March 30, 2008 at Saint Mark in Norman, OK

Acts 2: 42-27 + Psalm 118 + 1 Peter 1:3-9 + John 20: 19-31

Every year on the Sunday after Easter we tell this story. If I asked you to quote Thomas the Apostle, I would bet the debt of this church that all but a handful of you would only be able to say: “My Lord and my God” or “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in his side, I will not believe.  If that was all Thomas had to teach us, the lesson would be simple: “Be careful what you ask for.” This is also the Apostle who said: “Lord, we do not know where you are going.” And even more courageously when Jesus set his face toward Jerusalem, Thomas said to his apostolic companions: “Let us go with him and die with him.” No one ever remembers his moment of courage, but his moment of doubt is unforgettable. We all know what it’s like – you do fifty things well, make one mistake, and that’s all people can talk about. Why is that? Some trick to deflect attention from ourselves? I suspect so. How interesting it is for a less than perfect human church to tell the story of a doubting apostle. But the story is told year after year, and I believe it is so because there is something important for Thomas to teach us.

First, Thomas teaches us that faith does not exclude doubt and questions, nor does it exclude moments when we wonder whether God is truly with us and faithful to God’s promises. Our experience in life leaves us very aware that God can seem distant and unresponsive. Illness strikes, a job is lost, a home burns, a loved one dies and we wonder where God has gone. Real Faith is never clear and unchallenged. Faith may lead to certitude, but not always a comfortable certitude of logic and proof. Most of the time, it is the certitude of one who trusts, not one who knows.

Second, Thomas teaches us that we receive faith in and through the community of parents, friends, and church. It is not a private matter. Thomas found faith because he returned to the community and trusted enough to show up the following Sunday. Ultimately, he testifies to the facet that our faith must be rooted in our own experience of God, in a personal acceptance of God and commitment to God. We cannot simply believe because someone else believes. Our faith must be founded in our own deepest convictions.

Third Thomas teaches us that faith is not simply an assent to doctrines and propositions. Thomas had no creed to accept. In fact, the apostle Thomas did not know the Apostles’ Creed. He had no idea that Jesus had two natures united hypostatically in one person. He had not figured out that there were three persons in one God. He was totally unaware that 10 days earlier, at Jesus last supper, the bread and wine had been changed into the body and blood of Christ. Thomas would have flunked a quiz on first grade catechism. Yet he shows us that, while it is necessary to “believe that” certain doctrines are true, we must first “Believe in” God, the God revealed in Jesus. Thomas’ faith was a personal response, a graced surrender to the risen Jesus as his lord and savior and an acknowledgement that Jesus spoke the truth when he said, “I have the power to lay down my life and take it up again.” As John sees it in his Gospel, faith for Thomas was an expression of loyalty, faithfulness and allegiance to Jesus. It was a radical act of trust and a personal commitment to Jesus and Jesus’ invitation to new life. Thomas teaches us that, in the end, we believe because we know we are loved. We believe in the one who loves us.

The Gospel story does not tell us whether Thomas put his fingers in the wounds of Jesus or touched his side, but he did meet Jesus face to face. That is how he heard the call to faith and where he found the strength to believe and live out that faith as an apostle and martyr. We are invited to meet the Lord face to face in work, sacrament, in community and in the poor and the needy. Christ is always in our minds inviting us to touch him and believe.

I think the church puts this Gospel before us every year to encourage and suggest that the risen Christ is still with us, and those troubled by doubts belong here. Thomas the Teacher suggests that they might only ask, and then look. Touching may not be important, but looking and seeing with love is the beginning of that faith we all admire and desire.

March 23, 2008 at Saint Mark in Norman, OK

Acts 10:34-43 + Psalm 118 + Colossians 3: 1-4 + Matthew 28: 1-10

After forty years of preaching Easter Homilies, I am beginning to get the idea. Easter is not a day or a season. It is a perspective, a lens through which one can view the world and history. Those who think of Easter as a day or season, think of Easter in terms of “how” and “what”. “What happened in that tomb behind the stone?” “How did that stone get moved?” “What did he look like if Mary didn’t recognize him?” “How did he get around if he showed up in so many places?” This king of thinking needs evidence. For these people proving the resurrection is a big issue. It is also a losing proposition since an empty tomb is only an empty tomb and you can make anything out of it you want. Since the eyewitnesses are gone and all we have left is their testimony, we can’t ask any more questions.

