Keynotes for February 2007

February 4, 2007

Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Isaiah 6:1-2a, 3-8
1 Corinthians15:1-11
Luke5:1-11

God's call to ministry is a phenomenon that invites close scrutiny. In the lives of certain people God has intervened in some very radical ways. When it comes to the better known saints, you and I can even recite their stories. But in lives less conspicuous, like most of ours today, divine vocation often goes unnoticed, unless we develop a habit of watching and praying. The signs that appear in today's liturgy command and focus our attention on the issues. Jesus' deed of overloading the boats with tons of fish looms in Peter's eyes as such huge generosity that it suddenly imparts a feeling of great disparity. In the presence of holiness so unexpected, he experiences the pain of a contrite sinner. Wretchedly unworthy of this encounter Peter feels like one cauterized in the Lord's searing light. The very size of the catch not only dwarfs Peter's boast of a hard night's work, but coupled with Jesus' prediction that "you will be catching men," it instantaneously and profoundly rocks the group's sense of values. In a flash he and his mates abandon the livelihood they held so dear, for pursuit of a mission with a wonder worker of unknown promises.

Pundits today like to call this swap of interior perceptions/dispositions a "paradigm shift." Its prototype is the postulate of Copernicus about the earth spinning around the sun. Instead of holding center position in the universe, the earth flips to status of mere planet among peers in various orbits. Thus the call to ministry begins to reveal its components: divine agitation followed by harsh pain, guilt or deep anguish. The paradigm shift brings disorientation and is likely to cause a reshuffle of personal values into a new hierarchy. The pain, however,is optional. Take Isaiah for an example. He hears the Seraphim's proclamation, and is terrified at his own act with unpurified lips of having beheld the Almighty. Yet no sooner is he touched by the burning ember than his purification induces a shift from self-effacement to self-promotion. I sense no recoil from flesh seared or a mouth wounded. Only the same joyful, volunteer impulse that incited the apostles.

Before submitting to his vocation, Paul, the johnny-come-lately of all the apostles, passed through every step of the overhaul. By Paul's time God had already been grooming a nascent Christianity with a world series of private apparitions. The spread of the gospel was mushrooming into a campaign for conversions across continents. So we notice that while Paul on the one hand boasts "indeed, I have toiled harder than all of them," on the other a torrent of universal grace so engulfs him so that he can see himself only as the least of its precipitators.

These thoughts ought to stir up a whirlwind of reflections about our own calls to ministry. Some of us might wonder, "Has my conversion experience already passed me by undetected?" Others may progress to: "How will I handle it when it does come my way?" Many of us ask ourselves from time to time: "Where are the signs of God's agitation in my life?" "How do I know it is He who calls?" "What does He really want from me?" No two signs strike the same person. No two persons receive the same sign. Some strike with a blinding glare that knock us off our perches; others dwell silently, unnoticed for years inside our souls. We must pray constantly for the gift of being alert and responsive, so that when the call does come we possess the eagerness of the nanosecond to shout, "Here I am; send me." From the reflection and discernment that are certain to follow will come the assurrances of your fitness.

February 11, 2007

Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Jeremiah17:5-8
1Corinthians15:12,16-20
Luke6:17,20-26

No one gets to have it both ways. Either you trust in the rewards of this world or you trust in the Lord. Either you do not believe that Christ was raised from the dead, or you do believe it. A perfunctory acceptance of Jesus these days seems widespread and commonplace. Millions of people say they believe in the resurrected Christ; they concede that He also has the power to give them everlasting life. But who will match his conduct to His every word? And obey ALL of his teachings to the letter? In today's gospel Jesus tells us, if you are hungry or poor, crying in pain or weeping in sorrow, insulted or oppressed, these are true signs of your being blessed. "Rejoice and leap for joy," he says. Am I willing to accept the gospel wages of deprivation and hatred in order to better my chances for the happiness he promises? At first thought I say, no way am I going to let these afflictions come near me! If their forces do begin to surround me, I am betting I can find acceptable compromises and still be "saved."

Ah, yes, counsels the sixteeenth century philopsoher Blaise Pascal, but you have only one life to bet, and bet it you must, all if it, on the wager "that God is." To that end you have no choice. Then he asks, what if you could bet your one life at the chance of gaining three? With an equal risk of loss versus gain, these are pretty good odds, are they not? This is where Pascal injects his famous argument:

. . .you would act stupidly, being obliged to play, by refusing to
stake one life against three at a game in which out of an infinity
of chances there is one for you. . . But there is here an infinity
of an infinitely happy life to gain, a chance of gain against a
finite number of chances of loss, and what you stake is finite.
(World Masterpieces 2, p.37)

Using the probability of a mathematician, Pascal demonstrates the odds that make us think long and hard about being rich, well fed, well entertained and well spoken of (those other gospel wages). Strive to capture all the pleasures, conquests, honors, glories, amusements and assets the world has to offer, he submits, and then see what you stand to gain and lose by having placed the whole load of your chips on this mortal coil as the be-all and end-all of existence.

