School of Encounter: Rejecting the Culture of Exclusivity in the Church

“Would that all the people of the LORD were prophets!” (Numbers 11:29)

This morning when I walked out of the house, I noticed a flyer at my front gate.  It was for a Night of Healing and Worship at the Milander auditorium next door.  My first reaction was frustration because there is a Protestant healing service right at our doorstep, but then I remembered today’s readings and the homily I was going to preach.  The flyer said, “Jesus saves.”  I believe in that.  It also said “Jesus heals.” I believe in that too.  So essentially like in the gospel, two very well intentioned Christians who are not Catholic are going to do worship the Lord and heal in his name.  If I should be angry with anyone, it’s shouldn’t be directed at them; it’s at myself for not having thought of it first.  All of us, whether we are Catholic or Protestant, share the same baptism, and are baptized into Christ’s ministry of priest, prophet and king.  When Joshua complained to Moses that two outsiders were prophesying in the camp, Moses responded: “Would that all the people of the Lord were prophets!”  And we are!  We are called to speak the truth of Jesus Christ, to share His Good News.  Unfortunately, like in the gospel and like the disciples, we get jealous when another group, even inside our parishes gets more “glory” than we do when really all the glory should be given to our Lord and Savior.  I know this may sound harsh, but at times we often look down on others who are not in our particular group or a particular ministry as if one group holds the absolute keys to salvation.  Are we not one family as our Holy Father reminded us this week?

These past 9 days in which Pope Francis has been in Cuba and the United States have been days of incredible blessing and remarkable teaching from our Holy Father.  In his homily in New York on Friday night, he said that Christ “brings us to the school of encounter. He removes us from the fray of competition and self-absorption…”  We should not be competing against ourselves when we all have the same goal as a parish: to bring people to Christ.  Which is why, as Catholics, we do not have the luxury to compete with other ministries, and when it comes to our attitudes on Sundays, we definitely do not have the luxury to be “self-absorbed” and look down on the visitor who walks through our church doors.  This sacred space must be a place of encounter, not only for people to encounter Christ, but also of the people of Christ to encounter each other.  Oh, that blessed day last month when I roped off the back two sections of our church to encourage people to sit closer to the altar and closer to each other.  It breaks my heart as your pastor to see you come to worship the Lord and sit far from each other like strangers taking in a movie instead of gathering together as ONE Body of Christ to celebrate the Eucharist as a family.  I am embarrassed in our smaller Masses when the lector at the beginning of the liturgy invites people to greet each other and I see people giving a half-hearted wave to people who are maybe 50 feet away from them.  Goodness, there are a million people packed together like sardines in a can in Philadelphia right now for a Mass with the Pope that won’t start for another four and half hours, and they couldn’t be happier.  We do not come to Mass by ourselves, nor is it a private act, we come to Mass a family: the Immaculate Family that has been going strong for 61 blessed years.   We must rejoice when we see our neighbor at Mass not shy away from them.

So yes, I put up the ropes to rock the boat a little bit, to force us to encounter Christ and to force us to encounter each other in the Eucharist.  But then I discover that apparently we have parishioners who “own” pews in this parish and look down on fellow parishioners who dare to sit in their pews during Mass.  Sadly, I am not making this up.  I wish I was.  This attitude needs to stop.  If you are so tied to your seat in church that you will tell someone to move (and again, this has happened), I implore you, please take my seat on the sanctuary.  I’ll sit on the floor.  We do not have the luxury to be inhospitable to our visitors and our neighbors.  If someone is sitting in your seat: smile, welcome them, and pick one of the other 999 spaces that we have here in our beautiful church…even if it’s mine!  This culture of exclusivity needs to stop because we are turning people away from our beautiful parish that has so much to offer.  We offer Christ himself and when visitors come to Immaculate, they must encounter a people filled with the joy of Jesus Christ, a school of encounter, where they feel welcomed and not looked down upon.  This must be a place of warmth, of welcome, of a community gathering around the one altar of sacrifice.