When you begin to consider Easter in another way, there is a different set of issues. The “what” and “how” questions become irrelevant. “What does it mean?” is the big question, and “What happens to me because of it?” is another. Those other questions about how and what happened are silly and trivial by comparison.

If Jesus has risen from the dead, the question to ask is: “What does that mean, and what is happening to me because of it.” We know from the Gospel accounts what it meant for those who had been with him. It meant that their sorrow was turned in joy, that their fear was challenged, and that if they stayed together, lived together, and remembered what Jesus had taught them, their lives would see and do greater things than they could ever have dreamed of. Their testimony tells us that their sorrow lasted less than a day. In forty days time (a Biblical, symbolic number) their fear vanished, and that timid, unfaithful, confused, doubt filled group of unlikely leaders emerged with a courage, a spirit, and an understanding of what had happened that caught the attention of a whole city and soon the whole earth. Pentecost.

If you are interested in shifting from Easter as a calendar date to Easter as a way of seeing, believing, and understanding things, you have to begin asking those other questions and the last and biggest is “What happens to me because Christ rose from the dead?”

We Christian people, especially we Catholic people with our crucifixes and Good Friday cannot just focus on the fact that Christ died for us. That does not finish the story. More important than his suffering and death is the fact that he rose for us and sent us the Spirit. This is why I say: Easter is a lens – it gives us the whole picture with which we may then explore the whole Paschal mystery.

That whole picture then is not just Good Friday, not just Easter but also the Forty Days, the Ascension, and Pentecost. Look through the lens, and here is what you see: Good Friday=loss. Easter=reception of new life. Forty Days=grieving the old and adjusting to the new. Ascension=letting go of the old without clinging. Pentecost=reception of a new spirit for the new life that one is already living. That is the paschal mystery, all of it from Good Friday till Pentecost.

Looking through that lens, we can understand that there are two kinds of death: “terminal” and “paschal.” The first one ends life and all possibilities. They are both real; but the second one ends one kind of life and begins another. The image of a grain of wheat falling to the ground and dying to produce new life is the way Jesus taught us about this truth.

There are two kinds of life: resuscitated life and resurrected life. The first is that restoration that occurs when someone is clinically dead and then brought back. Perhaps the story of Lazarus is an example. Resurrected life is not this. It is no restoration of one’s old life, but the reception of a radically new life. Lazarus got his old life back with sisters Mary and Martha. Jesus did not get his old life back.  Easter is about paschal death and resurrected life. For living mature Christian people everything depends on getting this right.

Christ spoke of many daily deaths and of many risings. These are the reality of the Paschal Mystery and the secret to life and ultimate happiness.

We die so often, but rarely do we recognize it and integrate into the paschal mystery. We die to our youth. You get up one morning and look in the mirror and no matter what cosmetics you employ, or what surgeon you see, or diet you begin, something is gone. You can either grieve that loss for the rest of your life, or you can recognize that even without youth your life is good, full, and joyful.

We die to our wholeness. People who have been abused, raped, betrayed in love, wake up someday and realize that something has died inside them. They can either become bitter, angry, and filled with rage and hate, or rise in the Paschal mystery.

We die sometimes to our dreams. We hear about this in the Gospel as those disciples walked to Emmaus and said: “We had hoped that….” We have all experienced that death, that collapse of our dreams about how things might be for us and it can leave us empty and useless, or we can rise in the Paschal mystery.

The honeymoon of our lives dies, and the excitement, the passion, the interest that was there at first, in marriage, in parenting, in a new vocation begins to look like hard work. We either collapse or grow weary, or we find in the Paschal mystery something richer, deeper and fuller in spirit.

In our culture we experience and celebrate Easter with springtime and eggs, bunnies and lilies. In our faith we experience and celebrate Easter as the Paschal Mystery that takes us from death to new life leading us through times of confusion, doubt, and grieving to the time of letting go, and the moment of embracing a spirit filled new life. This is the Paschal Mystery. It is where Jesus would lead us. Look at the lives of those who first followed him. They are as much the point of the Easter Gospel as Jesus. Consider what happened to them because of this mystery, and believe not just that Christ rose from the dead; but that it can happen to you as well. We do not just die a thousand deaths without rising to new and fuller lives. This is the promise God has made to us, and that promise is being kept.

