Church of St. Mary at Clinton Heights

When I was in college, we used to sing a song at Mass that I have never been able to find since.  One line from this song was:  we’ll just say that we’ve been to the mo

untain to catch a glimpse of all that we can be”.   In both the first reading and the gospel, Abram and the disciples catch a glimpse of all that they could be…..and so do we.

Today’s first reading is a strange one.  In the midst of strange symbols for the 21^st century, God makes a covenant with Abram.   “It was on that occasion that the LORD made a covenant with Abram, saying: “To your descendants I give this land, from the Wadi of Egypt to the Great River, the Euphrates.”.  In the midst of this experience,  “a trance fell upon Abram, and a deep, terrifying darkness enveloped him.”  In the depth of that darkness, God showed Abram who he was:  the father of the nation.  From Abram, would rise the people of Israel and God would make an unbreakable covenant with them…at least, from God’s perspective.

The story of the Transfiguration reveals Jesus in the fullness of His Divine Nature. He is the fulfillment of the promise made to Abram and the promise of all the prophets.  In Jesus, God renews the covenant with humanity, with each of us, but not with the blood of animals, but with His own blood to be shed on the Cross.  This covenant sealed on the Cross is the covenant you and I live in.  At every Eucharist, we enter into the awesome light of that reality.  At every Eucharist, we climb the Mountain of Transfiguration to see who Jesus calls us to be and at every Eucharist we climb the Mount of Calvary and enter the mystery of the new and eternal covenant: the words Jesus used the night of the Last Supper and we use at the consecration of the chalice.  The covenant is not redone; we enter it’s saving mystery at every Eucharist and we are transformed into God’s People by it.

Today, we learn who we are in both readings: in the profound darkness of Genesis and in the blinding light of the Mount of Transfiguration.  Every spiritual writer talks about the profound darkness of God; a metaphor that the reality of God goes beyond any word we can say or any proof.  To truly be a disciple of Jesus, we must take a step into the darkness of faith and trust.  In that darkness, we experience the awesome and over whelming presence who brings us into a covenant that will never be broken.  In the awesome and overpowering light of God, we see ourselves as God sees us:  warts and all.  We do not need to perfect to be His disciple.  Despite our sins, in Christ, God has made an unbreakable covenant with each of us.

So, my brothers and sisters, here is the challenge:  Do you see yourself in covenant with God?  Can you and I accept that God has made a covenant with you by name?  Can we accept the leap of faith into the darkness of faith with trust and can we allow God to show us who we are in the brilliant light of divinity?

May this week of Lent be a week of discovery of who we can be.  May we allow God to show us all that we can be in darkness and in light.

The legend of the ancient phoenix is that it a new phoenix will rise from the ashes of the old phoenix.  This ancient symbol is the model of what we are preparing for during Lent.  From the Cross and Tomb, will come the new Man….the Risen Jesus who calls us out of the ashes of our sin and short comings.  A fruitful Lent will only be accomplished when we are willing to allow the ashes, we receive today to be a place of rebirth.

What needs to die in us?  What is Jesus calling us to change in our hearts?    The three disciplines of the Christian life offer us the path.  The practices of prayer, fasting and almsgiving are core practices to grow in Christ 365 days out of the year.  They allow us to rise from the ashes of our sin to a deeper life in Jesus.  This Lent dedicate yourself to a new life of prayer.  Pray every morning and evening.  Make the Sunday Eucharist the central part of the week.  Read the Gospels.  Fast from the things that are not allowing you to be free to follow Jesus.  Toward the end of Lent, celebrate the Sacrament of Reconciliation and allow yourself to rise from ashes and be the person you are in Christ.  Almsgiving is a sure way to show our dedication to the Gospel.  When we take care of the poor and needy among us and share with them our food, our wealth, our very selves, then we rise from the ashes of consumerism and waste.

“Today is the acceptable time!”  Will you allow Jesus to show you what you need to change to be closer to him?  May we all rise from ashes of our sins and failings and celebrate the Death and Resurrection of the Lord with a new heart.

I thought I would begin to today with a very small demonstration of what Matthew Kelly meant by a Holy Moment.  Owning the reality that each of us are called to holiness  the way to realize that is through the practice of Holy Moments….so here is what I would like you to do:

                                                       Look at the Crucifix here in church Just be aware of what God did for you 

You just had a holy moment. The neat thing is that we can develop the practice of having these all through out the day.  Notice I said the word: practice.  St Clare of Assisi told her sisters to do this mediation for the first five minutes of every day and reflect on Christ’s total poverty on the Cross.