Why am I so adamant about this?  Because as your pastor, the Archbishop entrusted me with the care of your souls.  I am entrusted with your salvation.  It is not something that I take lightly, and when the ship needs to be righted, I am the one who has to steer it away from the storm and into calm waters.  Immaculate must and will become a place of encounter and hospitality.  The old way is over.  We are beginning anew. And just like the Holy Father did yesterday morning in Philadelphia to empower the laity to do good works, I am empowering all of you to be God’s instruments of encounter to those we meet in this sacred space.

I want to finish with two quick stories:  Three weeks ago, a blind young man I met not long ago was brought to Mass by a mutual friend.  I knew he was coming, and I knew that he was bringing his guide dog that is as quiet as a mouse.  I did not know what Mass he was coming to and to be brutally honest, I was terrified how a blind young man with a guide dog would be received.  He walked in with our friend, sat in the first pew directly in front of me, and his dog lay quietly on the floor during the entire Mass.  What brought great joy to my heart was after Mass when an usher approached him when he was leaving and told him: “It was really wonderful to have you here.  Please come back again.”  The young man would tell me later that he had never felt more welcomed.

The second story happened early this morning.  A couple was standing outside the church doors.  They asked to speak to me and they asked me a question that I have never been asked as a priest:  “Can we go into church?”  I was taken aback by that question.  They went on to explain that were recently arrived immigrant and they had been to other churches, including some santero churches, and some of them had these supposed rites of welcome that one had to undergo before going in.  I smiled and said to them, “Of course you can go in!  Forget where you’ve been or what you’ve done, Jesus is waiting for you inside.”  I have never been asked permission by someone to go into church.  I felt like a father who opens the doors to his house with his children behind him and a child asks: “can we go in?”  It is our home!  This is YOUR home!  Of course you can come!  All are welcomed!  All are invited!  Immaculate must be a place of encounter.  This is not an exclusive club.  This is not a place where we look down on anyone.  This is a Catholic church!  It is universal!  Christ is our head, and we are his body.  May we accept our Holy Father’s invitation and truly transform this beautiful parish into a genuine “school of encounter.”

(Postscript: One of my deacons went to Cuba to see the Pope and gave a reflection at the midday Mass two hours after I preached this homily.  The first words he uttered were: “the Pope is calling us to be a people of encounter!”  Enough said….)

The Voice We Don't Want To Hear

“[Jesus] looked up to heaven and groaned, and said to [the deaf man], “Ephphatha!” (that is, “Be opened!”).” (Mark 7:34)

There’s a wonderful picture that was taken last year in our school that shows me sitting with our preschoolers during a school assembly.  Some of the older kids were singing and making or something and the preschoolers started putting their hands over their ears.  I went and I sat with them on the floor and started doing the same thing.  

When little kids are annoyed with noise, they just simply put their hands over their ears.  For kids, it’s cute.  For adults, it might be considered rude.  Yet this is how we sometimes act when God is trying to speak to us.   We place our hands over our ears like a little child.  We don’t want to listen, we are unwilling to listen, and we don’t want to hear what he has to say because it can change our lives.  The deaf man in today’s gospel didn’t have that option.  He just simply couldn’t hear.  Yet Jesus heals him, as he wants to heal us of our deafness and our speech impediments.  We don’t listen to the Word of God.  We don’t listen to his voice because it is drowned out by all the other voices in the world.  Notice that Jesus takes the deaf man apart from the crowd to heal him.  He needs to do the same with us.  We need to go to a place of silence to listen. 

But how does God speak to us?  How will we recognize his voice?  Well, he’s been speaking to you from the moment you walked into this church.  He’s been speaking to you in a very special way when the Scripture readings were being proclaimed.  And he is speaking to you now through a very unworthy servant.  Are we listening?  God speaks to us through Sacred Scripture, plain and simple.  It is God’s Divine Word.  The priest breaks open this Word for us during the homily.  Yet the reason this Word sometimes falls on deaf ears is because we are not familiar with this Word.  As Catholics, and I’ve said this before, we fall way behind our Protestant brothers and sisters when it comes to our knowledge of the Bible.  We hear three readings from the Bible every Sunday.  God is speaking to us in a very concrete way.  So much treasure.  So much wisdom.  Are we listening? Do we know what to listen for?  I know I’ve been asking a lot of questions but it all boils down to this one:  How often do you read your Bible?  Let’s not kid ourselves. Many of us know more about the lives of the Kardashians and other celebrities than we do about the heroes of the Bible and the lives of the saints.  We need to open the Good Book and read some Good News.  But again, do we want to hear it?

