The readings for the 4th Sunday of Lent are available on the bishops’ website, www.usccb.org (we preached on the Cycle A readings for the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults).  A recording of the Gospel is here, the audio for the homily is here, and the full text of the homily is here.

I am starting a study of Blessed John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, and I am finding even more to relate to my own experience than I found the first time I tried to unpack all of it.  And I am also finding a renewed urgency to get my head around it, so that I can share it.

A lot of this revolves around the sense of sight.  How do we see one another?  How do we see ourselves?  And most importantly, how do we see ourselves in relationship with God?

I hope my humble effort is worthy of your time.  And I hope your windowpane becomes clearer as this Lent progresses!

–Deacon Chip

Folks,

There are a few changes to the Adoration schedule on the Fridays of Lent this year.  For multiple reasons, which are beyond the scope of this post, we have decided to concentrate our hours for Eucharistic Adoration into three hours, from 9:00 pm (after Stations of the Cross and the Holy Hour after ) until midnight.  First Friday 24-hour Adoration will go as usual, and everyone who usually volunteers can count on their usual hour being available for them.  But on the Fridays of Lent besides First Friday (March 2nd), the Blessed Sacrament will be exposed at the end of stations, and the Holy Hour will continue until 9:00 pm in the Main Church.  We will move Adoration to the St. Joachim Chapel at 9:00 pm, and continue until midnight.

Please sign up for an hour with the Lord!  There will be sign-up sheets available in the Narthex after Masses this weekend (but not for you Saturday Mass folks; I’m not that good!).  We are looking for at least four volunteers per hour from 9 to midnight to commit to an hour; everyone else is welcome to come and visit Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament at their leisure.

Eucharistic Adoration is a good Lenten practice, one that, when developed, can bear fruit all year.  Please join us in Adoration of Our Lord in the Most Holy Sacrament of the Altar!

That the Government has no authority to mandate that anyone buy *anything* like health insurance for contraceptives and sterilizations (or Anything else)? One of the major objections to the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) is exactly that mandate. And it ain’t been demonstrated that the Federal Government has the power to do any such thing as tell you and me what we *must* buy. states? Yes. That’s why you have automobile insurance as a condition of operating a motor vehicle.

But the Federal Guhmint? I don’t believe so.

Man.

Our bishop, Most Reverend J. Terry Steib, of Memphis in West Tennessee, has joined a growing number of bishops across our country (here’s the most current list I could find) who vocally oppose the Health and Human Services contraception mandate. To date, 155 bishops have voiced their opposition to this goofy violation of our religious liberty a s Catholics.  I seriously doubt that the Administration has thought this through.

Thank you, Bishop Terry!

As kids, we all learned that song, “We Three Kings”. No, not the one that we sang this morning, but the one with the kings and the rubber cigar. (We Three Kings of Orient are/Trying to smoke a rubber cigar/It was Loaded, it exploded/That’s how we traversed so far!) And now everybody will have those lyrics stuck in their head the rest of the day…

But this got me thinking about how we think about Epiphany, what we emphasize, what we usually see as the point. Mostly we think about the kings, and the star, about King Herod trying to snake the Magi into giving up the location of the Christ child. And we think about what Jesus got from the Magi: every child here, I bet can name the gifts the brought to Jesus. What did they bring? (Ask for responses) See? Everybody knows about the gold, frankincense and myrrh!

And it occurs to me that, by focusing on the three kings, and the gold, frankincense and myrrh, and all the other tiny details of the story of the Magi, we miss what the Church is really trying to teach us about Christ, and about ourselves, with this celebration.

And the point isn’t the Magi of thousand years ago.

Where did this feast day come from, anyway? Epiphany was first celebrated in the Eastern Church to observe the birth of Christ; Christmas as we would recognize it came hundreds of years later there. In the West, while the celebration of the Nativity was the first celebration of Christ’s coming, the Church of Rome added a feast to acknowledge Jesus ’manifestation to the world. The word epiphany comes to us from the Greek epiphaneia, which means “appearing”, or “coming”. Our Feast of the Epiphany is literally a celebration of the “appearance” of the Lord before all of mankind, personified by the three Gentile kings.

