May 13, 2012
We Give Authority Carefully
Thoughts on the First Readings – Joe Frankenfield
6th Sunday of Easter
Acts10:25-26, 34-35, 44-48

There is a prized item that most authorities would like in their box of tools: the perception, if not of divinity itself, at least of a divine ambassadorship. When I am speaking, God is speaking is a powerful warrant. Parents, princes and popes would all like such clout.

Claims to speak for the Divinity can’t be effectively asserted, however, they can only be granted. Parent, pope or king can give every imaginable reason why he should be viewed as infallibly expressing God’s will but only those who judge his claim reasonable and beneficial will grant him authority.

Social or physical strength may give a person who claims authority great power to enforce his will but it gives him no authority. One who forces others to do his will without communicating to them a truth which they recognize is a tyrant, not an authority.

But, some say, God gives authority. God always has power but God has no authority that is not recognized by creatures. It is astounding to realize that our Creator respects that. Even God’s authority exists within a relationship of freedom.

The point of this observation is not to change the attitudes of those who claim authority. The point is to examine our attitude towards authority.

Our choices of those who possess power over us are limited. Every school child learns that on the playground. Our choices about authority in our lives, however, are another matter entirely.

No one who believes in Jesus’ God questions God’s authority. That authority is first of all and ultimately rooted in the perception that God loves us. The authority of anyone who would speak for God depends on whether she or he reflects God’s love for us.

I judge your authority to be true because I judge you to be loving is the key equation we must make. If we find ourselves troubled at those who claim authority, it’s most likely because we simply do not experience that simple truth with them. If that’s so, we do well to be wary.

May 6, 2012
The Courage To Love
Thoughts on the First Readings -Joe Frankenfield
5th Sunday of Easter
Acts of the Apostles 9:26-31

“I’m afraid; I’m simply afraid.” That’s how the young man summed up his feelings towards his girlfriend. “I like her. She’s a good person and lots of fun and we get along great. I just don’t know where she’s – where the whole thing is taking me and it scares me.”

I never found out how their relationship turned out. That’s campus ministry: a library of stories whose endings you never learn. Still, this one had a common but always important theme: fear.

If the core of Jesus’ revelation about God is the absolute love God has for every person, the biggest obstacle to experiencing as well as sharing that love is fear.

Why would the Creator of everything love me? What do I have to offer in return for love? What will love demand of me? Like the young man fearful of the demands his friend’s love might make on him, we all seem to have a fear of love – not just God’s love but of anyone’s love.

A long-married parishioner discussing how he and his wife had overcome their self-centeredness once told me, “We loved each other’s fears away. I don’t know exactly how. I think sometimes we just couldn’t do anything else.”

Thinking about his words many times, I realized that he was explaining something central not only to human relationships but at the core of God’s relationship with us as we’ve come to know it in Jesus. In Jesus, God loved or fears away.

When God loves away our fears, we’re freed to love away the fears of those around us. That’s when things begin to change. That’s when we begin to experience the world Jesus promised.

I often remember that elderly husband’s wisdom when I read of Jesus urging his disciples to forgive one another and enemies just as God forgives them.

April 29, 2012
We Give As God Gives
Thoughts on the First Readings – Joe Frankenfield
4th Sunday of Easter
Acts of the Apostles 4:8-12

“I don’t need your advice. I don’t need your criticism. I need your support and your help. If you can’t give me those, please leave.” The father of a disabled son spoke those words in a radio interview he gave about his friends’ reactions to his situation. His words struck me because they echoed those I’d heard a few weeks earlier from the political leader of a small, struggling nation.

Giving advice and criticism is easier than rolling up our sleeves and pitching in. Giving advice and criticism keeps us superior to the one in trouble. Wrestling directly with another’s problem means making the problem our own and experiencing our own weakness in its presence.

Too often our world asks us Christians for help only to receive advice and criticism instead. Standing outside of its pain we offer, “Let us explain to you why you are suffering. Let us tell you how you should have avoided your difficulty. We have the answers if you would simply listen to us.”

Too often, as well, our answers are based in ignorance. Too often they serve to justify our assumptions rather than lighten others’ burdens. Too often those in need tolerate our presumptuousness to obtain whatever benefit they can. They damp the flames of their resentment for a later time.

To give in the Spirit of Jesus is to give without strings. To help in the Spirit of Jesus is to enter into another’s problem so deeply that we live it from the perspective of the one seeking our aid.

If we understand Jesus as a human being who was God’s presence rather than God acting as though he were human, we know that he didn’t intervene as an outsider. From within the community he worked with and encouraged people to accomplish what, with God, they were capable of.

Jesus was never made himself better than we are. He was one of us in the struggle for the life God promises. That’s what the world asks of us.

April 22, 2012
Faith Lives Within History
Thoughts on the First Readings -Joe Frankenfield
3rd Sunday of Easter
Acts of the Apostles 3:13-15, 17-19

Recently a friend told me of a kindness that the members of his family had performed for an acquaintance. “We did it because it was the kind of thing that our parents did and, so the story goes, their parents before them. I guess. It’s just who we are.”