This past Friday, I celebrated the evening daily Mass in our chapel that is more often than not filled with good folks who do not practice their faith, yet come to Mass because it is being offered for a deceased relative.  They are there, God bless them, out of a sense of obligation to their loved ones.  On this particular day, we had a big group that had no idea what was going on in the Mass.  We have a very small chapel, so I can tell the type of Catholic who is sitting in the pews fairly quickly.  During the homily, I preached on the first reading that was taken from the first chapter of St. Paul’s Letter to the Colossians.  It is a beautiful reading with great history and tradition. It is an ancient Christian hymn, and I proceeded to explain the reading and hopefully connect with some of our visitors.  Now the worse thing someone can do during one of my homilies is ignore me.  I know it sounds vain, but I am up there preaching the Word of God and pouring my heart out unto that pulpit so that everyone can connect to the Word.  Yet there was a lady ignoring me.  This caused me to get more animated in my preaching.  There were two gentlemen in the back talking.  This caused me to get louder in my preaching.  So when I saw that I was getting a bit too long for a daily Mass homily, I wrapped things up by saying, “You know what, go home, open your Bibles, dust them off and read Colossians 1 and meditate on it.”  People laughed at the dusting off part, but I was not being judgmental, I was also pointing the finger at me.  Because of the advent of the iPad, I usually read the Bible, say my daily prayers, and prepare my homilies off an electronic device. My Bible is sitting on my bookshelf, you guessed it, collecting dust.  Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.  There’s nothing wrong with reading the Word of God from iPads or computers, but sometimes we need to have the actual Book in our hands.  Something that probably was blessed.  Something that is holy.  Something the Lord uses to speak to us. 

We need to start reading the Word of God so that we can hear the voice of God so that we can share this Good News.  If we’re deaf to the Word of God, if we don’t read our Bibles, then we can’t very well speak about it.  Ephphatha! One last thing I would like to point out: towards the end of today’s gospel, when the people saw what Jesus had done with the deaf man, they said about Jesus: “He has done all things well.”  This is a callback to the creation story in the Book of Genesis.  Jesus is recreating the world and doing it well, just like the Father back in the beginning of the Bible when at the end of every day of creation he would look at what he had created and saw that it was “good.”  Jesus wants to take you apart from the noise of the crowd like he did with the deaf man and open your ears and lead you to a place where you can hear Him more clearly.  This way armed with God’s Word, you can go forth to the world and do “all things well.”

A Religion of Hypocrites

“Religion that is pure and undefiled before God and the Father is this: to care for orphans and widows^* in their affliction and to keep oneself unstained by the world.” (James 1:27)

How do you practice your religion?  Religion is such a loaded word these days because people want us to keep it to ourselves.  I prefer the question: how do you live out your faith?  Because you see there is stodgy religion that can get in the way of our genuine relationship with God. This is exactly what is going on in the gospel today when the Pharisees and Scribes find Jesus' disciples eating with "unclean" hands. Jesus is quick to point out that these "laws" were enacted by the scribes and not given by God like the ones given to the people by God through Moses in the first reading. This ceremonial washing was a ritual or a custom that had developed that carried with it the stigma of being declared unclean or sinful if you did not follow these rituals to the tiniest letter of the law. Jesus calls them out as hypocrites because the ceremonial washings did not bring people closer to God but was an excuse for the Pharisees and the Scribes to lord over the people. 

