May 12, 2013
Faith: Its Freedom and Its Consequences
Thoughts on the Gospels -Joe
7th Sunday of Easter
John 17:20-26

Jesus once said, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.” For us who are trying to follow Jesus’ way, that statement holds a crucial piece of information. Jesus had a specific goal. He wasn’t interested in garnering public accolades. He was trying to change his world and he oriented everything towards that end. He did all he could to instill the same intense focus in his disciples.

In reaction to present and past religious and political systems that have attempted to deny us freedom of conscience and intellectual adulthood it’s common to hear folks adamantly assert that everyone has a right to his or her opinion. Everyone’s opinion is valid for that person, they say, and it merits acceptance by others.

I don’t know anyone who accepts that logic when it’s applied to their brake mechanic’s opinions. The only validity in that case is the one that results in the owner’s car stopping when she pushes the pedal. If such stopping doesn’t occur, there’s going to be a rather pointed confrontation about the offending opinion’s stupidity not to mention the stupidity of the mechanic holding it.

That folks can hold all religious opinions valid seems rooted in the radically privatized understanding of religion that’s popular among us. It’s a common opinion that as long as one is comfortable with one’s own opinion about Jesus, that’s all that matters. Jesus did not share that view.

Jesus believed that his teaching and lifestyle affected everyone. In his mind what folks believed had real consequences. Some beliefs moved the world closer to God’s promise; others hindered such progress. Hence his statement; If you think that simply praising me makes you part of the solution, you are mistaken. It doesn’t.

Our respect for one another must be absolute and reverence for each other’s religious beliefs is crucial to that respect. Such respect, however, doesn’t imply apathy to the search for truth as best we can discover it. We can’t allow an understandable fear of religious intolerance to result in privatized faith. That decision empties Jesus’ life of all meaning.

May 5, 2013
Searching For Jesus? Look For His Spirit
Thoughts on the Gospels -Joe
6th Sunday of Easter
John 14:23-29

In this week’s gospel Jesus says that those who have come to love him will keep his word. His comment may sound backwards, but it isn’t. As a rule, we pay closer attention to folks we find attractive.

Christians have been telling one another, and anyone else who would listen, to love Jesus for over two millennia. It begs the question, what does it mean to love someone we’ve never met? There are several ways to answer the question.

Loving Jesus can mean that knowing how deeply he valued and cared for everyone and what a forgiving person he was, we find him very attractive. We can imagine him so intensely that we begin to have an emotional response to the character of Jesus. In Christian circles this knowing and responding to the story, or gospel, of Jesus is seen as a gift of God’s Spirit. Given that understanding, we’ve actually come to love the person of Jesus in the presence of his Spirit.

There is another way of thinking about our relationship with Jesus. His Spirit, the presence of God that guided him throughout his life guides everyone today who continues to live his way. When someone touches us with forgiveness, caring, acceptance, generosity and true respect, we are touched by God’s Spirit, Jesus’ Spirit. When we find ourselves responding with love to a community or person who treats us as Jesus treated people and is therefore guided by the Spirit of Jesus, we can well say that we love Jesus.

Everyday life is filled with the Spirit of Jesus. When we are touched by it and encouraged by it, respond to it and then carry it to others we not only love Jesus, we become Jesus. We extend Jesus’ life through time and space. Paul taught that and the gospels taught that. No need to look for trumpets and angels; simply loving Jesus we become Jesus and we move the world a bit closer to its real future.

April 28, 2013
God Is There For The World – Always
Thoughts on the Gospels -Joe
5th Sunday of Easter
John 13:31-33, 34-35

It strains the imagination to think that anyone acquainted with the process would ever think of crucifixion as glorifying. It was an execution designed to terrorize a population into submission. It was prolonged, public, excruciating, suffocation. When Rome crucified someone, they wanted everyone to get and remember a stark message: don’t defy the Empire. When the gospel narrator portrayed Jesus speaking of his coming death in heroic terms, he was speaking not of the execution itself but of the astounding commitment to his people that he was about to demonstrate by not running from his immanent death. And beneath that demonstration was the deeper point summed up in Jesus’ statement, “When you see me, you see the Father.”

That a Creator would have such love for a creature makes no sense. It’s inexplicable. It stretches the imagination to the breaking point. But that’s the revelation. That’s what Jesus’ life was all about. That’s Christianity’s core message.

We get the idea at times that we’re to convince folks that God is a trinity of three persons or that the Mass really makes Jesus present in communion or that the Bible is God’s word. As important as those ideas are, they’re wrapping paper for the faith.

What people need to know is that the source of the universe knows and loves them and will never abandon them. We have been told that. It is our job to tell the world; not with bluster or cajoling, not with velvet words or clever ads but by being there for them. Being there in the good times and when things are tough, when folks aren’t appreciative and, especially, when everyone else grabs their stuff and lights out for the hills. That’s when folks will know that we have something true to say, when they see that we ourselves are true – to them.

“Nearing his final revelation of God’s love Jesus told his followers, To be part of God’s future world, you must be there for people in the world as it is. You can’t run away. You have to stand with them. Then they’ll understand.”

