2009

Do We Really Have to Do This?

In a northern Minnesota town there lived a man named Lars. He was born and raised a Lutheran. Each Friday night after work, Lars would fire up his stove and cook a venison steak.

Normally, this would not bother his Catholic neighbors, except during Lent, when they were required to abstain from eating meat every Friday.  Stuck with eating fish, cheese, and buttered noodles and bread, Catholics would just about die from the aroma coming from Lars’ house on Friday nights.  The local Catholic parishioners asked their pastor to use his powers of persuasion to see if they could get Lars to convert to Catholicism.

The pastor was very persuasive, and Lars agreed that he would go through RCIA and convert to Catholicism. In fact, the pastor even arranged to catechize Lars himself so that he could be brought into the Catholic faith before Lent arrived the following year.  After receiving the sacraments of Reconciliation, Eucharist and Confirmation, the pastor proudly told Lars, “Always remember: once you were a Lutheran, now you are a Catholic.”

Lent arrived and the Catholic community in the town thought that this Lent would indeed be different. No more “to die for” aromas coming out of Lars’ house during Lenten Fridays. And so the Catholic brothers and sisters were shocked when the first Friday after Ash Wednesday arrived, and the aroma of venison steak was again wafting from Lars’ house.  Frustrated and angry, parishioners visited their pastor and asked him if the pastor had clued Lars in about Lenten fasting and abstinence requirements.

The pastor himself was surprised. So he decided to visit Lars’ house.  It was an early spring evening, beautiful for Minnesota and Lars was cooking his venison with a window open. Father took in the wonderful smell, not sure whether to scold Lars or just simply explain the new responsibilities Lars must take on as a Catholic. Still not sure what he would say, the pastor looked into the house and overheard Lars praying over the venison. I was once a Lutheran, now I am Catholic, you were once venison, now you are a sturgeon.”

We are in the season of Lent. We are confronted with a season in which we take stock of our relationship with God, and attempt to move closer to Him through prayer, reading of Scripture, more frequent use of the sacraments, and acts of penance including, yes, fasting and abstinence.

In some important ways I suppose, I am an unlikely candidate to talk to you about fasting and abstinence. As you can tell by looking at me, I hate fasting and abstinence. I haven’t missed too many meals and I hate fish.

But fasting and abstinence is an important part of our faith. Why? Because first and foremost it was an important part of Christ’s life. It was part of his mission of salvation to his people. If we seek to journey with Christ, then we must be like Him. So fasting and abstinence are part of living an authentic Christian life.

We might think of fasting and abstinence only as an individual activity. But if we do, such practices become just a tedious chore. We can’t wait for 12:01 on Saturday morning, so we can snack on a ham sandwich and Fritos. We long for the passing of Good Friday. Then we won’t have to fast or abstain until nearly a year later, on Ash Wednesday. In short, we get hung up on fasting and abstinence at a superficial or mechanical level. We can then really resent it.

If, however, we think of fasting as communal, as a part of Christian and Catholic life, then we can see that the external observance of penitential practices like avoiding food between meals or abstaining from meat is embedded in a deeper action-filled faith that serves God and our world.

All three readings tonight (tomorrow) deal with the issue of sacrifice and the reality that sacrifice is a part of an authentic Christian life. Fasting and abstinence is conduct quite natural to a life dedicated to seeking God’s justice in our world. It is quite natural to someone who gives in order to receive, who puts others first.

Jesus’ whole life involved a deeper kind of fasting and abstinence, and a fasting and abstinence that was not just about food or the lack of it, but based on service to others in the most fundamental sense, even to the point of dying so that others could be returned to God.

And so, if we seek to follow him, our fasting and abstinence must also be more than food deep. It must also be based on service to God and others not just during Lent but all year round. Fasting and abstinence fundamentally is not a matter of missing snacks between meals two days a year, or abstaining from meat seven days a year, all in a condensed six week period.

