The Family - the Basic Unit of Society

+ J. M. J. +

Homily Outline for the Feast of the Holy Family (Basic readings, not the options for Year B or C)

Merry Christmas! This is the proper greeting for today, since we are still within the Octave of Christmas, and today is the 6th day of that Octave! The Church gives us this Feast of the Holy Family on the Sunday within the Octave of Christmas to further focus our attention on the mystery of the Incarnation: Jesus not only took on flesh and dwelt among us as one like us in all things but sin, He didn’t just enter into the individual human condition, but He also entered fully into human society.

The basic unit of society is NOT the individual… no individual is self-sufficient… our DNA and bodies come from our parents, and we have to be fed and tended with great care for many years before we come anywhere near taking care of ourselves! At the end of our lives we once again depend heavily on others for basic bodily care, and at every moment of our lives in between we are by nature, by God’s design, members of a family, and members of the human family. In a world so focused on “ME,” it is only by an intentional choice that we will live in touch with the fundamental reality that we are not self-sufficient, and that our lives do not in fact make much sense except in relationship with God and others. Jesus Himself entered into this fundamentally communal reality at His conception, He became a member of a family, and a town, and a nation.

The family is a complicated reality to approach from the standpoint of faith, because in every time and place there have been families. What structures family is marriage – the particular relationship between a man and a woman who are potentially a mother and a father. There are certainly instances where the conception of a new life is not physically possible, but the basic reality of family is structured by marriage and oriented toward the possibility of children. This reality is evident in every society in every time and place. There are variations, and various degrees to which particular cultures respected the equal dignity of men, women, and children, but nonetheless marriage is not the particular expression of one culture or religion, but a basic human reality found wherever there are humans.

It is this basic human reality, woven into our very being, that God elevated, blessed, and purified through His self-revelation. First amongst the Jewish people, and then in a fuller and fuller way in the Christian community, marriage took on a clearer and clearer form – a covenant between a man and a woman who freely and knowingly commit themselves to be totally faithful to each other until death and open to the possibility of life. Even in our first reading from the Book of Sirach we don’t find the full expression of Christian marriage, but notice how each member of the family, father, mother, and each child, are called to honor and respect and serve each other in kindness and love. Place this against the backdrop of the pagan world where wives and children were often treated as mere possessions to be bought and sold!  A helpful way to summarize this fullness of God’s teaching on marriage is to use four adjectives: free, total, fruitful, and faithful. We could unpack each one of those adjectives at great length, and maybe we will at another time!

I think anyone who opens their eyes and looks around in our society can easily recognize that marriage and family are under great pressure and even attack, and that, on average, our family structures are slowly falling apart around us. Everyone suffers from this: kids without parents, parents trying to do their best without spouses, and everyone else who’s caught in the middle. Marriage as the Church understands it, marriage as a sacrament, a covenant, that fundamentally structures family life is difficult… without God’s it’s not at all plausible or realistic. With God all things are possible, but as every married couple here present can attest to, that doesn’t make it easy.

Listen to Paul’s advice to the Colossians, and imagine how you might apply it in your family relationships:

Put on, as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, heartfelt compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience, bearing with one another and forgiving one another, if one has a grievance against another; as the Lord has forgiven you, so must you also do.

This advice applies to each one of us in all situations, but especially in family life.

The incident recorded in our Gospel today alerts us to the full reality of Jesus family life: Mary, Joseph, and Jesus have a miscommunication and misunderstanding that leads Mary and Joseph into no little difficulty and fear. They can’t find the child entrust to them by God! If such difficulty can be present in a family where two of the three people involved are without sin, how much more so in our own families!