Truth is, we cannot prove that Jesus rose from the dead, not scientifically, not historically, not even logically. We have only the apostles testimony to this, and that Jesus' promised eternal life to us. But if he did rise, then his own resurrection has to be the most convincing evidence possible of this guarantee, "Behold, your reward will be great in heaven."

This week Paul himself enters the glooomy passage of doubt, and confronts the terrifying specter that perhaps Christ did NOT come back to life. From this premise he draws some very depressing inferences:

your faith is in vain; you are still in your sins.
Then those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished.
If for this life only we have hoped in Christ,
we are the most pitiable people of all.

A Jesus permanently overcome by death would doom our own existences to an endless prospect of emptiness, absurdity, despair and even madness. We would be like the vegetation in Jeremiah:

He is like a barren bush in the desert
that enjoys no change of season,
but stands in a lava waste,
a salt and empty earth.

Ultimately, however, Paul reaches the jubilant conclusion (and well in advance of Pascal, thank God): "But now Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep." And so His resurrection is what makes sense of all my afflictions! Here is why the choice is so imperative. My allegiance to Jesus has to be 100%. If I do anything less, I am risking the security of my infinite happiness for a handful of sand. I am acting out Pascal's stupidity. All other alternatives are out of the question. Simply put, it comes down to what Jeremiah said in the first place:

Blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord
whose hope is in the Lord.

So, this being the case, why do I keep trying to have it both ways?

February 18, 2007

Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time
1 Samuel26:2,7-9,12-13,22-23
1 Corinthians15:45-49
Luke 6:27-38

Who are your worst enemies? Name the three at the top of your list. Do you really hate any of these? What is it about an enemy that churns up within us so much revulsion, backbiting, even the urge to destroy? Today Jesus introduces us to the innermost sanctum of his teaching. Today he forces us to confront the sparkplug of Christianity: "love your enemies." There is truly a sense in which every Christian must be like that pair of electrodes, opposites that draw the current across an arc from negative to positive. The mandate to each of us is to keep channeling the current upward, not to allow the force of love to reverse itself, never to permit a backward flow that can weaken, neutralize or deaden us.This analogy may limp, but the concept is even harder to practice, because we are so prone to insulate our precious egos with self-defenses, to protect our delicate souls behind thick-walled barricades, even to lash out with weapons in counter-offense. Jesus' mandate to keep injecting the jolts of his love into the world means constantly putting ourselves at great risk. We repeatedly fall back into such reasoning as the following:

If I am kind to ungrateful or wicked people, what will happen to me? What if I do bless those who curse me? actually pray for those who mistreat me? consistently do good to those who hate me? What if (God forbid) I were to get a reputation for turning the other cheek? Will I not have forsaken my natural immunities? left myself open to abuse? invited ridicule? allowed myself to be the butt of jokes? How can an all-caring Jesus, who knows better than anyone the viciousness of human nature, ask us to LOVE our enemies? If we take Him literally and try physically to live by these words, our enemies will use us for punching bags. They will wipe up the floor with us. They will devour us.

We all know that the causes of enmity are so multifarious and widespread as to defy categorizing. No one has ever tried to inventory them. But even if we did begin to gain an understanding of where animosity comes from, and even if we did find ways to harness its impulses, will we ever succeed in producing a cure for this blight upon humanity? Nevertheless, if you and I look within ourselves, deeply and honestly, for what makes certain persons despicable, there at that spot we shall also discover our own personal proclivity for how to love an enemy. The readings today tell us much about ourselves. They help to explain why God's love surging through us MUST generate a love for those around us, even those who oppose us. Each of us is expected to behave this way because each of us is endowed with a life-giving spirit, a penchant for justice, and a call to be merciful.

When Paul told the Corinthians:
The first man was from the earth, earthly;
the second man, from heaven,

he avered that human nature is a composite of spirit and matter. We are equipped to imitate Christ as well as Adam. If we were earthbound creatures only, like the animals, then our survival would depend upon our adaptability, and that would, on occasion, mandate the fighting of fellow humans who seek to overpower us. But because we also bear the image of the heavenly one, our true survival is guaranteed by the One who rose from the dead. The human spirits of us men and women, once linked by the Spirit of the heavenly one, dare not interfere with one another's well being, for we are all destined to the same final unification. The charge of the Spirit is one directional. It sweeps us along in a cumulative current that makes us always of assistance, never of resistance, to our brothers and sisters.