And note the details. The Magi visited well after Jesus’ actual birth, not the same night or even the same week of His birth; they likely visited the Holy Family somewhere other than a stable. And look at the gifts they brought! Jesus didn’t get no bicycle, or PlayStation 3 for His birthday! He received gold, frankincense, and myrrh, strange gifts by our standards!

History, tradition, and Hollywood have filled in a lot of other things for us, some of which help, but some of which just sensationalize the event of the Three Kings arriving, but which don’t help us understand.

The wise men followed…a light from the Heavens. That light led them to Jesus, even though the Jews of Jerusalem couldn’t quite see it!

So what’s the significance of all these details?

Well, first, the Magi coming to Jesus is the event that makes it clear that Jesus is here for everyone. The angels’ announcement to the shepherds at Christmas demonstrated that Jesus came for the poor, the lowly and neglected in society; the shepherds hearing the news first tells us that. The Magi being the first to acknowledge Jesus publicly as a King shows that Jesus came for the Gentiles as well.

The star leading the Magi to Jesus across hundreds miles of desert signifies Jesus’ call to faith, directed to all of mankind, Jews and Gentiles alike. The Magi dropping everything to leave immediately signifies the response of faith that comes from seeing the Light of Christ.

And the gifts weren’t just randomly selected, either. Gold is a tribute for royalty. Frankincense was used to worship God, as prayers rise with the smoke from the censer. And Myrrh was an expensive ointment used to care for the bodies of men. So, in their gifts, the Magi acknowledged Jesus as true God, true man, and King of all!

All that symbolism is vaguely inspiring, maybe…but so what? Why should we care?

See, the problem with quaint stories with lots of cute little details is that the details that we miss out on the big picture! The value of Epiphany is much more than pretty pictures of kings and dromedaries. It’s much more, because we figure into the story at almost every turn!

“Wise men still seek Him?” I’ll give you that. We should all constantly be seeking Christ in our lives, yes. So we’re all like the Magi, in a way.

But…where is the Star that new seekers follow to find Christ? That star is in us! The Light of Christ that we each receive at our baptisms is supposed to be kept burning brightly. Why? So that others may see our faith and follow it to Christ! And when we stand up for right, for truth, for what should be instead of what is, when we stand against the darkness and with the Light, we are the Star, showing others the way to Christ!

Remember I said that the point of the Feast of the Epiphany isn’t really the Magi?

It’s not. The point of the Epiphany of the Lord is not just that Christ was worshiped by three Gentile Kings. No…The point is that Christ continues to be worshiped by Gentiles even today! The point is that people do still seek the Light of Christ. The point is that, while the Magi followed a heavenly light to arrive at the home of the Redeemer, the Seekers of today follow another Light to find Him. And that light is in each one of us.

Heavy responsibility? Absolutely. But the Church doesn’t just leave us out there alone to bear it. The whole of our sacramental life in the Church is meant to kindle that Light of Christ in us. We gather to worship, and we gather to learn, so that we can better represent that Light in each of us.

Epiphany is about far more than Kings, and rubber cigars. Epiphany is about the Light of the world, being manifested to the Gentiles. It’s about that light leading all nations to God.

Most importantly, it’s about the call of Christ, asking each of us:

Be the Light!

I think I’ll go back to requiring listening to this talk for all my premarriage preparation.  Deanna, your English-speaking folks would benefit from it too.

I *dare* all my married and in-relationship friends to listen.  It don’t matter if you’re Catholic; the reasons for *not* doing this thing to your body don’t have anything to do with Catholics.  You show me how the things that Paul, the guy who led the Roman Catholic Church until the late 70′s, was wrong about what he predicted.

In this time during which we await the coming of our Savior, I challenge all to ponder the humility it took for Mary to be open to the life God wanted to place in her womb.  And then ponder how we got to the state that life is an illness we must medicate ourselves to prevent.

Just sayin’

Birth Control – The Pill – Why use contrapcepton? Why Not? – by Dr. Janet Smith

Gospel is here.

Homily audio is here.

Why Be Thankful?

Having “an attitude of gratitude” is polite.  When someone opens a door for us, we’re expected to say “thank you”; when we do something nice for someone and they don’t thank us, we get a little huffy.  For most of us, this is an attitude our mothers helped us learn:  It’s polite to say Thank You.

But, at the end of the day, why does it matter?  The door opened; we didn’t hit it on the way in.  What difference does it really make if we thank the person who opened it for us or not?  Other than making the opener feel bad, how does not thanking that person make any difference at all?