This is what Jesus is talking about in Luke’s version of the Beatitudes.  When we are see our poverty thought out the day, that is a holy moment.     Poverty is more than a lack of money.  It could be the realization that we won’t get a promotion, or we failed a test, get a cold, or cannot afford something.  The holy moment of our hunger is when we know we need God.  He is the only one who will fill the void in our lives.  Weeping holy moments are when we need to grief the losses of life or maybe the times we see the pain of this world.  Being persecuted is something that needs no explanation:  to stand up for our faith is a holy moment

Even the woes can be Holy Moments because they are the times of conversion.  Jesus reaches into our lives and shows us what is getting in the way.  These holy moments are the tough ones.  For example, I was with some friends the other night and we were talking about the water main break that happened at the foot of their driveway and how this would be an inconvenience.  As we talked, all three of us came to the conclusion:  this was a first world problem.  It was fixable and there were people who have never had water coming into their house.  There were people living in drought stricken areas.  A Holy Moment for the three of us!

As we begin to prepare for Lent in just over three week, I would offer this suggestion:  Each one of us begins the practice of having Holy Moments.  Let us pray for the grace to open our eyes and our hearts to those many moments every day when God is present to us.

We live in a time in need of prophets.  A prophet is not someone who foretells the future.  A prophet calls the world back to the covenant  God made with humanity.  For the people of Israel, it was to the covenant made on Mt Sinai; for you and me, it was the covenant made on Calvary by the sacrifice of the Cross.  A prophet calls the world back to the Love that freely offered himself on the Cross.  If you want to know what that Love looks like: re read Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, today’s second reading. This is the prophetic love of Christ.

The person called to be a prophet is not someone from the desert like John the Baptist or someone who lives on a mountaintop somewhere.  The prophets of today as a close as looking in the mirror.  How often have you heard the words of the anointing with Sacred Chrism at a Baptism….”you share now in the ministry of Christ who is Priest, Prophet and King.”  The you that is referred to is the baby or child…..but it is also you and me.  We are all prophets.  We are all called to refashion the world.  Jesus died so that we could be free to rebuild the world by His grace.

The challenge is to own who we are as  prophets and live it.  With the passage of the Reproductive Health Act and the slippery slope that it creates, we need to be prophetic in our stand against it.  The slippery slope is an open door to euthanasia, assisted suicide, etc.  This cheapening of life will also open the door to capital punishment for any reason, to a cutting a funding for social services, putting the mentally ill in prisons, etc.  This Act cheapens life in all its stages and erodes one of the primary beliefs of our faith:  that each person is created in the image and likeness of Almighty God and therefore deserving to be treated with respect and dignity love.  A prophetic stance demands we work across the board for every single human person in the world.

This is Christian Love….and here will be true test of our prophetic call.  How we will treat those who have chosen to make these laws and those who disagree with us?  Yes, we need to be angry, but our anger needs to be used to build and not hate.  Violence will solve nothing; anger that is repressed in our hearts will destroy us.  Our anger needs to empower us to be stand up and be heard; to get involved in changing our world.  Again, I refer us all back to today’s Second reading…..this is the blue print of how we are to be prophets.   As prophets, we risk being seen as naïve and out of touch.  As prophets, we must dare to dream that the Kingdom is real.  We must risk that God will use us to be the ones who build His Kingdom. 

I dream of a society in which we have alternatives to all these social ills; a place where a woman is treated with dignity and not an object, where babies are seen as the future not a problem to be dealt with, where a poor person is given the opportunities to a different life, a felon is able to leave prison and rebuild his or her life, a drug addict is able to have services and support in his or her recovery a woman who has had an abortion finds healing, acceptance and forgiveness in our midst, etc.…..as prophets, we have the mandate to not only talk about this Kingdom.  God empowers us to make it happen.

This is what a disciple does.  He or she or me gets their hands dirty and works side by side with people of different faiths, color, race, whether they come to Mass or not, whoever and love this world into a better place.  It is up to us to roll up our sleeves and do.  People may threaten to throw us off a cliff; but we will be in good company:  the crowd wanted to do that to Jesus.  Can we expect anything else?

God can transform anything in our lives into grace. It would have been a great embarrassment to the wedding couple and their families if they had run out of wine.  They would have been dishonored.   On the surface, it looked like an insurmountable problem.  To God, hardly.  Through the intersession of the Mother of God, Jesus transformed a problem into a sign of the abundant grace the flows out into the world from His divine heart.

Jesus can do the same thing for each of us.  We all have things we deal with on a daily basis that can seem overwhelming and unsolvable.  Do we ask God to give us the grace to deal with whatever it is?  I am convinced that God doesn’t solve the problem but gives us the knowledge and grace to do it.  Everyday we encounter small changes that we think we must solve alone.  We don’t.  We have the intercession of the saints and God’s grace to depend on.  It could be that the Holy Moment we want to work on this week would be to ask God to help us solve on problem that comes up every day. The problem doesn’t need to be as big as a wedding running out of wine, but something we are struggling with.

The wedding feast of Cana is the manifestation of the power of God that is active and alive in the world.  Like Jesus was the sign of the Father in his time; we now are the signs of Jesus in our time.  Like he changed the water into wine, the grace of God can change the world through His grace that flows within each of us.  In each situation that we encounter this week, if we are open to letting God use us, the water of grace will transform it into the wine of His presence.  Let us be the instruments of God’s grace this week so he can transform the world.