With Christmas we have entered into the 2nd phase of our Year of Faith. After focusing on the Sacrament of Penance, in step with the Penitential Act at the beginning of Mass, now we are moving into the Liturgy of the Word, with a focus on Sacred Scripture. In the midst of all the difficulties that each family faces, one very powerful way that we can center our family life on God is to place the Word of God in place of honor in our homes, and in our time. If a family begins to allow itself to be shaped by God’s word, each member individually and the family as a whole, then God’s grace will be more and more at work in them and through them. As the family goes, so goes society... it is ONLY by seeking conversion in our individual lives and in the lives of our families that we can hope to change the world!

Listen now to Bishop Sample’s invitation to each of us during this second moment of the Year of Faith:

BISHOP SAMPLE’S SCRIPT: SECOND MOMENT OF THE YEAR OF FAITH CD

“This is Bishop Alexander Sample. It gives me great joy to welcome all of you to this second moment in our celebration of the Year of Faith. This period will run from Christmas until Holy Week. And this part of the Year of Faith will focus on the part of the Holy Mass that we call the Liturgy of the Word. And we will focus during this time on the Sacred Scriptures, on the Bible. As we celebrate at Christmas time the Word that became flesh and dwelt among us, we will celebrate God’s Word in a very special way. We will take a closer look at what God has revealed to us in His Holy Word, in the Sacred Scriptures.

I ask you during this period of the Year of Faith to open your hearts and your minds to God as he speaks to us in the Sacred Scripture, in his Holy Word. During this time, we will try to teach all of you to take a more focused look at the Holy Bible. We hope to teach you how to study the Bible, how to pray with the Word of God, to meditate upon the words of Scripture and to apply the words of the Bible to your own lives. God’s Word is a living Word, and it speaks to each one of us today.

As a way of introducing all of us to this moment of our Year of Faith, we are going to ask that each one of us enthrone the Holy Bible in our homes. We will provide a ritual to use for you and your family to create that special place of honor in your home for the Word of God. We will also provide a reading plan for you, asking that you, individually and as a family, take time each week to read the Holy Scriptures. We will focus on the Gospel of St. Luke, which is the Gospel that the Church gives us during this year.

I ask that each one of you draw closer to God through his Holy Word during this time. God will speak to you and will draw you closer into communion with himself and in his mercy and love. God bless each and every one of you.”

+ A. M. D. G. +

Gaudete! Rejoice... and keep getting ready!

+ J. M. J. +

Homily Outline for the 3rd Sunday of Advent, Year C

The theme of this Gaudete Sunday is joy. Gaudete is command in Latin… “Rejoice.” It comes from our entrance antiphon today, the verse assigned by the Church to set the tone as we begin our Mass. I read it before the Sign of the Cross, and this year the same text is found in our 2nd reading:

Rejoice in the Lord always. I shall say it again: rejoice!

We have been waiting for two weeks, and we have nearly two more to go, and the Church wants us to be encouraged in our waiting and anticipation, and even filled with joy. The result of spiritual preparation is a deep, lasting, and abiding joy.

One of the most vivid experiences of joy that I have myself experienced came two summers ago when I had the beautiful opportunity to accompany our diocesan pilgrimage group to World Youth Day in Madrid. We were led by Bishop Sample, and I was directly responsible for a group of our campus ministry students. With them I tramped all over Madrid, moving through enormous crowds of young Catholics from all over the world. I had expected that this profound immersion in the universal Church and the encounter with Pope Benedict would integrate head knowledge of the Church into their hearts, and our prayerful discussion each night demonstrated that this was in fact happening, both for each of them and for me. However, when I interviewed each of them weeks after we had returned home, what struck me was how so many of the young people made reference to the deep and lasting joy that was still present and tangible in their hearts. Having prayed, worshiped, sang, laughed and danced with millions of young Catholics from every nation under the sun and with the Holy Father, these college students were able to speak of the joy that was still informing their daily lives weeks later. I was humbled and impressed by their insight and the authenticity of their experience of God at work in His Church.

