A New Kind of Joy

Third Sunday of Advent

Zeph 3, 14-18a / Phil 4, 4-7 / Lk 3, 10-18

Joy is in the air – at least, it should be according to our readings.  From the prophet Zephaniah we hear:  “Shout for joy, O daughter of Zion!”  And St. Paul practically shouts to us:  “Brothers and sisters:  Rejoice in the Lord always.  I shall say it again: rejoice!”  So the message is clear.  It’s joy.  It’s Gaudete Sunday.

To be honest.  I always come to “Gaudete” Sunday with some hesitation.  That’s because I’ve heard so many sermons preached in a way that tried to make joy into one, big should in my life.  “You should be joyful!”  And if you’re not, there’s something wrong with you spiritually.  But to me, joy can’t be made into that kind of ashould.  You will be joyful! – is too contrived.  It just doesn’t work.

Yet “Gaudete” Sunday does make me think about joy.  It makes me curious about the kind of joy so easily associated with this time of year.  Joy does seem to be the goal of all our eating and drinking – the goal of our music.  Whether we sing “Joy to the World” or “Rudolf the Red-nosed Reindeer” – I do think we want joy to come out of it all.  And of course there’s our gift-giving.  We don’t give gifts to get a groan.  We want smiles.  We want joy all around.  So the season does seem to say to us:  You will be joyful!  Joy is the reason for the season!

But again to be honest, isn’t that a kind of forced joy?  And isn’t it a disappointing joy – when you look from a Christian perspective?  From that perspective what gives us joy comes from someplace else altogether.  I want to tell you a kind of Advent story.  It’s about something that happened here at St. Peter’s this past Monday.

Last Monday we had a teaching Mass for those in RCIA.  We went through the Mass with commentary explaining why we do what we do.  We ended about 8:40pm and I left to go home.  Going out the back door I came upon a homeless woman who was setting herself up in the doorway for the night.  I asked her if she had tried to find a place in the women’s shelter.  She said she had stayed at the women’s shelter.  But she added there are usually a lot of younger women with their children at the shelter.  Since she had a kind of virus that made her cough a lot, she thought it better that she not expose the children to the virus.  Monday night was not too cold but Tuesday was predicted to dip into the 20’s.  So I encouraged her to plan on staying at the shelter the next night.  Then I left.

I kept thinking about that woman and her reason for not staying at the shelter:  to protect the children from her virus.  She was willing to spend the night outside – out of care for the children.  I thought to myself:  what a simply loving thing to do!  There and then I felt myself immersed in the mystery of the Incarnation:  God’s selfless love taking shape in human form.  There and then I felt joy in God’s presence that had come to me through this homeless woman.

That kind of joy comes as a gift – as sheer grace.  There can be no duty attached to it – no forced should – just gratitude – a simple gratitude.  That’s a new kind of joy – a leap of the heart at what God is doing in our very midst.  A new kind of joy – in God who is Immanuel – joy in God who is truly with us.  Oh come, oh come, Immanuel!

Fr. Pat Earl, SJ

What is Advent For?

SECOND SUNDAY of ADVENT

Fr. Pat Earl, SJ

Bar 5, 1-9 / Phil 1, 4-6, 8-9 / Lk 3, 1-6

I have something very simple to say.  I think it goes to the heart of Advent.  In our opening prayer we prayed that nothing would get in the way of our getting to know the Lord Jesus.  And we prayed to have God’s own wisdom so we could come to feel how closely Jesus accompanies us in our lives.  So let’s ask ourselves what gets in the way of our learning to recognize Jesus’ presence in our lives?

That’s what Advent is all about.  This whole season is all about helping us to become aware of Jesus’ presence in us.  And this is important to note:  it is not that at Christmas Christ will somehow come to us – as if he were not with us already.  Rather, it’s that during Advent we learn to come to Christ – we learn to recognize how Christ is already present to us in very real, concrete, fleshy ways.  That’s what Advent is for.

What gets in our way?  To begin with the obvious, we allow ourselves to become so busy, we fail to give ourselves quality time to spend with ourselves.  We fail to stay with what’s happening within us in any serious, sustained way.  So if anything is happening there, we’re the last to know it.