Folks care about what their ancestors have done, not simply out of historical curiosity but because their ancestors form the foundations of their lives. Each builds on the efforts of those who preceded them. To value one’s ancestors is to value one’s self and one’s future.

When Matthew and Luke told the story of Jesus, they began by placing him within his ancestral past. Name after name, century after century they recounted those who made Jesus possible until, nourished by the dreams, faith and work of countless progenitors, he revealed God’s promise of human triumph.

Just as we do, Jesus stood on the shoulders of those who went before him. His promise was the fulfillment of the future they had longed for.

One of the pluses of belonging to a faith tradition is that it constantly reminds us that others have given us faith and that we hold it in trust for those who will follow. The work of faith is inseparable from the work of human history. It’s not about our private lives. Faith’s focus is the common advancement of humanity from its present widespread suffering and injustice to its inheritance of peace and dignity.

It would be nice if our family of faith consisted of perfect people orderly processing into a glowing future. Alas, the old saw, family: you can’t live with them, you can’t live without them, applies as much to the Church as to any other group.

It helps to remember that, without a doubt, we are someone else’s frustration just as certainly as they are ours. Anyone who thinks the journey to God’s Kingdom is smooth and harmonious has been breathing too much incense.

God creates the universe to evolve. The Spirit lives in the dream that drives the process. As much as we complain about Church society, as we do as well about our political and social societies, it’s where we’re challenged, sometimes gently sometimes harshly to become the people we can be.

April 15, 2012
Wherever We Are, We All Teach
Thoughts on the First Readings -Joe Frankenfield
2nd Sunday of Easter
Acts of the Apostles 4:32-35

One result of the current debacle facing Catholic teaching authority is the serious lessening of its power to present the core Catholic vision in a way others find believable.

At the heart of our understanding of God, ourselves, salvation and human destiny is the communal nature of life. In Catholic understanding, there is no survival, let alone fulfillment of the individual outside of the community. There isn’t any hope for the community that does not include the dignity and fulfillment of the individual. The economic, social and legal behavior of our society makes it obvious that, regardless of the fine speeches we make about our union, we’ve not embraced this perspective.

If the law doesn’t stop me from getting or doing it, I have a right to it is a common attitude. To one who’s absorbed the Spirit of Jesus this understanding is unworkable and destructive.

Is it any business of religion? Yes. The foundational importance of community to life is a tenet of our faith. If we are committed to our faith, we are committed to the health of the community – the entire community. It’s not a doctrine to believe; it’s a love to share.

We must work for a healthy community and we must speak about a healthy community. We must make the community’s welfare the touchstone of our behavior. We promote the common good in every way we can – by explaining, by convincing, by encouraging, most of all, by modeling our commitment to it.

But some would say it’s not my job as a layperson to influence public opinion or policy. That’s the work of the bishops and cardinals. They testify before congressional hearings. They give speeches. They hold the press conferences.

In America today, the most trusted and powerful voice for our faith, the most valued source for Jesus’ values is the honest, down-to-earth neighbor next door. It’s the reliable person in the next office. It’s the car-pooling dad and the school volunteer mom. It’s the friendly clerk at the store.

You are the voice of the Church today. Don’t be silent.

April 8, 2012
The Promise God Won’t Let Die
Thoughts on the First Readings -Joe Frankenfield
Easter Sunday
Acts of the Apostles 10:34, 37-43

Ask any Christian school child what Easter is all about and you’ll get the confidant answer: That’s when Jesus rose from the dead. I’ve always wondered how Jesus would respond to that answer if he were the questioner. Given the kind of man he was, I imagine that he’d smile and say, “Very good” but he’d also whisper a quick prayer that the child would come to understand much more as she grew.

Jesus was never a self-promoter. It’s impossible to make the case from the gospels that he ever thought that it was all about him. Throughout his public life he directed his energy to instilling in his listeners an unshakable faith in the Reign of God. He strove to create in his countrymen the guiding hope for the day when the world would finally become the magnificent reality that God had been offering humanity from the start.

Jesus so totally identified himself with God’s New World that he equated his healing, his forgiving, his loving, his assurance with God’s healing, forgiving, loving and assurance. If folks would only reach out and grasp the reality he presented them with, the World of God’s Promise would be theirs. There was no gap between his love for them and God’s love for them. There would be no gap between their love for one another and God’s love for them.

Then everything crashed. There were threats and tension, an arrest and an execution. The dream, the promise died. But it didn’t.

People who had really known Jesus experienced his touch, his forgiveness, his loyalty, his joy – him – as alive as he’d ever been. The promise endured. The New World of God was unstoppable. It was theirs if they would only live it. Nothing could take it away.

Who rose on the first Easter? We did. The world did. God’s fondest hope rose.

April 1, 2012
Jesus: The God We Need To Know
Thoughts on the First Readings -Joe Frankenfield
Palm Sunday
Isaiah50:4-7

“What difference does it make whether Jesus is God or not. He was an excellent teacher and an amazing moral example. That’s good enough for me. His divinity just isn’t something I think about.” With that my lunch companion took a bite of salad. She viewed her point as unassailable and the issue exhausted.

Many active, committed Catholics doubt or find little need for Jesus’ divine status. Without in any way calling it into question, I agree that the idea of Jesus’ divinity is difficult.