March 22, 2008 at Saint Mark Church in Norman, OK

My dear friends, in the darkness of this night, we stand in awe before the power of light and life which reveals to those who wish to see and understand the wonder of God; Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier: a God of love and mercy. We gather in holy place tonight and express that wonder and our deepest hopes in the presence of these 50 people whose faith and hope has become our own. We see in them what we have become. While we watch and listen to what they say and do, we are reminded of what we must all become: a people open to grace, seeking the truth, dying and rising, filled with the Spirit. They remind us that conversion is way of life, not a one-time event. What they are tonight for us, is what we must become.

For you, our blessed elect, the time has come to wrap yourselves in mystery; not in the sense of something you can’t understand, but in the sense of mysterion: a gift from God that you will unwrap again and again in years to come; a gift in which you shall take unending delight. From this night on, life is that gift; and from now on, you must not think of life as a possession, something that is yours, something that is yours to control or protect. It is no longer a possession you can choose to share with others or from which others can be excluded.

If we see ourselves as a kind of property we have a right to control rather than as a gift with infinite depth we are meant to experience, we will make radically different decisions when we are faced with moments in time that threaten our autonomy. We do not exist alone. We have no identity without other. We would could not be here had not two people come together in intimacy with God to conceive this gift. Our lives are grounded in this mystery which we are meant to live. Our lives are not a form of property. The inevitable end of that thinking is despair because when suffering comes (suffering we cannot control) there is no hope.

Grasp that cross hanging from your neck right now. Hold it. May it be for you what it is for this church you are becoming: a sign of hope that we share because we have received the mysterion. It is both a sign of what it means to live on this side of death, and the resurrection we hope for. It is a reminder that loving surrender makes suffering a sacrifice of love that redeems not an experience of misery we have to control. Buddhism speaks of existence as suffering. It is inevitable to the Buddist mind that to live is to suffer and then to die. It is tragic, this way of thinking. What we all know to be true is that suffering is inevitable and dying is unavoidable. Yet what people of our faith and this religion believe is that suffering and dying are not problems to be relieved; but that they are a sign of the kind of world we live in, either a world that ends in, and is ultimately about the betrayal of our hope; or a world that is about the hope that transcends this suffering and these limits.

I have read that when the great church historian Jaroslav Pelikan was dying he said: “If Christ is risen, then nothing else matters.” then, after a pause, he said, “And if Christ is not risen, then nothing else matters.”

There is a choice for you, the elect. It is a choice between hope and hopelessness. The meaning of your lives is not found in the experiences of the moment, and experiences you can understand and control. The meaning of your life will be found when you surrender, let go, and fall headlong into the embrace of God who made you, calls you, and waits for you. When that happens, there will be no fear in you and no suffering you cannot endure. To that truth we say: “Amen” because Christ has risen, and so must we. If you want that gift and seek to be identified with him, move forward now into the mystery.

March 21, 2008 at Saint Mark Church in Norma, OK

Isaiah 52: 13-53:12 + Psalm 31 + Hebrews 4: 14-16, 5: 7-9 + John 18:1-19:42

Earlier in John’s Gospel, Chapter 11 to be exact, the movement toward this moment began. Threatened by an outsider, by some one out of their control, the leaders of the people ran to their high priest a man named Caiphas. He knew that the Romans would sack him if he did not keep his Jews in line. The closer Jesus got to Jerusalem, the greater was his following. Caiphas was at risk, and so the carpenter’s son from Nazareth had to go. He was upsetting things.

All that we have just heard in the Passion is the consequence of a way of thinking that found its ultimate expression in the one quote of this man Caiphas that has lasted longer than he did: “It is better that one man should die for the people.” That haunting quotation expresses a perverse truth that we have yet to question. Caiphas, even though he was put out by the Romans is yet to be silenced. Better this death than have our lives upset. Better this death than we should have to change. Better this death than we should do without anything we want. And so it goes on and on and on.