These same young people had often been exhausted, footsore, thirsty, and bewildered during those same days in Madrid. We had waited in lines for hours at a time, pressed into enormous crowds in the Spanish heat. It was clear that like us, many people were not recently bathed!  We slept each night packed together in rows in a stuffy school building which we shared with hundreds of other pilgrims, including a large group of Italians that didn’t even get home until midnight, forget about sleeping!

This is the mysterious of authentic Christian joy… it can coexist with and endure great hardship. It is not superficial happiness or a veneer of fake cheerfulness. The prophet Zephaniah exhorts Israel to “shout for joy” and to “be glad and exult with all your heart’ even as they are surrounded by enemies and the likelihood, humanly speaking, of failure. This weekend we all have heavy hearts in light of the terrible shooting in Connecticut, and we cannot help but grieve with the families of all those who died. Yet even into the midst of such circumstances, Paul’s message to the Philippians, and to us, still rings out:

I shall say it again: rejoice! Your kindness should be known to all. The Lord is near. Have no anxiety at all, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, make your requests known to God. Then the peace of God that surpasses all understanding will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.

Paul spoke to communities surrounded by persecution and misunderstanding… he’s not reminding them that the Lord is near for nothing. They have every worldly reason to be anxious, afraid, and discouraged. When we look around this mortal and broken world, even during this Advent season, we can find plenty of reasons to be discouraged. When we look even within our own families and recognized the brokenness and struggle that takes place between those who should love each other well, we can certainly find cause for anxiety. And, yet, there is more to the story. Our hope and our courage is not in this world alone. We are not called to be optimists who rely on positive predictable outcomes on our own schedule… rather we are called to hope in the Lord, and even to rejoice in the midst of sickness, sorrow, and struggle.

Hearing John the Baptist's call to repent and to begin anew, the people asked him, “What should we do?” In light of our coming commemoration of Christ coming in time, and our preparations to meet Him at the end of time, we too can rightly ask, “what should we do?” John the Baptist's reply is simple, but hard to live out: we should share what we have with those in need, we should treat others with fairness and justice, we should turn away from all sin. This is how we prepare to receive our Lord and King… and this preparation equips us to weather the storms of this life so that we might keep our eyes fixed on the calm joy of eternal life.

We have 10 more days to get ready… and we need them, as the struggles and tragedies of this world make all too clear. Please don’t jump the gun and skip the preparation. Prepare in prayer, in penance, in reflection now, so that your hearts might be truly open to the full joy of our coming feast!

+ A. M. D. G. +

Up Jerusalem, Stand upon the heights... (Or... Will we have to go door to door?)

+ J. M. J. +

Homily Outline for the 2nd Sunday of Advent, Year C

John the Baptist brings a basic, visceral, forceful message: “a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.” Recognizing that we are sinners, that our lives and deeds are not wholly pleasing to God or according to His law, we repent, we turn back, we change direction. To dramatize this invitation, John invited people to a baptism of repentance, an exterior washing that spoke of an interior desire. This is not yet the full Christian baptism, but it serves to prepare the soil of their souls for the further message Jesus Himself would bring.

As Luke records John the Baptist’s ministry, he recognizes the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy:

A voice of one crying out in the desert: “Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight his paths. Every valley shall be filled and every mountain and hill shall be made low. The winding roads shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth, and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.”

All creation expresses the call to every human heart: circuitous motives and desires to be straightened out and brought into the light, obstacles overcome and surmounted, weakness supplied with God’s strength, clouded flesh and bleary eyes beginning to see clearly the beautiful salvation of God.

This restoration and healing, this homecoming echoes through our first reading as well, from the prophet Baruch:

Up, Jerusalem! Stand upon the heights; look to the east and see your children gathered from the east and the west at the word of the Holy One, rejoicing that they are remembered by God.

Exiles who have been wandering lonely and poor in a strange land are restored to communion with God and with God’s people. They see from the heights of God’s truth out over the beautiful work that God is doing in their midst.