The belief that Jesus was both completely human and truly divine goes back to the earliest days of the gospel. Proving that this belief is true or explaining how it can be true, is beyond us here. It will have to suffice to say that this is our Faith.

The belief in Jesus’ divinity plays a crucial role in Catholic faith, however.

There are huge arguments about how God reacts to human events. If we win a game, God was on our side. If we lose, God either has a plan that we don’t know or God is punishing us for something. If we look at Jesus’ life, we quickly arrive at the realization that God isn’t involved in who wins or loses but cares deeply that the whole experience enhances the lives of all involved.

When we watch Jesus relate to people, we watch God relate to people. Jesus revealed God in his actions. He loved, he forgave, he healed, he listened, he didn’t count costs, he gave himself, he bet everything he had on people. When we see Jesus act, we see God act. When we know Jesus, we know God.

Do we know the totality of God? No. We know the reality of God that we need to live the gift that God gives us. That’s the revelation of Jesus. That’s the work of Jesus setting us free to overcome evil.

Think how often we argue about how God relates to people. Then think how seldom we argue about how Jesus related to people. For those who know Jesus as God-among-us, that’s the point.

March 25, 2012
Which God Do We Choose
Thoughts on the First Readings -Joe Frankenfield
Fifth Sunday of Lent
Jeremiah 31:31-34

Years ago a parishioner told me of things he had done in the past that he knew were wrong. He was certain that his actions had hurt God who in return would doubtlessly punish him.

I asked him why he thought that God would punish him. “God cares about us and how we treat one another,” he said. “God has to be upset with me and I’ll have to pay the price.” “In fact,” he continued, “I feel like God has already pulled away from me.”

Our image of God determines how we believe God acts.

If we picture God as a super human being, God will act the way human beings act – only with super-human strength. His patience will wear thin. On occasion he’ll decide that he needs to show who’s boss. He’ll feel ignored or slighted or jealous.

If we think of God as somehow separate from us – out there somewhere, we can imagine God being, at times, closer to us than at others. We can think of God caring more for some people than others.

A young man once adamantly informed me that he would picture God any way he wanted and no one would push their idea of God on him. He was right, of course. Still, the image of God he chose would affect him and, through him, the people around him. Willy nilly, his choice would have consequences.

Next time you hear someone talk about how God will treat someone they dislike, someone who’s done them wrong or disagrees with them, notice what image of God they turn to. Almost always it will be the super human God; the God “out there.” Rarely will they turn to a God who intimately knows and loves their enemy. Rarely will they turn to a God constantly creating every atom of their enemy’s being.

Christians too often have several gods and they put the one on the altar that gets them the result they want.

The image of God we choose makes a difference. And that brings us to Jesus.

March 18, 2012
Avoid A Too-Small God
Thoughts on the First Readings -Joe Frankenfield
Forth Sunday of Lent
2Chronicles 36:14-16, 19-23

Most folks tend to think of God as the biggest, strongest, all-around best being of us all. But the “of us all” is a problem. God isn’t one of us. There isn’t a hierarchy of beings that starts with atoms and moves up through worms, foxes, chimpanzees and human beings with god at the top of the pyramid. God isn’t another being like us, regardless of how wonderful and powerful we make him. God isn’t part of our pyramid. God is, instead, the reason that everything that we know exists. “So what,” you might ask.

One reason for rejecting the idea that God is in any way one of us lies in the great danger we face of giving God human weaknesses and prejudices. For instance, think how we turn God into someone we must bargain with, trading prayers and good works for things we want. Think of how we make God vengeful and petty. We do this even though we say that God loves everyone completely and perfectly.

Though it is natural to create God in our image, the great religions of the world have fought against it. Judaism has forbidden the word God to be spoken or an image of him made. Islam forbids images of God. Buddhism teaches that God is beyond our ability to know. Christian Tradition has been inconsistent on the matter though it has a deep philosophical tradition of God’s incomprehensibility.

St. Thomas Aquinas spoke of God as Pure Being, though not being as we experience it. St. Paul wrote that God is Love, though not the imperfect love that we give and receive even on our best days.

Who is God? Thomas and Paul were serious when they said God is Being and Love. It’s difficult to wrap our minds around that. But it’s worth the effort. It beats thinking of God as our Uncle Harry – super-sized!

March 11, 2012
Commandments Of Promise
Thoughts on the First Readings -Joe Frankenfield
Third Sunday of Lent
Exodus20:1-17

You shall not kill – unless you’re in a war, someone is attacking your spouse or children or you’ve got some other good reason. You shall not steal – unless you are starving and your neighbor, with more than enough food, refuses to share. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor – unless it’s necessary to prevent unjust harm to yourself or other innocent people. Unless I misread our situation, this is how folks really understand the Commandments.

Even though most Christians claim that God in some manner gave these rules to us, we mold and remold them until they fit into what we think is sensible.

What do we honestly think the Commandments are? What practical role do they play in our lives?

Some folks see the commandments as God’s posted warning: Do this thing and I’ll punish you in this life and the next. Others see the commandments as a list of behaviors God dislikes but stands ready to forgive without penalty if we show fitting remorse.

