Church of St. Mary at Clinton Heights

What does it mean to be a Christian?   For us Catholics, it is very foreign question but one that I think the times are demanding we look at.  What does it mean to follow Jesus?  The Gospel today gives us a hint.  It is not about being powerful or being served.  As we are witnessing, this will only lead to trouble and corruption.  Authentic Christianity is about serving one another in the name of the Lord Jesus.  It means that we align ourselves with the vulnerable of the world.  Jesus gathering that child to himself for me is a sign that His Body exists, we exist, to serve the poor and vulnerable, no matter who they are, what they look or where they are.

 The cornerstone of any Christian community must be Christ.  He is the source of the Church, the center of every parish, the inspiration of all we do , and the supreme model of service.  As we look at the future, He must be the center of this community.  Jesus must be the pastor. Jesus’s Word must be that which guides us.  From this flows everything we are.  Our worship will be focused on the glory of God and our thanksgiving to God for we have and have been given, most importantly, our salvation in Christ.  The Sacraments will not be rituals we go through; they will be encounters with the saving mystery of God.    Our gatherings for community and support will be build a community that learns how to laugh with each other, to learn each other’s name, how to work together with power plays, to disagree with each other  and to know we that are there for each other.  Our service to the vulnerable in this community and beyond will be done in Christ’s name and for His honor and glory, not ours.  We have so much to give in this community, so many gifts and talents that we can make a better world.  Together we are strong; together we can serve, together we will rebuild the Body of Christ.  Finally, we must learn about who Jesus is.  How?  Learning how to prayer; studying the Sacred Scriptures, learning what our church teaches and why, forming our consciences so we can make good decisions, and learning how to question and grow deeper in our belief.

 How will we do all this?  By prayer and God’s help.  I have been wondering to myself why I stay in the Church and how can I represent a group that has done things that have hurt others and then worse, covered it up.  What I have come to know is that my faith is not in a structure or institution.  I stay because of Jesus and who he is for me.  Jesus is more than a concept, but my friend and Master, the one I talk to through out the day, the one who I can always count on when things are crazy in my life, Jesus is the one who shows me the way even I resist him…I have learned that my friend in very patient with me.  This is the Jesus I want you to know and love.  It is this Jesus who binds this community together. 

 What will attract people here will not just be the building even though it is important.  What will attract people maybe the music and how it is, but that cannot be the only reason.  What will attract people here maybe the faith formation process or how well we serve the poor and needed.  All important, but that can’t be the main focus either.   What will attract people here will be them walking in here and leaving and saying that those people are really Christian and they showed me who Jesus is and can be for my life.  I want to go back there because I found Jesus there.

For us here at St Mary’s. I am making that our main goal.  As we make our commitment to the Reigniting our faith and discipleship initiative the next few weeks, I ask you to see your contribution as a way to help this community to create opportunities for people to know Jesus, to help you grow in your life with Christ, and to make this church’s reputation be about Jesus.   As you will see, everything we are proposing to use our 70% will be focused just on that:  enlivening and deepening your commitment to Christ and mine, to worship well, to be a community, and people who serve the rest.

During Lent, we always talk about giving something up. My question today is why do we just need to wait until Lent. Many people are already doing it. Giving up foods with a lot of salt or cholesterol, stopping smoking, giving up watching too much TV and exercising, and the list continues. One way to interpret today’s gospel is to ask what must I do away with, cut away, so that I could be a better follower of Jesus. One place to start is to take an inventory of our day; perhaps, meditate on your calendar. Is there time for prayer? How time is spent as a family? How much time am I not using my cellphone, iPad, etc and having a conversation with someone? If there is a spot for exercise, is there also a spot to read the Scriptures? Another place to look is in our hearts. This maybe the harder to place because it means we have to confront parts of our selves that we would rather not look at. Looking into our hearts means we confront our sins and all those parts of ourselves that are still in need of redemption and change. In reality,it is here where we “cut” out parts of ourselves….angers we have never dealt with, our envy, our selfishness, the me first attitude, our laziness, our apathy, and whatever else we meet Finally, St James offers us another to examine. Our concern, solidarity with the poor and our acts of charity. Again, look back to Lent. We put money aside for the poor….what about September? Where is our charity today? This past week we celebrated the feast of St Vincent de Paul. He wrote the following:

 Even though the poor are often rough and unrefined, we must not judge them from external appearances nor from the mental gifts they seem to have received. On the contrary, if you consider the poor in the light of faith, then you will observe that they are taking the place of the Son of God who chose to be poor. It is our duty to prefer the service of the poor to everything else and to offer such service as quickly as possible. If a needy person requires medicine or other help during prayer time, do whatever has to be done with peace of mind. Offer the deed to God as your prayer. Do not become upset or feel guilty because you interrupted your prayer to serve the poor. God is not neglected if you leave him for such service. One of God’s works is merely interrupted so that another can be carried out. So when you leave prayer to serve some poor person, remember that this very service is performed for God. Charity is certainly greater than any rule. Moreover, all rules must lead to charity. Since she is a noble mistress, we must do whatever she commands. With renewed devotion, then, we must serve the poor, especially outcasts and beggars.

St Vincent challenges to root out of live the judgmentalism that can creep into our hears. He reminds that charity is the most important virtue…charity not limited to those we like and love, but charity to all we meet.

So, today’s Gospel calls us to cut out all the parts that keep us from following Christ with our whole hearts. May we look honestly at ourselves and give up that which is in the way. Why do we have to wait until Lent when we can do it now? We will all have things to change in Lent anyway.

Take a step back in time with me.  First century, Judea.  Jesus tells his disciples to take up the cross and follow him.  This was hardly a comfortable or even acceptable thought.  The reality of the Cross was that it was used to make a statement to the people.  Rebel against Rome or doing something criminal and this too can be your fate.  No one wanted to end up on the Cross, let alone pick it up.

Granted Jesus is talking metaphorically for his disciples, but, he knew that this would be his fate because of the radical nature of his message.  He was proclaiming a Kingdom that would replace Rome and would be eternal, not like the temporary nature of manmade structures, whether civil or religious.  The commitment to follow him included the Cross and it would be the deciding point for many.

This is the deciding point for us, too.  Can we pick up the Cross and follow Jesus?  Ronald Rolheiser, an Oblate Father, in an article about today’s readings, quotes James Martin’s book: Jesus, a pilgrimage to describe what it means to take up our Cross:

The need for us to accept suffering in our lives. No one want to suffer, but it happens. People are not perfect, our bodies are not perfect, nothing is perfect and because of that we feel pain and we struggle.  Buddhism tells is when we accept sufferings it will not control us.  Accepting it, frees us

To not allow bitterness to overtake our lives and not to despair

This is my fear for each of you and every Catholic including myself.  That given all the news that keeps coming out, our hearts will fill with despair and this will choke out our faith and our commitment to Jesus.   With Christ, no matter what people have done in the Church, we, the living Church, will always have hope.

To accept some deaths before our physical deaths

to die to the parts of ourselves that keep us from being full disciples; to die to our selfishness, our sins, our comfortability, our stubbornness

To be willing to wait for the resurrection

We pray after the Lord’s Prayer every Mass: “we may be always free from sin and safe from all distress, as we await the blessed hope and the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ.”  We are pilgrims in this world walking with our eyes fixed on Jesus, even when it is tough, and the way seems hard.

Accepting that God’s will is not necessarily ours

To accept that when we give over our lives to Christ, God will work through us in ways we will never expect

Rolheiser concludes his article with this statement:  that we can only take up our Cross when we begin to believe in the Resurrection.  What a great statement for us to consider, considering the turmoil of the Church right now.  Our faith is in Jesus who calls us to take up the Cross knowing what the disciples did not know; that Easter morning would be end of the story (or its beginning), not Calvary.  Jesus reminds us of the hard truth of discipleship:  when we give our lives over to him we must walk with him to Calvary, but also to Easter Morning.

May each of us take our Cross and walk with Jesus, not just to Calvary, but beyond to the Empty Tomb and life eternal.