I am struck by how the profound call of the Year of Faith coincides with the message of our Scriptures today. Pope Benedict and Bishop Sample are calling us to leave our lonely wandering in the poor strange land of our modern time, a wandering characterized by so many Catholics who have slipped farther and farther away from God and the life of the Church… I refer to those of us here at Mass! Certainly there are many more who have fallen away more completely, but those of us here, those of us who still worship, at least occasionally, those of us who still pray, at least occasionally… God is speaking FIRST to us through His Church. We are the ones who still perhaps possess some flickering weak light of grace in our hearts that can be blown upon by the wind of the Holy Spirit and fanned into a beautiful flame of love. If we will re-appropriate, re-visit, re-learn the faith given to us at Baptism, then we may well stand upon the heights, then we may well stand upon the solid rock of the Church’s teaching and life and sacraments, rather than constantly getting bogged down in the shifting quicksand of popular opinion.

It has been a profound joy for me to accompany our Catholicism Project groups as we do exactly this, sinking our teeth into the solid food of the Church’s doctrine. Many perceptive questions have been asked that have led us into the heart of the fire of God’s love for us. This past week, one person sat with an uneasy face, and asked about going door to door. “Father, if we learn what our faith teaches, then we’re going to have to go out and knock on doors, right, and tell people about it.” You could see this person almost turning green at the gills at the thought! Isn’t this the gist of the New Evangelization, that we need to become more and more like the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who with great and persistent courage go from door to door?

Well, perhaps, but this is not exactly what Pope Benedict has in mind! The moment will come when some among us may well be called to do more inviting, even of strangers. But this movement must well up in the context our own personal and ongoing conversion to Christ. We cannot give what we do not have… as long as our own faith is lukewarm and wavering, we do not have much to offer! If we pick and choose the parts we like from amongst our broad and challenging tradition, we don’t have much to offer. If we think to ourselves, “Well, heh, I’m a pretty good person, I do some good things, isn’t that enough…” Well, I hate to say it… we don’t have much to offer. John the Baptist calls us to repentance, Jesus Christ calls us to repentance, Pope Benedict calls us to dig deep, repenting, and seeking once again the fullness of our faith, in all its challenging beauty. As we draw nearer and nearer the fire of God’s love, as the obstacles that separate us from God are overthrown, who knows what God might do in us? If we stand upon the bracing heights of Christ’s saving truth, who knows what path we might see leading deeper into God’s light? Who knows who we may see there, waiting for us to live the truth and speak the truth to them? God might well call us to all these things, but as long as we muddle along half-committed, half-converted, we’re not likely to hear any call clearly. If anyone ends up going door to door, it must be because of a burning love in their hearts that will not leave them in peace unless they share it with their neighbors!

This, then, is the project before us, the project of Advent, the project of the Year of Faith which we have begun by focusing on penance and repentance: to prepare the way for the Lord into our hearts and lives. The simple practices outlined last week will provide us with the concrete steps: Sunday Eucharist, regular confession, daily prayer. As we come into contact with God’s grace and truth, who knows what might be unlocked in our hearts and lives?! Let me close with St. Paul’s beautiful prayer on behalf of his beloved Philippians, a prayer our Mother the Church prays for us:

that your love may increase ever more and more in knowledge and every kind of perception, to discern what is of value, so that you may be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God.

+ A. M. D. G. +

Would we RUN forth to meet Christ?

+ J. M. J. +

Homily Outline for the 1st Sunday of Advent, Year C

Advent has arrived! With it a new liturgical year, a new cycle of readings (Year C), and some visible changes in our sanctuary and worship. The Church always seeks to engage the whole person, the whole human being, body, mind, and soul. We have begun this period of joyful waiting, “of devout expectant delight”. As the priest vests in purple, which has a penitential tone, we ask ourselves, “Are we ready to receive our Lord and King?” We forgo the Gloria during these 4 Sundays of Advent so that it might ring out with yet greater joy on Christmas Eve. Our music is simpler, less elaborate. We light the candles of the Advent Wreath to highlight this waiting, and our progress towards our King. In the weeks ahead we slowly begin to decorate the Church, step by step preparing for our feast.