What I think gets in our way in a big way is a kind of false religiosity we have allowed to shape how we think about and imagine God’s presence in our lives.  That false religiosity is typically very churchy and ultra-spiritual.  But the gospels – and this season of Advent – are all quite clear and down-to-earth about where we are to find the living Christ taking on real flesh in our lives.  Christ’s living presence is as simple as the love we have for one another.  It’s as simple as the loving, caring things we do for one another.  I’m talking about everyday stuff – like getting up and going to work to provide for others.  I’m talking about taking time to listen to one another, even though we’re tired.  I’m talking about phoning or e-mailing someone who might be lonely or sad or unemployed.  The gospels and Advent call these things Incarnation – Word becoming flesh – God’s Glory coming down-to-earth.

For me it is the blessing and the curse of being a priest to see the blindness so many have to their own goodness and holiness.  It’s so obvious that Christ is living in them.  It may seem odd but I especially experience that in the sacrament of reconciliation.  There people are so humbly good.  You are so humbly good.

I want to conclude with a story from an Indian Jesuit, Anthony de Mello.  It’s an Advent parable.  Listen and learn how to use Advent.

A group of tourists sits in a bus that is traveling through incredibly beautiful country – lakes and mountains, green fields and rivers – But the shades of the bus are pulled down.  The tourists haven’t the slightest idea of what lies beyond the windows of the bus.  So they spend their time squabbling:  who will have the seat of honor; who will be applauded; who will get everyone’s attention.  And they remain that way till journey’s end.

A Special Time

FIRST SUNDAY OF ADVENT

Fr. Pat Earl, SJ

Jer 33, 14-16 / 1Thess 3, 12-4, 2 / Lk 21, 25-28, 34-36 

We are beginning a special time of year.  And special times bring special expectations.  Our expectations make us alert to things.  We become alert – aware of the good things in our lives.  And that is so good for us.  We need to do that:  to let the goodness in our lives come to life for us.

Advent is just such a time – a time for letting the goodness in our lives really come to life for us – letting people, places, events come to mind and heart.  A word we will frequently be hearing throughout the Advent season is “awake”.  In the gospel Jesus says to us: “Be watchful!  Stay alert!  I say to you and to all: ‘Stay awake!’”  But our awakening presumes we’ve been sleeping – somehow not alert.  Advent is there to call us from our sleeping – to call us out of our un-awareness.

Advent wants to be a kind of cold shower for us to shock us out of our un-awareness.  And Advent wants especially to shock us out of our myths about God.  It wants to shock us out of what we have settled into calling God’s presence.  This is the presence we have made of God.  The myth is the God of our own creation – usually a very American god – reliably nice and polite – and very therapeutic.  This god makes us feel good all over.  This is a comforting, churchy god made in the USA.  Advent wants to stun us into recognizing God’s real presence – God’s holy, awesome, living presence.  It wants us to smell God where we normally don’t.

Advent wants to change us.  It wants to fill our minds and imaginations with confusing, perplexing images – images of a world where God is seen, sensed and smelled in human flesh – yours and mine – and even in daily bread.  This fleshy God confuses beyond all expectation.  This God of Advent says: “Take me, eat me, become me.”  This God says to us:  “I am already in you; you are already in me.”

We will know Advent is having its affect on us when – at an hour we do not expect – in a manner we cannot imagine – in a closeness that baffles and blesses us – the Son of Man will come to us – will come into our real, ordinary, daily lives.  He will have our own smell.

The grace of Advent will be given to us – as we come to recognize and realize we are where Jesus is most at home.  His first choice of residence is:  us.  We are his chosen tabernacle.  This wonderful church, this sanctuary, this tabernacle – they all have their use in recalling to us Jesus’ real presence:  “I am already in you; you are already in me.”

Let us awaken and be watchful.  Let us in Advent prepare ourselves for finding in our own lives God’s preferred place of residence.  Let us learn to smell God there – in our own lives.  Indeed, we are the Body of Christ.

