Command That I Come To You On The Water

 Matthew 14:22-33

“Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.” 

That's how our consent to the journey begins; we wish to recognize God as truly God, we invite him into our lives, offering our wills, offering ourselves and asking to be commanded.

He said, “Come.” Peter got out of the boat and began to walk on the water toward Jesus.

And so our journey to the Lord begins. There is the joy and energy of a first fervor and we set out, walking on the unsure foundation of all our mixed motivations, past traumas, and disordered attachments.

But when he saw how [strong] the wind was he became frightened; and, beginning to sink.

Soon we realize that it is beyond us to approach and much less arrive at the presence of God. We sink in our sins, confusions, wrong ideas about religion and God, and much else besides.

he cried out, “Lord, save me!” Immediately Jesus stretched out his hand and caught him, and said to him, “O you of little faith, why did you doubt?

What happens next, if we persevere at this point, becomes the real beginning of a spiritual life. We let our experience of our misery, our inability to even approach God, become compunction. Pierced to the heart, sinking and afraid, looking at our own death by drowning squarely in the face, we cry out in desperation. "Lord, save me!" 

We have realized that even to take a single step in our journey to the Lord, we need him to stretch out his hand and catch us. That outstretched hand is the Holy Spirit. And just as that Spirit stretched forth from the Godhead to conceive the Word of God as the human life of Jesus Christ, so now the same Spirit (if we allow it!) conceives us as Christ-ians.

With that new experience of faith comes the final realization, that the issues and difficulties in our spiritual journey arise from failing to see clearly that it isn't our journey at all, but the journey of the Son of God in and through our humanity, folding us, gently and mercifully, into the infinitely blessed, happy, and creative reality we call the Holy Trinity.

So let us invite the Lord, again for the first time, to command that we come to him on the water.

The Holy Family

Holy Family, C

The good news of Christmas continues to unfold; the mystery of the incarnation continues to reveal itself. Today we are given to contemplate Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, as a member of a family – the Holy Family – together with Mary and Joseph.

And we see that Jesus as a child in the Holy Family is part of the mystery of the incarnation. When we say that the Word of God assumed our human nature, this includes being a member of family, for it is part of our human nature to be members of a family, to be children of parents, parents of children, brothers and sisters. And given that the mystery of the incarnation in Jesus Christ not only reveals God but also our human nature as God sees it – and things only really exist in the way God sees them – perhaps this revelation of the Holy Family is important for us in our time, in which we see how forgetfulness of God quickly leads to much confusion – and the suffering that follows – about the nature and purpose of the family.

God Is Love

I remember once back in Yonkers I was caught off guard in need of a Sunday homily. A missionary priest was coming to make an appeal and was to preach at all the Masses for this purpose, so I hadn't prepared anything that week. His flight, however, was delayed, and he didn't make it in time for the Saturday vigil Mass.

So at the time of the homily I explained to the assembly how I was stuck. On the one hand, I was not willing to take them and my duties as a priest so lightly as to preach without having prepared. On the other hand, it was a Sunday Mass, and therefore the faithful had a right to a homily.

My solution: I brought and read a little passage of St. Augustine's comment on the gospel for that Sunday.

Trinity Sunday, First Mass of a New Priest

A friar who was ordained to the priesthood yesterday invited me to be the preacher at his first Mass. Here's the homily I gave.

(Trinity Sunday, A)

When I was a new priest—and had even less good sense and tact than the precious little I have now—I used to say that one of the benefits of becoming a priest was that you didn’t have to listen to any more Trinity Sunday homilies.

You know; they can be brilliant, but sometimes, not so much. It goes something like this: God is three, God is one, it’s a mystery, you can’t really understand it…please stand for the Creed.

And this is unfortunate; this business about ‘you can’t understand’ the mystery of the Blessed Trinity. We cannot have a full comprehension, of course, but this doesn’t mean we can’t have some understanding. In fact, all of us who are Christians can have some understanding of this great mystery, precisely because we have all had an experience of the Blessed Trinity.

