March 7, 2010
Stop Praising the House and Grab a Hammer
Thoughts on the First Readings – Joe Frankenfield
3rd Sunday in Lent
Exodus 3:1-8,13-15

“Take off those muddy shoes before you come in! Don’t you dare track up this kitchen; I just washed the floor!” As a kid I thought my mom simply didn’t want more work. As an adult I realized how much she wanted a nice place for us all to live. Taking my shoes off outside wasn’t just for my mom’s sake; it was for all our sakes.

That insight came back to me as I reread the story of the burning bush. It sounds as though God is displaying a bit of divine egotism. But God’s admonition to Moses not to approach with dirty feet isn’t about God’s ego; it’s about seeking respect for what God’s doing for humanity and, specifically, for the Hebrews enslaved in Egypt. God wants to impress on Moses that he’s being recruited into an act of liberation implications of which are beyond his comprehension.

It’s important to remember that those who composed the Bible’s stories wrote within the customs and characters of their experience. They could do nothing else. Since magnificent undertakings were the work of kings and pharaohs, the Bible portrays God as an ancient Mediterranean potentate. In Jewish history their liberation from Egyptian servitude and their conquests on the eastern end of the Mediterranean formed the core of their identity. Honor paid to God was honor paid to God’s accomplishments.

The Gospel of Matthew [7:21] quotes Jesus, “Not everyone saying, ‘Lord, Lord’ is part of the Reign of God; only the one who does my Father’s will.” Jesus worked to get folks to realize that we don’t praise God for God’s sake. We praise God for our sake. Praising God reminds us of what God is doing in our lives and encourages us to involve ourselves with his actions. If we remember this, our faith will deepen and mature.

It will be easier to keep our home free of all those muddy footprints too.

March 1, 2010
Thoughts on the First Readings – Joe Frankenfield
2nd Sunday in Lent
Genesis 15:5-12

When ancient Hebrews told the story of how God used Abram to sire their nation, they used language and customs of their time. To guarantee that his gift of land would be perpetual, God followed a common contract ritual. Jews of that era found it natural. We find the story exotic.

We face a similar situation. To maintain a united and orthodox understanding of God and our relationship with him church authority has enshrined language and images from centuries, even millennia, past. Much of it is foreign to us.

Democracy, facile communication, universal education, the equality of all people and individual rights are fundamental realities for us. Advances in the sciences have fundamentally changed the way we perceive reality. In addition, many possess an unprecedented amount of power for controlling their daily lives. These facts make our world drastically different from the world that gave rise to our religious language and imagery.

There are those who say that “everyone knows” what the prayers and rituals are saying. Sometimes people do. But the language of faith is becoming more and more remote from everyday existence. Consciously and unconsciously we find religion in an increasingly isolated corner of our lives.

Theologians work on this problem. They search out ways of making faith understandable to us. In the nature of things they bump heads with the bishops whose job it is to make certain that our ancestors’ experience of God is fully handed on. It’s a messy process that never stands still and is never finished.

As profound change chases profound change today, nothing substitutes for deepening our faith knowledge. We can’t wait for someone to hand us a new dictionary that translates what we hear in church and read in scripture. We need to grow more confident in pondering our faith and making sense of it ourselves and in conversation with one another. The doctrine that the Holy Spirit guides all baptized people will become a practical reality for us or our faith will end up in the attic of our lives.

February 21, 2010 Lent
To Live With Courage
Thoughts on the First Readings -Joe Frankenfield
1st Sunday in Lent
Deuteronomy 26:4-10

“If you decide you’re going to do something, give yourself to it completely. If it’s not worth your full energy, put it aside and find something that is. You owe that to yourself and to everyone else.” A wise counselor said those words to me many years ago when I was in college.

Giving life one’s full energy isn’t easy. We want to hoard our limited resources. Others’ acceptance, our own ego, our energy, our time, possessions, all these are finite.

Still, part of us recoils from living by halves. We dislike it in ourselves and we pity it in others. Young folks scorn a guarded life partly sensing that its roots lie in cowardice and partly dreading that they themselves may ultimately yield to the same fear-filled accounting. Old folks view it with the sadness of witnessing a profound loss.

“I have come that people will have the fullness of life,” said Jesus [John 10:10]. The gift of faith is the courage to live fully, to give all of ourselves to whatever we are doing: to give ourselves without hesitation to the future that God promises.

The experience of God’s inestimable care and generosity in creating our universe and us within it and the experience of Jesus, the personal touch of God’s love in history, overcome the fear of our own woefully inadequate resources. It is unimaginable that God who accomplishes such magnificence and revealed such love will not bring its potential to fullness.

We begin every Eucharistic Prayer remembering all the good that God has accomplished. Then we pray that God will complete the work he’s begun: the work of Christ in and through us. We don’t recall this for God’s sake. We recall for our sake.

