The Triumph of the cross Sept 14 Homily by Fr Mathew

Reading I: Numbers 21:4b-9

Responsorial Psalm 78:1bc-2, 34-35, 36-37, 38

Reading II: Philippians 2:6-11

Gospel: John 3:13-17

Mark Link SJ tells a story about two friends, Ann Thomas and Betty, who were at a garage sale. Ann couldn't find anything worth buying as she fumbled through many things displayed at the garage sale. Betty while looking around found a very antique cross among many junks and she thought it was a treasure. When she got home she was surprised to know the cross that was abandoned by everyone was made of silver and it was of immense value worth of thousands of dollars. Later when Betty’s seven year old looked at the cross he suddenly began to cry. “What’s the matter”, asked Betty. “Look at Jesus”, said the boy crying, “He’s on the cross and is in pain.”

Three people looked at the same cross: one saw junk, another saw treasure worth thousands of dollars and the third saw Jesus.

Many a time we are confused about the meaning of the cross in our salvation history.  Today’s readings throw a little light on this. In the first reading we hear about the ingratitude of the Israelites who turned against Moses by grumbling and casting aspersions on God. For their sin, they paid a big price; they were bitten by fiery venomous snakes and died a painful death.

The Israelites, being aware of their sins called to God and said, “We sinned, take the snakes from among us.” God instructed Moses to fashion a bronze serpent and affix it on a pole. The people are to gaze upon this symbol. Everyone who did was healed of their wounds.

My friends, this story tell us the profound truth about our life which is shadowed by the corruption of sin.  Doesn't the serpent that bit the Israelites in the desert point to the serpent in the Garden?  Are we not bitten by that serpent?   The little white lies, the sinful desires, the lusts, the laziness, the judgmental attitude that we harbor in our hearts against our brothers and sisters are indicative of the severity of that venomous bite of the serpent, sin..

That incident in Israel’s history became a prefiguring of Jesus Christ on a cross, lifted up, who became a symbol of wicked sin for us. Salvation, spiritual healing, re-birth comes from simply looking at Him, and, in that look, believing that hope comes only from trust in Him(John 3:14).

The cross is the intersection of God’s love. At the time of Jesus’ death on the cross, “the veil of the temple was rent in two from the top even to the bottom: and the earth quaked and the rocks were rent" (Matthew 27: 51). God deliberately tore the curtain of the temple that separated the Sanctuary from the ordinary people in the nave of the temple to make a point —that mankind's sins, which had cut us off from Him could now be forgiven through Jesus Christ's blood shed on the cross. It means there are no more  barriers that prevent us from having direct communion with God.

The cross is like a" medicine time capsule" that is being dissolved from time to time into the stream of our sick consciousness.. It has challenged us, our life, attitudes, prejudices, our arrogance and the profundity of our deviation from the very message of Christ. Fr Ron Rolheiser describes this in a beautiful way like this:

"Christianity is 2000 years old, but it took us nearly 1900 years to fully grasp the fact that slavery is wrong, that it goes against heart of Jesus’ teaching. The same can be said about the equality of women. Much of what Jesus revealed to us is like a time-released medicine capsule. Throughout the centuries, slowly, gradually, incrementally, Jesus’ message is dissolving more deeply into our consciousness.”

He continues “And this is particularly true about our understanding of the cross and what it teaches. For example: There have been popes for 2000 years, beginning with Peter, but it was only the last Pope, John Paul II, in our own generation, who stood up and said with clarity that capital punishment is wrong (independent of any arguments about whether or not it is a deterrent, brings closure to the victims’ families or not, or can be argued in terms of justice) Capital punishment is wrong because it goes against the heart of the gospel as revealed in the cross, namely, that we should forgive murderers, not kill them.”

Many a time we lose the meaning and the significance of the cross in our lives. I guarantee you many things will happen in the life of humanity with regard to our outlook and perspective of life in the years to come because of the cross.The cross will be "the guardian of our consciousness" which will help us straighten our life in conformity with the message of Christ.