Jesus calling the Pharisees hypocrites is something young people can relate to because they can spot a hypocrite a mile away.  In fact, many young people use this as an excuse for not coming to church: there are too many hypocrites.  I saw a great meme with Kevin Hart the other day that read:

We’re all hypocrites, including the priest that’s preaching to you, and the reason we are here is because we recognize that we sometimes fall short and are in need of God’s mercy.  The Pharisees had no room for that.  They were self-righteous, clean, pure, and looked down on everyone else.  There was no room in their hearts for taking care of the poorest among them because they were too busy lording over everyone with their rules.  Rules and rituals are important, but they shouldn’t hinder or be the end all be all of our relationship with God.  Just yesterday, a brother priest and I were swapping stories of parishioners who get bent out of shape when they see just the slightest liturgical error during the Mass.  (Listen, I am pretty strict on liturgical rules, but in 13 years of priesthood, I don’t think I’ve ever pitched a perfect game.)

So again rules are important, the commandments are important, but they are supposed to strengthen our relationship with and not hinder our relationship with him or our brothers and sisters.  So this is where St. James comes in.  He tells us that we must humbly, yes HUMBLY, listen to God’s word and be doers of that word and just not hearers deluding ourselves.  We have to humbly admit that we don’t have things figured out. That we are all still growing in our faith no matter how young or how old we are.  Why do I go around trying to get people out of their comfort zones when it comes to their faith? Because that’s what Jesus spent three years of his public life doing: calling people to get out of their little, rigid religion box and move into a deeper relationship with God.  (Side note: I blocked off the two extreme seating sections close to the back exits of the church this weekend with ropes because frankly those sections are not needed in most Masses and it caused people to actually sit closer to the altar.  To my surprise, everyone survived, but as I reflected on this on Sunday night, I realized that this gesture was in line with today’s readings.) 

We can’t continue doing what we are doing.  Religion does get in the way sometimes of genuine faith.  Rules can get in the way, if we let them, of a closer relationship with God.  We need to start DOING instead of just listening or pay lip service.  We need to care for the poor, feed the hungry, visit the sick, and as Pope Francis implored us this morning: pray for our fellow Christians who are dying at the hands of Muslim Extremists in the Middle East and Africa.  And above all, we must see Catholicism as more than a religion, for it is our faith and a way of life.  In the early Church, we were called the followers of “The Way.”  So let’s make Catholicism more attractive by our actions not just our words.  And let’s start with something one simple action this week: invite a fellow hypocrite to Mass next week.

Our House

“As for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.” (Joshua 24:15)

This is our House.  This is where we come to worship every Sunday.  This is where our community comes to life on the Lord’s Day.  This is where we encounter the Living God.  This is such a special place.  In this House is where we become the “Immaculate Family.” On a personal note, this is where my heart is filled with joy when I see God’s House overflowing as it is this morning for our “Back to School Mass.” There is no place I feel more at home than when I behind the altar offering the Holy Sacrifice for all of you.  All our children are getting ready to embark on another school year of educational adventures, and parents, I thank you for bringing them here this morning to receive the Lord’s blessing as they start a new year.  You have brought them to this House so that they can go forth strengthened by God’s blessing.

 

But a visit to this House isn’t simply any ordinary visit.  It is a visit that should transform us.  It is a visit that should allow us to delve deeper into the mystery of Christ himself who so very part want to be at the center of your family, so I ask you:  “Is Christ the center of your family?”  Let me take it a step further and ask a more practical question:  “Is Christ the center of your Sunday?”  I know the Church is full this morning because announcements went out and plans were made well ahead of time, but why isn’t it this way every Sunday?  Isn’t this what the Lord deserves?  Or do we make other things the center of our Sundays?  Lest we forget, the third commandment: “Keep holy the Sabbath day.”  Do we make this day holy?  Or are we concerned with traveling with our kids to sporting events, dance competitions, to visit family (which is fine after Mass), or doing everything else and then leaving the Mass for the “if we have time” column?  You’ve heard me say it a thousand times: Holy Mass should be the center of our Sunday.  Everything else, all other events we have planned should revolve around when we go to Mass.  It is a day of rest after that.  A day to spend with family and friends continuing the communion that we have established here in this House.

Yet this is not always the case.  We get lured away by the things of this world.  This is what is happening to Joshua and his people in the first reading.  Joshua is the heir to Moses in leading the Israelites into the Promised Land, but he notices that their attention is being taken away from God and they are being distracted by other gods as they travel through foreign territories.  Joshua draws a line in the sand:

“If it does not please you to serve the LORD,
decide today whom you will serve,
the gods your fathers served beyond the River
or the gods of the Amorites in whose country you are now dwelling.
As for me and my household, we will serve the LORD.”