Many view the commandments as fine ideas if you’re religious; however, since they were generated by ancient peoples and situations, they’re not realistic for our lives.

Finally, there are those who view the commandments as essential behaviors, learned under the Spirit’s guidance, that are necessary if humanity is to arrive at the world God promises. Each failure to pursue them delays that world and prolongs the injustice and suffering that we all endure.

Which view of the commandments to adopt? The best of Catholic Tradition uses the fourth.

March 4, 2012
A Living Faith Is A Changing Faith
Thoughts on the First Readings -Joe Frankenfield
Second Sunday of Lent
Genesis22:1-2, 9, 10-13, 15-18

The story of God asking Abraham to kill his son, Isaac, is repugnant to most of us.

To the Jews who told this story, however, it was a step forward. Its original audience knew of gods who demanded the life of a family’s firstborn in return for great favors. For them the headline was that their God did not want children sacrificed. That was the liberating message. Everything else was detail.

Over the ages the Jews have deepened their understanding of their relationship with God. It didn’t happen easily. It never does in a revelation-based religion because somewhere the words of prior understandings are written and they can’t be simply ignored or tossed cavalierly aside. To do so throws a religion into chaos.

Change in a revealed religion can only come when its members realize that to remain true to their foundational relationship with God and one another they must modify their understanding of both God and themselves. They must admit that they have not yet fully understood their faith. Such an admission tests the strength of a faith. It’s always difficult.

A living faith is vibrant, always flexing and stretching. As all who have been in intimate relationships know, those interactions change and adapt constantly. Only the dullest of people would say to a friend “I totally understand you; I always know how to respond to you”. We will never fully understand our faith because faith is a relationship between individuals, a community and God. It changes.

It would be nice if we could take faith for granted but we can’t. We have to wrestle with it, not simply to believe this or that but to understand just what it is that we need to believe. Faith grows by continually reflecting on our experience of living and believing to make sure that each reflects the other. That’s rarely easy; it’s rarely comfortable. Still, we owe that growth to ourselves and to the world with whom we promise to share the faith.

February 26, 2012
A God Like Us Isn’t God
Thoughts on the First Readings -Joe Frankenfield
First Sunday of Lent
Genesis9:8-15

God is all loving. God is angry. God is harsh. God is forgiving. In the Bible or common opinion, Christian writers or daily preaching, God’s moods frequently seem to conform to our moods.

A friend once refused get involved with religion because the God people presented to him was like “a mentally ill lover: warm and tender one moment and murderously violent the next. That kind of person will make you crazy. The only way to stay sane is to stay away. I don’t know whether God is actually like the picture people paint or people paint God to look the way they want Either way, no thanks!”

Sometimes the unpredictable, dangerous picture of God arises because folks naively imagine God as simply a super-human being, giving him familiar qualities so that he is, by turns, heroic and mean, loving and hateful – like we are. But there’s a deeper difficulty.

God loves and wants to give joy to everyone. How do we portray God who loves everyone but observes some of his loved ones inflicting pain on others of his loved ones? If I, as a kid, whacked my brother, my mom would comfort the victim of my nastiness and tend to his hurt. Turning to me she would yell, “Joseph, go to your room and stay there till I get to you.” I was about to feel several things; love wasn’t one of them. We’ve few images to portray God loving those who hurt his beloved.

Great world religions try to avoid ascribing human weakness to God. Christians have the revelation of Jesus which should have protected us from such a failure. It hasn’t. By the second century the Book of Revelation portrayed Christ wreaking vengeance upon Rome for its persecutions of the Church.

A God who loves our enemies and us alike challenges everything: who we are, who our enemies are, who God is and what our lives are about. We assume that God wants what we want. And on the deepest level that must be true. Yet we’re missing something basic.

A fourth grader once observed to me with some agitation, “If we love our enemies, they won’t be our enemies anymore! We won’t have any enemies. How can we do that!?” We have much to learn.

February 19, 2012
The Kingdom Is A Group Project
Thoughts on the First Readings -Joe Frankenfield
7th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Isaiah 43:18-19, 21-22, 24-25

All of us trying to follow Jesus want the world he promised: a good, abundant, loving life for everyone; problems arise, however, when we begin to examine the changes that vision entails. The first problem is that there will have to be changes and most of us have constructed fairly secure lives in the world the way it is. The second problem is that, even if we’re willing to accept disquieting change in pursuit of God’s promise, we still must deal with the fact that there’s no single, generally accepted, practical path leading to the world Jesus promised. There are many competing paths, most of which originate from deep intellectual and emotional commitments within their proponents.

Our faith offers a panoply of virtues to help us place our own security and contentment on hold for the sake of universal justice. It offers us far fewer resources, however, for overcoming the tension inherent in our widely divergent views about the best way to realize God’s vision.

How can Catholics who are convinced that Scripture should be understood literally cooperate with those who believe that its vision and spirit must be adapted to the language and experience of each new generation? How can people convinced that the Pope speaks the faith that God’s Spirit places in the entire community work with those convinced that the Spirit reveals only to the Pope who, in turn, tells everyone else what to believe?

Until we learn how to cooperate with such differences we’re like people walking past a starving man while arguing whether they should feed him home-made or store-bought bread. The situation would be comic were it not so critical.