Now don’t get me wrong. Symbolic actions are important or else the Church would not ask us to do them. They are a start. But let me dare say that if people thought of fasting and abstaining at a deeper level, it might be far easier to do symbolic fasting as well. The rituals of fasting and abstinence then become a symbolic celebration, a gateway if you will, to living the Gospel life in pursuit of justice and love for others. These rituals are then no longer a tedious ritualistic chore because they are accompanied by real charity toward our brothers and sisters.

What does it mean to fast and abstain at a deeper level? This deeper communal form of fasting and abstinence involves fasting and abstaining from oppression so that others not just you feel the freedom of the sons and daughters of God; it involves fasting and abstaining so others can be fed, fasting and abstaining from mindless materialism so the homeless can be sheltered, fasting and abstaining from accumulating obscene and unjust wealth so as to help the less fortunate of all kinds, fasting and abstaining from unjust wars so that people in other countries are not slaughtered, fasting and abstaining from violence so that life is respected to life at all of its stages is respected and protected.

If we can get to this deeper level of fasting and abstinence, we can see that, fasting and abstinence celebrates something unique about human beings. For only human beings are capable of offering sacrifice. And they are capable of offering sacrifice not just for the six weeks of Lent, but all year ’round. It is central to Christianity.

By following Christ’s way through communally based fasting, we fight for God’s justice on earth. Through effective fasting we come to understand that true love to God and others is self-emptying. We become truly free to become the unique persons he has called us to be. We become full members of a Christian community of love for God and love for others. And then we emulate the Trinity, which is a community of persons in oneness.

So Lars and his brother and sister Catholics need not worry about changing venison into sturgeon. For if they, and we, use Lent for prayer, sacrament, and Scripture, we can be transformed in Jesus Christ. The symbolic will be joined with the deeper practical everyday challenges and joys of the Christian life. Fasting and abstinence become not just food deep, but soul deep. And that is why we fast and abstain in the first place.
 

Late one night, a cheerful truck driver pulled into a roadside diner for a coffee break. The atmosphere in the diner suddenly grew tense when three wild looking cyclists, wearing dirty black leather jackets trimmed in metal, walked in. Immediately, they targeted the truck driver. One poured salt on his head; another flipped his doughnut on the floor, while the third “accidentally” bumped the coffee onto the driver’s lap. The driver didn’t say a thing. He merely got up, walked slowly to the cashier, calmly paid his bill and left. “Man, that doodle ain’t much of a fighter,” sneered one of the cyclists.  The waiter behind the counter peered out the window and replied, “He doesn’t seem to be much of a driver either. He just ran his truck over three motorcycles!”

Getting even is the name of the game many of us play whenever we have been victimized by someone. Buried in scripture, we find lines, such as from Leviticus, “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” to justify such an attitude. On the surface, getting even may seem so freeing, but in fact, revenge paralyzes us. When we refuse to forgive, we remain paralyzed by a past event.

Perhaps that is why Mark provides us with such an unusual setting in today’s gospel.  Being a man of few words, he doesn’t tell us why the man was paralyzed but there had to be a link between the paralytic’s condition and his life-style. His actions likely caused his condition. Our actions and the choices we make do have unavoidable consequences and effects. That is one reason why many bystanders show little mercy to those struck down by diseases supposedly caused by their own behavior. In biblical times, many viewed illness as a punishment for sin.  Maybe that is why the crowd would not bother to make room for the paralytic to come through the front door. I could picture some saying, “It serves you right!” Their attitude brings to mind another saying, “You made your bed and now you must lie in it.”  But we hear Jesus saying instead, “Take up your bed and walk. Your sins are forgiven.”

I imagine the paralytic and his friends were as surprised as the scribes when Jesus said, “My child, your sins are forgiven.” This was not the cure they made such a scene to obtain, yet anyone who has labored under the experience of guilt, shame or disbelief can identify with being spiritually paralyzed and the freedom that comes from experiencing forgiveness.

The word forgiveness or one of its variations appears nearly 150 times in the Bible.  As you might expect, next to the theme of God’s love, forgiveness is the single most prominent theme in the New Testament. Mark wastes little time bringing that theme to our attention with the opening lines of his second chapter by linking healing with forgiveness.

