Keynotes for September 2007

September 2, 2007
Twenty Second Sunday in Ordinary Time

Sirach3:17-18,20,28-29
Hebrews12:1819,22-24a
Luke14:1,7-14

Humility begins with the subordination of self to someone else so as to somehow lift that person one notch closer to the Lord. Jesus our model exemplified humility with his every intention, word and gesture. Luci Shaw, in her poem "He Who Would Be Great Among You,"describes him as "always beyond, above us," yet in each of the roles he assumed he was actually boosting us from below. Luci writes:

You whose birth broke all the
social and biological rules--
son of the poor who accepted
the worship due a king--
child progidy debating with
the Temple Th. D's--you
were the kind who used
a new math
to multiply bread, fish, faith.
You practiced a
radical sociology:
rehabilitated con men and
call girls. You valued women
and other minority groups.
A G.P., you specialized in
heart transplants.
Creator, healer,
shepherd, innovator,
storyteller, weather-maker,
botanist, alchemist,
exorcist, iconoclast,
seeker, seer, motive-sifter,
you were always beyond,
above us. Ahead
of your time, and ours.

And we would like
to be like you. Bold
as Boanerges, we hear ourselves
demand: "Admit us
to your avant-garde.
Grant us degree
in all the liberal arts of heaven."
Why our belligerence?
Why does this whiff of fame
and greatness smell so sweet?
Why must we compete
to be first? Have we fogotten
how you took simply, cool water
and a towel for our feet?
from The Book of Jesus, ed. Calvin Miller, pp559-560.

Jesus habit of subordinating himself in order to raise us up, once we begin to see it in the wharp and woof of his public life, boggles our imagination. In today's gospel he arrives as just another undistinguished guest to a wedding celebration. But the well wishers sit up and take notice when they hear him say,

For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled,
but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.

It is the paradox by which he draws all of mankind one notch closer to God, for it is his best means of informing us of how to bring the best out of ourselves. He would have us invite to our tables the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind, both because they suffer from disabilities and because they afford us opportunities to find within ourselves those nuggets of divine goodness by which we elevate them to a moment of divine gladness, and also to profit from the self sacrifice that cannot be neutralized by any here-and-now, earthly compensation.

Sirach had good reason to caution his listeners and us:
Humble yourself the more, the greater you are,
and you will find favor with God.

In his day prophets, priests, rulers, judges, seers were all of one hegemonic mind set. Placed in positions of learning, authority, and influence, they would have seen the assisting of a retard or the aiding of a village beggar or even the attending to a child as a preposterous lowering of themselves. But Sirach had come to understand how, within the Lord his God, all opposites can coincide, and thus he was equipped to warn his peers not to seek what is too sublime for them, nor to search into things beyond their strength. Their very positions tended to engender an inordinate esteem for their own faculties and talents. Officials such as these, proud, disdainful, authoritarian, are the ones that the Hebrews writer seems to be addressing in the lines that open today's passage. These in a torchlit gloom are the ones accosted by storm and trumpet blast, and pelted with a message they beg to hear no more of. The humble people, on the other hand, are summoned to that final rally where "the spirits of the just [are] made perfect." These are invited to approach Mount Zion, and to gather in the city of the living God with countless angels precisely because they have conducted their earthly lives by always taking the lowest place and by urging their fellows to move up closer to their Lord. For humble people the crowning reward of the heavenly Jerusalem will be

. . .Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant,
and the sprinkled blood that speaks more eloquently
than that of Abel.

These polar opposites make the contrast unforgetable. Abel's murder, the first recorded fratricide in human history, was humiliation in the most literal, radical sense of a bloody corpse dumped into the dirt (humus) from which it came. Jesus' execution, the one deicide that envelopes all of human history, was humiliation with divine meaning, ie of Blood sprinkled so as to keep redeeming and sanctifying fallen mankind. And the poet still thinks that we want to be like him? Well, maybe to some extent. Maybe by allowing ourselves and/or our loved ones to be lifted a notch closer to Him.

September 9, 2007
Twenty Third Sunday in Ordinary Time

Wisdom9:13-18b
Philomen9b-10, 12-17
Luke14:25-33

How can man know what God wants of him? This is an overriding concern in the Book of Wisdom. At one juncture the writer concludes:

Or who ever knew your counsel, except you had given wisdom
and sent your holy spirit from on high?. . .