April 21, 2013
An Open Armed: An Opened Armed People
Thoughts on the Gospels – Joe
4th Sunday of Easter
John 10:27-30

It makes no sense for us, as members of a faith community, to ask others to do what we don’t model ourselves. As the tough army sergeant in movies used to say, “I never ask my men to do what I don’t do.” It’s a matter of credibility: God’s and ours.

When our Church (that’s us) asks folks to behave this or that way, we’re claiming to speak God’s mind not just a useful philosophical insight that we’ve discovered.

God wouldn’t suggest that we do something that’s impossible. But that’s exactly the impression we give folks when we ask them to do what we don’t do ourselves.

It’s the core assertion of our faith is that God accepts everyone, forgives everyone and is faithful to everyone. We offer that message to everyone who will listen. We say that realizing this truth about our Creator gives humans a security beyond anything else that life offers.

If we say that God is accepting and faithful to all people no matter what their weaknesses and failures while we accept and are faithful to only those we find personally compatible, we don’t merely make ourselves less believable, we make God less believable.

When we become Christian we embrace the responsibility to welcome everyone. We take on that responsibility because we claim that God welcomes all people.

Be what you believe. That’s the challenge to everyone who would live the Christian life.

No one will steal God’s beloved creatures from God’s hands. That was Jesus’ claim about his Father’s dependability. That has to be our promise as well. Whether I find you enjoyable or obnoxious, sympathetic or offensive, nothing will make me turn my back on you.

What we claim of God we model for our world. It’s what we do; it’s who we are.

April 14, 2013
It’s About The Future Not The Past
Thoughts on the Gospels -Joe
3rd Sunday of Easter
John 21:1-19

The gospel this week tells of Jesus feeding people. It’s not a new story. Jesus often fed people. It was a way of demonstrating God’s nourishing love. The message was that God isn’t somewhere outside of things watching. God’s with folks giving them life. It would have been difficult for anyone hearing John’s gospel to this point to miss the idea. Why make it again?

John has Jesus feeding people once again because this time it’s not just anyone that he’s making breakfast for; it’s the apostles: the ones who had run away when he was arrested, except for Peter, of course, who, when things got dicey, had told everyone he hadn’t the slightest idea who Jesus was. That’s who Jesus was baking fish for.

It’s worth noting that the apostles didn’t go looking for Jesus figuring that he said that God would raise him from death so they ought to be there to welcome his return. Given the option, they had chosen to go back to work fishing. Jesus had to search them out.

When the apostles noticed him with the fish on the fire, they must have expected a tongue lashing. They didn’t get it. They just got breakfast – and a question: Are you still in this with me? Peter, having done so well speaking for the group before, said, Sure; you bet. I wonder if Jesus grinned; we’ll never know. Anyway, handing them a plate of fish, Jesus said, Okay, let’s get to it; there’s a lot to be done. If we could soak in that idea!

With God it’s not about punishment or threats or lectures. It’s about love and the commitment God’s made to us. It’s about a world to be made whole. It’s about the gift and the work.

April 7, 2013
Forgive: #1 On Our To Do list
Thoughts on the Gospels -Joe
2nd Sunday of Easter
John 20:19-31

With good reason John’s Gospel joins Jesus’ giving the Holy Spirit to the disciples with his blunt reminder of their responsibility to forgive sins. Forgiving is an essential and demanding activity of every Christian.

We forgive with no guarantee that the forgiven won’t offend again. We forgive and let go of the anger that we hold toward the offender. Yet anger is often our defense against the humiliation we experience at the disregard shown us. Revenge, even the passive type that denies another our care and respect, is an attempt to prove to ourselves that we can’t be trifled with, ignored or mistreated without consequence. Forgiving is an act of self-confidence, often great self-confidence.

The Spirit assures us that God knows, loves and is faithful to us. That knowledge forges an unshakable sense of our value in us. Deeper than any self-worth rooted in accomplishments or others’ recognition, this gift of knowing God’s commitment to us is undiminished by failure or rejection. The certainty of God’s faithfulness frees us to forgive. And forgiveness of human failure makes God’s future possible.

We mess up. Sometimes we mess up with full knowledge and responsibility, sometimes out of ignorance. Sometimes we mess up out of sheer stupidity; it’s not that we intend to or that we don’t know better, it’s just – well, we mess up. Forgiving isn’t only for technical sins: intentional bad actions. Forgiving is for all our mess ups.

If we’re to keep moving towards the future God has in mind, if we’re to advance in the face of our messes and everyone else’s; we have to know that we are forgiven – by our Creator and by one another. Without that the future we hope for is a fantasy.

Forgiving is our Church’s primary responsibility – not the clergy’s, the whole Church’s: yours and mine. We can’t live lives of forgiving without the sense of being unconditionally loved ourselves; it’s too hard.

The first step in opening our hearts to our messy world is opening our hearts to our accepting God.

March 31, 2013
Easter’s Message Is Now
Thoughts on the Gospels -Joe
Easter Sunday
Luke24:1-12

The term Son of Man appears frequently in Hebrew Scriptures. It refers to a human being with all his or her imperfections and troubles. When God address a character as son of man in an ancient Hebrew setting, it’s to make the point that God is very aware of how weak, confused and generally overwhelmed by life that person often is.