There was a time when Church authority, at least in theory, solved such tensions by simply declaring one way or opinion correct. That day, if it ever existed, is gone. Modern education, mobility, communication and respect for individual autonomy has ended it.

Unless the different groups within the Church are to naively believe that they can accomplish God’s work without the cooperation of other groups, we must find the single Spirit that unites us and discover a way to work together for the vision that God gives us in Jesus.

February 12, 2012
Right Or Wrong: It Matters
Thoughts on the First Readings -Joe Frankenfield
6th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Leviticus13:1-2, 44-446

Communities have long equated God’s will with what they believed best for their common welfare. Sure that God loves them, they are sure that he wants what’s best for them.

To know God’s will entails either receiving God’s direct revelation or observing how life functions best and inferring God’s desire from those observations. Ancient Jews believed, as do many contemporary Jews, that God directly revealed The Law. Most Christians believe the same. Catholic teaching has emphasized a way of understanding how folks should act called natural law. This consists of observations of life that yield a set of practical best practices for living, e.g., to treat our bodies in ways that do them needless harm is wrong because healthy bodies contribute to a full human life. It seems reasonable to assume that these best practices are God’s will for us though we don’t claim that he has directly spoken of them.

Today the awareness that various successful civilizations have lived by different understandings of what God has spoken has made our contemporaries cautious about claiming to possess a uniquely true revelation. Biblical and historical research has made others slow to accept that every claim of direct revelation is accurate. A deepening understanding of how the world and people function and difficulties involved in arriving at a single norm of human thriving makes many leery of generalities about human nature.

All this being said, making moral and ethical judgments is at once a necessary and an extremely high stakes activity. The issue involved isn’t whether God will reward or punish us for our decisions. The issue is whether we will do ourselves and others good or harm, whether we’ll make our world a better or worse place to live in and to hand on to our children.

We can’t cede responsibility for our decisions to others who make judgments we simply follow. I do what I’m told is a tragically inadequate moral response; so is I do it because it feels right.

Moral judgments are inescapable for those living the way of Jesus. The wise approach them with maturity, honesty, humility and in dialogue with others whose judgment and integrity they trust.

February 5, 2012
The Church’s Essential Service
Thoughts on the First Readings -Joe Frankenfield
5th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Job 7:1-4,6-7

It’s easy to talk about loving others and being committed to the stranger’s welfare. It’s anything but easy to move from the rhetoric to the reality.

Modern communication and transportation allow us to jog in shoes from Taiwan and enjoy fresh vegetables from California or Florida all winter. But they have other consequences. We hear about a ship sinking off an Italian island within minutes of its running aground. We see same-day video of soldiers shooting anti-government demonstrators in Syria. We hear the cries of mothers holding their starving children in the Sudan and watch the earthquake tragedy drag on month after month in Haiti. As a result we wonder if relatives cruising the Caribbean will be okay, whether we should send more money to Haiti, if our government ought to intervene in Syria. So much information is overwhelming. It’s understandable that we want to ignore world news and obsess over what star is dating whom and whether the Tigers have signed a new reliever.

Modern communication and mobility provide us the opportunity to respond to an entire world rather than just the twenty square miles around us. They leave unanswered, however, the question of how we want to deal with that response-ability?

Do I believe that God will actually end this world’s injustice? Do I believe that my actions contribute to that process? Where does God’s goal fall in my list of priorities? What sacrifice am I willing to ask of myself and those I love for a just world? What assurance of success do I need before I can risk my time and energy for such a world? Faith alone answers these questions. Faith alone allows us to embrace the promise of life. Our response is ultimately a matter of love.

What we need most from our Church is not a new liturgical style or firmer directions about how to behave; we need strong, reliable support to love freely – to love beyond the point that our fearful and security-centered world judges “good enough.”

January 29, 2012
The Voice Of God Is Everywhere
Thoughts on the First Readings -Joe Frankenfield
4th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Deuteronomy 18:15-20

Who speaks for God? When I was a child, my grandmother told me that my mother and father spoke for God. In grade school, the sisters told me that the priest spoke for God. High school teachers told me that the pope spoke for God. In college my professors assured me that Scripture, the Church and whoever spoke truth spoke for God. I began to sense a direction in these conversations.

Today many people listening closely for the word of God have come to accept that God speaks through life: all life but, most powerfully, human life – everyone’s life. Life reflects God most fully and in the longing for life reflects the longing for God at its most intense.

The more carefully folks attend to human life, the more clearly they see that it can’t be detached from the earth in which it dwells in and of which it’s a part. Seeing this, they have come to think of the entire earth and, to the extent we understand it, the universe beyond, as God speaking to us.

Christians may wonder if this experience of God in all of creation supersedes the experience of God in our Tradition. It doesn’t. What it does do is place the Word of God that the Church has conveyed to us into a context beyond measure.

Today we have to re-hear the story of Jesus. Christians of the New Testament era had to translate the story of Jesus from its Jewish context into the culture of the Greek and Roman world. We have to hear Jesus with the ears of world-wide humanity, of the planet itself and the universe beyond. If just moving the experience of Jesus from the world of first century Judaism into the Greco-Roman world pushed our faith to the edge of its breaking point, what will happen as we immerse it in the world that science and communication is opening up today! No wonder the Church feels so unsettled; God is drastically widening the horizons of our faith.

