seure our place in the Kingdom, they are talking about an integrated whole life free of compartments and healed of that split that has infected us and this whole world.

The body and the soul are together, and the health of one depends on the health of the other. Sickness of soul inevitably infects the well-being of the body. Body, Mind, Soul, and Heart are interdependent. We are a whole being in this life, and effective are for one part of this body demands effective care for the other. In the same way, love of God demands love of neighbor – if they are not together, the love of God is nothing more than a charade; an effort to look good in the eyes of others while remaining empty and broken, disconnected, and separated from our neighbor In the reverse, even those who do not know and may not confess Jesus Christ as their savior and close to God when they love and care for their neighbor

These Gospel verses speak to the demand for an integrated life, for a life that brings faith to hear on everything happens and every decision and every judgment. The very Incarnation of Jesus Christ, the Son of God taking on human flesh puts an end once and for ever to a separation between heaven and earth and breaks up the categories that might allow us to live a secular life distinct from a spiritual life Consequently, we cannot look at violence and war and not cry out that this is wrong. We cannot look at poverty and push it aside as if it were someone else’ problem or something we might eventually get around to thinking about. Our faith will not allow us to prioritize the evils of our age and shove them into categories to be sort3d our when we have the money or the time. We will never have either asl long as we keep them apart and argue among ourselves about which one is most important. This translation of these verses uses the world “all” where other translations prefer “whole” I prefer the world “whole”. In either case, the word is repeated seven times in seven verses. If nothing else clicks, the repetition ought to say something. Wholeness is the issue, an integration of faith and life, of God and neighbor, of body, mind, and soul is what it will take to get close to the Kingdom of God. Many in this church spend more hours in the gym than in the church, more time at physical exercise than at spiritual exercise, more time at play than at prayer with such an un-integrated lifestyle, it is no wonder that the human community is so divided when we live lake that from the inside.

November 2, 2012

Isaiah 25, 6-9 + Psalm 22 + 1 Corinthians 15, 51-57 + John 6, 37-40

Every time we gather around this altar I say on your behalf: “Remember also our brothers and sisters who have fallen asleep in the hope of the resurrection, and all who have died in your mercy: welcome them into the light of your face.”

In some ways this makes every Mass a Mass for the dead, a time for remembering or restoring what has been separated. For those of us who believe and express ourselves in this Catholic tradition, death does not separate us from one another. As the Invitation to Prayer so beautifully says in the Rite of Christian Burial:  “We believe that the ties of friendship and affection which knit us as one throughout our lives do not unravel with death.”

Each time we gather before this altar we do so in the communion of saints. Prayers for the dead in our tradition began at the very beginning in the earliest Christian communities who cared so lovingly for the bodies of those martyrs whose blood bore witness to their common hope in the resurrection. Those early Christians did so because the recognized the unbreakable bond that joins us all together in Christ, the living and the dead like. “Nothing can separate us from Christ” says Saint Paul. Not even death.

Thirteen hundred years ago a famous English Benedictine priest gave us some beautiful thoughts about this. He wrote: We seem to give them back to you, O God, who gave them first to us. Yet as you did not lose them in giving, so we do not lose them by their return. Not as the world gives do you give. What you give you do not take away. For what is yours is also ours. We are yours and life is eternal. And love is immortal, and death is only a horizon, and a horizon is but the limit of our sight. (The Venerable Bede, 673-735) The Venerable Bede gives us much to think about tonight, and his words propose a faithful and profoundly comforting way of living and celebrating All Souls Day.

We are resurrection people, Easter people who live in and through our oneness with Christ living now in us when we are one as church. This is a day of Thanksgiving, of day for gratitude for what God has given us in those we remember. As Bede says, God gave them first, and God lost nothing in giving them to us. We lose nothing in giving them back to God because God’s gifts are never taken away since what is God’s is also ours for God has given us everything God has: God’s Life, God’s only Son, God’s very Spirit.