When Christian Scriptures refer to Jesus as Son of Man they are in effect calling him everyman. They’re also making the point that, in Jesus, God has entered into the concrete reality of human life with all its weakness and trouble.

It’s in this context that John pictures the two people who announce Jesus’ resurrection referring to him as the Son of Man. John’s point is that Jesus has dealt with the same weaknesses and faced the same evils that we all face. Just as, despite our best efforts, we’re often overcome by injustice and rejection, Jesus was overcome. In the face of all that, the messengers tell us, God has rescued Jesus from death and failure.

Just as Jesus’ life demonstrated what a fully human life looked like, his resurrection revealed God’s faithfulness to humans who live with trust in God’s oneness with us. The messenger is Jesus; the message is about us.

Easter is concerned with much more than life after death. Jesus’ resurrection is God’s promise to preserve, utilize and bring every human effort for good to fruition. On Easter Christians celebrate the faith that none of our work for God’s justice is ever lost. No matter how dire things look, God underwrites our investment in life and assures its ultimate success.

We know all too well what it means to be Sons (and daughters) of Man. It’s God’s promise that we will also know the triumph of the Risen Jesus.

March 24, 2013
The Love Is Unique, Not The Suffering
Thoughts on the Gospels -Joe
Palm Sunday
Luke23:33-46

In high school a religion teacher assigned us a book that described scourging, crowning with thorns, carrying a cross and crucifixion in minute detail. The idea was to help us realize what Jesus endured for people. Without a doubt, the pain Jesus endured in his execution was great.

I was much older when it dawned on me that millions of people endure as much and, in many cases, vastly more suffering than Jesus endured. Holy Week isn’t really about whips and thorns and nails. If Jesus had lived a life of faithfulness to us but died of old age surrounded by loved ones, the astounding reality of who he was and what his life meant would have been no less.

The heart of God’s act in becoming human was to demonstrate God’s union with us and God’s commitment to our future. That the Creator of the universe knows and is concerned with us is itself astounding. That, beyond knowing us, the Creator loves us without qualification and is absolutely committed to our future is beyond our ability to fathom. That the Creator chose to demonstrate that love by sharing our humanity and caring for us despite the painful rejection that such care would bring is life-changing for all who grasp it.

We must be cautious about focusing too exclusively on Jesus’ tragic death. It’s beyond imagining that our Creator would suffer death at our hands. Attempting to make sense of it has led many to explain Jesus’ execution as restitution God demanded from us for our failures. That distorts God’s relationship with us and turns the loving gift of creation into a dodgy business deal humanity could never afford.

Sacrifice is an act of uniting. Jesus’ entire life was a sacrifice because it revealed God’s union with human history and the human dream. Jesus’ suffering was absurdly tragic. All suffering is, especially that which we impose on one another. That God couldn’t join in our existence without being caught up in such pain shines a harsh light the distance we have to travel before we arrive at the future God offers.

Holy Week is about God’s faithfulness.

March 17, 2013
Our Worth Is A Gift Not A Payment
Thoughts on the Gospels -Joe
5th Sunday in Lent
John 8:1-11

When I was a child I wanted to pitch in Little League. I would stand in the backyard and throw at a target for hours on end. When my dad came home from work, he would catch for me. The problem was that I thought that an eight year old should be able to pitch like Bob Feller and I couldn’t. When the ball sailed over my dad’s head or out of reach to his right or left, I grew angry with myself. The maturity I needed (more mental than physical) to be a good eight year old pitcher just wasn’t there. Try as he might, my father couldn’t convince me that it was neither a blot against my character nor my value as a human being that my fastball ended up in the shrubs.

It took many years before it sunk in that life wasn’t a test to prove oneself worthy of existence. God’s reasons for creating us are radically mysterious. The best that we can say is that God acts out of love. Having said that, we have to acknowledge that it’s a love that we couldn’t muster on our best day.

Adultery is no laughing matter. It can destroy marriages, families, lives and harm communities. That’s why ancient law, especially law rooted in nomadic culture, was quick and decisive about the issue. It was a big deal. Yet Jesus looked at the woman about to be executed for this behavior, loved what he saw and rescued her. The issue wasn’t that adultery was a minor crime nor was it that the woman, not the man, was to be executed. That reads our issues back into the situation. The point of the story is that God’s relationship with us isn’t about obedience, reward or punishment. It’s about the gift and promise of human joy. God never gives up on that promise to us – never places the human future second to some other consideration.

Human value doesn’t come from throwing a 103 mph fastball, obeying all the Ten Commandments, having the highest MCAT score, the best behaved kids or the biggest dossier of public service in town. Human value comes from the simple fact that the Creator has decided that each of us is worth creating and sticking by. That’s an astounding and unfathomable compliment.

We strive to view ourselves and everyone else from the perspective of that divine judgment. Only when we can do this this will we share the most basic aspect of how Jesus viewed life.

