Feast of St. Peter and St. Paul, St. Joe.
God plants us on a
rock. I find that a very realistic image
for what it looks like to live out our lives in the Church. We don’t live in a rose garden, yet, and we
don’t experience perpetual banquet, yet.
As much as I hope we get glimmers of those realities now furtively, we
live on a rock. It’s big and it’s craggy
and it’s home.
Friday, June 29, 2012
Friday, June 22, 2012
God reforms our vision – 2 Kings 11, Matt 6:19-23, SS. John Fisher and Thomas More.
Friday of the 11th week of Ordinary Time, St. Joe.
When did you last have
your vision checked? I don’t mean by an
eye-doctor; I mean by Jesus. In today’s
gospel, Jesus tells us that the quality of our vision will determine the health
of our entire self. Our Holy Cross Constitutions tell us that “for the kingdom to come, disciples need the
competence to see and the courage to act.”
The world looks different through eyes of faith, through kingdom-focused
eyes, through compassionate eyes, through courageous eyes.
Godly
vision doesn’t make the world looked rose-tinted; it doesn’t look nicer in a
cheap way. The priest Jehoiada in our
first reading had the keen vision to see more clearly the injustice of Athaliah’s
power-hungry reign. He also had the courageous vision to see this as injustice
he must right, and we just heard how he managed to preserve an heir, depose
Athaliah, destroy the site of Ba’al worship, and bring calm to Judah.
SS. John Fisher
and Thomas More also had the God-given vision for injustice to see how Henry
VIII was acting irreverently towards the Pope, wickedly towards his first wife,
Catherine of Aragorn, and hubristically towards God by claiming the power to
annul his own marriage. They also had
the courageous vision to see these wrongs as wrongs they must try to
address. They failed. They were put to death and Henry abandoned
Catherine and the Catholic Church.
But we celebrate
their feast day today. Why would we
celebrate failures? To see them as
failures is to see them with clouded eyes.
Godly eyes do not let their death blot out the rest of reality. Godly eyes see two men who loved: who loved
their queen, loved England, loved the Church, loved justice, loved God… who
loved enough to die for love.
Sunday, June 17, 2012
God humbles us – 1 Pet 5:1-6
Moreau Lucenarium; 1/26/12. I didn't preach this week as I was on vacation, so here's an old one from earlier this year. Note: I instructed the lector to say "be humbled" rather than "humble yourselves" in v. 6. Both are grammatically possible translations, but the passive is preferred to the middle as it puts the emphasis on God's saving action rather than making it seem as if we could humble ourselves without His grace.
“My
future spouse often humiliates me.”
That’s a red flag. When you’re
preparing a couple for marriage and one of them agrees with that statement on
the FOCCUS questionnaire, you know you’ve probably identified something you’ll
need to talk about during the preparation process. In fact, when you get the results printout
from the computer, it even puts a big star next to that statement, in case you
couldn’t guess that it’s kind of a big red flag.
So,
when I brought this up to Maria during one of our meetings, I was surprised
when she was surprised that I brought it up.
Her fiancé was pretty surprised about the whole thing too. Eventually, and there’s five confusing
minutes of conversation I’m abridging, we worked out what was going on. Maria is not a native speaker of English and
in her language (actually, in many languages), the word for ‘to humiliate
someone’ is the same word as ‘to humble someone.’ “John makes me humble,” she told me. “To be
loved by such a wonderful man, how could that not make you humble? Isn’t that beautiful?”
I
couldn’t help but agree with her. That
is beautiful. That’s not a red flag,
that’s good news, great news, for their future marriage. During that conversation, I struggled to put
into words something so seemingly obvious as the difference between being
humiliated and being humbled. Part of it
is consent – humiliation ordinarily happens against our will, it’s forced. To be humbled, we must cooperate, “not under
compulsion but willingly.”
To be
humiliated is to be pushed down, often by someone smaller than you, so you are forced
to crank your neck to see them. To be
humbled is to stand tall willingly straining your neck to gaze upon something much
bigger than you.
God
never humiliates us. God humbles
us. That’s good news, that’s great news
not for our future marriage but for right now.
It’s so tempting to skip past that line in our reading, “be humbled
under the mighty hand of God” and jump to “so that he might exalt us.” And that’s beautiful too – the exaltation
that is to come, the unfading crown that belongs to a future age – all
wonderful. But, “be humbled under the
mighty hand of God…” that’s not quid pro
quo; that’s not the price, how we earn a crown we could never earn. That’s the good news for right now.
God
takes our virtues and shows us what they look like in their fullness, in his
mighty hand. To strain your neck to gaze
at that is to be humble.
He
takes us when we finally realize we have slipped up and fallen down and offers
us that hand. To be humble is to take
it, to grasp that loving hand, that wounded hand. To be humble is to bear witness to the
sufferings of Christ and say look at this hand that holds me, look at the sign
of love etched into its palm. Can I love
like that? On my own, am I nothing, but
I am not on my own.
Friday, June 8, 2012
Jesus is Lord – 2 Tim 3:10-17; Mark 12:35-37
What’s the brashest way
you can think of to proclaim “Jesus is Lord”?
Picture a van careering through traffic on a dusty street, crammed with
12 people in the back with about enough seating for 6, open to the air except
for a brightly painted wooden frame enclosing them, decorated with vibrant
patterns, joyful pictures and religious phrases written in French or sometimes
Creole. This is a tap tap and they function as buses all over Haiti. The phrases vary – you can ride in a “Blood
of Jesus” tap tap, or a “Promise of
God” tap tap, or a “Jesus is Lord” tap tap.
These
were some of the first sights to greet me when I arrived in Haiti and they
surprised me. I went to Haiti thinking I
was going to a very poor country, and I was.
Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere and the poverty I
saw was crippling and horrific. Disease,
disaster, malnutrition, poor education, a history of oppression, dictatorship
and corruption conspire against life. But,
Haiti is not hopeless.
Naïve
Haitian art is colorful and daring. It focuses on what makes Haiti so very rich
– its beautiful natural surroundings; its welcome of the stranger; its familial
sense of mutual support and biblical neighborliness; its lively faith. It sees what a cursory glance cannot
see. It sees through all of the rival
powers that seem to overwhelm the country and declares that they do not have
the final word. Jesus is Lord.
Our
reading from 2nd Timothy tells us that all scripture is useful training
for righteousness. The insight from
today’s gospel that brought the crowd such joy – that the Christ is Lord – is emblazoned
on so many tap taps because it’s part
of the Haitian training regime. It’s
what gives hope. It’s what tells them
that wounds don’t get to have the last word: resurrection does.
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