Paul, Philomen and Onesimus all seem to have a firm grasp of what God wants of them. Their concern is to seek the perfection of their callings. The traveling apostle, the wealthy aristocrat, and the slave--each wants to know not just that he will be there, but what his rightful place in God's kingdom should be, and how he might be one of Christ's disciples. Each of the three is enlightened, insofar as each of them is counselled by wisdom, and visited by the Holy Spirit from on high. Our situations today are similar. There is that vague longing in you and me to fulfill the potential that the Lord has destined for us. We go about searching, probing, asking, testing. But as the Book of Wisdom says, our deliberations are timid, our plans are unsure, our minds are weighted down by the earthly shelters that encase them, ie, our corruptible bodies.

When things are in heaven, who can search them out? Only with instruction from Jesus himself shall we succeed. "Sit down and calculate," he says, "sit down and decide" how you might become my disciple. Take a hard look at the prospect, size up its demands and requirements, and examine your inner self to see if you have the resources. Make an estimate of what it is going to cost you.You may have to renounce your attachments to memberships, your estates and other holdings, your credit among the worldly, and above all you may have to surrender some affection for relatives, friends, spouses if any of these surpasses your love for Me.

Paul would have himself, Philomen and Onesimus voluntarily take one another for brothers, equal partners in a campaign to win converts for Christ. But for Philomen this entails a profound change in a personal relationship, not just in granting his slave his freedom, and not just in accepting Onesimus back on a par socially with himself, but now in treating him as a fellow in Christ. Philomen has to treat Onesimus as if he were embracing Christ himself. Paul is proposing here the equilateral pyramid of a three way partnership, one not just based among the three humans, but one with Christ as the link between every pair, and pinnacle of all three of them. If this is an adjustment hard for Philomen to make, it must be equally hard for Onesimus, to suddenly have to be a peer to two noblemen, to change all his ways of thinking so as to inject in himself and project to them a consistent attitude of a brother rather than a subordinate, to undergo the drastic transformation of identity that being Christ-like demands.

And Paul seems to imply that for the perfection of his own calling, he too must make a sacrifice. This new arrangement is going to cost Paul, in the debility of his declining years, to relinquish the one he has come to love as his own son. When changes of this severity come into our own lives, we too have to adjust. We must try to take them primarily as our opportunities to make ourselves more fitting for the Kingdom.

The message this week is: restructure your relationships, reorder your priorities, and reallign your direction, for "thus [are] the paths of those on earth made straight." Our watchword has to be: adjust, Adjust, ADJUST, as we keep tweaking our behavior. And Jesus will be with us saying to us, as Paul had said to Philomen:

I do not want to do anything without your consent,
so that the good you do might not be forced but voluntary.

Once the Holy Spirit enables us to see how it all fits with the eternal purpose designed for us, then the thrust of "Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple." will begin to make sense. The wisdom of knowing what God wants of us will again and again emerge from triangular partnerships, but only from the pinnacle of each one's pyramid is it perfected.

September 16, 2007
Twenty Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Exodus32:7-11,13-14
1Timothy1:12-17
Luke15:1-32

An OPEN LETTER to would-be suicide bombers and holy war assassins of every stripe!!

Before you strap on the explosives, take a few minutes to do three things:
1. Consider the counsels in the Scripture readings of today's Catholic Mass, the Twenty Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time.
2. When you say good bye to your friends and family, ask those who profess the same Faith as yours if they approve of your mission.
3. With all the sincerity in your heart, seek God's forgiveness for your past sins and His pardon for the deed you are about to commit.

Now take a hard look at the Scripture readings and learn how your fellow travelers fared. They were

1.a stiff necked people for whom the Lord had done many favors, and whose way of saying thanks was to fashion an animal of bronze and gold and dance in worship around it;
2.an arrogant zealot on a self-appointed mission of persecution, yanked off the case by Jesus himself and mercifully shocked into retreat and conversion;
3.an upstart in a parable characterized as a prodigal son, who one day demanded his full inheritance with all due disrespect from a dismayed but caring father, only to be humbled in his travels by strangers and by hunger and by menial jobs. But he nurtured a seed of hope in his heart that his father would take him back.