Doing Basic Things

33rd SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME

Fr. Pat Earl, SJ

Daniel 12, 1-3 / Heb 10, 11-14, 18 / Mark 13, 24-32

 

Next Sunday we celebrate the feast of Christ the King.  It marks the end of the church’s liturgical year.  And so the liturgy today would have us reflect on basic things – on final and fundamental things – as we move toward the end of the year.

As a Jesuit, I also have a real need to remember that this past Friday marked the twenty-third anniversary of the Jesuit martyrs of El Salvador.  I hope they will help us reflect on basic things.

In today’s gospel Jesus talks about the coming of the Son of Man in great power and glory.  The coming is framed by turbulence and darkness.  Here Jesus wants to teach us what to look for – what signs to look for – that we may discern and recognize his coming among us.  It’s like recognizing summer’s coming, he says, when we see leaves beginning to sprout.  But at his coming – what begins to sprout in us and among us is a committed love for others.  When love enters alien territory, there’s upset and turbulence.  When we love in a world grown suspect of real love, then we will face opposition.

I want to offer the example of the Jesuit martyrs – their lives and their deaths – as a way to help us recognize and respond to the coming of Jesus into our lives and our world.

And so we remember that on November 16, 1989 elite troops of the Salvadoran army arrived on the campus of the Jesuit university in San Salvador.  It was night.  These troops had been trained here in the United States.  They headed directly to the Jesuit residence.  They shot six Jesuits through the brain – their protest to the kind of thinking these Jesuits had pursued.  Then they shot their cook and her daughter.

There was a member of the Jesuit community who was not killed.  Fr. Jon Sobrino, a theologian, had been away in Asia giving talks.  I know Jon.  We were students together in Germany.  He later reflected on the slaughter of his brother Jesuits.  Why?  Why kill these men?  His answer was simple.  They were killed because they had taken to heart Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan.  These parish priests and university professors were killed because their lives had been given over to mercy and compassion.  They had seen the obvious needs of the Salvadoran people – and they had responded.  And their response to real human needs called into question the basic power structure of Salvadoran society.  These Jesuits thought basic thoughts and asked basic questions about justice in their society.  They did basic things – like publicly protesting in their preaching and teaching the absence of justice.  They called the powerful into question and called them to accountability.

A year after their martyrdom Jon publicly prayed these words at their graves:  “rest in peace, my six Jesuit brothers.  May your peace give us hope, and may your memory never let us rest in peace.”  I think this kind of remembering should give us, the living, unsettling memories.  I don’t mean an unsettling that comes from guilt.  That takes us nowhere.  Today Jesus is telling us in the gospel we are to see in these martyrs – to recognize in their lives and deaths – the Son of Man returning in all his power and glory.  We are to see here in these men what real love can do, when lived utterly to the end.  What should unsettle us is what we can become – what God can actually make of us.  It is our hope that unsettles us.

As a parish we reflect on these final, fundamental things.  We reflect on what these martyrs have to say to us.  And they speak to us of living in bold hope – a hope that unsettles us.  May we be a parish of unsettling hope for ourselves and for Charlotte.  Come, Lord Jesus, renew the face of your church!

Living in Fear or Living in Love

31st SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME

Fr. Pat Earl, SJ

Dt 6, 2-6 / Heb 7, 23-28 / Mk 12, 28-34

Our readings today are saying two different things.  Especially our first reading – from the Book of Deuteronomy in the Hebrew Scriptures – tells us we should fear God and then it says we should love God.  Fear and love are difficult to reconcile as ways to approach God.  Yet this is what Moses says:  “Fear the Lord, your God, and keep all his statutes and commandments…”  But then he says: “The Lord is our God, the Lord alone!  Therefore, you shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength.”

I’d like to talk about fearing God.  The reason is that I think we have greatly misunderstood what the Bible means when it speaks of “fear of God”.  This misunderstanding has had tragic consequences for many who are trying to live life faithful to the Word of God.  They feel commanded to become fearful before God.  So, a sensed distance before God is good; an anxious distance is expected.  And correspondingly, the God who commands our fear also commends our cringing.  Being religious somehow translates, bottom-line, into becoming a fearful, anxious person.  That can get further translated into becoming fearful in the church before church authority.  Such fear in the church is never acceptable.