Believing this perversity means that capital punishment will find supporters who believe that people should be put to death. Caiphas is still saying, “Better that one should die.” Believing this perversity means an unborn child has its life taken because it is better than upsetting one’s plans and one’s future. Caiphas is still saying, “Better than one should die.” Believing this perversity means the poor stay poor because we cannot afford welfare, Medicare, day care, or support mothers at home with small children. Caiphas is still saying, “Better that one should die.” Believing this perversity means our country will not allow refugees because we fear they will take our jobs and have an adverse effect on our standard of living. Caiphas is still saying, “Better that one should die.” We take the resources of this earth to support a lifestyle we think we deserve and do not respect nature,but just consume and pollute the environment for future generations. Caiphas is still saying, “Better that one man should die.”

It’s like a great litany of death that is repeated again and again from Caiphas to us. Better these deaths than we should be upset or have to change.

When Martin Luther King, Oscar Romero, Stan Rother, and Anne Frank are killed, when the clan murders civil rights workers in Mississippi, when oppressive regimes intimidate people and make them disappear, Caiphas is still saying, “Better that one person should die for the people.”

But it isn’t better. It is not better at all. We need the courage to say that and believe it. We need to be less intimated by our own weaknesses and fears and more courageous in moving out of our affluence, privilege and good name, less timid, small and petty and more willing to sacrifice and die rather than let an innocent person die by thinking that it might better than risk upsetting the way things are or always have been. For this kind of courage we ought to pray today as we look at the cross. This isn’t the time for sentimentality. Gospel love is not about feelings. It is about action. If we respond to God’s love at all it will be by action.

Joseph of Aramathea emerges in this Passion as a man of courage. He stepped forward by name in the absence of others to get the body of Jesus down from that cross. But he only took down the body. The truth is, Christ is still on the cross. Christ still is crucified as long as Caiphas holds his power over us leading us to believe and act on the belief that it is better for one person to die than have things upset or change.

The death of Jesus, an innocent man, is the consequence of thinking like Caiphas. Our lack of courage is no greater or less than the lack of courage on the part of the closest friends of Jesus. They are nowhere to be found in the passion accounts. They have all gone missing rather than call into question the thinking of Caiphas. As we ponder the cross this day, we must ponder the attitude that leaves Christ hanging there still all alone.

March 20, 2008 At Saint Mark in Norman, OK

Exodus 12:1-8, 11-14 + Psalm 116 + 1 Corinthians 11: 23-26 + John 13: 1-15

The Jesus of John’s Gospel is Divine, all knowing, all powerful.He knows, says John that the Father had given all things into his hands. He knows who will betray him. This Jesus does not eat the Passover meal. He is the Passover Meal. There is no Passover meal in John’s Gospel, no institution of the Eucharist. The Jesus of John’s Gospel does not pass broken bread and a cup around with a command. The Jesus of John’s Gospel has a different command.

He takes off his robes and wraps himself in a towel. Tomorrow his robes will be stripped from him, and he will be tied by others. Before they can do their deed, he does it himself. What he does seems at first to be act of humility. That is what Peter thought. But this is an act of love, not humility. It is a divine act, a revelation of how much God loves us revealed in a new Commandment upon which the New Covenant will rest: the Commandment of LoveYet if we think that this love is a feeling, we still get it wrong like Peter. The Love of Jesus is not a feeling, it is an action.

This is the love by which Jesus set aside all that was His. No power, no authority, no exaltation. He left that aside to show His love, and he asks us to do the same: to set aside our perceived privilege, our desire for power, our controlling ways, and our expectations, and be empty for the sake of others. He says to Peter and to all who fail to understand, if you do not participate in this self emptying, you cannot enjoy the blessings it will guarantee.

Never did Jesus deny the dignity that was his as God, but he did not use it to safeguard is own comfort or well-being. Instead, his self-giving is the model and example of what his disciples must be willing to offer others.

In John’s Gospel there is water everywhere. From water in the Jordan for John’s Baptism, from water into wine at Cana, from water at the Temple’s Pool, from water at Jacob’s well, water in this basin, finally to water from his pierced side. By water our thirst is quenched, we are healed, washed and brought to life. See it once more. Understand, believe, and imitate his example keeping the commandment he has given us all.

March 16, 2008 At Saint Mark Church in Norman, K

Isaiah 50: 4-7 + Psalm 22 + Philippians 2: 6-1 + Matthew 26:14 – 27:66

(The Homily is delivered before the Proclamation of the Passion today.)