 

Have you ever been with someone and the moment you start taking about something uncomfortable or something that someone doesn’t want to hear, they stick their fingers in their ears and usually start singing something, so they don’t hear?  God’s voice can make us uncomfortable sometimes, too.  We hear the Scriptures and, like today’s second reading from James, I would not rather hear it because it is uncomfortable to hear.   Listen to it again:

 My brothers and sisters, show no partiality as you adhere to the faith in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ. For if a man with gold rings and fine clothes comes into your assembly, and a poor person in shabby clothes also comes in, and you pay attention to the one wearing the fine clothes and say, “Sit here, please, ” while you say to the poor one, “Stand there, ” or “Sit at my feet, ” have you not made distinctions among yourselves and become judges with evil designs?

 

As a parish community, we need to be ready to not only give to Concerns U or Circles of Mercy or Unity House or wherever, we also need to be ready to have someone from any of those places sitting next to us and welcome them as Jesus did.  This is the core of discipleship: to be like Jesus and to bring the Good News to the poor and the forgotten of society.   Everything Isaiah described in the first reading are the signs that the Messiah is among us.   It is up to us, you and me, to now be the signs of the reality of the Kingdom Jesus proclaimed

I have been saying that we need to challenge the Bishops of the United States and the Church to authentic discipleship and I stand behind my words.  We need to hold them to accountability.   Yet, we need to be living it ourselves, or as St Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 13:  you are a noisy gong or clanging cymbal without love.  I would change it to without living as authentic disciples.

To be a Christian disciple is not an easy call.  It demands from us the willingness to say publicly, “I believe in Jesus and I am Catholic” which is not an easy thing to say right now.  It demands from us the willingness to be like Jesus and touch the hurting and lowly of the world.  It demands that we give up the desire for the best clothes or the finest things and befriend those who have nothing.

As hard as it is to hear it, it is the truth of the Gospel.

          The poor and lowly one we welcome to sit next to us  here in church is Jesus himself. The stranger in our midst is Jesus himself The one who doesn’t look like us is Jesus himself

 

      May the Lord touch our ears and open them to hear his voice and our lips to sing his praise; for He is God among us

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The character Tevye from Fiddler of the Roof is a great example of Peter’s response to Jesus:  Lord, to who else shall we go?  Through out the entire play, Tevye has an ongoing conversation with God, even to the point of questioning why God is doing some of things that are happening in life.  He asks honest questions yet choose to remain faithful to God.  Peter is really saying the same thing.  There is no other person but Jesus who will constantly be there; even in the darkest of moments. 

We need to ask our self’s:  Why? 

• Why continue to believe even when it is tough? 
• Why stay faithful when it seems God is silent? 
• Why pray when our prayer is not answered the way we want? 

Peter and Tevye show us the how to pray like this.  We must have a living relationship with God.  Both teach us that key component is prayer; but, not just reciting the prayers someone else wrote.  The most authentic prayer is the ongoing conversation with God that includes everything we are going through out the day. 

• Our cars can become a chapel;
• our desks at school or at work can become Mountain of transfiguration when our prayer leads to insight,            
• standing next to someone who is serious ill or struggling with an addiction or having a tough time can become Calvary
• and every joy and good thing becomes an experience of Easter morning. 

To choose to follow God, to realize that as Christians we have no one else to go through but Jesus, and like Tevye who was honest with God like an old friend, then and only then, will the church be rebuilt!

As disciples of Jesus, we must develop this deep prayer.  Prayer is adialogue by its very nature.  For many Catholics, this is a unique approach.  We are taught our prayers and we say them.  The traditional prayers of the our faith are essential, but like Tevye who knew the prayers of the Jewish people, he continues his prayer outside the synagogue by this ongoing conversation.  I believe in the traditional prayers of our church because they give us words when we don’t have any; but they must lead us into the ongoing dialogue between our hearts and God’s.

For me, this is the first step in rebuilding the Church.  Each one of us including the Pope, every Bishop, every priest and deacon, every Catholic must echo the word’s St Peter:  Lord, to who else can we go?  Then and only then will the Church begin again.

 

 

Lord Jesus, we, your broken and hurting Church, stand before you today laying bear the pain, the hurt, the mistrust in our leaders, the sorrow for those abused, and our doubts.  Lord, we have no one else to go to.  You alone have the words of life.  Give us the grace to reform your church in your image so that we may become your Body, broken and in pain, but also renewed by the healing light of your Resurrection.  Lord, heal us your people.