Life Is Different Because of Christ
Stray thoughts from retreat for the 2nd Week of Advent
Homily for Monday of the 2nd Week of Advent
We Need Anonymous Laborers in the Kingdom
The characters in today’s Gospel who receive the least amount of attention are the most fascinating for me. We are told that some men bring to Christ a person who is paralyzed, wanting to place the paralyzed man in Christ’s presence. Who are these men? We don’t know anything about them. We don’t know if these men were friends of the paralyzed man, or members of his family. We don’t know if these men were followers of Christ. We don’t know their names or to what part of society these men belonged. Maybe these men were rich. Maybe they were poor. Maybe these men were Jewish. Maybe these men were Roman citizens. We don’t know anything about these men.
Except for three facts. We know three facts about these men. Here is the first fact: these men behold in Christ a person with the power to save. These are men of some kind of faith. The kind of faith that convinces them that to simply place a paralyzed man in the presence of Christ must do some good. Here is the second fact: these are men who practice charity, who do the work of love. These are men who recognize the poverty of another and are moved with compassion. These are men who take action to alleviate the suffering of another person. Here is the third fact: these are men of determination and perseverance. These are men who—confronted with a dilemma that is seemingly unresolvable—scale a roof and lower a man into the presence of Christ. Such is their faith and such is their charity these are men of remarkable resolve. These men let nothing keep them from their labor.
The scribes and the Pharisees receive the most attention in the Gospel passage we just heard. And in our world today, it is usually the modern equivalent of scribes and Pharisees who receive the most attention in society. Our world is obsessed with controversy and debate. We want leaders who give hard opinions, celebrities who tell us their thoughts on every issue, journalists and newscasters who give us the truth in a way that conforms to our own standards and expectations. Our world today is full of Pharisees and scribes.
What our world needs are more people like the anonymous men we hear about in the Gospel. The example that they give is for us: we are called to possess the kind of faith in Christ that motivates us to do the work of love, and our desire to do the work of love and our faith in Christ ought to fill our hearts and minds with determination. We can let nothing keep us from our labor.
Our reading from the Book of Isaiah gives us a beautiful image of a renewed creation, a world that has been restored by God. But we know that the work of restoration is accomplished moment by moment, life by life. The work of restoration is accomplished whenever we—through our faith and charity and determination—bring some broken and desperate person into the presence of Christ. And maybe we know a final fact about these men: these men are humble. These men bring the paralyzed man to Christ, but they make no demands of Christ. These men merely entrust a broken and desperate person to the Lord and leave the matter in God’s hands. We should want that kind of humility for ourselves as well.
Homily for Tuesday of the 2nd Week of Advent
We Must Live By the Logic of God
Christ asks a question in the Gospel today to which no one gives an answer. Maybe the question is rhetorical. But maybe the reason that no one gives an answer to the question is that the question makes no sense according to the logic of the world. Christ teaches us that our God is a God who leaves the ninety-nine behind in order to seek and to save the one who is lost. And we are called to live by that same logic. What is your opinion?
The teaching that Christ gives us about God at the conclusion of the Gospel is important for our lives. Christ says that it is not the will of God that someone is lost to sin and death. The will of God. What is the will? The will is the deepest, most important part of our lives. I had a professor in seminary who told us that our will is who we are. The will gives us the structure and the order of our lives. The will is the place in our lives where promises and commitments are made and kept. The will is the place in our lives where our desires become grounded into abiding and settled dispositions to act a certain way and to live a certain kind of life. We are our wills.
The will is not the intellect. We can know the truth of something and yet that truth can have no impact on our lives. The will is not passion or emotion. Feelings come and go, usually without our consent or control. The will is not even raw desire, but rather the place in our lives where desire gets concretized and established. The will is the place in our lives where love takes root and forms us; where love gives orientation to our lives, where love gives purpose and meaning to our lives.