The scribes protested Jesus’ actions, asserting that only God can forgive sins. In addition, the paralytic had not confessed to any wrong doing, so what gives?  Mark tells us, “Jesus immediately knew in his mind what they were thinking to themselves.” Most likely, he also knew what was going through the mind of the paralytic as well, namely a change of heart that was freeing him from his spiritual paralysis. He was ready to seek forgiveness. Thus in the end, Jesus could tell him, “Rise, pick up your mat and walk.”

None of us are physically paralyzed but how often have we found ourselves spiritually paralyzed? Gripped by an irrational anger that fuels a refusal to forgive or seek forgiveness, we find ourselves in a rut with our relationship, not only with the person who has victimized us or the one whom we have victimized but also with God. Is there a sibling or cousin, parent or child, in your life whom you have not spoken to perhaps in years because of some past hurt, injury, affront, or misunderstanding?  

The paralytic personifies us crippled not only by our sins but also by our reluctance to celebrate the art of forgiveness. Jesus uses this miracle to enable us to see that forgiveness can be healing.  While the scribes may be right in claiming that only God can forgive sins, if we are to fully experience divine forgiveness, then we must practice the art of forgiveness as well. Many times for a penance, I will tell people to slowly and reflectively say the Lord’s Prayer, then keep the promise they have just made. Some people will looked at me puzzled, but others quickly recall the line I have in mind, “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” I encourage the penitent to then pray for everyone that comes to mind who is in need of their forgiveness and to pray for those whose forgiveness they need. Through prayer, they take that first step toward forgiving and being forgiven.

When we are willing to forgive or seek forgiveness, we can break down the walls of separation and we can bring about healing in our relationships, healing the broken hearted.

Recall the last line from Isaiah when God told the Israelites, “Your sins I remember no more.”  Fortunately for us, God has selective memory. Some of us find forgiving nearly impossible because we cannot forget the hurt, but bear in mind, forget and forgive do not mean the same thing. So what do we gain by forgiving others? Like the actions of God toward the Israelites, Jesus frees the paralytic and us from the past, opening a brand new start in life. Forgiveness makes possible a whole new relationship with God, not only directly, but also indirectly through the restored relations in our lives as well. Simply put, we need not remain paralyzed by wounded relationships. Forgiveness offers us a new start in life, so leave here, as convinced as the paralytic, that Jesus has come to offer you a new lease on life, a lease that allows no room for revenge of any kind.
 

“Unclean! Unclean!” Those words from the book of Leviticus might hit home for some of us, even if we don’t suffer from leprosy.  As a confessor, I have listened to a fair number of penitents over the years begging forgiveness for what they have done or failed to do. Against the backdrop of our conscience, certain sins stand out like blotches or scabs that leave us feeling unclean until we make our peace with God, which the Church urges us to do in the sacrament of reconciliation.

Fortunately, today’s lepers are no longer forced to live physically apart from their family and community, but some sinners find themselves feeling excluded from their faith community. The Church maintains that grave sins, such as murder, fornication, adultery, and apostasy prevent us from fully belonging to our faith community and receiving the grace of Holy Communion. In effect, you could say that grave sins leave us ritually unclean.

Any sin is an offense against reason, truth and right conscience. While any wrong is a sin, not every sin is grave enough to cut us off from God’s love. I think of sin as coming in every shade of gray from a dirty white to nearly black. The darker the gray, the more serious the wrongful act. Any sin that is life threatening to our eternal relationship with God is labeled by the Church as being a mortal sin and rightly so, for mortal sin destroys the loving relationship with God that we need for eternal happiness.

St. Augustine defined sin as being an utterance, a deed, or a desire contrary to the eternal law. A sin becomes mortal when we consciously and freely choose to do something gravely wrong against the divine law and contrary to our divine destiny. When we choose to commit a mortal sin, we are opting to reject God’s love and friendship right then and there.