March 10, 2013
Forgiveness: Love’s Core
Thoughts on the Gospels -Joe
4th Sunday in Lent
Luke15:1-3, 11-32

When we think of forgiving people, we often imagine those closest to us: spouses, children, parents, intimate friends. That’s understandable since we depend so much on them and their actions affect us so deeply. We want to maintain our relationship with them.

It’s also a good idea to think of folks with whom we’ve only casual contact: grocery store clerks, cable reps, our children’s teacher, Cousin Seth, other drivers. Faith reminds us that we bring God’s forgiveness to the world. We all signed up to do this. It’s not just a priest’s job.

Forgiveness is more about relationships than rules; more about belonging than behavior. We have countless reasons to put people outside our fences. We easily find ways to say that God rejects them too. Jesus refused to let people blame their rejection on God. He let everyone into the community – because, regardless of our judgments, that’s what God does.

We can’t claim to bring God’s love to the world and refuse to let people into our hearts.

Who are we talking about? When we find ourselves thinking, to hell with him or who cares about her; I’ll be civil to him when he’s civil to me or who needs her, she makes no difference; that’s the one.

Forgiving isn’t simple. How do I welcome Johnny into my home when Johnny steals the silverware? Still, faith is the absolute: we invite everyone who will come into our community. We have to find the way to make forgiveness work. We have to forgive because loving is the Christian non-negotiable.

And we wondered what our Lenten Sacrifice would be!

March 3, 2013
Behavior Matters
Thoughts on the Gospels -Joe
3rd Sunday in Lent
Luke13:1-9

A perennial source of anxiety in university life is the freshman first semester. From the minute new students step foot on campus someone is cajoling them to dig into their books. “Don’t think that because your parents aren’t here you can leave your books on the floor until December and still grasp a decent grade from the maw of academic disaster. You can’t. A 4.0 in high school last year gets you nothing here.” There follows a string of anecdotal failures designed to imbed fear in 18 year old hearts.

The thing about this tactic is that it’s rooted in fact. While it doesn’t do the university’s reputation any good to have lots of freshmen flunk out, the professors get paid either way and orientation mentors are compensated no matter how well their young charges do, folks give their advice altruistically. That’s how it was with Jesus. Jesus consistently preached God’s freely-given love. Over and over he spoke of God’s concern for the sinner as well as the saint. Still; sin carried a real and steep price. It was paid in blood, in civil disorder, in human alienation and, ultimately, in the extended delay of God’s promised future.

In the ancient world’s static view of reality where life was as life was, unless God intervened from beyond, change or its absence was a direct result of divine pleasure or displeasure.

Without a sense of history’s course and humans’ ability to directly influence its path, the only way of explaining the negative effects of self-centeredness was to view it as a personal affront to God meriting retribution. Jesus, not withstanding his constant assurance of God’s forgiveness for sinners, also preached sin’s dire punishments.

We live with a much different understanding of history. For us, despite its obvious triumphs and tragedies, history moves forward. We assume progress even though it comes in fits and starts. And we assume as well that our behavior influences it. It may have been simpler for the ancients to imagine but it is no less true for us: for good and ill, behavior effects destiny. Our decisions and actions make a real, permanent difference. Just as they do for college freshmen.

February 24, 2013
Beyond Today’s Joy And Sorrow
Thoughts on the Gospel -Joe
2nd Sunday in Lent
Luke9:28-36

Tuesday it’s pazckis (aka, punchkies) and parties. Dancing, jazz and samba. Wake up Wednesday morning groggy and stuffed; it’s Ash Wednesday. Three tiny meals, no meat, smudged dirt on our heads; it’s Lent. Seven weeks of rigor to get ready for Easter, the highpoint of the Christian year: the day of our Creator’s faithfulness, the day of The Promise.

There are a lot of contradictions in a Christian life. Sorrow lies next to Joy. Misery walks with hope. Failure jostles success. It’s hard to keep one’s balance. Critics call Christianity wildly, even naively, optimistic in one breath and an endless source of weakness and guilt in the next.

The gospel this week tells of Jesus exhibiting marks of divinity in the presence of his disciples and conversing with long-dead Moses and Elijah, pivotal characters in the march of Jewish history. Yet, this amazing event is preceded and followed by Jesus confronting those same disciples with predictions of his approaching arrest and execution. There’s a dissonance in all this that is both distressing and profoundly true.

In the 50s and 60s Thelonious Monk, a great jazz pianist, would play two adjacent keys at once bringing out a sound hidden between them that was both strange and right. It’s often occurred to me that this is what we try to do in Christianity when we place joy and suffering adjacent to one another. In the Holy Spirit’s evolving act of guiding creation to fullness, they’re the realities that we experience as happiness and sorrow, ecstasy and misery but they also contain something beyond each of them. There’s something so good there that, as St. Paul wrote, it’s beyond our ability to imagine.

Every day of our lives we bounce back and forth between the prediction of suffering and the preview of joy, the pain of failure and the excitement of success. We live the same reality that Jesus lived. But for those with ears to hear, there’s a note between those keys that is beautiful, a note that haunts us, a note that, as St. Paul wrote to Christians in Corinth, the eye hasn’t seen and our imaginations haven’t touched. That’s the world for which we live.

