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.