It is this faith that tempers our sadness and our loss. It is this faith that calls us here every Easter to light a fire in the darkness, to bring a new candle into this dark church, to take light from this candle that never dims no matter how much light is taken from it. See the symbol. Understand the mystery. The life of God poured out for us is never lost and never less. One day death will claim us all. There is no escape, but for those of us who gather at the foot of the cross week after week, there is the constant reminder that death has been defeated, and Life claims the victory. The one who called Lazarus from the tomb has himself burst the bonds of death and scattered the darkness. Why not believe that he will call us from our tombs as well to be remembered among those already gone before us. Perhaps if we, like Martha and Mary at the time Lazarus died call upon him and profess our faith as did Mary we shall find courage, comfort, and joy in this autumn season when all nature seems to take its rest for one reason only, to rise, to bloom, to bear fruit in the morning.

November 1, 2012

Shortly after he converted to Catholicism in the late 1930s, Thomas Merton was walking the streets of New York with his friend, Robert Lax. Lax was Jewish, and he asked Merton what he wanted to be, now that he was Catholic. “I don’t know,” Merton replied, adding simply that he wanted to be a good Catholic. Lax stopped him in his tracks. “What you should say,” he told him, “is that you want to be a saint!” Merton was dumbfounded. “How do you expect me to become a saint?,” Merton asked him.

Lax said: “All that is necessary to be a saint is to want to be one. Don’t you believe that God will make you what He created you to be, if you will consent to let him do it? All you have to do is desire it.” Thomas Merton knew his friend was right. Merton, of course, would go on to become one of the great spiritual thinkers and writers of the last century. His friend Bob Lax would later convert to Catholicism himself — and begin his own journey to try and be a saint. But the words Lax spoke ring down through the decades to all of us today. Because they speak so simply and profoundly to our calling as Catholic Christians.

You should want to be a saint. And to be one, all you need is to want to be one.

Of course, if you only want to be a run-of-the-mill, average Christian, that’s probably all you’ll ever be. Every one can do just enough to get by. It’s not hard. But the message Christ sends to all of us is an invitation to be something more. In the words of the old Army recruiting ad: be all that you can be. Be a saint.

If anyone has any doubts how to do that, Matthew’s gospel today is a helpful how-to guide.You might call it “Becoming a Saint for Dummies.” We know it better as The Beatitudes.

“Blessed are…” With those two words Jesus begins a beautiful instruction in how to live the life of a saint. Pope Benedict has taken that a step further: in his remarkable book “Jesus of Nazareth,” he suggests that the beatitudes are nothing less than a self-portrait of Christ.

It is a portrait of what all of us should aspire to. To be poor in spirit…to be meek…to be merciful. To hunger and thirst for righteousness. To be clean of heart and to make peace. Taken as a whole, the Beatitudes also sum up the beautiful refrain of today’s psalm. Because “Lord, this is the people that longs to see your face.” This is the people that want to be saints.

Most of us are familiar with the phenomenal saintly stories of the Church. We grew up hearing of how John was beheaded, and Stephen was stoned; how Francis got the stigmata, or how Therese suffered humiliations and disease to die an early death. You hear stories like that and you can’t blame Thomas Merton for not really being eager to be a saint. It’s not only hard work, it often doesn’t have a happy ending. But those are the stories we hear about. There are countless stories – millions, throughout the centuries – that we don’t. They are the anonymous saints who go about their daily lives quietly, peacefully, joyfully, finally entering into the fullness of grace without doing anything more dramatic than merely living the beatitudes. They are the unsung saints.

If you visit the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles, you’ll see magnificent tapestries lining the walls. And they really are magnificent, designed and executed by the artist John Nava. They remind me of the work of Norman Rockwell or Andrew Wyeth – dramatic, realistic, and contemporary depictions of ordinary people of extraordinary character. And they adorn the walls of the cathedral the same way that stained glass windows once decorated the great Gothic cathedrals of Europe. In the tapestries, you can see all the familiar saints whose names we know, in a row, facing toward the altar, as if in line for communion. It is – literally and figuratively – the communion of the saints. There is St. Nicholas, St. Gregory, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Francis, St. Clare…and on and on, with their names over their heads.