August 31, 2014 Homily

By Father Mathew

A farmer went to town to buy a truck.  The salesman told him that the truck would cost $21,500.

So the farmer was about to write a check for $21,500, the salesman told him that it was the basic price and with options it would cost $25,500.

With reluctance, the farmer wrote a check for $25,500.

A few months later the salesman called the farmer and told him that he wanted to buy a cow.  The salesman came to the farm and the farmer said the price of the cow would be $500.  When the salesman was about to write a check for $500 for the cow, the farmer said, “Wait a minute, that was just the basic price of the cow.”

Then he gave the salesman a final bill which read like this: Basic Cow $ 500. Extra stomach, $75 Milk storage $100, Straw Cycle Compartment, $275, Automatic Rear Flyswatter$125, Natural Fertilizer Outlet$ 175; Total with all options $1,250

Whether you are to buy a car or a cow, you've got to get to what we call “the bottom line.”

What is the bottom line of following Christ?  In the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer “When Jesus calls you to follow Him, He bids you to die.”

In 2003 the Church of Holy Cross was broken into twice.

The first time they stole some money boxes.  The second time they did something strange.  The Holy Cross Church has a huge cross.  The thieves unbolted the 4’, 200-lb. plaster Jesus from the crucifix, but left behind the wooden cross to which Jesus was attached.

They left the cross and took Jesus!  Perhaps we Christians, the followers of Christ, do the same.  We take Jesus and leave the cross behind.

Take up your cross and deny yourself and follow me.  That is the command He gave all his followers who want to walk in his footsteps.  It sounds a little hard, right?  The meaning of that verse is “expend your life.”

When I was a little young boy growing up among eight siblings, we didn't have any luxury as much as the kids have nowadays and my father used to buy ice cream bars once a year for us.  Since it was a very rare thing, one of my siblings wouldn't eat it, he wouldn't take a bite from it hoping that it would last forever.  Every now and then he would lick it.  Finally, it would melt on him, while we enjoyed our ice cream.

Recently I saw a video of a young girl of four years embracing her 1-year-old brother crying “You are so cute, I don’t want you to grow up.”

If you don’t use it, you will lose it.

In today’s second reading to the Romans, Paul says “you may discern what is the will of God.”  God has a plan for your life and my life.  Expend that life the way God wants of us.  If you don’t use it, you will lose it.  In other words, it means an open and honest relationship with God.  You are like a blank check – a blank paper – and God writes the value, God writes the numbers.  It is a daily quest to discover what God wishes of us.  I know it is not easy.

That is what happened to Jeremiah as we read in today’s first reading.  Jeremiah was open to God.  God said to him to become a prophet for him.  A prophet is the public conscience of people.  So he started talking about their real life which was against God’s will and so they didn’t like the prophet Jeremiah and they pushed him in a cistern and left him to die.  And Jeremiah laments “You duped me.”

What is it that God wishes you to do in your life as his follower? 

James Foley felt he was being called to become a journalist.  He wanted to tell stories about human misery.  As a journalist while he was in Libya he was detained for 44 days.  Later after his release from the detention in Libya in an interview he said “I began to pray the rosary.  It was what my mother and my grandmother would have prayed . . . my colleague and I prayed together out loud.  I felt energizing to speak our weaknesses and hopes together, as if in a conversation with God, rather than silently and alone.”  Later he was in Syria and he was kidnapped by the terrorists and he was beheaded.   That is how James Foley followed Jesus in his footsteps.  How do you feel being called by Jesus to walk in his footsteps?

Everything that blossoms dies.  We are in September, and summer is dying.  Summer will give way to autumn with its colorful trees.  Autumn will give way to winter.  During that time the whole place will be covered with snow.  Everything dies, even the germs die.  Winter will give way to spring with new life everywhere.  Everything that blossoms dies.  There will come a day when you and I will die.  We believe in more that death.  We believe in dying and rising.  That is why we place everything on the altar at the time of the offertory – our whole life we give to God.  By giving our whole life to God, we believe that we are born into the life that never, never dies.