To get at what I mean, let’s turn to something we all know well: Christmas. What is Christmas all about? As we read in the gospel of St. Matthew:

Now this is how the birth of Jesus Christ came about. When his mother Mary was betrothed to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found with child through the holy Spirit. (1:18)

Catholicity

The feast of All Saints today and the commemoration of All Souls tomorrow are perfect opportunities to recall to ourselves the catholicity of the Church. We are members of the Catholic Church, practitioners of Catholic Christianity. Catholic is a Greek word that simply means general or universal. The Church is ‘universal’ or ‘general’ in many ways. In one sense the Church is universal because it extends over the whole earth. There’s even a Catholic chapel in Antarctica; it’s dedicated to St. Francis by the way. The moon, it’s already been decided, is part of the diocese of Rome, in case you were thinking of making a visit and were wondering who your bishop might be. The Church is also universal because it extends until the end of time. But most of all, the Church is universal and catholic because it passes beyond the boundaries of time and space to include both heaven and earth.

This teaching on the catholicity of the church comes to us in the classic language of the Church Triumphant, the Church Militant, and the Church Suffering or Expectant. The Church Triumphant is the Church we honor today on All Saints’ Day: those Christians who have completed their journey and enjoy the vision of God in heaven. We who make up the Church on earth are classically called the Church Militant; “militant” in the sense that we are in the midst of the struggle with sin and the work of ushering in the fullness of the Kingdom of God.

Being a Branch

I find today's gospel, that of the vine and the branches from St. John's Last Supper Discourses, so beautiful and encouraging.

I am the true vine, and my Father is the vine grower. (John 15:1)

Who is the Father? He is one who grows something, someone who cultivates. He plants and cultivates a vine in his creation, the Vine Jesus Christ.

I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever remains in me and I in him will bear much fruit, because without me you can do nothing. (John 15:5)

Branches are part of the vine, but one can still make a distinction between the vine and the branches. So it is with us who are baptized into Christ and who renew our union with him in Holy Communion. We remain at the same time the free and discrete beings we were created and members of the mystical Body of Christ.

Branches draw their growth and nourishment from the vine; they grow from the life of the vine. So it is with us in our prayer and our participation in the sacraments. While the vine is the life of the branches, on the other hand the branches are the flourishing of the vine; it is from the branches that the leaves and the fruit come. This is what we branches are called to be--the flourishing of the vine:

By this is my Father glorified, that you bear much fruit and become my disciples. (John 15:8)

The glory of God is our bearing of fruit, through our humanity joined to the sacred humanity of Christ. The fruits of the Holy Spirit are where the glorification of God and human flourishing intersect: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. (Galatians 5:22-23)

But this is not without its challenges:

He takes away every branch in me that does not bear fruit, and everyone that does he prunes so that it bears more fruit. (John 15:2)

If we set out on the journey of letting ourselves to be a branch of the Vine Jesus Christ, we can expect to be pruned. When God finds a soul willing to work, he puts her to work. This pruning is a letting go. A letting go of sins, attachments, and ideas, even ideas of God. The pruning can feel painful because we have become attached to material things and our ways of thinking in disordered ways. This is to say that we try to love them outside of the love of God.The pruning can seem to take away even the person we thought we were, but it has the purpose of revealing the true person that God has created and that God wills to flourish in his her humanity. Our pruning comes first of all through an attentive and prayerful listening to the Word of God, a listening that is ready to be challenged to action and to change:

You are already pruned because of the word that I spoke to you. (John 15:3)

It is the Word proclaimed in the assembled Church that prunes us believers, as well as the Word pronounced by Father and breathed out by the Holy Spirit in the interior place of our prayer, that breath that conceives us in the Word, as Christians, members of the Body of Christ.

Why do Penance?

Brothers and sisters: in your struggle against sin you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding blood. (Hebrews 12:4)

Nevertheless, we practice penance now, so that we might learn the fortitude that will serve us well should God some day judge us worthy of the opportunity.

The Holy Spirit

I got caught up in the readings on the way up to Pentecost, especially Jesus' prayer at the Last Supper as it comes to us in John.