But scattered among those saints are people without names – people you won’t find in Butler’s “Lives of the Saints.” A teenage girl. A young man from the barrio. Children in contemporary clothes. They are the saints whose names are known only to God. It is a beautiful and eloquent depiction of the day we celebrate today: All Saints. And the message of those tapestries is the message of this feast day: these unknown saints are just as worthy as the ones who are known. They look like us. They look like people we might pass on the street. If we have any faith at all that motivates our lives, then  the world has every reason to expect that we could be there for as Bob Lax explained, to a man whom some people today consider a saint: All you really need…is to want to. And God will do all the rest.

October 20, 2012

Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem. We’re not sure where he started from, but no matter, it could not be any further than from going to Purcell to Downtown Oklahoma City. It has taken him a long time. Most of us, even at my age could make if faster, but he has had a lot of interruptions. Last week someone ran up to him and wanted to know what he had to do to be saved. That took a long time to resolve, and then today he is walking along and here James and John start. It is not just James and John start. It’s all of them. They just don’t get it. The ten are angry and they are not angry at James and John for what they ask. I think they are angry because they did not ask the question themselves. James and John just beat them to it. Jesus shows remarkable patience. I have a hunch that if last week and this week are connected, I think Jesus is sad because that rich man did not just come along. Now his closest friends may be walking with him, but they are not thinking with him. They may be following with their footsteps, but they are not following with their minds and hearts.

He has spoken to them about discipleship and what it means in terms of suffering and service. He has shown them how words fail, and when he could not say it any more, he took a little child. He held it up in their midst. I spoke that a couple of weeks ago. He held up that child who just focused on the moment, living right now. He has again and again turned his favor on the vulnerable and the helpless and those without privilege and power. He must be wondering: “What is it going to take for you to get it.” Everything around them, however, made it easy to miss the point. They were living under the power of the Romans who had slaves to preserve order among the common people and insure their economic prosperity. When you are the underdog, it is easy to think that greatness means lording it over others. It’s often been proven that the perscuted become the persecutors. We know that bullies often have been bullied. Jesus in his way confronts all of that. He speaks of being on his right and his left, and we know who ends up there. We know who ends up there, two criminals, two sinners. The only ones who have a claim to be on the side of Jesus are sinners and those who have known failure. That is the problem with these disciples. They are way too perfect. They are too impressed and concerned with their privilege. They are close to the “Man!” They are walking along with that man who draws crowds of people who are coming out to see and hang around. They know this guy who feeds multitudes, who cures the sick. They think they are really something.

Where are they when there are nails going into his hands and feet? You see, what they don’t get is that it is not until you fail, not until you hit bottom, not until you know your sin or your unworthiness that you have any claim on what Jesus has to offer. Fortunately for James and John and the others as well, we get their chance and we get their ambitious righteouness but we to see how it crumbes. They run away. They are miserable failures when it comes to friendship or loyalty and the faith it takes to see glory in the cross.

Finally once they have failed Jesus by their cowerdly behavior in the face of injustice and the execution of their friend, they finally get it. To their credit, at that point, they become believable and worthy of share in his victory as well as a share in his mission. When he offers them a cup, this is symbolic language of table fellowship. The cup he drinks is the cup of service, and those would share are those who would lay down their lives for others. Sinners and servers are those who have place at the table of the Lord and a share in the cup of that table. This place is not for the righteous, and the food of this table is for the unworthy who know and confess and accept their unworthiness in the face of unimaginable grace. What I think the apostles don’t get early on, but begin to  understand when they acknowledge their unworthiness and quick scrambling for the places of honor is that success is measured not by what we get, but by what we give.

October 14, 2012

Wisdom 7: 7-11 + Psalm 90 + Hebrews 4: 12-13 + Mark 10:17-30

I straighted a book shelf. I dusted the desk top. I cleaned out the top drawer of my desk, straightened two picutres, and desperatly checked email four times within an hour. Perhaps for the first time in my memory the “inbox” was empty: not even some spam! I studied nine commentaries, played the piano for fifteen minutes, and had a third cup of coffee. I prayed; but this complicated and perplexing Gospel does not go away. I learned a lot things in process about myself and Mark’s Gospel. I discovered that the older I get the more I feel what that man felt: there has to be something more. I want eternal life, and this isn’t it. Is there something yet I must do, or is perhaps something I must become. Is it really possible to “do” something (like earning points) to possess eternal life or is it not a gift for which I must become receptive. I discovered to my shame that the longer I live as a priest, the more I sometimes feel like the disciples sometimes in weariness and weakness wondering: “What’s in it for me?” How shameful those apostles must have felt when their thoughts were so exposed by Peter, that blabber-mouth! I suspect that as soon as it said it, he wished he hadn’t.

