The Wounded Sheep

(Note: This homily was delivered during a Blue Mass this morning honoring our local police and firefighters on the anniversary of the attacks of September 11, 2011)

“What man among you having a hundred sheep and losing one of them would not leave the ninety-nine in the desert and go after the lost one until he finds it?” (Luke 15:4)

Why does the lost sheep wander far from the shepherd? Quite simply, because the sheep forgets what the shepherd’s voice sounds like, forgets that the shepherd leads us to green pastures, and forgets that the shepherd brings us peace.  The lost sheep goes in search of greener pastures which are illusions, distractions, and could ultimately lead to the sheep’s demise.  But the shepherd goes in search of the lost one anyways putting the rest in peril.  Such is God’s love for us.

This morning, we are honored to have members of the City of Hialeah Police and Fire Departments with us as we commemorate this somber anniversary of the attacks on our nation 15 years ago today.  Many brave men and women risked their lives in search of the defenseless when they bravely ran into those burning towers on that fateful Tuesday morning.  Today we gather not only to remember the victims, particularly your comrades in the New York and Port Authority Police and Fire Departments, but also to honor their heroic sacrifice.  Their examples of courage and selflessness are surely held up in every precinct and fire house as what exemplary police officers, fire fighters, and first responders should be.  Fifteen years have passed, but the pain is still there.  It is still raw.  I can vividly remember my brother calling me, two weeks from graduating from the fire academy, while all of us watched those towers burn. I can still remember his voice of horror yelling at the TV, “They can’t go in there! They can’t go in there!”  And even though he wasn’t officially a firefighter yet, he mourned those brave men and women that ran towards the towers. One of the iconic images in the aftermath of the attack was the three firefighters hoisting the American flag in the midst of the rubble of Ground Zero.  I made two copies of that photograph. One I gave to my brother as a present when he graduated from the academy.  The other still sits on a bookshelf in my office as a reminder not only of this date but that I must always pray for those who protect us.

Fifteen years ago it took the most tragic event of our lifetime to realize what all of you do for us each and every day.  That you put your lives between danger and those you are charged to protect during every shift. And for the police officers present, you had to endure a trying summer as many questioned your service.  You deserve better, and for this we apologize.  As I saw with my brother and the countless friends and parishioners who serve in law enforcement or stand guard in a firehouse, I have learned over the past 15 years that all of you are wired differently.  How else do you explain your comrades running towards those towers?  Your courage and strength are what drive you and what we honor this day.  Yet as I saw in my brother and in countless friends and parishioners who wear the uniform, I know that this call to protect can also be a burden that is far too difficult to carry alone.  You are witnesses to unspeakable tragedies, horrific scenes that none of us see precisely because you are protecting us.  All of you know far too well that criminals and fires aren’t the only things that can cost your comrades their lives, silent killers like PTSD that claimed my brother’s life also pose a great danger to your ranks.  Your burden, your pains should not be carried alone.  Like the sheep that wanders far off and puts its life at risk away from the shepherd, you are being chased by the Good Shepherd who loves you and seeks to protect you. 

Today this community of faith gathers to honor you and pray for you on this most solemn of days.  And as we pray for you, I urge you to seek out the voice of the Good Shepherd, the voice of God that calls out to you so that you may never have to walk the beat or ride the truck alone.  Because my brother wore your uniform, albeit for a different city, I still feel a certain responsibility to our civil servants.  Know that here in Immaculate you always have a place of refuge—a place where you can come to unload your sorrows and place them at the feet of our Lord.  Many of your comrades in New York 15 years ago finished long shifts and would walk into churches near Ground Zero with ashy uniforms to try to process what they had just witnessed.  They knew they couldn’t do it alone.  And know that I am always here to listen to your burdens.  I will not turn you away, not only because I am a priest, but because I am the brother of a firefighter who lost a fight to PTSD.  I now implore you to not let this silent killer touch you so that your families don’t have to go through what my family went through.  Talk to me. Talk to someone.  But don’t stay silent.  It doesn’t make you any less of a man or woman if your share your burdens with someone.  It just makes you stronger, makes you more courageous and makes you a better civil servant.  There’s a slogan that was used at PTSD fundraiser that I attended last year that applies to all of us that are called to serve and to be strong:  “The worst part about being strong is that no one ever asks if you’re ok.”  And so the Lord seeks you out this morning and hoists you on His strong shoulders and asks you if you are ok.  We are made stronger in numbers, and we are made stronger when our God finds us like he finds the lost sheep and hold us in his arms. 