We may have only two keys to play but between them the music of God’s future sings to us.

February 17, 2013
Doing Evil Is Doing Evil
Thoughts on the Gospels -Joe
1st Sunday in Lent
Luke4:1-13

Should I embezzle money from my employer to buy myself a Corvette? Most folks would reject this idea without a second thought. Should I embezzle money from my employer to pay for the operation my child needs? Though most of us would reject this idea as well, our reaction would be slower and we’d feel a tension missing in the first case.

People have known for a long time that the really difficult moral judgments aren’t whether or not to do something bad simply for our own pleasure. The hard choices center on doing something bad in order to accomplish something good.

This gospel says that Jesus faced the temptation of using force and political manipulation to bring about the world of God’s promise. He considered it and decided against it. The gospels hint at such temptations in other places such as when Peter told Jesus not to risk arrest and execution by preaching in Jerusalem. Jesus, none too gently, warned him against getting in the way of his work. Later on Peter wanted to take up arms to protect Jesus and his mission. Again Jesus let him know he was hurting, not helping, the cause. These ideas, put in Peter’s mouth, were certainly ones that Jesus wrestled with.

There are always good, sensible sounding reasons for doing evil to accomplish something good. But to acquiesce to them is to become part of the underlying problem. If we can do something evil to advance our good agenda why shouldn’t others do something evil to accomplish what they see as good? There is no reason. And we end up with the same the messes in the world that we’ve always faced with folks doing whatever they deem necessary for results they find laudable. I’ve never met anyone who decided to hurt others, whether it involved a million people or two, saying, “I’m going doing this because I’m mean and bad and like to hurt folks.”

This gospel warns against the seductiveness of telling ourselves that we can do evil for a righteous cause. It’s a crucial caution about a rationalization that has hindered the World of God’s Promise more than any heresy or persecution.

February 10, 2013
The Gift We Have To Offer
Thoughts on the Gospels -Joe
5th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Luke5:1-11

This amazing fish tale in John’s Gospel is about the fishermen, not the fish.

The communal context for telling this story over and over for 2000 years is the ongoing difficulty Jesus’ followers have believing in our influence. The world is huge. It has deeply entrenched values which do not include loving one’s enemy, caring for the needy as much as for oneself, refusing to do violence to others no matter how great the good at stake. We find it difficult to be so confident of Jesus’ just and loving world that we will expend every effort and take every risk to accomplish it.

Sometimes the amazing fish catch is said to mean that God will help Christians convince everyone to believe things about Jesus. Believing things about Jesus makes little difference. Only acting like Jesus makes a difference. We are called to move people to act like Jesus. That won’t result from our making powerful arguments for Christian doctrines. It will result from our living like Jesus and by our actions making God’s loving justice real in others’ lives.

But the challenge of convincing our world to live like Jesus isn’t the only prospect that overwhelms us at times. It is just as difficult to believe that we can live as Jesus lived. That’s the context of Jesus’ reassurance to the disciples. Jesus commented that it’s more difficult for a camel to pass through a needles eye than someone rich to be part of God’s Reign. Nonetheless, he continued, “What is impossible for people God can make happen.”

It’s crucial that we never doubt, let alone give up on our ability to live the way of Jesus. No matter how often we fail, we admit our failings and begin again. That’s part of being Christian. Jesus was confident that we could bring his love and justice to our world. We can.

February 3, 2013
Building A Spirituality Together
Thoughts on the First Readings -Joe
4th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Luke4:21-30

Over the years the married folks in our parish prepared more than a thousand young couples to begin life together. We shared our experiences and what we thought we’d leaned from them about communication, finance and children in the years we’d spent with our spouses.

Organizing these gatherings, I noticed that there was one subject that few of us were willing to discuss. It wasn’t money or sex but spirituality. This was so even though all of us were long-time active, committed members of St. Mary’s.

Maybe our difficulty centered on the fact that we knew that our beliefs about God and Jesus mattered much less than our day-to-day practical dedication to God’s gift of life and our willingness to love as Jesus loved. Catholic spirituality is ultimately concerned with concrete actions not abstract truths. It’s about how we treat people.

Since none of us are perfect, discussing our faith is always humbling. We are talking about our vision of the world and our role in it that we never quite get right.

The thing is: we need to hear one another’s struggles as much as we need to hear of the successes. What we need to share of each other’s spirituality is not wise theories or profound spiritual growth. We need to know the constancy, the efforts day after day to love as God loves in the face of weakness and insecurity. We need to hear this because we need to be reminded that others are committed to the same struggle that we pursue. We need to know that others aren’t giving up on Jesus’ dream. We need to know that we’re not alone.

Others remind us that we’re members of a community that moves forward together, a community sharing a hope for an individual salvation inseparable from hope for the world’s.

It’s fundamental to Catholic faith that no one finds or follows God alone. We share one spiritual story and it’s important to share it.