About Mark’s Gospel I learned that no where does it say that this was a “young” man. For years I always thought it did. The only reason to think that he was “young” is probably that he was running. I don’t run much anymore. I learned to consider that this text invites us to think about two kinds of wealth: material and spiritual. I was reminded how the First or Old Testament  considered wealth a proof that one was righteous leaving the poor desperate for any salvation. If poverty then is a curse, why would Jesus demand it of the rich man? If it is necessary, then why give it to the poor making them more poor? The potential for conflict between material wealth and spiritual wealth cannnot be ignored. That man is both rich and poor: so spiritually poor in spite of his great wealth that he cannot do what is necessary. He cannot do what the master asks of him.

Yet in spite of all the complexity both in our lives and in Mark’s Gospel, there are a couple of things that do not go away, and will not be avoided for long. They spring from the two questions raised in this story first by the rich man and then by the Apostles.

“Is this all there is?” That is what the man is really asking as he lives with all his wealth and comforts knowing that those have not provided what he seeks nor satisfied his deepest hunger. He knows there must be more, so he goes to Jesus the man who feeds all hungers and satisfies all thirsts. There he discovers that he has failed to ask another very important question: “How much is enough?” The ability to answer that question is the first sign of spiritual wealth. Then there is that second question asked by Peter that reveals a shameful poverty of spirit: “What’s in it for me?”

Mark puts questions before us today.

They are good tools to measure our material and spiritual wealth and poverty.

“What’s in it for me?”

“Is this all there is?”

Leading to the big question: “How much is enough?”

I find it interesting that in his usual way, Mark does not give that rich man a name. Failing to do so allows us to stand in his place. I like to think that this rich man’s turning away is not the end of his story, and that years later he may have picked up some early manuscript of Mark’s Gospel and recognized himself in these verses, stood up right then and said: “Enough” and let go of all the things that held him bound and unable to follow Jesus to Jerusalem. It isn’t always material stuff like cars and clothing, homes, accessories and gadgets that we can’t let go of. Sometimes the attachments that hold us back are anger and revenge, pride and stubborness, grudges and forgiveness withheld.

Perhaps today we can see ourselves in this Gospel holding on to that image of Jesus who looks at us with love, and finally say: “Enough” and then surrender reaching for the treasure of his friendship.

September 23, 2012

Wis 2:12, 17-20 + Psalm 54 + James 3:16–4:3 + Mark 9:30-37

I am a people watcher. I can sit for hours and watch people coming and going, talking, laughing, reading the paper or their Kedalls. The other day I was having lunch and there was a mother sitting across the restaurant with her child – perhaps a 4 year old. It was a beautiful sight, but I could tell that mom was growing impatient with her son as he played with the silverware, the glass, the plate, the food, and finally with her cell phone which I think she handed to him for fear something was going to end up on the floor. His thumbs were lightening fast! I don’t know what he was doing, but he had not a care in the world. He was worried about nothing, focused on the moment, living in the present. That’s how it is with children, even the one’s I’ve watched down in Haiti who ought to have plenty to worry about. Even in that poverty they just play with whatever they can find leaving the adults to their big schemes of revenge and ambition. I think this is what Jesus was proposing in today’s verses from Mark’s Gospel when he talks about children.

Those apostles have just embarrassed themselves with their easy ambition: their plans about their future. They are not living in the present. They are not focused on where they are, who they are, and they have not been listening to Jesus. They are full of their plans and ambitions. Jealous of one another, they are looking at each other instead of looking at the master. He speaks of what will happen to the “Son of Man”, a title he has just used a few verses earlier for himself. The title means: “One who is living in solidarity with others.” So jealous, so individualized, so isolated from each other, they cannot live in solidarity with the one who has called them to be such a community. It’s all about them, their future, their power, their position in life. Instead of comfort for their friend and master, instead of compassion, or seeking some understanding, they are afraid and say nothing except to continue their arguing. Of course arguing is never about the issue that starts it. It is only about being right. They look at each other with a jealous eye wondering who sits where. In no time at all it’s an argument, and nothing matters after that except winning, being “right” while the other is wrong is all that matters. Where is the solidarity in that?