As our grade school teachers said when we had to cross a dangerous street, “Hold tight to the hand of the boy or girl next to you.”

January 22, 2012
We Listen For The Voice Of God
Thoughts on the First Readings -Joe Frankenfield
3rd Sunday in Ordinary Time
Jonah 3:1-5, 10

In recent comments for a Commonweal article Luke Timothy Johnson, a respected scripture scholar, observed that every theologian’s first question has to be, what is God doing in the world? I’d add, that’s the first question every Christian has to ask!

Many Catholics today struggle to maintain confidence in authority’s ability to provide them a useful answer to that question. It seems sometimes that our leaders fear the messiness of the new experiences and situations within which faith must operate and are simply attempting to mandate attitudes and solutions from a previous age. We view this as a dead end. Accepting that life and faith-life are always lived in a fumbling, insecure and restless world we choose to move ahead bringing what ancient treasures we can carry and counting on the Holy Spirit and our sense of the Tradition to help us construct what we need as we proceed. As we journey, we hold tightly to two basic elements of Catholic life.

First, we are a Eucharistic community. This means much more than that we go to Mass. It means that we’re committed to the promise of Jesus. It means that we’re confident that the Holy Spirit works through our lives. It means we believe that God will accomplish through us the just world that he promised. We celebrate the renewal of that promise every time we pray the Eucharist. We unite ourselves to God’s work and one another’s when we share Christ in Communion.

Next, the world that we live in, as unfulfilled and painful as it often is, is the gift God gives for our joy and fulfillment. It is a sacrament; it is God’s realm. God didn’t enter this world because there was no other way to communicate his love for us. He entered it because it’s his gift to us and he loves it as he loves us. Our world is not intended to be a vale of tears but a wondrous home. Our faith is not to flee this world but to immerse ourselves in it and complete it.

If we know where we’re going, if we’re committed to the journey, if we know what to carry, we’ll arrive in God’s time. We have his promise.

January 15, 2012
The God In Front Of Our Noses
Thoughts on the First Readings -Joe Frankenfield
2nd Sunday in Ordinary Time
I Samuel 3:3-10, 19

My dad wore reading glasses. One day he couldn’t find them. He searched the house high and low certain that someone, probably my mom, had moved them from their usual place. Complaining loudly, he finally walked into the kitchen demanding to know why my mother had moved his glasses and where she had put them. She looked up from her work and, giving him her best you poor dumb man look said, “For God’s sake, Walter, they’re on your nose.”

Missing the obvious is common. It happens in our faith lives. We hear repeated admonitions to practice some behavior or virtue and it becomes part of the wallpaper: always there, rarely noticed. Jesus agreed with the common rabbinical teaching that the central commandment of Jewish Law was to love God and one’s neighbor. We hear those words thousands of times and yet they sit hidden on our noses.

Part of the trouble is the unfortunate use of the word commandment referring to Jewish Law. We tend to react to law as an imposition on our freedom. What’s the fine for its infringement? How can we circumvent it? Jews, on the other hand, viewed The Law, at least in theory, as the road map for successful living. God had given it to them as their most precious possession. It advanced them above every other nation.

Loving God above all else meant recognizing that a Benevolent Being was behind all reality giving it meaning and direction. Aligning oneself with this Being was traveling the road to success. It was the height of common sense. Loving one’s neighbor as oneself was simply recognizing the fact that the Creator constructs life as a web in which, ultimately, for one to thrive all must thrive. The admonishment to love God and one another was like an admonishment to breathe: not some extraneous regulation but the simple encouragement to commit to life.

We spend a lot of time storming about our world looking for lost peace, misplaced civility, vanished resources sorely needed by millions. The solution isn’t missing. It’s Love God above all else and our neighbor as ourselves. What’s missing is the courage to acknowledge it.
Pray for courage.

January 8, 2012
Faith’s Focus
Thoughts on the First Readings -Joe Frankenfield
Feast of the Epiphany
Isaiah 60:1-6

Once arriving home from school for the holidays I was overcome by rare feelings of generosity and asked my mother how I could help her get ready for the festivities. Casting an amused look around the pre-Christmas chaos she quipped, “Gee, I don’t know; just look around and see if anything catches your eye in.” So much for my grand gesture!

Some folks are convinced that it’s crucial to return elements of the mystical to our world. They are certain that the Church has lost its sense of the sacred and has discarded our rich spiritual heritage creating a trivial, feeble, boring religion focused only on what we can see and measure. An earnest young man once informed me that we needed to move past worldly preoccupations and promote what Celtic religion refers to as the thin spots in life, where the sacred world is near at hand and easily grasped. We should stress the wonder of the sacraments, especially the mystery of the Eucharist, and adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. We should emphasize the world’s holy places like the Vatican, Lourdes, cathedrals and shrines. “Folks today have lost their grasp of the spiritual and divine, they’re drowning in the ordinary,” he informed me. This thinking is strong in many circles and carries significant official backing. Still, it misses a huge point. The sacred is not the other-worldly.