Hubristes was the cancer that all of these rebels shared in common, a contempt for believers who opposed them and the insolence to inflict their wills by force upon them. Its a sickness harbored by guerillas, gangsters, sabotuers and their like. Hubris, you remember from your study of the ancient Greek dramas, manifested itself when the hero defied the gods. It was eventually traced to one and the same source, which turned out to be the blind spot or fatal flaw in his own character. The prodigal son did not ask; he compelled his father to fork over. Paul openly spoke of using sword, chains and prison cells on his victims. And the Israelites thumbed their noses in spectacular pageantry at the God who did so much for them. All three readings reveal the tragedy of a contemptuous streak in human nature. But they are also instructive about the ways that God handles it. To you who are bent on killing others by your self destruction I point out that, in all these cases, God not only showed the perpetrators incredible mercy and allowed them to go on living, but that upon their repentance He subsequently rewarded them with an abundance of gifts and great prosperity. God, the author of all life, was determined to make these rebels realize how much He values life, and how much it should mean to His creatures.

After Moses succeeded in getting God to put aside his wrath and cool down, he reminded God of the oaths promised to his ancestors. Yes, Moses' people had already been freed from Egyptian slavery, but now they were journeying to that promised land of milk and honey, where they would in fact fulfill what God had said: "I will make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky." A more reflectiove God was not about to let a molten calf provoke Him to wreak consuming fires of chastisement on his people.

The prodigal father was likewise filled with pleasure at the return of his wayward son. Instead of looking for penalties to teach his son a lesson, he brought forth ring, robe and sandals, and ordered up the slaughter of the fattened calf for a celebration feast. And the son, who had the impudence to squander his father's gifts, what was his demeanor then? Even the older brother's claim of being slighted did not hold up in this court. His brother's "death" and return to life simply overwhelmed them all with rejoicing.

And for Paul to say, "the grace of our Lord has been abundant" was something of an understatement, given all his subsequent opportunities to exercise those teaching and preaching talents; given his bent for assembling of one congregation after another along the Mediterranean basin; given his fervor for an evangelical campaign that would set the early Christian communities on their feet. From the hurt God suffered when Paul first harmed His faithful ones, this is how He turned around and rewarded Paul.

For those of you who have similar bomb plots in mind, these are the thoughts I would thrust upon you. Consider what your life might turn out to be if you do NOT take this fatal step. Approach your friends and relatives, not with goodbyes, but with an openness to listen and let your heart be softened. Flee from the vicegrip of contempt, and you will be ready for the abundance of life that still awaits you.

September 23, 2007
Twenty Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Amos8:4-7
1Timothy2:1-8
Luke16:1-13

The meanings behind Jesus' parables are not always immediately apparent nor crystal clear. In today's gospel something that may elude our grasp is Jesus' reason for extenuating the offenses of the dishonest steward. We are puzzled that the master in this parable would actually commend the dishonest steward for acting prudently, when the steward had not only been fired for squandering the master's property but then was allowed to go about, in further dishonesty, to reduce the promissory notes of debt to the master in order to feather his own nest. What the cunning steward demonstrated was that humans are more shrewd at gaining worldly advantage than at living according to their God-given wisdom. Jesus uses him to make the point that

. . . the children of this world
are more prudent in dealing with their own generation
than are the children of light.

Here is a terminated chief-of-staff with some fire left in his belly, committed to salvaging all he can so as to perpetuate his own life of comfort and ease at his master's expense. If we, for the things that matter to God, were to take our stewardship that seriously, would we not then see clearly the dichotomy between the two masters, God and mammon? And be made habitually aware, even in our smallest thoughts and movements, of which one we were serving? Our Master Jesus who tells this parable is schooling us, here, in our true stewardship duties. Then he pops the quiz:

If, therefore, you are not trustworthy with dishonest wealth,
who will trust you with true wealth?
Would you or I, either of us, trust the machiavelian steward in the parable? O.K. Now we know which side we are on. Next question.
If you are not trustworthy with what belongs to another,
who will give you what is yours?

At least Jesus brings us to recognize that when we are devious and underhanded, the ones who will get hurt the most are ourselves. It can all start, as Jesus suggests, with "very small matters."

In the Book of Amos we witness injustice at the level of petty pilfering. Steward-ship for these merchants means slipping their furtive thumbs onto the scales so as to sway the deals to their own leverage. They devalue the ephah, inflate the shekel, wieght the scales and con a beggar out of his only pair of sandals. This grifting does not have the gravity of more serious crimes, but it lays the goundwork for the children of this world to pull off their mega-deals. And here is where that "one mediator between God and men" steps in. Paul introduces him as

the man Christ Jesus,
who gave himself as ransom for all.