They are not living in the present. There is no center to their lives. That is what it takes to live in the present: a center. A rock solid core, a focus that allows one to be in the moment, not pulled one way  by a past full of resentment or disappointment, or pulled into the future by cheap ambition or fear. Just a quiet center that can bring an extra ordinary kind of freedom.  This is what Jesus expects of his apostles who are  free, focused, and fearless. As James says in the second reading today, this is a kind of Wisdom that comes from on high. This is the kind of wisdom that is pure, peaceable, gentle, full of mercy and good fruits. For that Wisdom today we must pray. For a solid centered life with Christ as the focus, we should live. For a desire to remain in solidarity with others and therefore in solidarity with the Son of Man, we must yearn.

Deuteronomy 4: 1-2, 6-8 + Psalm 15 + James 1: 17-18, 21-27 + Mark 7: 1-8, 14-15,21-23

         As a child I often got into trouble because I would ask a certain question. I honestly think it is a phase everyone goes through in growing up. I would ask the question and then often end up sitting in my room for a while to contemplate the answer: “Because I said so.” It never seemed like a good answer to me until I started to need it, which is, I guess, the first stage of moving out of that phase. I asked the question in the seminary a lot, and it would draw looks of suspicion from those in charge. That has not changed either. The question of course, is “Why”

         When it comes to this part of Mark’s Gospel, there is a little trouble brewing over the law and following the law, and the trouble reveals for us a real tension that exists not between the law and freedom, but between the outside and the inside – a tension that is experienced in the very living of the law and answering the question “why” in the face of the law.

         The Pharisees are a good example of that tension gone wrong. They were not typical of all Jews. I often call the Book of Deuteronomy from which we read first today a “Love Song to the Law”.

The mood and the spirit in which it is written is almost a poem that would describe the love of God’s Law – a Love that generates and sustains the very Love that is God. Staying in a right relationship to the Law puts one in a position of love. If you catch on to what the Book of Deuteronomy proposes you begin to get the idea that God’s love for God’s people is the source of the law because it leads to the Covenant. Our Love for God is expressed and lived in that covenant and the keeping of, loving of, and observance of the Law.

         Now, that is an entirely interior idea. I like to call it a matter of the heart, and so it is the heart that determines how one keeps the law, why, and what comes from keeping the law. A loving and pure heart makes keeping the law a joy. But a tension arises when the focus shifts from the interior to the exterior, and I think that is what Jesus is talking about to his disciples using the Pharasees as his example. The Pharasees were focused was on the external expression of the law rather than the internal loving and living of the law. For them it did not matter how you felt, or what was in your heart. All that concerned them was a following the rules. If anyone asked them, “Why should we wash our hands?” their answer would have been: “Because it says so.” leaving the one who asked the question cold and distant from the law. Had they made some connection between a clean heart and clean hands and suggested that the cleaning of the hands be connected to a cleansing of the soul, the tension could have resolved into a wonderful moment of conversion.

         This tension still exists today, and it has all the potential to turn us into Pharasees or lead us to deeper conversion, great joy, and love in our covenant with God. So, we have the Law of God. Why? Because it is God’s way of revealing God’s Will for us and leading us to be all that God wishes us and has imagined us to be. Why is there a law that says: Thou Shalt Not Kill? Now think with your heart, and don’t say because, “Because God said so.” That’s outside thinking. Inside thinking with the heart says: “Because wherever there is Life there is God, and the taking of any life diminishes the presence of God in this world. Because God is the creator of all life, destroying life destroys God’s last and best work of creation.” Why is there a rule that says: “Missing Mass on Sunday is wrong?” What do you say to a child that asks, “Why do we have to go?” Think with your heart. Only say “Because I said so if it’s a contest of the will.” The real answer when you’re not in a power struggle is: “Because we have been invited, and Jesus asked us to come and do this in his memory; because it is how we stay together with the Risen Christ and with others who love us.” Or perhaps a shorter answer from the heart is: “Because we can, not because we have to.” Why do we have to share? The heart says: “Because that is why God gave us what we have….because nothing we have is our own….. because it brings joy and happiness to others.” This is heart talk – it is what come from within.