"I made known to them your name, and I will make it known, that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them." (John 17:26)

To me this is the heart of Christianity; that the love with which you have loved me may be in them. Our communion with the humanity of Jesus Christ draws us into the love of the Father and the Son. And this is what we call the Holy Spirit.

Jesus Christ reveals that 'God' is not a static 'supreme being' nor a philosopher's abstraction, but a relationship, a Lover and Beloved in the perfect unity of Love. That Love conceives the Beloved in time, within the creation, so that the human creature may also enjoy and be renovated by the creative relationship that is the Father and the Son. This historical event we call Jesus Christ.

As the Spirit conceives Jesus Christ through the loving consent of Mary, so the same Spirit conceives each Christian soul, made Christ-ian by communion with the humanity of Christ, empowered to confess that "Jesus is Lord." (1 Cor 12:3) Just as Christ is raised from the dead, so the Christian gains new life from the Spirit dwelling within, (Rom 8:11) enabling him or her to leave behind selfishness and fear and to "seek the things that are above." (Col 3:1)

The Spirit does all this precisely as the Love of the Father and the Son, drawing the person who consents into the very life of the Blessed Trinity, into the overflowingly creative love from which everything that has being has come.

Each of us is a unique and unrepeatable creation. Since, as we say, 'grace builds on nature,' this means that each of us has the potential of being the bearer of a unique and unrepeatable grace for the world. Indeed, God wills it. St. Paul says as much to the Corinthians: "To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good." (1 Cor 12:7) Let us then let go of anything that holds us back, and consent to be conceived as Christians, as members of the mystical Body of Christ, that we might become the particular grace God wills and delights for us to be for each other.

His Birth, Our Rebirth

(This is the little homily I gave to the remnant of the brethren this morning.)

"This is how the birth of Jesus Christ came about...his mother Mary...was found with child through the Holy Spirit." (Mt 1:18)

The Church was born in the same way, when the same Spirit filled the house where the apostles were gathered after the Ascension.

And every Sunday, even every day, the Church--we as Church--are regenerated right here by the Eucharist.

Just as God opened the side of Adam to form Eve, mother of all the living, so with the water and blood flowing from the side of Jesus--opened by our violence--all those brought back to life come to be fed.

This is the good news of our faith; in Christ crucified, God has transformed the violence of sin into the source of salvation. We, reborn in the same Christ conceived by the Holy Spirit in the womb of Mary, filled with the same Spirit, come to be washed and fed from the wounds of the Son become man. This is why we pray in today's Collect--the same prayer we pray three times a day in the Angelus--that the Passion and Cross of the Lord would bring us the glory of the Resurrection.

In these days, when we celebrate with joy the birth among us of the Son of God, we celebrate in the same way our regeneration in the Holy Spirit as the Church--the Body of Christ--as well as our daily and eucharistic rebirth, as John says, "not by water alone, but by water and blood." (1 Jn 5:6)

His conception in the womb of Mary is the dawn of our regeneration, his birth our rebirth.

Bartimaeus

(This is a partial re-post from this Sunday three years ago. But I was grateful to read it again, so I thought maybe it was worth it.)

St. Mark's presentation of blind Bartimaeus is full of wonderful ironies. Most plainly there is the classic irony of the blind person being the one who can actually see; after several episodes in which the disciples address Jesus with incomplete titles--e.g. master, teacher, rabbi--this blind beggar finally calls upon Jesus with all of his saving and royal dignity: "Son of David, have mercy on me!"

In their arrogance and presumption, James and John had approached Jesus and told him, "We want you do for us whatever we ask of you." Now Jesus addresses Bartimaeus in a similar way: "What do you want me to do for you?"

An authentic encounter with Jesus, i.e. prayer, always becomes an encounter with the desires of the heart. If our desires are distorted we can expect, like James and John, to receive a jarring challenge in response. If our heart is in the right place we will hear the words Jesus gives back to Bartimaeus: "Go your way: your faith has made you well."

The end of the healing experience matters as well. Right away the newly sighted Bartimaeus follows Jesus "on the way." Here we see the difference between Christianity and the 'spirituality' of the world. A worldly, so-called spirituality offers healing so that we might enjoy ourselves. The end of being healed in Christ is discipleship; we are restored in Christ so that we might follow him on his Way.