Unfortunately too many of us have learned fright, anxiety and dread at the very thought of coming into God’s presence, especially at the hour of our death.  With confidence I say that is not what God wants for us.  What God actually wants for us – Jesus tells us.  It is the Father’s pleasure to give us the kingdom – that and all things beside [Lk 12, 30-31].

It will help us to take a look at what the Bible means by “fear of God”.  The “fear of the Lord” spoken of in the Bible is a healthy sense of reverence, wonder and awe when coming into the presence of the divine.  And so it is called “the beginning of wisdom” as it opens us up to the presence of something larger and wiser than ourselves.  Fear of the Lord recognizes how utterly other God is but also allows us to recognize the holy in our midst.  And it also allows God to awaken in us larger and wiser desires and responsibilities that we have been afraid to contemplate for ourselves.

Fear of the Lord expands us.  It fills us with God’s own ambitions for us and our world – what Jesus calls “the kingdom of God”.  This fear of the Lord has quite the opposite affect than the kind of fear that shrinks us, making us too cautious to move beyond our own self-interest.  It is precisely this kind of shriveling fear that God through the prophets tells us we should not have. “Fear not!” is the Bible’s most repeated command.  That kind of fear only diminishes us.  And we should be very careful not to allow it to shape the way we see things nor the way we decide things.  Fear – in religion as well as in politics – is always a bad counselor.

Fear of the Lord, the beginning of wisdom, leads us into doing the love of the Lord.  I’d like to finish with a Jesuit thing.  It’s from Fr. Pedro Arrupe who was the leader or superior general of the Jesuits and for us quite a hero.  Listen to how he describes the kind of life we will lead if we let ourselves be led by fear of the Lord.

Nothing is more practical than finding God, that is, than falling in love in a quite absolute, final way.  What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will affect everything.  It will decide… who you know, what breaks your heart, and what amazes you with joy and gratitude.  Fall in love, stay in love, and it will decide everything.

Our Blessed Blindness

30^th SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME

Jer 31, 7-9 / Heb 5, 1-6 / Mark 10, 46-52

 

We are blessed to be earthy people.  We can touch things and hear sounds.  We smell pine trees and we see leaves changing color.  Our world is full of colors and aromas – shapes and sizes – things hard and things soft.  And so we can understand the plea of the blind beggar to Jesus:  I want to see.

We need to see.  And we need to see on many levels and in many situations.  We need to see trees changing color, but we also need to see purpose and meaning in our lives.  We need to see the truth of our lives.  And we need to see the God of our lives – to see the God in our lives.

Often we do not see our life’s purpose – the truth of our lives.  Often – in fact, if we are honest, very often – we do not see God – we do not see God present in our lives at all.  We are blind to God’s presence.

Today’s Gospel calls our blindness a blessing.  The beggar’s blindness is, in fact, an enlightened blindness.  He knows he doesn’t know.  He knows he doesn’t grasp God’s goodness and presence in his life.  Bartimaeus is honest about his own experience, and he’s humble.  When Jesus asks him the all-important question:  What do you want me to do for you?  What do you really, deeply want? – it’s his very blindness that allows Bartimaeus to honestly answer:  I do not see and I want to see.  I want to see the living God in my life.  It is then that Jesus recognizes that before him is a man of faith: Go your way; your faith is healing your blindness.

The story of Bartimaeus is the last healing miracle in the Gospel of Mark.  It comes as a climax to a theme so important to Mark:  the arrogant blindness of Jesus’ disciples compared to the honest blindness of outsiders such as Bartimaeus.

Today’s story stands in direct contrast to the gospel story in Mark we heard last Sunday.  There Jesus puts the same question to his disciples, James and John, as he put to Bartimaeus, the outsider:  What do you want me to do for you?  What do you really want?  What desires finally shape your life?  Their answer – the answer of Jesus’ disciples and close apostles:  We want glory, recognition, power.  Jesus, we want to sit at your right and left in glory when the kingdom arrives.  Jesus can only answer:  You don’t know what you are asking for.  You have missed the meaning of my message – the meaning of my “good news”.  You are blind to the gospel and blind to your own blindness.