On this September 11th, we thank you for your service and bravery and pray for all of you.  This community is here to remind you that you are being prayed for and it always stands with those who protect us.  No matter what happened 15 years ago, and no matter how many things you may endure in the line of duty, your God is always by your side.  May the St. Michael the Archangel always defend you and protect.  May God bless the City of Hialeah Police and Fire Departments, and on this day may God bless this great nation that you have sworn to protect.

Nothing is Impossible: The Cross of St. Teresa of Calcutta

“Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.” (Luke 14:27)

Too often we toss around the term impossible to make excuses for we cannot or are not willing to do.  Sometimes we look up to heaven when burdened by a great cross and say, “Lord, this is impossible.”  Impossible is a human word and not part of God’s vocabulary.  “Nothing is impossible for God,” the Angel Gabriel told the Virgin Mary when announcing the birth of Christ.  We use this word as a crutch, an excuse, or as an escape clause when everything seems to be falling down around us.  We use this word at times when God asks of us what we deem “impossible.”  Today in the gospel, our Lord is quite frank in saying that whoever does not carry his own cross to come after him cannot be his disciple.  So many times we leave our crosses on the side of the road when things get tough and then realize we get lost because that very cross that seemed so heavy was our compass to lead us to where God wants us to be.

On this day in which we celebrate the canonization of Mother Teresa, we recall her own call to take up the cross unexpectedly given to her by our Lord to take care of the poorest of the poor.  Why another call?  At the time, she was already a nun teaching girls.  She had already consecrated herself to Jesus as his bride when she answered the call to be a nun, but as the first reading tells us “who can conceive what the Lord intends? (Wisdom 9:13)”  No one.  Not even a future saint.  So after a long struggle with her superiors, she one day left the secure confines of her convent to go into the streets of Calcutta.  If you haven’t seen the movie “The Letters” about Mother Teresa, I highly recommend it (it is currently available on Netflix).  The film does a beautiful job of depicting this transition of Mother Teresa from the convent to the unwelcoming streets of Calcutta to embrace this “impossible” vocation.  Impossible? Because the saints are so close to God, this word also does not exist in their vocabulary while they journey with us here on earth.  But here is probably what is most remarkable about St. Teresa answering this new call from the Lord: as she ventured out to care for the sick and the poor, at times she felt abandoned by God.  Yet she persisted.  She continued to carry her cross even though she felt at times that she was carrying alone.  Every day she spent an hour in front of the Blessed Sacrament even when she felt she was not being accompanied by He who called her.  In carrying out her God given mission to reach out to the poor, St. Teresa showed us was is truly possible when we surrender to God even when we feel abandoned by Him.  It’s not Him. It’s us.  We’re the ones that can’t perceive his presence at times, and we’re the ones who toss around the word impossible.  This little nun captivated not only our Church but the entire world with her actions and even some of her words when she would pause to speak.

On this concept of surrender, St. Teresa once said: “Total surrender consists in giving ourselves completely to God, because God has given Himself to us.  If God owes nothing to us and is ready to impart to us no less than Himself, shall we answer with just a fraction of ourselves?  I give up my own self and in this way induce God to live for me.  Therefore to possess God we must allow him to possess our souls.”  In another instance the saint proclaimed: “Let God use you without consulting with you. Let the Lord catch you…Let yourself be caught by Him and then let Him dispose of you utterly.”  And these were the things this holy woman was saying while she was going through a “dark night” as we have recently discovered.  This is why nothing is impossible for God.  He took this imperfect little pencil, this tiny Albanian nun who experienced her own dark night of the soul, and made her nothing less than a saint here on earth.

So the next time you are about to toss around the word “impossible,” ask yourself if you have totally surrendered to God and his will.  Christ says we cannot be his disciples if we don’t take up our cross and go after him.  St. Teresa left everything to do just that.  She carried her cross faithfully, even through the night, and that cross broke down doors that were impossible to open.  Where is your cross?  What is your impossible calling?  Surrender yourself completely to God: not just a part of you but your entire self.  Let Him catch you, let Him live in you, and let him dispose of you as He wills.  It is not impossible, for this tiny nun showed us that this word does not even belong in the vocabulary of a Christian. 

St. Teresa of Calcutta, pray for us.