The answer to that question is obvious.  Not acknowledging someone who does something nice for us is rude.  And since we don’t want to be rude, we thank people who help us.

But…what about God?  How’s our “attitude of gratitude with Him?  And what does our attitude say about us, and about what’s most important to us?

Naaman (Nay-uh-mun) understood what it meant to be thankful.  Naaman was a pagan, the commander of the armies of the King of Aram.  But he had a problem:  Naaman had contracted leprosy, which was incurable and contagious.  Naaman couldn’t keep his job and his status without help.  His wife’s servant girl, a captured Israelite, told him to go to Samaria to see Elisha. After resisting what Elisha instructed him to do, Naaman finally obeyed…and what happened?  He was cured.

Now flip to the Gospel.  The ten lepers ask Jesus to heal them.  He tells them to go see the priests, and on the way, they were healed! No drama…no flashing lights and thunderclaps.  The Gospel says, “As they were going they were cleansed.”

These two events have a lot in common.  They were told to do something…they did it…and they were cured of their leprosy!  Dive deeper, and again, there are more things in common:  Naaman’s cure convinced Him that God alone was the one he should worship.  The Samaritan leper came back to Jesus, praising God, and thanked Jesus for curing him.

Now…look even deeper.  Naaman had a conversion experience.  He would worship the God of Israel alone.  And what did Jesus tell the Samaritan leper?  “Stand up and go; your faith has saved you.”  Your faith…has saved you.  The Samaritan’s belief in Jesus…had earned him eternal life!

For our part, we buy into this.  We know God can and does work miracles all the time.  The lives of the saints are full of them; everyone knows at least one story of someone who was cured, or someone who was saved from death, through circumstances that can only be described as miraculous. 

But it strikes me that our technology is advancing so quickly these days that things that were unimaginable even ten years ago have become commonplace! So many “miraculous” things happen every day that we almost want to sue someone when we don’t get that miraculous outcome!

And where does that leave us?  It leaves us, as a culture, with a loss of the sense of the miraculous.  It leaves us with broad swaths of people, even people of faith, who end up losing the understanding that God acts in our world.  It leaves us, some of us, at least, with an inability to really see what’s going on around us.  And it leaves us without the “attitude of gratitude” that really is the point of all of this!

What do I mean?  Here’s what I mean. 

It’s miraculous when a heart surgeon can take a beating heart out of one person and put it into another one.  But without the right attitude, the surgeon and the patient can think it’s all about the surgeon.  But who gave the surgeon the gifts to perform the operation?  God.  Who created our bodies so fearfully and wonderfully that it’s even possible to transplant a heart?  God.

And this takes us back to the stories from today’s readings.  Ten lepers were cleansed.  Only one came back to thank Jesus and praise God.  Did the other nine become unhealed?  No!  But the one who returned got the greater good:  “…go, your faith has saved you”.

The “point of all of this” is that the Samaritan leper showed one quality the other nine lacked:  gratitude.  And because of that, he was earned eternal life.  With us, God isn’t going to punish us because of our lack of faith, as Paul said in his letter to Timothy, “If we are unfaithful, [Jesus] remains faithful, for He cannot deny Himself.”  The miracles that God makes possible will still occur.  But without that “attitude of gratitude”, we might just miss the most important thing: eternity with God!

How’s our attitude of gratitude”?  Do we recognize the miraculous in the every day?  Do we acknowledge the faithfulness of God in our lives, in the gifts great and small that come to us? 

Or is it all about us, and how good we are, how hard we’ve worked, and how much we have achieved on our own merit?

God will be faithful no matter what.  And God’s gifts will be given whether we acknowledge Him or not, because “He remains faithful” as Paul said.

But how much are we missing, if we don’t recognize God’s hand in our lives?  How much are we losing, if we can’t see the miracles in our lives…as miraculous?

We get huffy when we open a door for someone, and they ignore us.  Do we do any better by God when we fail to acknowledge His work in our lives?

God is good, all the time.  Shouldn’t we let Him know that we know that?

 Gospel audio is here.

Homily audio is here (listen to it; it’s a little different from the text below, but I’m too lazy to transcribe the changes!).

“Where’d You Go?”