February 14, 2010
God’s Word Is Good
Thoughts on the Second Readings – Joe Frankenfield
6th Sunday in Ordinary Time
1 Corinthians 15:12,16-20

Rain was dripping from a gray March sky several years ago when a student walked into my office and plopped in a chair. “Last night I decided I have to live as though there’s a God, whether there is one or not. It’s the only way I can have any hope what I do makes any difference. On a really good day just trying to make things better works as its own reward. But there are too many tiresome days like this to make it with only an intellectual reason for getting fired up. Most days I need to really believe that what I’m doing will make a difference not just for me but for other people.

“And I really hope there is a God because winter lasts way too long around here and I’m not that good at pretending.”

I had to laugh. I knew he wrestled with this issue more, or more vocally, than most. But he was a very honest guy who needed things to make sense. His decision was so human – kind of sad, but very human. He wanted to make sense of his faith.

Why would Paul have said that if God hasn’t raised Jesus from death, our faith is empty? Millions of people have faith in God who know nothing or care nothing about Jesus’ resurrection.

The fact is that we know God’s love and promise through Jesus: God’s presence in our world. If God has allowed the good life Jesus lived to simply end denying him his role in the world he revealed, Jesus’ life failed and the ground of our faith is empty. We can differ in how we explain it. We can differ in how we imagine it. But if God wasn’t faithful to Jesus past life as we know it, then God has no meaning for us.

We need a meaningful God, a God who lives up to his promise and our hopes. There’s no faith without that. None of us are that good at pretending.

February 7, 2010
We Make a Difference
Thoughts on the Second Readings – Joe Frankenfield
5th Sunday in Ordinary Time
1Corinthians 15:1-11

Most of us respond ‘aw shucks’ to the good we do. Especially when someone notices that our good deeds appear rooted in our faith, we blush, look down and scuff our toes in the dust. Maybe this arises from an assumption that only priests and sisters are really fitting examples of faith since they’ve put aside marriage and family for their way of life. Maybe the Church’s habit of focusing on the extraordinary, even miraculous actions of those it designates saints makes our ordinary lives seem too humdrum for God to be operating there. Neither is true. Maybe it’s just how we are.

In the grand scheme of things an ‘aw shucks’ attitude about helping a friend or forgiving an enemy isn’t a big deal like turning our backs on starving people. It can even be kind of endearing. But here’s something to think about. If we don’t have a sense that God is working through us for good – even great good, we run the risk of not taking our potential to make a difference seriously. If we’re blind to that, people suffer – not directly from what we do to them but indirectly by what we do not do for them.

Being aware that the benefits we provide depend on God’s Spirit directing us as well as the matrix of enabling good that others create around us is crucial. Without that we accomplish nothing. Still, it’s we who decide to act and we who spend our energy to make things better. The love we give, the aid we provide, the life and beauty we create are gifts we give and gifts we’re given.

Too many people in our world are hungry and hurting and ignored. Too many of life’s needs are unmet. Too many human advances remain unfulfilled for us to mutter ‘aw shucks’ about our abilities – physical, moral or intellectual. In a room full of braggarts that may provide a refreshing moment but the truth is that God has done great things in us and more will follow.

January 31, 2010
Forgive – or Forget It
Thoughts on the Second Reading – Joe Frankenfield
4th Sunday of Ordinary Time
1 Corinthians 12:31-13:13

Love is always patient, kind, truthful, faithful, hopeful and persistent. It’s never jealous, pompous, rude, self-centered, hot-headed, sulky or mean-spirited. Okay, everyone still claiming to be a lover put up your hand!

Years ago the wife of a couple, considering Paul’s letter to the Corinthians for their fiftieth anniversary celebration, commented that he obviously had never been married. “You got that right,” her husband replied, laughing. “We try, and on a good day we get some of that right. On our worst days . . . ; never mind.”

We might think it strange that Jesus made “forgive us just as we forgive others” one of the four blessings he taught his disciples to pray for. We might, unless we’ve ever attempted a lasting relationship. Friendship and love teach a simple lesson: no forgiveness; no relationship.

Assuming that we’ve put aside the idea that God will establish the world of Jesus’ vision whether we cooperate or not, we’ve had to accept the idea that he’s going to work through a lot of very imperfect folks.

Stupidity isn’t going to suddenly vanish. Weak egos aren’t going to grow magically strong. All the poor aren’t going to wake up hopeful and wise or the rich as concerned with the common welfare as with their own. Enemies aren’t going to suddenly decide that their opponents are just as right as they are. How, then, will things ever change?

We have no clue how things will change! But we know how things will begin to change: we will forgive one another. We will forgive one another not because we’ve all “gotten it right” but because we realize that our future depends on forgiving one another – as we are. Everything begins with that. Each of us begins with that.