Humility: The Foundation of All Love

“Humble yourself the more, the greater you are, and you will find mercy in the sight of God.” (Sirach 3:18)

During my third year in seminary, I was helping out in the library putting barcodes on all the books (that’s a lot of books).  One afternoon, I reached for a book call “Love: A Fruit Always in Season.”  It was a book of daily meditations by Mother Teresa that someone had compiled.  I flipped to the daily meditation of that day and it totally hit the mark of where I was in my spiritual life at the age of 20 and what I needed to hear/read that day (I won’t get into what it said because that’s an entire different homily).  So I stayed there for a good 5-10 minutes flipping through that book, reading her sayings, quotes and mini speeches, and in a pre-Amazon world, I drove the next chance I could to the nearest bookstore and bought the book.  It’s been at my side ever since.  Mother Teresa will be canonized next Sunday, and she is one of the most quoted (and misquoted) individuals of the 20^th century.  When I read today’s readings on humility, I immediately thought of her and her many beautiful words about this virtue that seems to escape us.   Humility is seen by this world as a weakness instead of the powerful spiritual gift that God saw and that Mother Teresa and many of the saints embraced.  Humility is the foundation of all love, for to love you have to humble yourself to be able to love the other.  Humility requires putting God and the other first so that we love them with little regard for ourselves.  Jesus extols the virtue of humility in the gospel when he tells us that those who humble themselves will be exalted.  This is the way of God: to think of the other first so that we can start to love them.

So what did (soon to be Saint) Mother Teresa have to say about humility? Well, plenty:  “If you are humble nothing will touch you, neither praise nor disgrace, because you know what you are.  If you are blamed you will not be discouraged.  If they call you a saint you will not put yourself on a pedestal.”  The humble person is always even keel: doesn’t get too high and doesn’t get too low because this person knows that God always comes first and that God is at their side.  Mother Teresa also delights in the humility of God:  “In God I find two things admirable: His goodness and His humility.  His love and His humility are striking.  God is truly humble; He comes down and uses instruments as weak and imperfect as we are.  He deigns to work through us. Is that not marvelous?”  Here Mother is touching upon the beauty of the mystery of the Incarnation.  Not only did God become man, but he uses us to accomplish his will, as his instruments or as his “little pencils” as Mother would say.  This is what is marvelous: that God loves us so much that he wants us to be part of his great plan to re-create the world.  As Mother would say, it starts with a smile, and in today’s readings we realize that it also starts off with embracing humility in order to begin to love.  Once we realize that God and the other come first and the beauty that is humility, then the spiritual benefits that await us are simply eternal.

(Many of you asked me this morning where you could get the book that I referenced.  I thought it was out of print but here it is:

https://www.amazon.com/Love-Always-Mother-Teresa-Calcutta/dp/0898701678/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1472424117&sr=8-1&keywords=Love+a+fruit+always+in+season)

Doorway to Heaven

“Strive to enter through the narrow door…” (Luke 14:24)

In today’s gospel, someone asks Jesus a very straightforward question: “Lord will only a few people be saved?”  The Lord does not answer the question directly but says to enter through the narrow door.  Many will try to get into the party, but only those who take the road less travelled and use the narrow door will get in.  Such is the life of the Christian.  But what can prevents us from entering through the small door that leads to eternal life?  This morning, Pope Francis reminded us that Jesus is the door and that pride prevents us from passing through the door: “For this, it is narrow: to contain our pride, which bloats us.  The door of God's mercy is narrow but always wide open, wide open for everyone!”  Pride and sin may prevent us from getting through, but our Holy Father rightly points out that while the door to eternity may be narrow, it is definitely always open.  We just got to shed some of the excess spiritual weight that hold us back from being, as Matthew Kelly would say, the best version of ourselves.