Jewish Scripture repeatedly points out that the world is full of God’s goodness and splendor (e.g., Num. 14:20, Is. 6:3, Hab. 2:14). In the gospel Jesus bluntly points out that those who feed and care for others, especially the needy, feed and care for him (Mt. 25:35). At the heart of our every Eucharist prayer the priest raises his hands over the bread and wine that ordinary folks make in ordinary wineries and bakeries. He asks the Holy Spirit to transform these symbols of our efforts for the life God promises into the divine guarantee that is Christ.

It’s tempting to seek the sacred and meaningful in a sphere where, by our beliefs, we control the demands and their fulfillment. In the everyday world the demands and consequences of our action or inaction are objective, immediate and measurable: sometimes we succeed, sometimes we fail and often we get exasperatingly mixed results. That’s a lot different; a lot tougher. Still, this is the world God gives us and promises to transform into his Kingdom. This is the arena of our faith lives.

January 1, 2012
Giving God’s Image Room to Grow
Thoughts on the First Readings -Joe Frankenfield
Feast of Mary, the Mother of God
Numbers 6:22-27

The young woman in my office was upset, nearly in tears. “My professor said I was stupid and naïve for believing in God. It felt like he was accusing me of believing in the tooth fairy or something.” I happened to know the professor she was speaking of and, though he didn’t personally believe in God, he held others’ beliefs in great respect. The student and I had a long talk about her childhood beliefs and her current confusion about them.

When we begin thinking about God, it’s understandably in human terms. That’s our experience. We know reward and punishment so God rewards and punishes. We know jealousy and anger so God gets jealous and angry. We control things to get what we want so God controls things to get his way. We respond to those who are attentive to us and ignore those who discount us; so we understand God.

Later in life, when we’ve lived more and acquired a deeper wonder, we begin to find the super-human image of God unsatisfying. The Being underlying all being isn’t like us yet is as close to us, as one with us, as we are with ourselves. God becomes impossible to imagine apart from our selves yet equally united with every other being. How can we ask more of the Being who’s the foundation of being. How can we ask for love from Love itself. We begin to know God at once indescribably other and incredibly intimate.

When our faith makes this leap, the childlike ease of explaining and encompassing God is gone, gone as well is the need and desire to do so. In its place is a new, deeper union – one that can be neither limited nor lost.

This was the source of disquiet in the student’s life. This was changing her way of viewing Jesus. This was changing her way of praying. She was secretly excited about her growth but unsure of it and anxious about relinquishing the God of her childhood. Growth, not her professor, stirred her unease. She was young to experience this much growth but it’s there for all of us.

December 25, 2011
God Is Here
Thoughts on the First Readings -Joe Frankenfield
Christmas Day
1 Isaiah 52: 7-10

“I am worried about my grandson leaving for college. He’s young and immature. He doesn’t think. Anybody can talk him into anything. I’m afraid for him and so is his mother. I constantly pray that God will watch over him. I just never feel I’ve prayed enough.” This is one of countless conversations I’ve had with people worried that their prayers weren’t sufficient to turn God’s attention from heaven to earth.

Why do we speak of God as being out there? For thousands of years people have spoken of God existing in another realm. God may occasionally break into our realm to take care of some situation or other but this isn’t his natural milieu. Even though our faith teaches that God is constantly involved with us, creating our entire universe, we continue to speak of him as external to us. This assumption is so deeply woven into Christian cosmology that it seems inextricable from the faith. But Is it?

What happens if we don’t posit a unique sphere for God? What if we view God existing within our realm, giving it life and direction rather than entering our world from the outside? Are we reducing God to the stuff around us? Certainly not. Our faith is that the universe is meaningful, destined for fulfillment. Everything that exists is good and purposeful. From black holes to kitty cats, with us in that continuum, we give ourselves neither existence nor promise. God alone gives goodness and promise to creation.

Can we speak of God as independent of but inseparable from creation?
Isn’t this the underlying revelation of the Incarnation? Doesn’t this illuminate the enormity of God’s becoming human? Christians have a chronic problem: we’re prone to envisioning God as creating us and sitting back to see if we’ll achieve our destiny. We sometimes speak even of the Incarnation as though it were merely an exception in which God visited our world to straighten us out then returned to his “out there” to observe the results. This isn’t our faith.

We need to know that God is closer to human life than our breath, more involved with material creation than gravity. God is not “out there” somewhere; God is not and refuses to be separate from our lives. We celebrate that every Christmas.

December 11, 2011
Everyday Messiahs
Thoughts on the First Readings -Joe Frankenfield
Third Sunday in Advent
Isaiah 61: 1-2, 10-11

Late one recent evening I stopped in a local store to pick up several things I needed for a home repair. The person who waited on me was friendly and very helpful, going out of his way to make sure he understood my needs and guided me to the right items. We didn’t know one another but for the few minutes that we were together he was caring and pleasant. When he got home later he probably complained about tired feet and having to mother-hen clueless folks like me about home repair. Still, however tired and frustrated he may have been, he went out of his way to assist me and let me know that I was worth his time and energy.