Once the sin has been committed, many sinners are left feeling much like the leper did. Their conscience is troubled. They could grow accustomed to feeling “unclean,” and grow distant from God and the Church, and many do, sometimes oblivious to the harm their stance plays in their lives and the lives of others.

Many sinners rationalize that their act is not all that wrong or even wrong at all. They cling to values that are contrary to what God puts forth in scripture and the teachings of our Catholic faith. For example, many people are convinced that there is nothing wrong with living together or missing Mass on Sundays since others do so, but God’s morality is not based on popular opinion.  Even if they are widely accepted by society, immoral values can and do imperil our relationship with God, thus leaving us feeling “unclean.” Our attitude toward sin and its potential impact on us brings to mind a story a friend recently e-mailed me.

A young couple moved into a new neighborhood.  The next morning while they were eating breakfast, the young woman saw her neighbor hanging the wash outside. “That laundry is not very clean,” she said. “She doesn’t know how to wash correctly. Perhaps she needs better laundry soap.”

Her husband looked on, but remained silent. Every time her neighbor would hang her wash to dry, the young woman would make the same comments. About one month later, the woman was surprised to see nice clean wash on the line and said to her husband: “Look, she has learned how to wash correctly. I wonder who taught her this.”

The husband said, “I got up early this morning and cleaned our windows.”

Unlike in the passage from Leviticus, the key word in the gospel is “clean.” The leper came to Jesus and begged, “If you wish, you can make me clean.”  Out of compassion, Jesus then did the unthinkable. He touched the man and said, “I do will it. Be made clean.” Given the chance, Jesus would say that to every sinner.  He came into the world so that we could experience divine forgiveness and be cleansed of our wrong doing. He died on the cross to save us from our sins, leaving behind the sacrament of reconciliation as a means for us to hear his words of absolution, spoken by the priest who hears our confession. This is the only way we can be cleansed of our grave sins, thus restored to full communion in the church, but like the leper, we first have to come forth and ask to be made clean.

To experience the fullness of God’s mercy and love, Jesus left us with a blueprint for living, but so often we reject what he tells us to do because we fail to see either the value of what is gained by following his way or the consequences for ignoring God’s moral law. A good confessor often finds himself cleaning the sinner’s limited outlook on the world and God’s mercy.

However long we have been away from this sacrament or however grave our sins are, when we contritely confess our sins, we can be quickly cleansed through the words of absolution and once we are, God’s hope is that we will seek to remain clean. That is what we resolve to do each time we pray the act of contrition. God willing, we then develop an aversion to that which leaves us feeling unclean. Even venial sins can do that.  The catechism cautions that deliberate and unrepented venial sin disposes us little by little to commit mortal sin.

Consider the little sins we commit without much thought, from the way we talk to what we say, from what we do or don’t do to what we see. Do they leave us feeling unclean or not? Paul urges us that whatever we do should be done for the glory of God. We avoid becoming unclean when we choose to imitate Christ in what we say and do.
 

The Virtue of Hope

We have all heard the expression “hope springs eternal.” But what does this really mean? Of the three great Christian virtues, faith, hope, and charity, hope seems the least clearly defined, or at least the virtue on which we focus less. We have a pretty good idea what faith means to us, and we have a pretty good idea what charity, that is love in its various forms, means to us. But hope is a little more elusive in its meaning.

At the outset, we need to clarify what Christian hope is. It is not about winning the lottery, or hoping our favorite sports team will do well. That is faint hope. Christian hope is a confident hope because it is hope for eternal communion with an all-merciful, all-loving, and all-powerful God. Jesus told us that He would be with us always, even to the end of time, and He sent the Holy Spirit to give us the hope that springs eternally in our hearts for an intimate communion with God.

Christian hope is also a desire for attaining something that has not yet been attained, but which is possible to attain. We have a faithful and loving God who keeps his promises, so we have reason to hope that with God’s grace we can grow in holiness, in the perfection of which human beings are capable, and be successful in our journey to salvation.