January 27, 2013
Faith That Does All It Can
Thoughts on the First Readings -Joe
3rd Sunday in Ordinary Time
Luke1:1-4; 4:1`4-21

Jesus sounds so confident in this gospel. He is God’s Messiah, the one who will initiate the loving human community God has always wanted for the world. He is going to end injustice, bring about peace and make human suffering a thing of the past. What a wonderful vision. What a life to look forward to. What a gift to make of one’s self! Then things begin to fall apart.

Gone is the confident Jesus of the early days when, nearing the end of his career, he cries in frustration and grief over Jerusalem, the center of his people and his faith, for refusing to listen to his message (Lk 19:41). How different from confidence of his early days is the scene in the Garden of Gethsemane where begs his disciples to pray with him as he asks God to find a way for him to avoid his inevitable execution (Lk 22: 39).

Last week I listened to President Obama’s inaugural address and I saw the movie Lincoln. A central theme in both was the realization that change comes as people change. Usually that is slowly. We have to accept our responsibility to make things better even though we can’t make things perfect. It is a realization at once troubling, humbling and liberating.

Those of us who read these thoughts do our best to cooperate with God’s loving service to the world as best we can understand it. Sometimes we see results. Often we don’t. It’s difficult to keep going when we can’t point to sure progress nor glimpse the goals for which we long. It helps if we realize that even Jesus discovered that others would have to carry on his work – even if the full realization of this came only after his resurrection.

The life of faith is to do what we can, to take joy in the work and to thank God for the opportunity. It’s an act of faith.

January 20, 2013
A Creator Who Caters
Thoughts on the Gospels -Joe
2nd Sunday in Ordinary Time
John 2:1-11

What a party. Days of eating, drinking, singing and dancing then Jesus provides more, and better, wine! After writing a poetic, deeply theological introduction about Jesus’ divinity, John begins the story of Jesus’ life with a party. His point: Jesus lived to bring human joy – even when it seemed impossible. Especially when it seemed impossible! God will accomplish human happiness in a way that common sense says won’t happen. John seems to say, I know you’re going to find this story improbably, even fantastic. Open your minds; even more, open your hearts. Trust God to surprise you.

It isn’t doubt or even hostility that most hobbles Christianity; it’s lack of imagination. Too many of us simply can’t imagine a world different from what we’ve known. Our experiences of how things have been set the parameters of how we believe things can be. If we ask ourselves what we put more stock in, Jesus’ promise of God’s Reign or our assumptions about human nature, most of us choose our assumptions about human nature. What’s more, even though we profess that God has a different vision, we label our assumptions realism. That’s certainly understandable; it’s also certainly not faith.

So John begins his narrative of Jesus by recounting his impossible rescue of someone’s party.

God’s loving presence is more immediate and more intimate than we imagine. God can and will accomplish things through us that we deem impossible. Only our assumptions stand in God’s way.

When we’re reflecting on the strength of our faith, the best place to begin isn’t with the our acceptance of the doctrine of the Trinity or Jesus’ Real Presence in Communion or Papal infallibility: it’s with our assumptions about what’s possible for humans to accomplish in God’s Spirit and what size bet we’re willing to make on Jesus’ promise.

January 13, 2013
God Amidst The Sin
Thoughts on the Gospels -Joe
The Baptism of the Lord
Luke 3:15-16, 21-22

Here’s a question: why did Jesus, the presence of God in our lives, ask to participate in baptism, a ritual cleansing from sin? Without claiming access into his private thoughts, we can answer that Jesus began his public life immersed in the universal human struggle with evil and ended his life immersed in the universal human struggle with death. Between these bookends of his life it was his faith that kept evil from defining him. It was faith that freed him to heal and forgive, love and rejoice in God’s promise to us all.

When life turns dark and tragic we ask, where is God? Jesus was God’s answer: I am with you – always; no matter how hopeless, how absurd, how painful the situation, I am at your side.

Often, however, we aren’t asking where God is located; we’re asking why God allows chaos to reign in life. Biology observes that without death there is no evolution, psychology observes that without pain there is no growth or learning, geography observes that without destruction, the earth is static and dead. But these answers offer whats not whys. When my child is hurt, my relationships broken, my dreams shattered, my security evaporated, these facts tell me nothing.

In response God offers us no why. Instead God offers God’s self in the person of Jesus. Between his baptism and his death Jesus faced evil as every human does and in the end he bowed to the inevitable absurdity of death. In Jesus God revealed that God’s self-love is inseparable from God’s love for us. I can’t explain evil to you, God said in Jesus, I can only demonstrate that it will never be my last word to you.

When Jesus asked John for baptism, he wasn’t play acting. The issue wasn’t his personal guilt for this or that immoral action; it was his involvement in the tragedy of human weakness that plagues us all. Jesus needed Baptism because he was immersed in and struggled with evil as we all do. It wasn’t just a figure of speech when Paul wrote to the Christians of Corinth that Jesus became sin for us [2 Corinthians 5:21].

January 6, 2013
Building The World We’re Given
Thoughts on the Gospels - Joe
Feast of the Epiphany
Matthew 2:1-12

Scripture depicts the Reign of God as the crux of Jesus’ life. It’s an already-but-not-yet reality. In Jesus, the first Christians saw God loving them and promising to fulfill every human potential. Still disease oppressed them as well as plagues and starvation, poverty and violence. Their lives regularly lacked the feel of God’s love. Clearly, all was not yet right.