We begin today a week of remembering. Our remembering however is not simply the calling to mind a past event that might stir up gratitude or sympathy. Our remembering now is the heart of our Catholic faith. It is about connections. This remembering is the opposite of “dismembering.” The first consequence of sin, the break up of our relationship with God is over.  We are reconnected to God by the faithful obedience of His Son. We are brought together with each other by our Communion in and through His Son.  The one who remembers us and whom we remember died violently, shockingly, suddenly, but not senselessly. The one who remembers us and whom we remember was mocked, pierced, and spit upon, without losing sight of his mission. The one who remembers us and whom we remember was betrayed by a trusted friend, abandoned by everyone he loved when he needed them most.

We remember his living as well as his dying. We remember his giving and his serving. We do so to experience every day his presence to us here now and always.

We do so to allow that presence to transform us.

Listen now to the Passion of Jesus Christ as recorded by Matthew. Notice carefully that the evil of sin is not just the torture Christ endured, but the fact that he endured it alone. It is the abandonment of Christ, the faithlessness of those who professed to follow him that Matthew reveals. In this account of the Passion, except at the table of the Supper, Jesus is nearly silent. He is not the central figure, the crowd is.

We are ones in Matthew who are the focus of the Passion. Jesus is the recipient of the actions of others.

We remember this today in order to grow in faith: to become defenders and selfless servants of the least, the little ones, poor and hungry, thirsty, naked, and homeless.

We remember in order to become more like this one in whom we find our reason for living, our hope in dying, and our faith in the future where all our memories will be forever realized.

March 2, 2008 At Saint Mark Church in Norman, OK

1 Samuel 16:1-7, 10-13 + Psalm 23 + Ephesians 5:8-14 + John 9: 1-41

This is a thrilling and exciting story. It is dramatic in the typical way John constructs his stories. There are details that excite the imagination, and those details tell most of the story. This is not simply a story about a blind man who bumped into Jesus. Do not miss the detail that Jesus went looking for him not just once, but twice. This not a story about sight being restored. The man was blind from birth, from the beginning. There are unmistakable references to creation here.

Get that little detail about dirt. Think of creation. Then remember where the man is sent: to the Pool – the Water – and the name of the pool is “Sent.” Then recall what God does on the first day of creation: bring light out of darkness. Suddenly this is not about a cure. This is about creation, about what God has done, and what God is still doing. It’s about what is happening now with Jesus, and what is happening those Jesus seeks. That man did not simply have blind eyes cured. He came to the realization that God’s creative power was at the center of his being. No story here about a blind man, no story about something Jesus did; this is a story about conversion as a new creation; how it works, and what it brings about.

It is a spiritual experience, a spiritual cure far more significant than getting 20/20 vision. Throughout the Gospel of John, the theme of Light and victory of light over darkness weaves its way through every scene. From the first chapter to the Passion,

there is a constant movement from darkness to light. Right up to the dramatic moment when darkness covers the earth in the middle of the day as the sun is darkened.

What John would have us understand is this truth: that Christ the Light has come to seek those who live in darkness. Now darkness itself is neither bad nor sinful. Jesus deals with that through the discussion of this man’s blindness: did it come from his parents and their sin? No. Darkness is simply the stuff in which creation happens. What is wrong and sinful is to choose to remain in darkness and refuse the light when it comes.

This is the heart of our Lenten story today.  Sin is a stubborn attachment to darkness. When the Pharisees refuse to change, refuse to open their eyes to the Light in their midst, when they accuse others of sin who clearly see the creative work of God in their midst, they are in trouble. Avoid Jesus as light, then meet him as judge. The Pharisees had an investment in darkness in keeping things the same, in keeping things in control, their control. When they see this man who is so different, they see a threat.  We must understand this story my friends: that blind man did not ask for anything. Jesus went looking for him. The gift did not make his life easier at first. He ended up expelled from the synagogue. But this story reveals that through human weakness the power of God enters human life, and the power is creative. Light comes to those who recognize that life is blindness without Christ; and comes through their weaknesses. Darkness comes to those who without Christ claim to see. It is a message for Lent. It is a call to choose Christ, to make him first and more important than others or the approval of others. We have been to the pool, the “sending pool” of Baptism. We have been enlightened. Why should any still live in darkness unless they have chosen it?