         The whole speech of Moses to the people as he delivered the Law to them was touched with joy and hope because he knew that God’s Law was the expression of God’s Love, and the keeping of that law would keep the Israelites within the embrace of God as no other nation or people could ever hope to experience. Rather than complain, avoid, and reluctantly keep the law, we might be tempted by the tension between right and wrong, obedience and disobedience, to ask why, and then from a heart filled with the Spirit of God begin follow the words of James today in the second reading: “Humbly welcome the word that has been planted in you and is able to save your souls. Be doers of the word and not hears only.”

In the practice of our faith, the goal must be to internalize the law and the will of God for us so that we do not even think about the details of the law because we have so embraced it, so loved it, and so understood what the law is that we shall live the law, not keep the law or ever need to enforce the law. It has always seemed to me that enforcers of the law are the ones who have not yet themselves internalized the law. They are stuck on the outside fussing with the details while all the while never coming close to the God who is finally revealed within the Law within one’s heart.

26 August 2012
Joshua 24:1,2,15-17 + Psalm 34 + Ephesians 5: 21-32 + John 6: 60-69

Now comes the end of the great Sermon at Capernaum. While the “Sermon on the Mount” may capture the imagination of many, and while it may have inaugurated the public ministry of Jesus; this sermon in John’s Gospel brings the whole mission of Jesus Christ to the point of decision, the point of no return, the point of entry into the very life of God. No one finds “Blessed are the meek or the pure of heart” troubling or challenging. No one walks away at the words, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for Justice.” These are not hard sayings. But “My flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you.” is a whole different matter. This is not symbolic language. He is not proposing some metaphor. The REAL means REAL, not “sort-of-like” or “a symbol of”, or a “sign for”. He means, real! In some translations it says: “True.” In either case, the meaning is the same.

When in today’s Gospel Jesus hears their murmuring, he knows that they are beginning to wonder, and perhaps even understand what he is saying. To make sure that they do, he says: “What if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before? It is the Spirit that gives life, while the flesh is of no avail.” What Jesus has to say here is a complete breakdown of the hard and fast distinction of heaven and earth, the spiritual and the material. It is the final and complete revelation of what has happened by the Incarnation, the Word becoming flesh. God is no longer off there unavailable, distant, and separate from us. We are no longer confined to this time and space, to this life. The connection between what had been so distinctly separated is Jesus himself, and our passage, our Passover into the spirit and the divine is his flesh and blood. As he took on our flesh to be with us, we take on the divine life, by eating and drinking his flesh and pass into the life of God.

Jesus was no symbol. Jesus was not “sort of” human. Jesus was not a “sign for” the divine and the human separated. He was true. He was real from birth to death. If any of us has a chance to or wishes to become true and real, to make real what we are from the beginning, then we must eat and drink in order to become what Christ Jesus is, the life of God offered for us. This is a hard saying. What’s hard about it is that all the neat little categories fall apart. Heaven is no longer out there, a place we wait for until we die.
Eternal life is no longer something you get when you die. We are no longer living here in exile unable and bound by humanity and sin to a life that is less than perfectly holy touched by and inspired by the Divine Holy Spirit. How is this so? Because we are becoming what we eat – we are eating the very real, true flesh and blood of the Son of Man who has been with the Father from the beginning, come here to unite with us, and take us back to the very life of the Father

This isn’t symbolic. It is as real as the bread and wine of this altar. What we do here is no
“memorial service” that brings us together to act out the Last Supper like a group of actors gather in Gettysburg every year to act out a day in the life of this nation. What we do here is real. It is for now, not the past. It is to transport us in the very life of God so that we leave here not all warmed up and feeling good becasue we “remembered” the Lord’s Supper. We leave here transformed, transfigured, consecrated, into the very life of the Word Made Flesh. You can’t leave her the same as you came in.