The penchant for justice is examplified by David when he has the perfect opportunity to kill Saul. Abishai steps forward thinking they are duty bound to slay this enemy on the spot, assuming they owe this much to their compatriots. But David regards the Lord's anointing of Saul as an immunity that no warrior dare violate. David sublimates the fight when he parries the menacing blows of his opponent not with harm and damage back to him, but with a counter thrust of the Lord's invention. He trots to the hilltop with Saul's spear and stabs it into the ground as proof to both sides that he could have taken Saul's life but deliberately chose not to. Thus he demonstrates to them all how "The Lord will reward each man for his justice and faithfulness." If David had dispatched Saul, would he have done wrong? No, not in terms of warfare, it conventions, the "rules of engagement" or any of life's earthly measurements. Did David, by his refusal, put his own life at greater risk? Yes, for he knew Sauls' legions would grant no such amnesty once the circumstances were reversed.

David's reprieve of Saul foreshadows Jesus' handling of his enemies; it also exemplifies how the Lord pardons of us for our offenses. With our natures supercharged by forgiveness, we in turn discover how much more rewarding it is to not demand back what is taken from us, to lend without expecting repayment, to let go of our tunic as well as our cloak, to pray for those who mistreat us. We are now on the road to becoming merciful as our Father is merciful. Paul and David were enabled by Jesus to lift up their opponents because they found within themselves the justice and mercy to do so. Do you and I not have within ourselves the same strengths? Are we not ignited by the same sparks as they were? And drawn to the same rewards? Well now, maybe its time for us to sit down and rethink those names on our list.

February 21, 2007

Ash Wednesday

Joel2:12-18;
2Corinthians5:20-6:2;
Matthew6:1-6,16-18

The ashes on our foreheads today announce that "We are ambassadors for Christ." Paul's terse directive to the Corinthians is likewise our invitation to diplomacy school. In that ambassadors are go-betweens, Jesus serves as model for all ambassadors, entreating us to accept the terms of God and pleading with God to take us back. To learn our roles as likeminded emissaries we must, in similar fashion, turn both inward and outward. We negotiate with our neighbors to bring them to God, but not before we turn ourselves to God first. On this mission we are trained to look inward first, then outward! Paul implores us no less than he did his contemporaries, ". . . in Christ's name: be reconciled to God!"

Our job as ambassadors is to bring about a mutually desired change in those to whom we are sent. In what he did for us, Jesus was striving to effect the desired change first and foremost within ourselves, that we might thereafter bring it about in others. But the extreme to which he went was incredible. The gist of it, as Paul puts it, should make us gasp:

For our sakes God made him who did not know sin, to be sin
so that in him we might become the very holiness of God.

What an astonishing means to an otherwise unbelievable objective! As the meaning of the Pauline paradox begins to sink in, it should cause us to blanch, squirm, even run for the exits. Must an ambassador for Christ part with all his sinfulness? Am I expected to make expiation for the sins of others? Is this to be an atonement of such perfection as to require me to die for it? No. Jesus' answer right there in the gospel is astonishingly less demanding: all he says is, give your alms in secret, pray to your Father in private, keep your fast hidden.

In a recent Sunday gospel, Jesus urged us to let our lights shine before the world. We are the salt of the earth, he told us. And now he is instructing us to act in ways unseen? There is a distinction, to be sure, but not a contradiction. Those for prominent display are our good works in general, potentially of a great variety. The penances called for on Ash Wednesday are only these three religious acts: alms, prayer and fasting. The performance of each will be wasted if done for men to behold or to be impressed by. But done without witnesses, before the unseen Father, they do indeed become our diplomatic overtures. They demonstrate the change taking place within ourselves. They are designed to appease, assuage, molify the Recipient. Such must be the whole tenor of our new posture, now that Lent has arrived. Joel the prophet summons the congregation, summons the assembly, calls for fasts, offerings and libations. He nudges us novice envoys into the presence of a Deity who is benign and receptive:

For gracious and merciful is he,
slow to anger, rich in kindness,
and relenting in punishment.
Perhaps he will again relent,
and leave behind him a blessing. . .

Today with confidence we can stir the Lord to concern because we share in Jesus' work of reparation, which was the offering of himself. Yes, we may have doubted that we are of any rank in God's eyes; we may utterly have refused to admit that we have gifts or skills at dealing and negotiating with others, let alone God Himself. After all, how can a tiny creature influence, let alone change, the mind of infinite wisdom? Yet with the sacrifice of Jesus as our petition, this is in fact what happens. What greater hope can be held out to us? While this day of ashes, mourning and weeping is casting our spirits into the depths of humility, it also is raising our hearts to the heights of exhiliration, at the prospect of becoming the very holiness of God. Here is the diploma that shall be awarded to us at the end of our Lenten exercises, if we have truly learned how to be His diplomats.