The Gentle and Hopeful Doctrine of Purgatory

This is a homily for All Souls Day that I wrote a few years ago:

The observance we make today goes by many names. In English we usually call it All Souls Day, but it’s also known as the Day of the Dead, El Día de Los Muertos, or as it’s officially called, the Commemoration of all the Faithful Departed. Whatever we call it, today is a day that the Church sets aside in a particular way to pray and offer Masses for our beloved dead.

When we reflect on our laudable practice of praying for the dead, we can’t get away from talking about purgatory. This is because if our beloved dead have completed their journey to God and find themselves in the fullness of his presence—in the ultimate destiny we call heaven—then their feast day was yesterday on All Saints Day, and it is they who should be praying for us! And if, God forbid, someone finds themselves in hell, then there isn’t any use praying for them anyway. Keep in mind, though, that though the Church has always affirmed hell as a kind of logical possibility for the final destiny of human freedom, she has never claimed or affirmed that any human soul actually went there. Apart from the devil and his angels, hell might be empty.

In the midst of the two final destinies of heaven and hell we affirm the process of purgatory. We are not talking about a place, but a process. Sometimes we have this idea that purgatory is some kind of awful thing with fire and torments and all that. I’m not sure that this is the right approach. I’ll tell you right now, if I die today and I find myself in purgatory, I’ll be overjoyed! Why? Because, brothers and sisters, purgatory has only one exit, and that exit is the eternal joy and peace of the perfect vision of God, the blessed destiny of heaven. To be in purgatory is to be on the way to heaven, and there is nothing more anyone could ever want.

In fact, my friends, purgatory is not about punishment for sinners, but about God’s mercy on those who have already been saved and destined for heaven by their baptism into Christ’s death and Resurrection. The process begins at our baptism. We are freed from sin and configured to the perfect humanity of Christ. In the course of our life from that day on, we are called to grow in faith and holiness. Though we are free from sin by baptism, the wounds and injuries of sin remain in our hearts, minds, and bodies. That’s why we still struggle with selfishness and sin over the course of our baptized life. Now, if at the end of our life, whenever it comes, we have not yet fully freed ourselves from our attachment to the selfishness and sin, God provides a means for us to continue our purification after death. This final process of purification we call purgatory. See how gentle and merciful God is to us! God passionately desires the salvation of every human soul, and even if we don’t succeed in letting God make us perfectly good and holy in this life, he will purify and prepare us for heaven in the life to come.

That’s why I would be overjoyed to find myself in purgatory. I find it very comforting. With all of my sins, I know that even if I don’t succeed in becoming a saint in this life, God will make me one in the life to come. Purgatory is one more sign to us that God’s love and desire to bring us to the perfect joy of himself is stronger than sin. God’s desire to save the world will not be thwarted by something as stupid as my sins.

We don’t know what this process of purification will be like. We don’t know if it takes time—as we know it—or if it happens in an instant awareness of God. But today is a day to pray for those who are in the midst of this final, purifying journey to heaven, that through the communion of saints our prayers might speed them on the way to the final destiny we all look forward to: the eternal joy and peace, the perfectly satisfying vision of God we call heaven.

In Nativitate Domini

Merry Christmas, friends.

May the dawn of the new creation draw us in and be the refreshment and renovation of our hearts and minds! I'm on the road for Christmas and Holy Family weekend, but I left this post to publish itself in my absence. I've posted this text before, but I remain happy with it. It's a homily for the Christmas Mass in nocte that I wrote as part of the final exam for a course on the Blessed Trinity:


Rejoice, friends, for the mystery of Christmas is the revelation of God’s loving plan for our salvation. “The grace of God has appeared,” as Paul tells us. The human birth of the Son of God reveals the mystery that God indeed has a son. Our God is a perfect love, and what is love that does not love someone? Therefore from all eternity there is lover and beloved in God, the Father and the Son.

