Trinity 2 – reflection from 2023 & 2020
Forgive and be merciful
That may be your best gift on this Father’s Day weekend. Forgiveness is the only thing that is new. The world contains only one thing that is truly novel, forgiveness. Everything else is an old tape repeating itself endlessly over and over again. There is normally only one song that gets sung: betrayal-hurt-resentment-non-forgiveness. That pattern never changes. There is an unbroken chain of unforgiven resentment and anger stretching back to Adam and Eve.
We are all part of that chain. Everyone is wounded and everyone wounds. Everyone sins and everyone is sinned against. Everyone needs to forgive and everyone needs to be forgiven. Betrayal is an archetypal structure within the human soul, just as sin is innate within the human condition. We, all of us, betray and sin. We betray ourselves, betray our loved ones, betray our communities, and sin against our God. Everyone stands in need of forgiveness.
But we are also, each one of us, betrayed and sinned against. We are betrayed by our loved ones, by our families, and, in a manner of speaking, even by our God. Hence, as badly as we need to be forgiven, we also need to forgive.
We have hurt others and we have been hurt. We have sinned and we have been sinned against and when we wake up to that we have a choice: Like Judas we can cleanse ourselves of this, figuratively speaking, by taking what we have gained by our sin, the thirty pieces of silver, and throwing it back into the temple and walking away, purified, but unforgiven, walking straight towards suicide. Conversely, though, we can do like Peter, after his great betrayal, weep bitterly and then return, humbled, compromised and scarred, but forgiven, walking solidly into life. In forgiveness lies the difference between the choice for suicide and the choice for life. But forgiveness is not easy. An old adage says: To err is human, to forgive is divine.
Trinity 2 – reflection from 2022 & 2019 & 2015
Party or Perish!
Last Sunday featured an intense and shocking parable about our readiness, our fruitfulness, and our decision to accept and enter the Kingdom of God or not. The Lord has used the story of a rich man and a poor man named Lazarus. This parable is shocking and speaks to the great and dramatic decision to which we are all summoned: Will we accept the Kingdom of God, entering into it and accepting its terms, or not? It is a decision on which your destiny (and that of those you love) depends. And Jesus is not playing around; He lays out the drama in stark and shocking ways. Jesus is not the harmless hippie or the mild-mannered Messiah that many today have recast Him to be. He is the Great Prophet, the very Son of God and Lord who authoritatively stands before us and says, “Decide.”
Today’s gospel is perhaps the most shocking and dramatic of all. The Lord Jesus issues another urgent summons to the Kingdom, the parable of the wedding banquet. As with the past Sunday, there is the warning of hellish destruction in the refusal of the Kingdom. But this view must be balanced with the vision of a seeking Lord who wants to fill His banquet and will not stop urging until the end. You might say that the theme of this gospel is “Party or Perish!” From Jesus’ banquet parables we realize that he knows all about empty places at table, invitations refused, lack of interest in him and his closeness. For us, the empty places at the table of the Lord’s wedding feast, whether excusable or not, are no longer a parable but a reality in this very country to which he had revealed his closeness in a special way. Jesus also knew about guests who come to the banquet without being robed in the wedding garment – they come not to rejoice in his presence but merely out of habit, since their hearts are elsewhere. Those who do not live their faith as love are not ready for the banquet and are cast out. Eucharistic communion requires faith, but faith requires love; otherwise, even as faith, it is dead.
Trinity 2 – reflection from 2021 & 2018
Fleeing from God! Our daily dread
This Sunday’s Gospel is the account of the “great supper” in Luke 14:16. They declined the invitation…they began to make excuses…they did not want to get involved…they ignored the voice, the face of God in the master of the house…they fled from God. Fleeing from God! You can flee from God, being Christian, being a priest, bishop…we all are able to flee from God. It is a daily temptation. To not listen to God, not listen to his voice, not accept his invitation to the supper.
The Old Testament prophet Jonah’s effort to escape God was direct and born of a desire to not be “bothered”, but there are other ways to flee from God, a bit more educated, a bit more sophisticated. The guests mentioned in the Gospel, who declined the master’s invitation, were decent people, wealthy and well-mannered and, I imagine, faithful people and loyal to their human priorities or agendas. In other words, they were busy. The invitation came at a “bad time”.
Why did they all flee from God? Because their hearts were closed, and when your heart is closed, you cannot hear the voice of God. Instead, the poor, the maimed, the halt and the blind answered the call, because their hearts were opened…they were longing for God. The important key element of our salvation-is being attached to God himself, not to the things of God or to good acts.
Jonah had a plan for his life: he wanted to write his own life, as did the guests in the gospel account. They had a plan of work but not a plan that worked well for their salvation; those who were brought in, however, let God write their life. Their “yes” changed everything, that night, because the Lord had drawn near them.
Are you able to hear God’s voice in the story of each day? Do you let his surprises speak to you? Or are your own ideas, your “plan for your life” the only thing that matters? Do you let God speak to you on daily basis? Do you try to listen to his voice? Or do you like to follow your own will, meaning living your life as if you were in control? Do we let God write our lives? Or do we want to do the writing ourselves?
Trinity 2 – reflection from 2016
Why Church?
Many people today, especially younger generations, say that they do believe in God and in fact that they are on a spiritual quest. But they do not need an organized religion to help them.
This Sunday’s readings will make the question especially poignant. To say it in another way, why would Anglican Catholics go each week to be given a flat wafer called a “host”, along with a small sip of wine? It seems like a lot of trouble, and appears to have little to do with the “spiritual quest”. Our answer that the host is no longer “bread” but has undergone “transubstantiation”. In simpler words, even though it has the appearance of a piece of bread, its substance has been transformed from that of bread to that of Christ’s body. Ditto for the wine.
Non church believers might reply, “God and spirituality are something interior, something private. Isn’t it the point that we should help each other? Why can’t we do it without all the paraphernalia, without all this ‘body and blood’ business?” Nonsense. Yes, we human beings have a spiritual “insides” and it is very important, but we have an outside too. We are not built to just stay within ourselves but instead to let our spirits walk, play, and even suffer out in the material world. The Spirit’s presence at the depths of our being makes us desire to discover Jesus with our eyes, ears, nose, tongue and hands.
And that is why we go to Church: to find the answer to our Spiritual quest in the fleshly presence of Christ. At Mass, which is a ritual, we find the presence of God given to our senses in Communion, and our Spiritual and physical yearning fulfilled in both. Are you hungry for God? Come and eat.
Trinity II – reflection from 2014
“Who am I?”
This question Jesus put to his disciples long ago remains a question for all times and all disciples. Psalm 34 asserts that “the angel of the Lord will rescue those who fear him.” While this is literally true for Peter in the first reading, in the end neither Peter nor Paul was rescued from suffering and death for the sake of Christ. A cynic might ask where the angel of the Lord was when Peter was martyred at Rome. We may reply that the angel of the Lord was there then too, to take Peter to heaven. He had the courage to remain faithful even to death because he knew who Jesus was and his faith in him was rock solid. With the firm establishment of the community at Rome through the labors of Peter and Paul, their task on earth had been fulfilled, and God was ready for them.
To be faithful rocks upon which the church is built, we must know who Jesus is for us, listen to what he teaches us, and guard against anything prevailing against his church. Peter‘s faithful and fruitful discipleship rested on the rock of his knowing Jesus. Our own faithful and fruitful discipleship rests on this same rock.