What Christ teaches us in the Gospel is that the love of God dictates the logic of God. The love comes first, and the only irrational choice for God would be to not follow the demands of love. Because God loves, God pursues the one who is lost. To leave the ninety-nine to find the one is lost is the only logical choice for God. And we are called to live that same kind of life. Our love demands from us a certain kind of logic. Our love for God demands that we also go out in pursuit of those who are lost and who do not know Christ.
The teaching that Christ gives us about God also teaches us about ourselves. We reach a point in our lives at which our failures—sometimes moral failures and sometimes spiritual failures—are usually not the consequence of not knowing what to do. We know the difference between right and wrong. We know a good desire from a bad desire. We know what is true and we know what is false. So, what our failures reveal to us is that we have a problem with love. There is sometimes a weakness in our love that holds us back from living according to the logic of God. We are fragile creatures, and there is a self-interest inside of us that always threatens to weaken the power of our love. We start to rationalize—to think according to the logic of the world—to justify for ourselves the choice to stay inside, to remain with the ninety-nine, to forget about the one who is lost and tell ourselves that the loss of just one person for the good of the ninety-nine makes sense.
But we are not called to live according to the logic of the world. We are called to live according to the logic of God. What is your opinion?
Homily for Wednesday of the 2nd Week of Advent
Our God Comes to Us, So Let Go of Your Expectations
The Kingdom of Bhutan is a small, landlocked country in Central Asia, not much bigger than the state of Maryland. It’s the kind of place that you wouldn’t be at fault for never having heard of before. And if you were to look at a map of Bhutan and trace out its northern border with Tibet, you would find a mountain called Ghankar Puensum. The mountain is a giant. 24, 836 feet tall — one of the biggest in the Himalayas and the 40th tallest mountain in the world. It’s also the tallest mountain in the world that has yet to be climbed. No human being has ever stepped upon her summit. And not for a lack of desire. For decades, climbers from around the world have wanted to conquer this mountain that many consider to be the last, best unclimbed mountain in the world. The problem is that climbing mountains this tall in the Kingdom of Bhutan is illegal. The people of Bhutan believe that the gods of their religion live on the summits of their tallest mountains. Mountains in the Kingdom of Bhutan are sacred spaces; places where human beings don’t belong.
And we don’t need to travel to Central Asia in order to develop an appreciation for these kinds of religious beliefs. The Old Testament makes it clear that mountains are the kinds of places to which you should go if you want to find God. Abraham is told by God to sacrifice his son in the mountains of Moriah; Moses meets God on Mount Sinai in the burning bush; David captures Mount Zion, whose summit will one day be crowned with Solomon’s Temple; Elijah calls upon God on the slopes of Mount Carmel to defeat the prophets of Baal and to prove the reality of the one true God of Israel. Mountains in the Old Testament are sacred spaces, the kinds of places where a person goes when they are in search of God.
Which makes the sudden appearance of John the Baptist in the story of the Gospel all the more striking. Here was a man dressed in camel hair and eating locusts and wild honey, telling the people of Israel that their search for God — that their search for a savior — will soon come to an end. He prepares the people of Israel to come to terms with the dramatic reality that no longer will they need to ascend to the heights of mountains to meet God. Nor will the people of Israel need to climb to the summit of Mount Zion to find God hidden behind a veil in the Temple. With the coming of Christ, the people of Israel will meet God in the streets of Capernaum and Jerusalem; they will find the Word of God teaching in any number of small synagogues spread throughout the countryside; they will find healing and deliverance by welcoming Christ into their homes and into their lives and by professing faith in a God who appears to them in human flesh; they will discover salvation not because they have finally found God at all, but rather because God has found them by uniting himself to human nature. This is the message of John the Baptist: a voice of one crying out in the desert — the Kingdom of heaven is at hand. Christ is here, present in your midst. Repent. Prepare the way of the Lord. Make straight his paths.
