To get to the heart of today’s gospel, we must go back to the first century church of Mark.  Marriage was not about two people in love, romance , the wedding day, or even about the couple.  A marriage was arraigned by the parents as a way to unite two families.  One commentator put it this way:  no one chooses their parents but God, God chooses the spouse through the parents. The union of the families was for a variety of reasons, never love.  A divorce was seen as shame to both families, in particular, the bride’s family.  For her to be rejected by her husband was an affront to her father, brothers, etc.  In a society that often devalued a woman, we see one way in which she was honored.  To be rejected by her husband, her family would avenge the shame, often though blood feuds.

So how does this apply to our lives today?  The answer is found in Genesis in the creation of man and woman.  God created woman from the side of man….as his equal.  In the nuptial blessing of the wedding Mass, this is part of the prayer we could miss…”May her husband entrust his heart to her, so that acknowledging her as his equal and joint heir to the life of grace”.   The relationship of two people living in marriage is not about one having more power; the type of power that abuses…emotionally, physically, psychologically, in fact, this is so against what marriage is to be, that the abused woman or man should leave that marriage because it is so against what God intends.  Sometimes the two people are not able to make it work and the love dies.  The relationship of two people in marriage is a reflection of God’s love for us, His people.  This best definition of Christian love is found in 1 Corinthians 13,  “Love is patient and kind, etc.  If a marital relationship is not reflecting this, then the marriage is in trouble, in the Christian sense.

A Christian couple is called by God, the Father of all, to witness to all people the love that the Father has for each us.  At this Eucharist today, let us pray for all those who live in marriage that God will bless their union with his grace and peace.  Let us pray for all those are contemplating Christian marriage that they will be blessed in their life together.  Let us also prayer for those marriages in difficulty that they will experience healing.  Finally, may we remember all woman and men who have been or are in domestic violence situations.  For their healing and peace of mind and for the strength to find a way out of the abuse. 

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