 

A similar line in the sand is drawn by Jesus in today’s gospel.  For the last five weeks we’ve been hearing Jesus telling us that he is the bread of life come down from heaven, but today this teaching is starting to bother his listeners.  Jesus speaks harshly.  He wants committed followers but many don’t want that commitment and start to walk away.  This prompts Jesus to turn to the Twelve and ask: “Do you also want to go?”  Simon Peter responds: “To whom shall we go?”  Pope Francis made a distinction in Peter’s words this morning pointing out that Peter didn’t say “where shall we go?”  He said: “To whom shall we go?”  Who else is going to feed us like Jesus?  Who else is going to give us peace like Jesus?  Who is going to challenge us to live better lives like Jesus?

My friends, like Joshua and Jesus, I too am drawing a line in the sand this morning.  I want this church packed every Sunday. Jesus longs to see you here at this time in our House.  I long to see all of you here.  So since the Lord has placed me as the head of this household so to speak, I ask you: what is important to you when you wake up on Sunday morning?  Will you follow the way of the world or will you follow the way of the Lord?  “As for me and my household, we will serve the Lord!”

Anything Goes: The Lost Virtue of Obedience

“Therefore, do not continue in ignorance, but try to understand what is the will of the Lord.” (Ephesians 5:17)

Let’s face it.  We live in a world where pretty much anything goes.  We are taught to be independent, which is not a bad thing, we are to think for ourselves, which again is not a bad thing, but the consequences of these two things is that we ignore the wisdom of the past, of our elders, and make the same mistakes over and over again just to achieve what we think will make us happy.  Again, anything goes.  Kids don’t listen to their parents and slowly we grow to forget the virtue of obedience.  Obedience is almost anathema in society because we somehow believe being obedient is a sign of weakness.  Yet obedience is one of the constants throughout the life of Jesus and his mother Mary.  Through history, the great saints achieved eternal glory through obedience.  In the life of the Church, priests, deacons, and religious promise obedience to their superiors.  We do this because we want to be submissive to the will of God in our lives and allow Him to take us where he needs us and not to where we want to be.  Where He needs us is most often where we find happiness and peace.

St. Paul tells the Ephesians quite frankly in the second reading that we are living evil days.  If you read the news and listen to doomsday prophets you would think that St. Paul is talking about 2015 and not the mid-first century.  Now I must confess that I don’t subscribe to the all those that say the days we were are currently living are the most evil yet.  I like to look at the good happening in the world, but I do recognize that yes there is plenty of evil as well.  But you can apply St. Paul’s observation to pretty much any point in history since he wrote those words.  Today we see the degradation of the family, the persecution of Christians, the ravages of poverty in places that are forgotten, and I can go on but make no mistake that all of us can work to make this world a bit better if only we listen to the will of God.  We cannot live in ignorance, Paul tells us, we have to stand out and be exemplary Christians.  And in this weekend when we celebrate the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, we look to her as the model of what it means to be an exemplary Christian who helps us in our journey by teaching us the virtue of obedience to God.

This past Friday, the Church celebrated the feast of the martyr St. Maximilian Kolbe (for the sake of brevity in this homily, do yourself a favor and google his incredibly life and death).  St. Max was very devout to Mary Immaculate, our patroness, and writes beautifully on obedience and how it shaped the lives of Jesus and Mary:

Obedience is the one and the only way of wisdom and prudence for us to offer glory to God…Scripture set obedience as the theme of [Christ’s] life, repeatedly declaring that he came into the world to do his Father’s will.

Let us love our loving Father with all our hearts. Let our obedience increase that love, above all when it requires us to surrender our own will. Jesus Christ crucified is our sublime guide toward growth in God’s love.