One of the themes that runs throughout the Gospels is this idea that the scribes and the Pharisees and the Sadducees were simply too stubborn to recognize Christ as the savior of Israel. We see an example of this in the Gospels that we hear in this second week of Advent. John the Baptist has barely begun his ministry before he needs to condemn the Pharisees and Sadducees. Christ is challenged again and again by the Pharisees and scribes on matters of law and worship. And I certainly think it fair to say that these priests and scholars of the law didn’t do themselves any favors; they seem to have really refused to even consider the possibility that God appears before them in human flesh. But at the same time, I think it’s hard to blame them. The coming of Christ challenges the deepest convictions of the people of Israel regarding the coming of the savior; it challenges so much of what they thought they knew about God. And if we take a step back from the story of Israel and compare the coming of Christ to the history of religious belief in the world, we will arrive at the same conclusion: with the Incarnation, God defies the expectations of human history. He does something profound, something dramatic, something that would be impossible to believe apart from a supernatural gift of faith. The coming of Christ is precisely that powerful of a moment in the history of the world.
This season of Advent is our opportunity to prepare ourselves for the coming of Christ. That’s why we spend these weeks with the figure of John the Baptist. The Church teaches that John is the last of the prophets; with the birth of Christ, the time of prophecy comes to an end; Christ will fulfill the prophecies of the Old Testament. John is the last messenger whom God sends out into the world to announce that the Lord will not abandon his creation; salvation will come. But the prophetic message that John delivers is the most difficult of all for the world to understand, because it is a message that announces to the world that God will fulfill the prophecies in a way that no one could have imagined; death will be destroyed in a way that no one could have predicted; salvation will come in a way will utterly defy your expectations.
Which is why John the Baptist tells the people of Israel to repent. In other words, he tells them: let go of your old ways; forget what you think you know about the plans of God; remove from your life those parts of yourself that will prevent you from seeing salvation in the person of Christ; get yourself into a position so that when God defies your expectations, you will be able to respond in faith, to respond with genuine belief. What John the Baptist understood so well is that it is not simply the bad things that we do that distance us from God. He knew that it is also our convictions about God, our expectations, and our preexisting beliefs about the world that sometimes get in the way of our relationship with Christ. This is the message that John the Baptist delivers to the Pharisees and the Sadducees in our Gospel readings during these weeks of Advent. He tells the Pharisees and scribes and Saducees that it is their own expectations and convictions that will prevent them from recognizing Christ as the Son of God. So, he tells them to repent; to begin fresh; to start over.
Advent is our opportunity to start over, to begin again fresh. Advent is our opportunity to repent. I think that another way of saying this is that Advent is our opportunity to ask ourselves: what will keep us from recognizing the Christ-child as our savior on Christmas morning? What will prevent us from seeing in the flesh of a child the coming of our salvation? And surely, what we will discover is that there are sins we commit that separate us from God. There are times when we say or do the wrong thing; there are times when we act the wrong way. But John the Baptist invites us to go deeper in our spiritual preparation. He diagnoses that at the heart of disbelief is the conviction that God must meet our expectations: our expectations about our lives, our expectations about the world around us, our expectations even about God himself. So what John tells us shouldn’t come as a surprise. He simply affirms something that we’ve always known: that it’s often our own pride and self-assuredness that distances us from Christ. Advent is our time to let go of that pride and self-assuredness; it’s our time to let God take the lead in telling us what our expectations should be. For on Christmas day God will appear before us humble and vulnerable in the flesh of a child. So, repent. Prepare the way of the Lord. Make straight his paths. The Kingdom of heaven is at hand.
I Shall Not Want: A Reflection on Psalm 23
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.
At the center—at the heart—of our relationship with the history of the world, of our relationship with the story of God's salvific work in the world, is the reality of our own experiences in life. We cannot relate to the characters of Scripture, to the lives they lived or the hurts they endured, to the joys they experienced or the love they knew, without putting their lives in conversation with similar moments in our own lives. The moments when we ourselves have experienced hardship, when we have felt joy, when we have known love. We can connect to the past only insofar as the past relates to our own lives; or rather, to the extent that our own lives relate to the people and stories of the past.