Be assured that this Son of God whose human birth we adore tonight is God himself, “light from light,” and “true God from true God” as we shall soon pray in the creed. Paul himself calls him “our great God and savior.”

While contemplating the poor and simple birth of the Lord, let us pay attention to our attitude toward the mystery. Is it just that we have awe for the humility of the God who was willing to accept not only the poverty of our nature but to be born among simple parents in an obscure nation? Is Christmas here to teach us to be humble too? I assure you that the Son of God is much more than a role model, though he is surely that as well. Paul tells us that this appearance of the grace of God will, in fact, “deliver us from all lawlessness” and “cleanse” us, making us into God’s own people.

This is the great good news of Christmas: the Son of God is born in our human nature and thus provides our human nature a path to the divine life of God that he himself has been from all eternity. By becoming one of us, the infinite love that the Son has always received is now extended to us through the human nature of Jesus Christ.

The Incarnation connects the divine with the human, extending God’s life to us. This sacred exchange is voiced in the preface to tonight’s Eucharist prayer when it says that in Christ we see “our God made visible and so are caught up in love of the God we cannot see.” This stretching forth, as it were, of the eternal love of Father and Son to us is what we call the Holy Spirit. The Incarnation of God establishes a path for our human nature to be brought back to God, and God’s Spirit draws us in. This is what we mean when we say that Jesus Christ was conceived by the Holy Spirit; the Spirit of God, God’s desire to be known, works in the Incarnation so that God’s saving plan may be known.

This is good news! The birth of Jesus Christ reveals the new availability of the infinitely beautiful and satisfying love that is the personal life of God himself. This is our adoption into the eternal Sonship of Christ himself, through which we become the true children of God. We rejoice tonight for, through the human birth of Christ, the Holy Spirit includes us in the eternal and perfect relationship of the Lover whom we call Father and the Beloved whom we call the Son. And this is the grand and mysterious reality that we call God.

The Domestic Face of Christ Crucified

This Sunday's gospel has become one my favorites. The funeral ritual suggests the shorter form of it for the wake service, so I have preached on it often. I like to call it, 'the domestic face of Christ crucified:'

“Gird your loins and light your lamps and be like servants who await their master’s return from a wedding, ready to open immediately when he comes and knocks. Blessed are those servants whom the master finds vigilant on his arrival. Amen, I say to you, he will gird himself, have them recline at table, and proceed to wait on them." (Luke 12:35-37)

Here is the great reversal of Christianity. The master returns late from a wedding, presumably tired. But then it is not the servants who wait on him, but the master who invites the servants to recline at table while he waits on them. This is the God who reverses our human ideas of what lordship and dominion are supposed to mean, and places himself below us as Servant. To be empowered in Christ to do the same thing ourselves, to let go of all of our selfish and fleshly drives toward dominance, control, and commodification of each other, is the salvation offered to and accomplished for the world in Christ.

The Answer to Prayer

Jesus assures us that by our confidence and persistence we will receive a favorable answer to our prayer. In fact, we receive the greatest gift of all. Follow this link for my homily for this weekend.

The Good Samaritan

I know I'm being a scrub, but in my transitional space I don't have a new homily to post today. Nevertheless, I'm still happy with what I posted three years ago, which you can check out by following this link.

Lambs Among Wolves

I didn't manage a new homily this week, but I'm still pretty happy with the one I wrote three years ago. Topics include fitness for mission and receiving the stigmata. Check it out here.

Christian Freedom

Our freedom in Christ is worth our attention from time to time, both because of the errors of the flesh and the world, and because it is the means by which we fulfill the commandment to love our neighbor. Follow this link for my homily for this weekend.

Recognizing the Christ

By our contemplation of Christ crucified, we receive the Spirit that is handed over to us by his Passion. Follow this link for my homily for this weekend.

Corpus (et Sanguis) Christi

Follow this link for my homily for this weekend, in which is touched upon the good news of the institution of the Eucharist, the meaning of 'conscious and active participation' at Mass, and the mission of imitating the mystery we receive.

The Most Holy Trinity

This weekend's homily contains an interpolation of the previously published rant on the same topic. Follow this link to check it out.