Fr Mathew's Homily: A 23 rd Sunday

First reading from Ezekiel: If your brother dies in his sin, you will be held accountable. In other words, you are your brother’s keeper.

Paul reminds us that love, tested in immediate relationship with our neighbor, is the fulfillment of all laws. The dramatic sins of adultery, murder, and stealing are violations of the law of love as they reflect selfishness, manipulation, and egotism.

The gospel presents three strategies for conflict resolution: They’re confrontation, negotiation, and adjudication. In ecclesiastical terminology, adjudication is called excommunication.

The force of excommunication is lost on American individualists who have little allegiance to any group, including family.  Americans prefer to “go it alone” and “do it my way.”(Remember the song, “I did it my way”). “See if I care. I gotta be me

Without community and family one is effectively dead. When we exclude family and community, and only “I” matters, spiritually we’re committing suicide because God is Trinity, Family and Community.

What is sin? I am not asking you the Baltimore catechism definition of Sin! Sin is brokenness in our life. It’s a disarray and rupture in us and in our relationship with God.It is disharmony; it is isolation.

It's in this context Jesus says in today's gospel, ‘If two or more gathered in my name I will be there.” When there is harmony God is there because God is, as I mentioned before, Trinity: God is community, family, harmony and a flow of relationships.

What is hell? The real hell is disharmony, disconnection. It is the land of brokenness Some people think that heaven and hell start only after death. That is not true. Heaven and hell start here on this earth right now as we're alive.  When we are in disarray- when there is brokenness in our relationships whether in our families or communities, we start hell here.  

We initiate here either hell or heaven depending on our relationships and then it’s perpetuated here after our death. According to Teresa of Avila, our relationships in community and family are the indicators of our greater relationship to God than the heights of mystical prayer.

A few years ago, there was a picture in "Outdoor" magazine of two huge and beautiful mules that had died horrible deaths.  These two deer mules had gotten into a fight, locked horns, and could not get free. They died with horns tightly in place.

Let me tell you, there are a lot of people who have locked horns with someone, and as a result, are dying a slow, bitter and agonizing death.  We start dying here with horns pinned and that gradual spiritual death becomes complete after our physical death by ending up in real hell.

In his book “The Great Divorce”, C. S. Lewis, the great Christian apologist, draws a stark picture of hell. -According to him, hell is like a great, vast city, a city inhabited only at its outer edges, with rows and rows of empty houses in the middle. These houses in the middle are empty because everyone who once lived there has quarreled with the neighbors and moved.

Then, they quarreled with the new neighbors and moved again, leaving the streets and the houses of their old neighborhoods empty and barren. Lewis says, ‘That is how hell has gotten so large. It is empty at its center and inhabited only at the outer edges, because everyone chose distance instead of honest confrontation when it came to dealing with their relationships.

From this it is very obvious that reconciliation and harmony are “sine qua non” conditions in our spiritual life without which we can not enter heaven.

Reconciliation implies two people.  It may take many years to happen.  However, forgiveness can happen in two minutes. Why forgive?

A couple years ago, during one summer there was power outage in Mattawan. There was no electricity for five days in my house.

I have an old refrigerator downstairs in the basement, besides one I have in the Kitchen. I had kept some fish and meat in that old refrigerator in the basement.   For some reason, I had forgotten all about the meat and fish in the refrigerator in the basement during the outage.One day as I was going to the car garage through the basement I felt a foul smell.

I followed the odor, and it took me to that back room off the rectory basement. It was coming from the refrigerator.  When I opened its door, it almost knocked me over. I won't give you the gross details of what I saw and smelled - but I'm sure you can imagine it.  I spent the next two hours emptying and cleaning the refrigerator, and spraying Lysol into the air, and lighting candles and doing everything I could do… to get that smell out of the air.