The world's sins of thievery, swindling, bribery, extortion, fraud and coercion--all of them throughout history--were loaded into that one cross and laid on the shoulders of this one man, who surrendered his life in exchange for pardons for all.

What an incomprehensible sacrifice! How could the whole lot of humanity, lock, stock and barrel, even with all the goodness and sanctity it has achieved, amount to anything close to the worth of the Second Person of the Trinity? Yet from this staggering exchange Jesus took us, the "treasure" he had saved, and made us into stewards, the very guardians of the sacred treasury of himself. At every Communion he literally places himself into our hands, and thereby bestows himself as the greatest gift ever woven into our lives. There is no way we could have merited such a ransom on our own, even with the total accumulation of all the wealth that mankind has owned since Adam. So why would we waste one minute of precious thought on a cheating scheme--whether it be to sneak into a ball game or to pull off some worldwide, market-busting, headline-grabbing heist--when, as stewards, we are entrusted with a Value so much higher? So let us pray, when Jesus poses the final question of the quiz: "Just what is it that matters most to your Lord and Master?" that we shall be counted among "the children of the light" who have the answer.

September 30, 2007
Twenty Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Amos6:1a,4-7
1Timothy6:11-16
Luke16:19-31

"Woe to the complacent in Zion,"warns the prophet Amos. His words give a jump start to today's liturgy. Yet to get our attention the statement ought perhaps to say: "Woe to the complacent on planet earth." Much as times have changed in the last two millenia since Jesus completed his timeless Act of Salvation, our world still contains millions who either fail to understand or who willfully disregard Paul's instruction to Timothy, the one where he said,

Lay hold of eternal life, to which you were called
when you made the noble confession in the presence
of many witnesses.

Paul is referring to the promises that Timothy took, and every Christian takes, when they undergo baptism. At our baptisms we were asked to make three rejections, of sin, of evil, and of Satan, and we responded "I do," "I do," "I do." And in three separate statements we were invited to affirm our beliefs in the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit, and again we responded, "I do," "I do," "I do." This was our noble confession, our timeless pledge of allegiance, as it were, in answer to Jesus' singular mission and purpose, which he stated in solemn declaration before Pilate: "The reason I have come into the world is to bear witness to the truth." Today's world population is way overbalanced by those who ignore their baptismal vows, a greater proportion, perhaps, than that of the unbaptized. Complacency runs rampant everywhere over dedication and devotion. Today God's woe threatens every continent, nation and culture, even as it once seemed to hang heaviest in ancient times over His chosen people.

Look how we today resemble the wanton revelers of Zion, as we race from pleasure to pleasure, indifferent to our callings, unconcerned about why we were created, caring less about the cost of our redemption, filled only with self indulgences. How are we any different from those warned by Amos? There they were, feasting on beef and mutton, drinking wine by the bowlful, annointing themselves with oils, languishing on soft couches and sedating themselves with harp music. Do we not realize that the same perils of moral collapse surround ourselves? Are they not induced by our daily failures to reaffirm the "I do's" of our Christian pledge?

Paul charged Timothy "to keep the commandment without stain or reproach." The same applies to us. Should the great chasm in Jesus' parable between the rich man and Lazarus come as any surprise? Surely the eternal Abraham with the fullness of his power can bridge the gulf between a once comfortable Dives now tormented by ceaseless flames and the former sufferer now enjoying solace. We think so because we ourselves take so much of God's mercy for granted. I say to myself: yes I go stray, but surely He will not punish me that severely.

From the Catechism we learn:

There are two kinds of presumption. Either man presumes upon his own capacities, (hoping to be able to save himself without help from on high), or he presumes upon God's almighty power or his mercy (hoping to obtain his forgiveness without conversion, and glory without merit). 2732

The "day of infamy" that our country underwent on Nine One One witnessed a clash of the two presumptions, a victim nation smugly taking inviolability to be its divine entitlemment, and fixated assailants pervertedly presuming the reward of heaven for their suicide missions of mass destruction.The errors of both proved to be egregious, no less than those of Amos' people, or Jesus' rich man. Surely events of this nature must give us pause to ask ourselves: Of what effect is my noble confession? If I don't practice it in all seriousness, will I too end up on the wrong side of the great chasm?

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