February 25, 2007

First Sunday of Lent
Deuteronomy26:4-10
Romans10:8-13
Luke4:1-3

Dependence, independence, interdependence. Stephen Covey's paradigm of how human relationships grow and develop may be useful in explaining why God's deliverance of the Israelites from Egyptian slavery seemed so easy for both the liberator and the captives, while Jesus' mission of rescuing the human race from the bondage of Satan looms as much more difficult for both sides.

The story of the Exodus is couched in terms of the earliest stage. Moses certainly makes no attempt to hide his tribe's dependence upon the God with whom they have found so much favor. Their demeanor is remineniscent of the young child's cry that a bully is mistreating him, knowing it will provoke daddy's sympathy. God reacts as they expect. "With his strong hand and outstretched arm, with terrifying power, with signs and wonders" He makes all the maltreatment go away. Without effort, it seems, God releases them, gives them a free ride to safety, to a land of milk and honey. The Israelites are His protected children.

The ordeal of Jesus' temptations, by contrast, is a second stage drama, one that puts him in a position not unlike the frustrated parents of truant teen agers. They have to keep trying to cope with and overcome their offsprings' insubordination and defiance, just as Jesus is in a bout with the wiles of a cagey devil. Of the thousands of people Jesus encountered face to face during his lifetime, a great many no doubt felt their own values far surpassed his. In their minds they entertained hopes and dreams, plans and expectations far beyond (and quite divergent from) the focus of his proposals. To obey even one of Jesus' directives would, to them, have seemed self-demeaning, and to actually follow him was thought by many to be utterly ridiculous. In today's gospel the devil, while tempting Jesus in the desert, personifies this adolescent attitude, mimicking those independent humans he would gladly ensnare. The devil comes across as the one who knows it all, has all the grand designs, gives all the orders. His test of Jesus was not to exploit a proneness to sin, for he knew such was not a part of Jesus' natures either human or divine. What is under siege here is Jesus' resolve, his determination to make manifest the excesses of appetite, possession and power in the human nature that he must extricate.

Inordinate appetite, exhibited by the deadly sins of Gluttony and Lust, is the first monster Jesus must deal with, and the devil's snap-finger solution is to have him "command this stone to become bread." Overambitious power, displayed in Pride and Anger, is Jesus' second obstacle. Here the devil pops a trade idea, offering him instant power and glory over all the kingdoms of the world "if you worship me." The third feat--subduing the insinuations of Envy and Avarice, --man's acquisition instincts run amok-- might seem to Jesus like some Herculean labor, like conquering the laws of nature. Yet the devil's answer is a simple fiat. Just call out the angels to suspend gravity. i.e., use your temple-guard minions to assert who you really are. Notice that beneath all these temptations lurks the effortless, painless short circuit to a quick fix known as Sloth. Given the enormity of the task, the devil's tricks arise from jejune presumptions. The point is, his naivete keeps parading the facile, pretentious independence of Jesus' contemporaries in the same ways they were wont to display it.

If the Exodus exemplifies dependence, and the three temptations illustrate independence, then the third stage--interdependence--is the environment that the gospel of Jesus would have us create in our lives today. In Covey's description,

Interdependence opens up worlds of possibilities for deep, rich, meaningful associations, for geometrically increased productivity, for serving, for contributing, for learning, for growing. But it is also where we feel the greatest pain, the greatest frustration, the greatest roadblocks to happiness and success. (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,187)

Ah, yes, this is why we, like Jesus' contemporaries, would rather cling to our independence. We too insist on defining happiness and success according to our own terms, and not by those God has spelled out for us. Here's the rub. The interdependence of relationships is to be fostered within the divine milieu of the New Covenant, ie, the environment designed for us by Jesus' teaching and his mission. This is a phenomenon that we, just getting into the twenty first century, have scarcely begun to appreciate! In simplest terms, we are talking about the plan that Paul first spelled out for the Romans, yet seems to fitting for us:

. . .if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord
and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead,
you will be saved.

This interdependent level is triagular. As Jesus entrusts himself to you and me, we in turn are expected to believe him in our hearts and profess him in our speech. As Jesus entrusts himself to the rest of our church membership, they must do the same with him. And then cross-wise, there must be a reciprocity of trust and confession of faith between ourselves and our fellow Christians. Its the network that grows by learning, learns through suffering, and suffers toward success and happiness through pain and frustration. If we can learn to treat one another without any special deference to our backgrounds, our social standings, or even to our respect for various ministries, then we shall have reached the ideal where

the same Lord is Lord of all,
enriching all who call upon him.
For everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.

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