Why should I forgive?  When I harbor anger and revenge and hateful thoughts, I am like that rotten refrigerator. We are like walking- rotting -open garbage bag emitting foul smell.  With that foul smell, do you think you can ever enter heaven?

Final thoughts: 

Here are a few questions for our reflection

---Do I have any unfinished business in my life with regard to my relationships to any members of my family or community?

---By evaluating my emotions with regard to my relationships, can I say there is no brokenness and rupture and disharmony in my relationship to my family and community and thereby to God?

---If I die right now, because I have started heaven here on this earth and because of my optimum relationship with my family and community, can I say I can claim heaven in the life after death?

---Because of my unfinished business with the members of family and community, am I walking around like garbage bag diffusing foul smell?

---If so what steps have I taken to dispose of that smelly garbage bag of hate and anger that I have been carrying around?

Teachable Moments

Our family was invited to a co-worker's home for dinner this weekend. When they were new to the company, we invited their family to our house and, now that they were settled, they reciprocated. We were looking forward to the dinner because their children are similar in age to ours and we knew they were a very faith-filled Christian family; homeschooling their children and even serving as foreign missionaries in the past.

Just as we were about to pray before dinner, our guest apologized to us for serving a meal that included beef and, because we were Catholics, he knew that we didn't eat meat on Fridays. Since it's August, I laughed because I thought he was teasing us. Then, I was confused because he was genuinely worried that he had offended us. What a considerate host and what a misunderstanding! I assured him that Catholics only refrain from eating meat on Fridays during Lent.

Then, seeing this as an opportunity to teach more about our Catholic faith, I told him that we deny ourselves each week during Lent so that, in a small way, we suffer because Christ suffered and died for us. This discipline is sometimes misunderstood even by Catholics. In Jesus' time and area of the world, fish was an inexpensive, everyday food. Beef was an expensive, specialty food. Today in our area of the world, it's just the opposite. Ground beef is relatively inexpensive and common. The practice of the early Christians who ate fish on Fridays was a way to deny the best foods for themselves on that one day of the week that Jesus died.  If we truly wanted to sacrifice and deny ourselves the best foods on Friday, we would not eat a specialty food like fish or shrimp. We'd eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches; a cheap, common food. Going to Red Lobster or a fish fry is yummy and enjoyable, but hardly a sacrifice.

Later, when reflecting on the evening, I was surprised again that our friends did not know that Catholics go meatless on Fridays only during Lent. It reinforced my awareness of what Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen said, "There are not one hundred people in the United States who hate The Catholic Church, but there are millions who hate what they wrongly perceive the Catholic Church to be." Not that our friends hate the Catholic Church, they just don't know the beauty, dept, and timelessness of our faith. It's up to us to teach our family and friends during teachable moments like this one.

Learn more about Catholic apologetics so that you can teach and defend your Catholic Faith at work, school, the sports field, the playground, the gym, the neighborhood, the airport, the garage sale, the grocery, etc.

Authentic Disciples Only

In Matthew 5, Jesus gives us the Beatitudes and the examples of Salt and Light, and then He says, "Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish but to fulfill it." 

He's just spoken in a revolutionary way, contrary to the worldly view of poverty, peace, and persecution in the Beatitudes, and then he says, 'I'm not abolishing the law." How can this be? He then drops another bombshell when he says, almost casually, "'You've heard it said, but I say...'" Robert Barron explains that Jesus refers to the Torah here. He seems to be saying that what is written in the Torah, the most holy scripture to the Jewish people, is not as important as what I'm about to tell you. Now that's confidence, audacity, boldness, and even dangerous. What Jesus is doing here is enforcing the law and making it so clear, no one can misunderstand the demands of God. The pharisees had gotten good at following the law but doing evil to others. We can't just look good to the people we see at church each weekend. We have to be holy inside and out; authentic and genuine. 