GPS is a wonderful thing!  You can just put the address you’re trying to get to into that puppy, hit “Navigate”, and turn by turn, the thing tells you exactly where to go!  Most of us have access to a GPS now; our phones even have them included.  And if we can’t get GPS on our phone, there’s always MapQuest, or Google Maps, or other services to tell us how to get to where we’re headed.

But since that’s the case, since we can use a computer to see places far and near, and a computer will tell us exactly how to get where we want to go…how do we still manage to get lost? With so many resources to show us the way…how do we manage to lose our way?

As it is with the physical, so it is with the spiritual.  With so much help out there, how do we manage to still get lost?  And what hope is there for us when we do?

More importantly: do we even realize it when we’re lost?  And do we leave God asking, “Where’d you go?”

This is not a new problem.  In the Old Testament reading today, Moses is intervening with God on behalf of the Children of Israel, who (yet again!) had descended into worship of idols!  What were they thinking?  Where did they go, that they forgot that it was God who saved them from Egypt, that it was God who was leading them to the Promised Land!  How did they get so lost that, not once, but twice, they decided to worship an idol they’d made themselves, instead of the God who made them?

And yet, Moses is able to turn away God’s wrath at His people, simply by reminding God of all He had promised to them!  The just punishment owed to the people of Israel was turned back…by God’s mercy.

And look at the Gospel for today.  Jesus tells two parables, all about something lost being found.  The first parable, about the shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine to find the one, is the subject of many a painting of Jesus.  The second, though, about the woman sweeping the house to find her lost coin, is a little tougher to picture.

But in both cases, Jesus’ point is the same:  God wants the lost to be found!  No effort is too great to expend to rescue a sinner!  And heaven rejoices when the lost get found!

We don’t relate as well to those stories, because we don’t live the same way the people of Israel did in Jesus’ day.  But they still apply to us.

The first lines of the Gospel give it away.  What was the complaint of the scribes and Pharisees against Jesus?  “This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.”  Jesus’ offense, in their minds, was hanging out with sinners!  Jesus went to the trouble of telling not one, not two, but three parables to address their complaint, because He came to us to rescue the lost!  Jesus didn’t show up as a man just to high-five the righteous.  He came because, like Paul, all of us get lost sometimes, and all of us need to be found!

“But Deacon Chip”, one might say, “I’m not that bad!  I come to church, I try to be a good person…surely this isn’t about me!”

Think about it for a minute, though.  Sure, there are people who willfully ignore God, who flaunt His commandments, who live lives that are intentionally opposed to God.  They’re probably not here today.

But going back to the parables from the Gospels: How did that sheep get lost?  There is safety and security in the flock!  Was he intentionally ignoring the shepherd, just to be hard-headed?  No!  More likely, the sheep got distracted by something, and when he looked around, the flock had moved on without him.  Or he took a wrong path, one that looked like it was going where the rest of the flock was headed, but that turned off suddenly, leaving the sheep stranded.

And how did that coin get lost?  It was worth a day’s wages; surely the woman would have paid attention.  Did she just throw the coins around carelessly, or was it that one just rolled away on its own?

There are a lot of ways we can end up in sin, without even trying hard.  We think we know the way we should go, only to find we’re not where we thought we’d end up.  Or we get distracted by something: a pretty person, or a strong emotion; something bad happens, like an illness, or the death of a spouse; or maybe we make a wrong turn, and then can’t find our way back. 

Today’s Gospel tells us, though, that God is ever on the watch for us.  God wants to forgive our sins.  He wants us to be with Him, not separated from Him.  And He will spare no effort to find us when we get lost!

It’s funny how we can still manage to get lost, in spite of all the technology that is available to us to help us understand where to go.

And it’s sad, as well, how we can manage to wander away from God, in spite of all the information available to us about life in Christ.

Jesus tells us in today’s parables that God yearns for us to be with Him.  He tells us that no effort will be spared to find us if we get lost.

We all wander away from the path we should be on.  When we do, God is there to ask:  “Where’d you go?”  And then, He’s there to pick us up and return us to where we belong.

Are we distracted…by the world?  Are we allowing ourselves to be led down the wrong path…by Satan, and by the flesh?  Are we allowing sin to make us deaf to the turn-by turn directions of our spiritual GPS?

Where’d we go? 

God’s looking for us…

Audio of the Gospel reading is here.  Audio of the below homily is here.