This experience of already-but-not-yet has an effect on Christian life. We live in the tension between peace and urgency. It plays itself out in every area of faith.

We constantly hear about the gift of peace: Peace on Earth, Peace be with you, Jesus is the Prince of Peace. Yet we know a world full of suffering and unrealized human hopes. We see this; we feel this constantly. We pray every day that everyone, ourselves included, will live more justly.

It’s common belief that faith will provide a deep calm sense of calm, even tranquility. Some folks go so far as to say that worldly problems shouldn’t trouble those with deep Christian convictions.

Jesus’ central teaching, however, was that God will fulfill his gift to humanity in the new world when he overcomes injustice, ends poverty and brings power to the powerless. He will accomplish this new world through the lives of those guided and empowered by the very same Spirit that enlivened Jesus. The Spirit will accomplish God’s Reign through us. Though this is human destiny, it’s a destiny not yet fulfilled. Now people suffer; many unimaginably.

There’s no way that Christians can live content until God’s world is a reality and human suffering is ended. The happiness, the survival of real lives depends on the efforts of people who are guided by Jesus’ Spirit. Christians simply can’t live tranquilly while others suffer from the absence of God’s Reign.

This is the inescapable tension of Christian life: we know the peace of God’s love and promise but we can’t escape the urgent ache of the world’s suffering millions. For now, that’s the irresolvable reality.

December 30, 2012
Jesus: The Biography Of God
Thoughts on the Gospels -Joe
Feast of the Holy Family
Luke 2:41-52

It’s easy to overlook Jesus’ words, “I have to be about my Father’s business.” We expect this kind of pious comment. Nonetheless, the statement makes an important point: Jesus wasn’t about himself; he was about God, his father. His every teaching explained and every action demonstrated that God, the Creator of the universe, knows and loves us.

Early Christians grew up believing that the Messiah would transform the world: he would overcome, not succumb, to inhumanity. In their attempts to explain how humans could have destroyed the Messiah, the Creator’s Presence, Christians sought a mechanism of salvation that necessitated Jesus’ dying.

One explanation for the world’s history of chaos was that God withheld his blessings because of human sin. Actions contrary to God’s will had thrown the world out of balance. Only when the world was rebalanced, freed from sin’s consequences, could it receive God’s favor – could it become God’s Kingdom. If the Messiah’s execution paid the total price for human sin, it would reestablish balance and make the world worthy of God’s blessing. Jesus’ incomprehensible crucifixion itself accomplished our salvation. This explanation won common acceptance; it also, however, presented serious problems.

Making Jesus’ death the crux of our salvation separated his work from the work of Creation. Everything else good in life is the result of God creating and humans realizing the potential of his creation. From babies to bocce balls, God creates and people build on his gifts. Not so with Jesus’ crucifixion.

For Jesus to “be about his Father’s business” means that he also was about creation. As God’s Loving Presence, his life demonstrated that the Source of all goodness was not alienated from humanity. His entire life, up to and including his acceptance of death, revealed that the Creator was dedicated to the world. For those who knew him, Jesus’ life became the freeing and sustaining foundation for living. Jesus was God’s “you can do this because I am with you.” Jesus’ salvation wasn’t separate from our creation. It was the definitive statement that God’s promise was imbedded in life from its beginning.

December 23, 2012
Christ Today
Thoughts on the Gospels -by Joe
4th Sunday in Advent
Luke 1:39-45

By the generation after Jesus’ death his followers were reflecting on what it meant that Mary, a person like they, had given birth to this man who was the presence and action of God in their lives. They surrounded Mary’s story with marvelous events and viewed her as the recipient of God’s particular care. They saw it as wondrous that an ordinary person could bring God to the world.

In the second book of his gospel, The Acts of the Apostles, Luke made the case, as Paul had decades earlier, that the community of faith is now God’s agent, the Christ, bringing salvation to its world.

It’s difficult to know the full reason that this understanding of the community faded from popular imagination but forty generations later few of us are comfortable with the idea. The Second Vatican Council worked mightily to rekindle the realization.

That God works through ordinary events and ordinary people is fundamental to the Christian vision. Still, we often find the thought strange. We’ve magnified the majesty of God so much that something balks at the suggestion that he would sully himself with earthy soil and sweat. That’s strange given the humanity of Jesus and the fact that God brings every human life into the world through the down-to-earth reality of sex.

To the extent that we lay people embrace the idea that God works through us we will transform our spirituality. For centuries we’ve accepted the ordained bring God to the world. Without objection we’ve listened to the assertion that they are the primary agents of Jesus’ revelation and salvation. It’s crucial that we restore the understanding that every person who lives the way of Christ in his or her family, job, community and corner of the world carries on the work of Jesus.

The role of Christ-in-our-world is not something that someone bestows on or withholds from us. It’s a role that Jesus’ Spirit gives us when we accept Jesus’ revelation. Together with our community we ritualize that role in our baptism and every Eucharist. It’s who we are.