"The Lord is My Shepherd; I shall not want." What do we know of the trust and peace that David describes in this psalm if we know nothing of the pain and isolation that forms David's relationship with the Lord? What do we understand of the fulfillment that David finds in God when so often there is nothing missing in our lives? David sings a hymn of praise to the Lord as he is running for his life, pursued by a king, hiding from one deserted cave to another. David is separated from his family; estranged from his family. David at this point in his life knows nothing of a future when he will be crowned King of Israel and ruler of God's chosen people. David is — at this moment — no more than a young farmer who has spent some fortunate years as the commander of an army but has now lived through the loss of a future that until recently seemed within reach. And still the Lord is his shepherd and there is nothing he shall want.
The words of this psalm are a consolation to those who mourn death and give peace to those who suffer. It is a psalm we recognize from funerals, wakes, or moments of challenge and difficulty in our lives. These are the moments in our lives of faith when we search for words to articulate the sadness, pain, and anxieties we experience. And it is at these moments, perhaps, that we best understand something of this chapter of David's life. The nature of tragedy breaks down the walls of time and unites our sufferings and pains to those of a young man who three thousand years ago found himself abandoned by his king and estranged from his family. And so for us, too, the Lord is our shepherd and there is nothing we shall want.
But our lives — and David's life — consist of more than tragedy and pain. Hardship comes and hardship goes away. The sufferings of life make their mark on the soul and then they disappear. Fortunes change. There came a time in David's life when he lived no longer as a fugitive but as the leader of nations; when he lived no longer as a peasant but as a commander of armies; when he no longer experienced the pain of being separated from his family or the sadness of being isolated from his friends. We know for ourselves what David could never have imagined: that a day would come when power and comfort would lead him to sin. A day would come for David when his state in life would make him vulnerable to temptation and sin. And we would have reason to wonder: was the Lord still David's shepherd at that time? What did he lack on that roof that he did not lack however many years ago in the deserts of Israel? Was the Lord still his shepherd? What was it that David was missing?
Here we have a spiritual reality that we must embrace if we would know God not like David on the roof but rather like the young man who lacked nothing in his life because he maintained a right relationship with the Lord. When we feel very comfortable, it is easier to run away from our relationship with the Lord. When we are comfortable, we give vices space to work in our moral and spiritual lives. When David lived in the desert, he was not tempted by vanity or power or lust. Perhaps this is why we find the words of this psalm so beautiful in times of pain and distress: it is in these times of our lives that the sudden loss of comfort opens us up to truths that otherwise do not seem important to us. The great danger that threatens faith is allowing us to forget God in the times of joy and good fortune in our lives. How simple for us to allow the pressures of everyday life and the boredom of routine to separate us from the Lord. How easy for us to allow comfort to hide our deep need for God. When David lost everything, he found himself helpless materially and spiritually, and it was at this time that he wrote a psalm of lyrical beauty. When David was made humble, he articulated a love of God that continues to comfort us three thousand years later.
We should not take advantage of the words of this psalm only in times of tragedy and distress. Our love for God cannot be momentary or circumstantial. Often, we are invited to pray and fast and give alms, but those practices alone cannot be the measure by which we give ourselves to the Lord. We have to ask ourselves: Do I make sacrifices a few times a year or do I live a simple life? Do I make some time for God or do I live a spiritual life ? Do I sometimes give alms to the poor and the work of charity or have I completely given my life to love? We have to give God the requisite time to work on our lives of faith. We have to allow the Lord to protect us like a shepherd and remind us that if we are a member of his flock, we lack nothing.
For, even if it is in moments of tragedy and suffering that we find ourselves most attached to David's life, we must recognize that the spiritual reality that David has captured in his psalm is true at all times, regardless of circumstance. Circumstances change for David, and the truth that exists in this psalm will not always shape David's life. A time will come when comfort leads him to sin. And the fault of his sin is his own. If we want to avoid a similar fate, we have to embrace the deeper truth: a simple life, of faith, hope, and charity unite us most deeply to the words of David. The Lord is my shepherd, there is nothing I shall want.
All homilies and talks given December 3rd-5th at San Damiano Spiritual Life Center in White Post, Virginia