But sometimes, Christian hope can get sidetracked. Jesus, the greatest human being of all time, suffered, and so Christian hope is not hope that we will go through life and never suffer. We will. Many are suffering now, particularly in this time of serious economic downturn. So hope is not avoidance of bad things happening. While we all work for economic and social justice for people of all ages, Christian hope is not the expectation that life will necessarily be fair. Nor is hope is the anticipation of life without bad things happening to us. The presence of sin in the world prevents that from being possible.

Misplaced hope is the mistake of the hero of the Book of Job, from which we read this (evening) morning. Job was a very successful man, innocent and just. He thinks he is a really good guy, and by all accounts, he was. But Job becomes plagued by unexplained misfortune. He loses his children, his property, and his health. All of this leaves him puzzled and disheartened, and he soon becomes angry with God for punishing him unfairly. He becomes increasingly hopeless.

There is a mystery to suffering. Why do bad things happen to good people? We don’t always have good answers to this. Life can create great obstacles to hope. These are despair, pride, doubt, fear, and impatience. These emotions all feed on each other, and they can be ruinously sinful in the destruction of Christian hope. We see so much injustice and violence and we wonder where God is. There is pride that also misdirects hope. We think we need to fix the world all by ourselves, or decide what needs to be done all by ourselves, and that we don’t need God.

We then fail and then it becomes easy to despair. We can wallow in sin or see only evil in ourselves and others in a way that makes us think that a perfect union with God is impossible. Our failure then turns to fear. Fear that violence and injustice will overtake us if we try to stop it, so just don’t get involved. Fear that what God asks of us is just too much. Fear in relationships when people have hurt us so we don’t want to love again in love’s many meanings. Fear of economic downturn impacting directly in our lives.

In the face of all this is the reality of Christian hope. We do know that God himself endured the most unfair suffering for us through the death of Jesus Christ. But Christ conquered sin and death through the Resurrection. And in the process he enabled us to do the same. God is always with us, and He gives us the tools to grow in holiness, and move closer and closer to His enduring love.

In the Book of Job, God restores Job’s life when Job accepts the fact that to live in hope is also to trust. For God is loving and merciful. God is also all-powerful. We do not control much of what happens to us. But whatever our suffering, and the greatness of it, God gives us the tools to overcome that suffering by joining it to the redemptive power of God. A living hope involves a living trust, a surrender to God by choosing to live our lives in a certain way that is ultimately invincible to suffering just as Jesus was invincible to suffering.

And in that invincibility comes spiritual, sometimes even physical healing. We see Jesus in our Gospel from Mark (tonight)today bringing that healing to Peter’s mother-in-law. The story provides evidence of an all-loving and merciful God.

But every day, we encounter people who are like Jesus. I call them snapshots of heaven. They are the people to whom we are naturally drawn. They endure their suffering, bear wrongs patiently. Even in the face of their own suffering, they always have a kind word and an invincible generosity and love for God and others. I sincerely believe these people carry the hope, the trust of heaven, proof that we can build a better world in anticipation of the next world, and hope that we can get there.

With God’s grace, we can even be one of those snapshots. Our hope is not only individual, it is communal. The great Catholic concept of the communion of saints reminds us that our hope is joined to those both past and present who lived and live Christian hope effectively. The grace they received we can receive as well. Such people build us up and remind us of the confident Christian hope even as we feel the world is trying to tear us down. The saints of yesterday and today follow the example of St. Paul in our second reading (tonight) this morning. They offer the Gospel life to others free of charge.

So how do we live in hope? A formula is available to us. We have all heard of ESP. But there is also 3SP (sacraments, service, Scripture, and prayer). These are the means for a living Christian hope. They keep hope alive in ourselves and others by a life of love and service. Living a life of love and service is how Jesus lived his life, and He invites us to do the same. He gives us through 3SP, the fruits, gifts, and charisms of the Holy Spirit to guide us, inspire us, give us direction, and show us the benefits of hope for own lives and the lives of others.