Mary is a powerful memory in our community. Her words in the Magnificat [Lk 1:46-55] were, “The Lord has done great things in me.” That’s true of us all.

December 16, 2012
Getting Serious About God’s Future
Thoughts on the Gospels -Joe
3rd Sunday of Advent
Luke 3:10-18

I’ve met Christians who rarely give the reign of God a thought and others who express little practical concern about when or how it might come to pass. I’ve never met a Christian, however, who didn’t claim to hope, at least in general, that the Reign of God would some day be an earthly reality. Of course, that could simply be because to oppose what, by definition, is God’s will sounds like a really bad idea.

Unless we never take our fill of life at the expense of others, we have to admit that there are times and ways in which we act in opposition to God’s intention for our world. To the extent that we benefit from others’ weakness, we will find our benefits being taken away when God’s Spirit reorders the world.

Some maintain that the world can become economically and personally just while the rich and powerful possess all the advantages of wealth and control that they’ve customarily enjoyed. They accuse anyone who contradicts their vision of promoting a win/lose world with a zero sum understanding of our situation. They portray themselves as pursuing a win/win world in which the well-off maintain, even increase their prerogatives so that they can improve the lives of all. This line of thinking is jaw-droppingly self-serving as well as historically unfounded.

This leaves us with an unsettling question. In our desire to see the Reign of God become reality in the lives of the poor and powerless, are we willing to give up some of our power and security? In the current political parlance: are we willing to see our control re-distributed? To what extent are we willing to use our intelligence and abilities to benefit those currently denied their God-given share in life’s beauty?

Scripture often speaks of the suffering that the unjust will endure with the arrival of God’s Reign. It’s not an issue of punishment. It’s a matter of losing prerogatives that they never had a right to in the first place. Where we fit into that discussion is an uncomfortable question but one that makes sense for us all to ask.

December 9, 2012
Dare to Repent
Thoughts on the Gospels – Joe
2nd Sunday in Advent
Luke 3:1-6

There were seven children in my family. As was true for most of the people I knew, money was tight and my mother was always telling us to share. Food, toys, clothes, even beds – everything had to be shared. I remember thinking it was a great imposition that forced my parents’ ideas of fairness on me. I saw no benefit to me from all this sharing.

Then I had the good luck to be chosen the fifteenth boy on our fifteen boy seventh grade basketball team. Sharing became a different matter. Our coach constantly shouted, “Pass the ball; don’t hog it.” “Look,” he’d say, “if you keep the ball to yourself, we’re going to lose. While you’re having a great time dribbling around, other people with open shots can’t take because you’ve got the ball. Share the ball; pass it around!” Not even I could miss the point. Sharing made sense after all.

When someone tries to convince us that we should change this or that behavior, we often hear them simply trying to impose their ideas of good behavior on us. That can be what we hear when the Church repeats John the Baptist’s call to repent. The message sounds like Shape up and act like you’re supposed to because God is coming to clean house. That is not the point.

Repent, when it occurs in the gospels, encourages us to live with courageous love and justice. It tells us that we’re capable of accomplishing great things with God. To live self-centered lives, taking for ourselves what’s needed by others because we fear for our security denies us and the world we inhabit the gift that God offers.

Repent reminds us that God is making something wonderful possible. Repent encourages us to take advantage of the opportunity to work with God. Repent proclaims that we can live for the world we long for not the one we think we have to settle for. Repent dares us to risk ourselves for a world of hope rather hide in a comfortable world that betrays God’s love and our future.

Repent, in the gospels, assumes that we want to change things. It’s an encouragement, not a threat.

December 2, 2012
Don’t Make Them Wait
Thoughts on the Gospels – Joe
1st Sunday in Advent
Luke 21:25-28, 34-36

“Are you waiting for a personal invitation?” Those were my dad’s words when we ignored my mom’s call to supper. If we wanted to eat, we didn’t wait for him to say it twice.

As a kid I had a tendency to move when I was good and ready. This was especially true when it was to do something that someone else wanted rather than something I wanted. I never understood why others got upset about that. There always seemed plenty of time to me. My usual response to others’ urgings was, “What’s your rush.” It took me years to realize that I needed to care for others’ needs.

Those who think that God is nastier than most humans tell us not to put off the good we can do because God is impatient and vindictive and will get us. On the other hand, folks who look for real-world reasons for virtue realize that when there’s something good we can do or something bad we can cease doing, real people are depending on us to get our act together. Morality is about people’s needs. How we act or don’t act affects others.

There’s a self-serving element to making God’s imagined anger the ultimate reason to avoid self-centeredness. That supposed consequence of our choice remains out there in another realm that can be ignored – at least for the time being. As the young St. Augustine supposedly prayed about his lack of chastity, “Lord, make me chaste, but not yet.”

Maturity – and honesty – leads us to realize that the problem with doing evil or neglecting to do good is that we are betraying someone.

The season of Advent is a reminder that we can’t afford to ignore other people who depend on us. And that, in one way or another, is everyone: especially the poor and powerless.

We can’t make those who depend on us call us repeatedly. They may not be able to.