Now this is not talk for children. It is serious revelation of the Divine plan and the Will of God for us. Children cannot understand this. Perhaps that is why some murmured and left. They preferred the life of an ignorant child, preferred to avoid the demands of and the changes in their lives that this revelation would demand. Parents, if you believe what is said to us in this Gospel, you cannot now explain this to your children, but you can lead them into the mystery of this creating in them a desire, a thirst for, and a wonder for what they may someday want to know. You must do that by your reverence and example, your absolute and unwavering commitment to this sacramental gift making it the first priority of every week without fail. A couple of years ago, a child was sent to me by their parent because the child in preparation for First Communion had expressed some revulsion at the thought of drinking blood. I sat with that child for a long time talking about grapes and juice, wine, blood, the Passover meal, and the blood of the Passover Lamb on the door posts of the Israelite’s. When I was finished, the child just wrinkled up their nose and looked at me as though I was some alien from another planet. But, the child went away curious and knowing that there was something deeper here, something more special and profound because their parents brought them to me, and I sat on the floor and talked with them for a long time. Someday the hunger for truth and a desire for the real will awaken in that child a readiness to know more and to become more than a little child.

Those of you leaving childhood and becoming adults must hear this gospel with profound wonder as you look at yourselves and ask: To whom shall we go?” That is what was happening to Peter and the Apostles, they were growing up in faith. No longer were they going to stay with Jesus because he worked signs and wonders that entertained them or made them seem important because they were “close to the man.” At that moment they began to understand that something about this Son of Man was going to change them, awaken in them the Spirit of Life, provide for them a food that would never leave them hungry, a food that would give them more than physical life.

Don’t leave because you don’t understand. Stay until you do. There is nothing out there that will give you everlasting life. There is nothing out there that will bring you closer to God and draw you deeper into God’s Spirit. When you do, people may come to look at you and discover that you are a Holy One of God.

15 August 2012 at Saint Mark Church in Norman, OK

Revelation 11: 19, 12: 1-6, 10 + Psalm 45 + 1 Corinthians 15: 20-26 + Luke 1: 39-56

The earliest artistic representations of Mary show her as a figure far from human with a face that is frozen in an icon-like gaze. Gradually over time, under the influence of Greek and Roman art, and then the Renaissance with its veneration of the human form she takes on a more motherly and sometimes more regal appearance. In more modern times this woman favored by God is sometimes seen in art more realistically as a Palestinian girl, and even more boldly as a teen ager in jeans and a sweater. Artists often have a way of entering into the realm of theology, and certainly theologians have influenced the vision of artists.

Of all the figures and women in human history, Mary, the Mother of God has certainly intrigued them both. In the first reading today, we hear of a mighty woman/warrior ready to do battle with a dragon. This image inspired by the author of the Book of Revelation provides a fresh new image of the Virgin Mary, and I wish some artists might take up the challenge. Mary as Warrior would be quite an image. Like so many other forward looking works of art, it might well be shunned by the pious and even condemned by puritanical self-appointed critics. But I wonder, if the Sacred Scriptures can write about it, why can’t we think about it and even paint it. Imagine, Mary as a warrior! She might look like Joan of Arc. It does cause some conflict with the meek and mild, the sweet gentle mother look so favored in some ages, but I don’t think that is what we need these days in the face of so much evil.

The author of the Book of Revelation provides us with a woman who is armed and ready to do battle with evil. This dragon in the vision of John is a symbol of evil power in this world. It stands for all the oppression and abused power that holds people in poverty and in ignorance. It stands for all injustice that empowers greed and the evil that greed perpetuates. In John’s Revelation, it is this woman who comes from the New Jerusalem to defeat it. This woman in John’s vision is the Arc of the Covenant with which Israel was able to do battle with every enemy and emerge victorious.