We will learn this lesson more quickly through the Immaculate Virgin, whom God has made the dispenser of his mercy. It is beyond all doubt that Mary’s will represents to us the will of God himself. By dedicating ourselves to her we become in her hands instruments of God’s mercy even as she was such an instrument in God’s hands. We should let ourselves be guided and led by Mary and rest quiet and secure in her hands. She will watch out for us, provide for us, answer our needs of body and spirit; she will dissolve all our difficulties and worries.

Today we gather for Mass in obedience to the Lord’s command.  We are fed and strengthened by the bread of life, the flesh of the Son of Man.  This Eucharist helps us to follow the will of God more perfectly, to live the life of Christ more perfectly, and to live exemplary Christian lives more perfectly.  Yes, obedience is hard (take it from a priest), but the rewards for being obedient to God are eternal.  We entrust ourselves to Mary Immaculate who will “watch out for us” and who teaches us so perfectly the virtue of total obedience to the will of God.

When God Squeezes Too Hard

“This is enough, O LORD! 1 Kings 19:4

Elijah had had enough.  He was a faithful prophet.  He had done all that the Lord had commanded him to do.  Yet, we find him in today’s first reading wishing for death.  How did he get to this point?  To answer this question we have to go to the previous chapter of the First Book of Kings: chapter 18.  There we see Elijah doing mighty deeds for the Lord.  There was a battle going on, so to speak, between Elijah and the prophets of the false gods.  All of Israel had been gathered at Mount Carmel where Elijah confronted Israel who had been unfaithful to God by worshiping these false gods. So on that mountain Elijah exhorted the people of Israel to choose whom to worship once and for all, and he challenged the 450 prophets of the false gods. They would both offer sacrifices of a young bull and both Elijah and the false prophets would call down fire to consume the sacrifice, “The Lord who answers with fire is God.”  The people consented.  Now Elijah knew how this would end, he knew that as soon as he called down fire from God, it would happen, just as sure as I know that as soon as I call the Holy Spirit down in a few minutes upon the bread and the wine that they will be transformed into the Body and Blood of Christ.  So Elijah, let the false prophets make their “prayers” first, in fact, Elijah taunted them “Call louder…perhaps your god is asleep.”  (Read 1 Kings 18; it’s all there.)  But of course, nothing happens, but as soon as Elijah calls down fire so that the people may know that the Lord is God, God answers his prayer and the people turn their backs on the false gods and believe again in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. 

So Elijah defeats the false prophets that had invaded his land, turns the people back to God, and puts and end to a long drought.  Yet Queen Jezebel who brought these false gods to Israel was determined to destroy Elijah which is where we pick up the first reading today.  Elijah had been heroic, done the Lord’s will, and he was still a wanted man fearing for his life.  He fled through the desert and after a day’s journey said “enough!”  All of us have been there.  All of us have been at a place in our lives where despite doing God’s work and living good lives, things still don’t turn out the way we want them.  We feel like the deck is stacked against us.  We may not wish for death like Elijah, but we look up to the heavens and ask God, “why?”  It’s a valid question.  Why, if we do so much good, do bad things still happen to us?  Elijah is considered the mightiest of the prophets of Israel.  In fact, he appeared with Moses during the Transfiguration of Jesus.  Yet Elijah was frustrated with God too.  He reached his wits end and wished for death.

So how did God answer his faithful prophet?  God sent an angel to feed Elijah.  He sent an angel to strengthen him.  Elijah would lie down again after eating, but the angel came back to make sure that he would be strengthened by this heavenly food, for Elijah’s journey was not complete.  This is what the Lord offers his faithful servants: sustenance, strength, food, and oh yea, the gentle nudge of an angel.  This leads us to today’s gospel where it’s not an angel but Jesus Christ himself that feeds us.  Tired? Overwhelmed? Anxious?  In over your head?  Come to the table of life.  Come and be fed the bread of life, the flesh of Christ for the life of the world.  There are so many things that overwhelm us consume us, bring us down, but this Eucharist reminds us that we never take on our problems alone.  Jesus Christ is always with us.  So yes, we may feel squeezed by God from time to time.  Elijah felt it. Even Jesus felt it in Gethsemane.  But He is always with us to feed us and strengthen us and in this Eucharist take it a step further by giving us nothing less than life eternal.