So basically we got to get in spiritual shape to fit through that narrow door.  Today the Olympics come to a close and we’ve been witnessed to some remarkable triumphs and stories.  These athletes sacrifice so much and train for hours every day just to be able to compete. In the case of those who trained for the 100 meter dash, they train four years for a 10 second sprint, and as has been the case for the last three Olympics, they train for the honor of sprinting next to the great Usain Bolt who did more to promulgate the devotion to Miraculous Medal than any priest or bishop over the last two weeks.  So these athletes train to attain their prize, which is a gold medal.  As Christians, we spiritual train to attain the ultimate prize, which is heaven.  Just like we can’t wake up one morning and think we can compete with Michael Phelps, we can’t just expect to walk through the narrow door if we aren’t in spiritual shape.  Yet God’s mercy is so great that we can make the decision right now if we want to to shed the excess spiritual weight that is holding us back from being great Christians.  I was joking with some ladies this morning that the best place to lose weight is basically the confessional.  We walk in burdened by sin, bloated as the Pope said, and we walk out as slim as a supermodel: free to live the lives that Christ wants us to live.  Unburdened by our past and focused totally on the present.   The importance of confession has been at the forefront of this Year of Mercy, and once done with confession, we are surrounded by a myriad of Holy Doors to symbolize our leaving our old ways behind to walk with Christ though one of those doors and into a new life full of endless possibilities.  This was the highlight of my recent pilgrimage through Europe and all the different Holy Doors that I walked through especially the Holy Door in St. Peter’s Basilica.

So in order to enter through the narrow door, the doorway to eternity, I leave you with one simple question: what is holding you back from being the Christian that Christ wants you to be?

Fired Up Christians

“I have come to set the earth on fire, and how I wish I were already blazing!” (Luke 12:49)

The Christian will always be a symbol of division. In this world where the truth takes a back seat to lies, where we are surrounded by a society that goes totally contrary to what Christ taught us, anyone who speaks the truth of Christ will be seen as a lunatic, as out of touch, as an outcast, as crazy as Christ appeared to many.  So when Jesus tells us that he has come to set fire to the earth, what he is proposing is a spiritual flood, a little bit different than the flood of Noah, but he seeks to make all things new. The brush fires that we constantly see in the Everglades are natural, and they clear away the old to make way for the new, for more vibrant vegetation and life.  That fire that Jesus desires is meant to purify, to cleanse; to help us, as the second reading tells us, to “rid ourselves of every burden of sin that clings to us and persevere in running the race that lies before us while keeping our eyes fixed on Jesus."  That fire should help us detach from the world, and live only for Christ.

If today weren’t Sunday, we’d be celebrating the feast of St. Maximilian Kolbe.  Here was a priest of the 20^th century who detached from the world with his eyes fixed solely on Jesus and the Blessed Mother.  This inclination, this freedom he had is what allowed him to do what he did in probably the darkest and most horrific place in human history: Auschwitz.  Freed from everything of this world and living only for Christ, St. Maximilian laid down his life for someone else.   Having been arrested in Poland during the Nazi occupation of World War II, St. Max was sent to Auschwitz.  One day a prisoner escaped and the Nazis ordered that ten random men be put to death as punishment for the escape.  St. Max was not chosen, but there was a man who was a husband and father who was chosen to die.  St. Max volunteered to take his place which the Nazis allowed.  Even in the darkest of places where God seemed to be absent, this priest brought the love of God and became a sign of division, of hope, of the fire of the Holy Spirit that had consumed his heart.  St. Max lived out one of his most famous sayings: “The poison of our times is indifference."  He was not indifferent to the suffering around him.  He became a martyr and a model for Christian life.  He took the gospel literally and laid down his life for a friend.  This was a man who was sent to set the earth on fire, and he did so by giving his life.

But how do we set the earth on fire? How do we cause division?  The Holy Father this morning said that this gospel serves as a reminder that we need this fire in our Church lest we become cold or lukewarm. People should feel a warm embrace when they come into church.  This comes from impassioned missionaries of the gospel and not from once a week, punches the one-hour time clock Catholic.  All of us have a responsibility to light this fire and to be the voice for the voiceless.  Yes, following Jesus is difficult. It causes division. Many families are already divided this morning because some chose to come to Mass while others chose another priority.  What can be more important than worshiping Christ on his day, the Lord's Day?  Set the earth on fire even if it’s in your home. Don't be afraid. Be bold. And if it causes division: good! We are doing what the Lord commanded. We are fulfilling our baptismal call to be prophetic. Sure it may get us thrown into a metaphorical cistern like Jeremiah in the first reading, but Jesus is always at our side.

Did you know that St. Max was the last to die in that death chamber? He encouraged his fellow inmates. He prayed. He sang. He had no fear of death. Even "defeated" he was setting the earth on fire until his last breath. May we all learn from his example. We cannot be indifferent.  We have to ask ourselves how we are helping our parish grow and how we are setting the earth on fire for this is what our Lord desires.  May our parish always be a place of warmth, of welcome, and may we bring the fire of Jesus onto the earth to purify, restore, and give new life.