I like thinking of Mary as a Warrior. I propose that all of you consider what your image of this Virgin might be – so that again she might excite our imaginations and provide us with an example of what a woman can do. She has done so in the past. Her weapons are always prayer, fasting, and sacrifice. Time and time again these weapons have overcome the mighty and pulled them down from their thrones. I wonder how it is that the evil of an oppressive Communist empire finally collapsed on itself almost without one shot being fired by men. Could it not possibly be that countless prayers in her name were stronger than bombs and sabers, warheads and tanks? Behind all that fluffy lace and golden pillows, their hides the strength of mother, the strength of prayer, and the promise of victory from a loud voice in heaven that says: “Now have salvation and power come, the reign of our God and the authority of his Anointed One.”

 This is what we celebrate today: God’s affirmation of a woman, God’s affirmation that there is power in a mother’s love to defeat every evil and right every wrong, to pull down the mighty from their thrones and lift up the lowly. The Assumption is not just God’s exaltation of faithfulness and discipleship, but our own as well.

Holy Mary, Mother of God, — how does the rest of it go? Say it.

12 August 2012 at Saint Mark Church in Norman, OK

1 Kings 19: 4-8 + Psalm 34 + Ephesians 4: 30-5:2 + John 6: 41-51

When you step forward before one of us distributing the Body of Christ, bow and extend you open hand for the gift of this Bread of Life that comes down from heaven, this living bread, flesh for the life of the world, you say: “Amen.”

At that moment, something happens, and I’m not sure it is always the right thing.

Our Eucharistic piety usually directs us to a momenet of solotude in private prayer before we are called to common prayer in a song of praise and thanksgiving. This shift in the movement of the liturgy is one that should reflect an internal movement as well, and I’m not sure it always works.

While no one has yet responded to the words: “Body of Christ” with the words: “It’s all mine.” we may not be far from it. There is always a temptation, and it is a temptation, to think that this is some kind of personal, private experience or a priviledged experience of intimacy with Christ. This is why I often recoil a bit when someone mistakenly reaches out to grab the Body of Christ. This is not “mine” to grab and run. There is something being said in these verses from John’s Gospel that is essential to our common understanding not only of what has been given to us, but why.

This gift, “my flesh for the life of the world” is given for the world. It is not my personal and private possession. “The Bread that I will give” is given for the life of the world, not just for me: for the world. So, how is it going to get to the world? The answer to that question is the essential message of this Gospel. Think deeply for moment: BREAD, FLESH, LIFE FOR THE WORLD. The Eucharist is not flesh, it is bread. That is the essential element. If it were not bread it could not become the Holy Eucharist. We are the Flesh. We enter into the mystery of the Incarnation when we receive and consume this Eucharistic Bread of Life, and in that awesome experience, it is our flesh that must give life to this world: our flesh nourished and strengthened, consecrated and commissioned to bring life to this world.

The issue is: “Why do we get this gift?”  “What are we to do with it?” What are we to become becasue of it?” The answer is all revealed here in John 6. This Eucharist gift is not all mine – it is not mine to keep or simply to adore. Once I receive this gift, the Bread of Life, I am responsible for the life of the world; that bread becomes my flesh in union now with the Body of Christ which is given for the life of the world.

But look at what happens when we fail to perceive and respond to what is revealed here. We turn the Eucharist into a private devotion that may or may not move us out of ourselves, our little world of wants and needs, pains and sorrows. This is not the intent of the one who has given us this gift. He left us this gift so that we might continue his work. It is not given to me and you to hold onto like some prize treasure we find and then hide in order to keep it all for ourselves. The life of the world depends upon our flesh doing something and becoming something because of the Bread of Life we share.

This Mass is not just for us, it is for the world. The Word of God feeds us, the Bread of Life feeds us so that we can satisfy the deepest hunger of this world for forgiveness, for vision, leadership, hope, and joy. I am convinced that if we lived our faith this way, we would need Mass, and wait and long for next Sunday to be fed again, renewed, and encouraged with the Christ’s vision of the Kingdom of Heaven that has already come into the world. Likewise, I am beginning to suspect that the reason some are not here is that they spent the week preoccupied with themselves, their jobs, their worries and concerns. Instead of feeding the world, they are exhausted from their own little world and are too tired to find their way back into the life of the world.

You try living the Gospel this week for the life of the world, and you will be hungry again in no time at all, and we will gather again around this table to encourage each other, lift up the discouraged, and heal the broken hearted; and Christ will come again to fill us with his life.