God clears away what keeps us distant – Matt 18:21-35

Year A, Twenty-fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time; Holy Infant

This gospel passage is powerful, capable of communicating something wondrous and awesome (in the true sense). But, like anything powerful, it’s also dangerous. Powerful things are rarely safe. One of the dangers is, in using this financial imagery for sin and forgiveness, it can encourage us to think of sin in those terms, in a kind of mechanical accounting – “Well, I gossiped four times today, and I was kind of judgmental, so five Hail Marys in this other column will offset that, and one good deed to round them off will put me in the black!” And if that kind of thinking leads people to do good, then great, as a first step. But, its danger is that it prevents us from seeing what sin is holding us back from.

God appoints us as watchmen to bring us forgiveness – Ezek 33:7-9, Matt 18:15-20

Twenty-third Sunday of Ordinary Time; Holy Infant parish.

Ezekiel was an exile, a displaced person.  He was an Israelite living in Babylon, because the Babylonians had come to Jerusalem, destroyed it, destroyed God’s house, the Temple, in its midst and forced them on the long march East to Babylon.  The people were bereft of the only ways they’d known God: the Temple, the kingship, the Land.  But, God did not desert them.  The people would discover that in their exile, God was in their midst too.  Just as, centuries later, the Church, bereft of Christ’s humane presence, would discover that wherever two or three gathered in his name, he was there. 

Christ leads us through suffering to eternal life – Matt 16:21-27, Rom 12:1-2

22nd Sunday of Ordinary Time; Holy Infant parish.

One year at Notre Dame’s baccalaureate Mass, I was the person tasked with purifying the vessels after communion. As I was purifying the main, celebrants’ chalice, I noticed whose it was.  It was Fr. Sorin’s chalice, the chalice of the priest who my community’s founder had sent on the arduous trip across the ocean from France to the mission territory of Indiana to found a school.  It wasn’t the chalice he’d received at his ordination, but one he’d been given on one of his ordination anniversaries by a benefactor.  The precious metal alone must have been worth a pretty penny, the craftsmanship and artistry more, and the history behind it probably made it the most expensive thing I’d ever held, and certainly the most expensive thing I’d ever swilled water around in and drunk out of.  The most expensive thing I’d ever held, but not the most valuable: for a little while before I’d embraced fellow Christians in the sign of peace, and a shortly after that I’d held the body of my Lord briefly in my hand, before I consumed it.  “What could we give in exchange for our life, or the life of anyone?”  Jesus asked.  Nothing, we could give nothing so valuable as a life.  What would he give for our life?  Everything.  He would give his clothing, his blood, his body, his very life, to lead us into eternal life.

Jesus welcomes us in earth-shattering embrace – Luke 1:39-56 (Assumption)

Feast of the Assumption; Holy Infant parish.

Today is a feast of embrace. What the feast centrally is about is Jesus’ embrace of Mary, but our Gospel speaks to us of Mary’s embrace of Jesus. What we celebrate today is Jesus’ assumption, taking up, embracing, his Mother, lifting her, body and soul, directly into heaven at the moment of her death. We celebrate Christ’s embrace. We celebrate that Jesus, who came to show us what love looks like, showed a fully human love, a love that includes children’s love for their mother, without thereby excluding anyone else from that. But, Christ’s love being divine love doesn’t make it any less human, and fully human love isn’t impersonal, generalized beneficence, but full-hearted fully-particular affection. And, in this feast, we celebrate one way Christ loved his mother.

God gives us good news to proclaim – Rom 5:12-15, Matt 10:20-33

12th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year A; Mission Appeal at St. Augusta's, Lake Village, IN

When St. Paul talks about a gift over-flowing, he doesn’t just mean a benign trickle. He knew what it was like to be bawled over by a torrent of over-flowing gift, Jesus Christ’s gift of self, an act of love that changes the world. The gift of the resurrection is that Jesus gives everything to show us that God’s love for us is so intense that not even death, death at our hands, could keep him from being with us. It’s a gift that finds its first installment in God’s own Spirit, dwelling to closer to us than we are to ourselves, praying in us; a gift that will find its perfect fulfillment when it leads us to live forever lives of such love ourselves, standing shoulder to shoulder with the saints in heaven. It’s a gift, as we heard Jesus say, that’s spoken into the darkest parts of our world, and of ourselves, daring to go to places we’d balk to reveal, and lovingly transforming them. It’s a gift that compels us to speak of it, wherever there is light, Jesus says. And God has bathed his whole world in light.

God meets us with the poor – Acts 6:1-7

5th Sunday of Easter, Year A; Holy Infant parish

The most curious thing about the first reading we heard today isn’t anything in the reading, or what precedes or follows the reading, but what doesn’t follow it. Let me back up and talk about how we don’t get to where we might think we might get to. The story is about the earliest days of the church in Jerusalem. This happens after Pentecost, but before Paul becoming Christian, for instance, before the church has started expanding outside Jerusalem. The Hellenists we hear about are Jews who grew up in Greek-speaking communities but have since moved to Jerusalem and have joined this nascent Christian community, all of whose leaders are Aramaic speaking Jews (“the Hebrews”). They’re insiders… to some extent. But, they’re also immigrants. And while there’s no debate about them being welcome, as there’ll be debate later about quite on what terms Gentiles are welcome, being welcome isn’t quite the same as being fully integrated, isn’t the same as being always remembered, even. And the complaint comes that their widows are being ignored in the daily distribution of food. The apostles both realize the problem, and realize that they can’t solve it. So, they recruit seven men from among this Hellenist group and put them in charge of ensuring that Hellenist widows are better included.

God calls us by name – Jn 10:1-10, 1 Pet 2:20b-25

Easter, Week 4, Year A; Holy Infant.

Many of you know that before I entered seminary I worked as a prison teacher.  When I first started working there, a lot of the other helping professionals in the prison recognized that there was something about the culture of that place, the marbled unity of grotesque beauty and darkness in search of light, that I needed to understand to be fruitful there, and the only way they could explain it was through stories.  This story’s from a prison chaplain.  I never knew the inmate the story’s about, but it’s a pithy way of getting across in one short graced conversation what I saw so many times, on a much slower scale.  He was young, but a hulk of a man, apparently, intimidating.  By which, I learnt, the chaplain meant both that he looked intimidating, and that he often went out of his way to intimidate people.  He’d stand at the back of the chapel throughout Mass, defiant.  After several weeks of this, the chaplain approached him and asked: “What’s your name?”  “Striker,” came back the answer.  “That’s not a name, that’s a committal offense, a claim, a front.  What’s your name?”  “González.”  “OK, but I’m not going to call you by your last name. That’s not how you were baptized.  What’s your name?  What does your momma call you?”  The next answer, I won’t repeat in church.  That’s what his mother called him, something I won’t repeat in church.  “She’s mad with you a lot, huh?”  “Yeah.  I’m bad.”  It wasn’t a confession, it wasn’t a boast; it was just a flat statement of fact.  “But, I bet that wasn’t what she called you when you were a baby, huh?  What does your momma call you when she’s not mad with you?”  “OK, my first name is Napoleón.”  “Nice name.  But that’s not what I asked.  What does your momma call you when she’s not mad with you?”  Out of a face, I came to know so well that was about to erupt in something, you just didn’t know what, came: “Well, sometimes… she’d call me Napito.”  “Napito.  Can I call you that?”  I wonder how long since he’d heard that. He didn’t say. He just replied, “Sure, padre.  That would be chido.”