Jesus says that being angry with your brother is murder and loving your neighbor isn't good enough. You must love your enemies too. He says adultery is not just doing something with the body, it's doing something with the eyes and the mind too. He teaches us not to calculate or be overly conscious of our tithing; in other words, be overly generous and expect nothing in return. We should deny and discipline ourselves often, stop worrying about the details, stop trying to control our own lives, pray as if everything depended on it (it does), and refrain from retaliating when attacked or insulted. We need to love; freely, completely, faithfully, always, and we need to forgive because we have been forgiven. Not even a pharisee could miss the teaching from Matthew 5.

House Building

If you are like me and have been on this Christian journey for a while, it is easy to feel 'accomplished' or 'finished.' You do not resemble the person you were years or even months ago. Christ has conquered some of the bad habits and character flaws and you look and feel like a "good person." When this happens, I feel like it would be natural for things to now go smoothly. When troubles come along, like sickness, car repairs, people conflicts, money shortages, or new temptations, I am disappointed. These things were necessary to help me become a better person in my bad-old-days, but why do I have them now? The answer is that God is forcing each of us on. He's putting us in situations where we will have to be more patient, braver, careful, and more faithful than we ever dreamed of being before. It seems unnecessary, but that is because we have no idea of the person he is planning for us to be.

C.S. Lewis quotes George McDonald in Mere Christianity when he tells this parable: "Imagine yourself a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first you can understand what he is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof. You knew those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But then He starts knocking the house about that hurts abominably and does not seem to make sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house than you thought of. He's throwing out a new wing here, putting in an extra floor there, putting up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself."

We may say, "I never expected to be a saint. I just wanted to be a decent, ordinary person," but this is a fatal mistake. Although it sounds humble, it's actually laziness and cowardice. Of course we never wanted and never asked to be made into the perfect person He is going to make us into, but the question is not what we intended ourselves to be but what He intended us to be when he made us. He is the inventor. We are only the machine. He is the painter. We are only the picture. His goal is to make us saints. We are the only obstacle to this process.

Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis

The Purpose of the Rear View Mirror

When my oldest son took driver's education he learned that he knew less about operating a car than he thought. One of his biggest 'ah, ha' moments was when he learned the true purpose of the rear view mirror. He learned that it was indeed not for monitoring what's going on in the back seat and catching a child doing something he shouldn't! A rear view mirror allows the driver to clearly see what's going on outside and around the car, to gauge where the car is in relation to other obstacles, to help anticipate dangerous situations, and to take advantage of safe opportunities on the road.

Likewise, when my second son took driver's education, he learned the true purpose of the hazard lights button. It was not, in fact, a button to be pushed just before the car exploded to signal a warning to other driver's who might be caught in the blast radius! Hazard lights indicate to other drivers to use care in approaching, overtaking, or passing. They signal that there is an emergency, such as, a mechanical breakdown or car accident.

I believe that if we all had a better understanding of the true purpose of the Catholic Mass, we would never, EVER miss another Sunday or Holy Day of Obligation!

The Mass is not about God catching us doing something wrong and His opportunity to punish us. The Mass is not something we seek out when all else fails and we are in imminent danger. The Mass is a Love Story. It's about a groom seeking His bride. It's a wedding feast. It's a free gift of sanctifying grace. The Mass is about our selfless offering, His selfless sacrifice, His VERY PRESENCE. The Mass is about community and family. Its about support, guidance, encouragement, and instruction. The Mass is about contrition, forgiveness, and mercy. It's about boosting morale, summoning His strength and courage, and sending us out to bring Christ to the world!

If you've been away from the Mass or you don't recognize anything in the above paragraph as relating to the Mass you've been to lately, I encourage you first to pray for God's free gift of Faith; one of the Theological Virtues. Secondly, educate yourself about what's really and truly happening at every Mass. I recommend Behold The Mystery: A Deeper Understanding of the Catholic Mass by Mark Hart (2014). The best thing about the Mass is that even if you don't understand or even recognize the miracle happening there, you still receive all the grace (Christ's Very Life) when you give your full, active, and conscious participation!

Don't miss Mass this weekend!