Isaiah anticipated a political Messiah because the oppression his people faced was political. Jesus’ vision was also political but not in the sense of managing power to get people to do what he wanted. Jesus understood that the first step toward peace and justice was to want peace and justice for everyone including those who oppose us. If that isn’t our ultimate goal, we’ll never attain the world we long for; without that goal we can’t accept the world God offers. What does that have to do with a tired, foot-sore clerk in a hardware store?

There’s a mocking element in saying that someone views herself as a messiah. It calls to mind the image of a person who believes that she has all the answers to how the world should act and is willing to do most anything to drag others in her schemes. We generally view would-be messiahs as ludicrous, even dangerous, people. Yet the primary aim of everyone seriously claiming to be Christian is to be Christ for the world. Christ means Messiah.

The core work of Jesus was to free people from fear. He used his life to reveal that whatever their weaknesses, whatever their failures, whatever their history the Creator of the universe stands with folks – without question. Experiencing this divine commitment, each person is free to join with every other in the search for life. It is the work of all who take up Jesus’ mantel to free others from fear, not by intellectual brilliance or the force of an amazing personality but by standing with them, respecting them, loving them – without question.

We begin with the person in front of us, not with the Taliban or drug cartels or some other enemy-of-the-day. We begin with the guy looking for the thingamajig when our feet hurt too much and our day’s been too long. We show that person honest care and respect. We make ourselves one with him and his needs. Our faith promises that this will change us and change our world.

December 4, 2011
God Busy Here
Thoughts on the First Readings -Joe Frankenfield
Second Sunday in Advent
Isaiah 40:1-5, 9-11

Early one morning when I was very small, my mother and I stood looking out of our front window at a bright red dawn. “Why’s the sky so red,” I asked. Because, mom replied, “God’s making cotton candy today.” I’d eaten cotton candy but had no idea where it came from or how it was made. But grown-ups said that God gave us good things and cotton candy was good. For a long time I imagined God busy up in the sky making things, among them bright red cotton candy. It just seemed right, though I never figured out how he got it from “up there” to “down here”. It was a letdown, several years later, to watch a sweaty, grumpy woman in a dirty apron making cotton candy at the county fair.

Giving up the idea that God is somewhere out there acting directly on our world comes at a price. Some folks will accuse us of losing our faith – and we may wonder ourselves. If God isn’t directing things, what’s God doing? If God doesn’t control when good and bad things happen, why do we pray? If God isn’t pulling the strings, who is? Anybody?

When Jesus was beginning his ministry, he referred to himself as accomplishing the work of the Messiah; he was announcing the good news of God’s love to the disabled and disenfranchised. He then spent the rest of his life convincing his followers that they had the ability and the responsibility to bring healing and justice to those in need.

God is the living force bringing everything to fulfillment. God is the reality within growth and change, never forcing, never relenting, searching out the way forward. We sense it within ourselves. We thrill to it when we’re strong; we crave it when we’re weak. We are cynical about it when our progress is overwhelmed and we’re thrown back at every turn. We find it getting up and shaking itself back into life when we can see no way forward simply because, for God, not to rise up isn’t an option.

All life evolves as it struggles against the obstacles it faces. We say that Jesus revealed God in his life and death. We know that Jesus’ life was a struggle from his conception to his resurrection. Why can’t we accept that his struggle revealed God – as much as his resurrection.

Maybe one day we’ll be able to see the saint in the sweaty cotton candy lady with the dirty apron. When we do, she’ll be less grumpy.

November 27, 2011
Striving For The Politics Of God’s Promise
Thoughts on the First Readings -Joe Frankenfield
First Sunday in Advent
Isaiah 2:1-5

Between the visions of a prophet and the assumptions of a politician there can exist a chasm that few manage to bridge. “What can people do,” the prophet asks? “What will people do,” asks the politician?

“God works in people,” says the prophet, “He frees us from our fears. We can meet our potential. We can become the people God intends.”“People are just people,” responds the politician; “we look for security and prosperity. Life is short and dicey; we do what we must to survive. Beliefs and promises about God are fine but first life has to work – we have to live.”

The prophet and the politician: they struggled within our faith before it was Christian. The Hebrew Scriptures are full of the tension (Isaiah 7:1-18). Jesus’ and Peter’s relationship revealed the stress (Mk 8:33) that beset the first generations of the Church.

Scholars refer to the strain in the gospels between the already and the not yet when they discuss the Kingdom of God. On the one hand Jesus proclaimed that the reality of God’s promised new world was present in his own life (Lk 4:18-21). On the other hand, the gospels foretold persecution (Mk 13:11) and encouraged virtues necessary to endure the privations of living a life of loving-justice in a world not yet embracing God’s promise (Mt 5, 6 & 7).

This tension has always plagued the Church. It will continue to dog it until God’s peace fills our hearts and lands. Praying beside us are people who, by personality and experience are politicians as well as people who are prophets. And within each of us our own political and prophetic sides struggle. We have to acknowledge that they often accomplish no more than an awkward truce.

Yet, it is the challenge of faith to develop our own politics that embodies the prophesy of Jesus: the vision that the world will not stay as it is and God’s vision of peace with justice will become reality. We cannot allow that hope to fade, either for our own lives or for the world at large.