With absolutely NO reference to the film by the same title, I must say, “There’s something about Mary”.  There’s something about Mary, the Mother of Jesus, which makes some people just crazy.  There’s something about Mary, Mother of the Church, which embarrasses some people.  There’s something about Mary, Holy Mary, Mother of God, which causes many Catholics to run away from any association with her.  Some of our separated brethren mock us about Mary.  Some of them think we aren’t Christian because of Mary.  And some of them just flat won’t talk about Mary.

But as I said…There’s something about Mary.  There’s something about her that should educate us.  There’s something about her that should encourage us.  And there is something about Mary that should drive us to strive to be like her.  And it is these things that our Feast today, the feast of the Assumption of Mary, celebrates.

So…what is it about Mary?

On November 1, 1950, Pope Pius XII defined the dogma of Mary’s Assumption:  “the Immaculate Mother of God, the ever Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory.”  Simple.  When it came time for Mary to die, she went to heaven, body and soul.  The Pope didn’t say she died, though most seem to think she did.  He said that she was “assumed”, meaning she was “drawn up”, into heaven, and that both her body and her soul were glorified.

This dogma should give us hope, not embarrass us.  As I said, there’s something about Mary.  One thing “about Mary” is that she was conceived without the stain of Original Sin. This made her into the perfect vessel that she would have to be in order for God to come to Earth through her. 

So, what do the Scriptures have to say about all of this?  Today’s readings help us to understand, even if they don’t paint the entire picture.

The first reading, from the Book of Revelation, is all about Mary.  The very first lines connect the Ark of the Covenant, God’s presence among the People of Israel until they lost it, with the Ark of the New covenant, Mary.  The Old Testament Ark contained the word of God, and reminders of His presence with His people.  The New Testament Ark, Mary, also contained the Word of God:  The Word Made Flesh, who came to dwell among us!  There’s something…about Mary!

The Gospel today teaches us why we refer to Mary as we do.  What’s the Marian Prayer that everyone knows, the one that comes to mind first? The Hail Mary! And where did it come from?  The Scriptures!  “Hail, Mary, Full of Grace, the Lord is with you” is the greeting that the angel Gabriel used in Luke 1, verse 28.  The next part?  That comes from the Gospel!  Elizabeth says, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb”.  Second part of the prayer!  The rest is just a petition from us to her, to pray for us; we ask her to do this because we know (from the Scriptures) the Jesus listens to her in a special way.  Because…There’s something…about Mary!

So why do they beat on us so about her, our separated brethren?  Sadly, brothers and sisters, it’s out of ignorance, out of a lack of understanding, rooted in a little prejudice, about what we really believe.  And the situation isn’t helped by our attitude toward Mary.

Mary is our Mother.  But how often do we check in with her?  She’s not God.  But she is in Heaven with God.  She is the Mother of the Church.  She is our model, our exemplar, our guide to living the Perfect Christian Life.  Mary was assumed into Heaven precisely to show us what’s in store for us at the end of time; she just received the Promise first, as a reward for her faithfulness, and out of recognition of her unique status.  She was conceived without sin. She gave her fiat, her “Yes” to God when asked to be the mother of His Son. 

And she did this in spite of what it would mean!  Mary was an unwed mother at a time when adultery and fornication got you killed.  She said Yes to God at a time when a pregnancy out-of-wedlock would disgrace generations of a family.  She submitted herself to God’s will…And she received God’s reward.  And at the end of the day…isn’t that exactly what we are all called to do, to submit our will…to God’s will?

There’s something about Mary, brothers and sisters.  Actually, there’s a ton of stuff about Mary.  And so many of our separated brethren just don’t know.

Maybe it’s time we found out.  Maybe it’s time Mary, the Mother of God, the Mother of our Lord, and our Mother, becomes more than an embarrassment, more than a subject that makes us run away.

“The Immaculate Mother of God, the ever Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory.” That’s what the feast we celebrate today is all about. 

But do we embrace it? Do we believe it?

Those are important questions. Because if we don’t accept this dogma of our faith, what does it say about what we believe about everything else the Church teaches, believes, and proclaims to be true?

Mary was assumed into Heaven, body and soul.  Her earthly body was glorified, just as we hope ours will be at the end of time.

There’s something about Mary…something that made God take her to Himself at the end of her life.  Shouldn’t we find out what it is?