What are we waiting for? For what do we prepare so elaborately and with so much care? I suspect many of you are saying in your mind, Christmas! And that is the second thing we prepare for during Advent… but the first is actually Jesus’ Second Coming in Glory at the End of Time! Prior to Dec. 17th, the Church directs our attention to the coming of Christ that lies ahead of us. Note our Gospel today:

And then they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory….Be vigilant at all times and pray that you have the strength to escape the tribulations that are imminent and to stand before the Son of Man.

There is a nice logical flow here: in November we meditate upon death and the end this mortal world, and then as Advent begins, we focus on that end as a beginning: With Jesus’ 2nd coming, God will bring to final completion and fulfillment all His promises to us.

Those promises are very evident in our first reading from Jeremiah:

The days are coming, says the Lord, when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and Judah….In those days Judah shall be safe and Jerusalem shall dwell secure….

Jesus’ coming in time as a tiny baby child was the beginning of the fulfillment of this promise. That fulfillment reached a climax on the Cross and in the tomb and on the third day when He rose, but we live now in the tension between the victory already won for us on the Cross, and our own appropriation, reception, and acceptance of that perfect gift. When Jesus comes again in glory, His arrival will be unmistakable—every heart will know that God has come.

We see, then, how this message and teaching to us echoes through these readings proclaimed here, and in EVERY Catholic Church in the world on this first Sunday of Advent. The Church chooses them with great love and care to teach us.

There is another text, though, that I often fear we easily miss. Mass begins with the Sign of the Cross, a greeting, the penitential rite… outside of Advent and Lent we continue then with the Gloria. Having begun in God’s name, having asked His forgiveness, the priest then prays the opening prayer, more properly called the collect. That name suggests what this prayer is meant to do: it gathers up, collects, the message and import of the whole liturgy that lies ahead into one succinct prayer. But, unless you have a missal in front of you, it goes by so quickly! I remember beginning to practice celebrating Mass as a seminarian, and being amazed both by the beauty of these prayers, and by how I was for the most part totally unaware of them!  Here it is again:

Grant your faithful, we pray, almighty God, with resolve to run forth to meet your Christ with righteous deeds at his coming, so that, gathered at his right hand, they may be worthy to possess the heavenly kingdom.

This is a very fine summary of what we are about during Advent, especially these opening weeks: preparing to meet Christ at His coming. If we imagine Jesus’ coming to judge the living and the dead, do we shrink back? The Church desires us to be so converted to Christ that we might be filled with zeal and joy at the thought of His Second Coming, so much joy that we run to meet Him, with righteous deeds… acting on our joy and His grace by pouring out acts of virtue, love, and mercy.

This is very different from the commercial hype that began celebrating Christmas, forget about Advent, 3 weeks ago! Please don’t allow the mercantile madness to sweep over you… seek Christ, not piles of gifts! Seek prayer, not seasonal anxiety. Seek deeds of charity rather than keeping up with the Joneses!

What does this look like concretely? Well… I’ve given some very simple suggestions in my bulletin column:

          · Make a good confession this Advent;

          · Come to Mass every Sunday until Christmas;

          · Come to a daily Mass, an extra helping of grace.

          · Read the Gospel every day, they’re listed in the bulletin, or even both the daily Mass readings.

          · Finally… take one of our Advent Companions that are at all the entrances, and pray with the
            simply daily devotion that’s given there.

          · Use these prayers with your Advent wreath at your evening meal each Sunday, or even each night.

These are simple, concrete ways to prepare to greet the Lord in this life and in the next.

Paul gives the Thessalonians a beautiful blessing:

May the Lord make you increase and abound in love for one another and for all, just as we have for you, so as to strengthen your hearts to be blameless in holiness before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his holy ones.

And all God’s people say, “Amen.”

 + A. M. D. G. +