Here we are – the assembly of Jesus’ disciples.  The question now comes to us from Jesus:  What do you want me to do for you?  What do you really, deeply want?  What desires shape our lives – our daily lives?  Do we find ourselves much like our fellow disciples James and John?  Do we share their arrogant blindness?  Do we go for the glory – like being called “Christian” and “Catholic” – but without a thought to so living our lives with one another that a tormented world will see in us the possibility of hope, of honesty and love?

Let us beg for the grace to become honestly blind beggars.  Then we will have a chance of actually grasping God’s goodness and real presence in life.  Let us join with Bartimaeus and with all those blessed with his enlightened blindness.  Like them, we must become outsiders to all religious arrogance, pretense and posturing.  We will choose to live with one another in honest humility.  Then Jesus will recognize in us people of faith learning – or trying to learn – to walk his way of life.  Lord Jesus, we want to see!  We want to believe!  Help our unbelief!

Suffering and Power

29th SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME

Is 53, 10-11 / Heb 4, 14-16 / Mk 10, 35-45

Our readings tell us about two things we already know – and know well.  They tell us about suffering, and they tell us about power.  Suffering and power – these are realities we know intimately and that we must know inevitably.  We all undergo things – we suffer.  And we all do things – have our affect – have our power.  Both suffering and power ebb and flow into our lives – though we run from suffering and run toward power.

The first reading from the prophet Isaiah comes from what are called “The Songs of the Suffering Servant”.  Isaiah is trying to make sense of suffering – the suffering of Israel.  Above all, he is intent on convincing people that suffering is not God’s punishment for sin.  The suffering servant Isaiah describes is sinless.  Yet the sinless servant suffers.  He even portrays the servant’s suffering as coming from God.  But Isaiah’s point – what he would have us understand – is that even if suffering does come from God, God does not send it as punishment for sin.  Suffering – as an inevitable part of our lives – is not punishment from God.  So we should not think of ourselves as somehow tarnished because we suffer.  We are not less because we suffer.

Yet I do think we are tempted to think that somehow we do become less because we suffer.  We take such precautions to protect ourselves from even seeing suffering.  Take for example the suffering that comes with ageing.  Is it possible we have convinced ourselves that ageing is an ugly violation of life – that ageing is to be resented and somehow hidden?  If we choose to shun the real human suffering in front of us, then we have chosen to shun our very humanity.  If we choose to resent suffering, then we have chosen to resent life itself.  Isaiah calls us to embrace our complete humanity – including our suffering – as full of meaning and value.  We are not less because we suffer.

In the gospel we learn how Jesus deals with suffering and also how he deals with power.  We recall he predicts his suffering, his passion to the disciples.  Jesus reckons with the violent suffering he correctly sees he will face.  And deliberately he moves toward it – in the sure hope that even out of suffering life will flow and flourish.  Life will triumph.

And in the gospel Jesus calls into question the way the powerful use their power.  The powerful in Jesus’ day were much like the powerful in our own day.  They measure themselves and their power by their ability to make themselves felt by others.  In the end they base their power and authority on their ability to make others submit.  Submission is crucial to the powerful.

Jesus rejects the kind of power which maintains itself through the submission of others.  Real power does not threaten – nor does it seek to impose itself.  Rather – for Jesus – real power serves.  Real power gives itself away.  In Jesus’ understanding – which to us seems to create a world that is upside down – real power seeks to expend itself – not expand itself – seeks to give and not to get.  And this kind of self-giving power Jesus identifies with the very presence of God.  This is the way God is.  This is simply how God is powerful.  So our God does not know how to lord it over us.  For Jesus anyone who seeks to lord it over others is merely indulging in self-pretense.  They have no real power.

As people – as a nation – and as a church we still have much to learn about suffering and power.  Especially in times of crisis and decision we need to learn to put our final trust in the Servant God – Jesus’ God whose self-giving-away goodness is recognized as the power at the very heart of all creation and life.

Once in a Sunday sermon the German mystic, Meister Eckhart, told his congregation: “When God created man, he put into his soul his equal, his active, his everlasting masterpiece.”  As God’s equal masterpiece, should we not be powerful as our God is powerful.  Let us become servants to one another and to all.  Let us live in the recognition that we are more when we give ourselves away.