It is in loving action, the use of 3SP that we come to see the promise of the virtue of Christian hope. For in the final analysis, we not only live in confident hope. With God’s help we live that confident hope.
 

Two words jump out at me in these readings: anxieties and authority.  As we heard, Paul wants us to be free of anxiety yet don’t we often feel anxious whenever we have ignored authority in our lives? I think back to instances in my childhood when I disobeyed my parents. Sooner or later, I began to feel anxious, wondering what the punishment would be once they found out that I had ignored their authority. My parents are no longer around, but the occasions for anxiety still remain. They surface when we ignore authentic authority, that is, authority that ultimately has our well-being in mind.

Moses told the people of Israel that someday God would send a prophet with legitimate authority whom the people would be well advised to listen to. “Whoever will not listen to my words which he speaks in my name, I myself will make him answer for it.”  To this day, the Church cautions us that when we ignore Jesus’ authority, the consequence is sin, and the consequence of sin is punishment, if not in this lifetime, then in the lifetime to come.

When Jesus began his public ministry, his reputation for healing became wide spread. Some scripture scholars argue what the gospel writers alluded to whenever they spoke of unclean spirits. Were these people really possessed by the devil or only mentally disturbed? The debate is beside the point. These people were troubled and Jesus healed them.  Perhaps the man with an unclean spirit only had a guilty conscience, and afraid to face up to the wrath of God for his wrong doing. Unbeknownst to him, Jesus came to heal both body and soul and did so with the reprimand, “Quiet! Come out of him!”

Sooner or later, we all experience moments of anxiety.  Pope Benedict spoke recently of anxiety as a natural dimension of life. To defeat this, he tells us, we need Christ’s intervention in our lives, just as he intervened in the life of the man with the unclean spirit.  This was a lesson a certain political prisoner learned unexpectedly.

A Lutheran minister, Richard Wurmbrand, spent 14 years in prison in Romania, three of them in solitary confinement. His cell was a basement room with no windows, illuminated by a bare light bulb.  One night, he was startled by a faint tapping on the wall next to his bed. A new prisoner was signaling him. This prompted a fury of taps. After awhile, Pastor Wurmbrand realized that his neighbor was trying to teach him a simple code.

From this crude beginning, his neighbor, who had been a radio operator, taught him the Morse code. Wurmbrand told him that he was a minister. He then asked the operator if he were a Christian. There was a long silence. Finally, the radio operator tapped back, “I cannot say so.”

Every night the two men spoke through the wall, getting better acquainted. Finally, one night, the radio operator tapped a strange message, “I should like to confess my sins.” Pastor Wurmbrand was deeply moved by his request.

The confession took a long time. It was interrupted by periods of silence and extended far into the night. No detail was left out. Nothing was glossed over. The confession was sincere and from the heart. When the radio operator was done, Wurmbrand was profoundly touched and slowly, he tapped back the words of absolution. It was a dramatic moment for both men. Then the radio operator tapped these beautiful words, “I am happier at this moment than I have been in many years.”

Although he had been baptized, the radio operator did not consider himself a Christian until he took the step to meet Jesus in the person of his representative. What he did in the gospel, Jesus did in that prison cell. He drove out another unclean spirit, this time, through Pastor Wurmbrand’s words of absolution.

What Jesus did in the gospel story and that Romanian prison cell, he does every time the sacrament of reconciliation is celebrated. Perhaps the anxiety of baring one’s soul to a priest is enough to stop you from giving him the chance to cleanse you of your unclean spirit, yet the words of absolution can be so freeing. 

Each of us in this church to some degree has an unclean spirit, which keeps us from being the kind of person we want to be. For example, something may keep us from praying the way we would really like to pray. Or, something in us keeps us from loving the way we would like to love, especially our spouses and other members of our family.

Or perhaps, we may have something in us that keeps us from being as generous as we would like to be. For example, by virtue of our baptism, we all have the responsibility of helping to build up God’s kingdom on earth, yet, how much time, energy or money do we devote to this mission? We spend large amounts of time, energy, and money on ourselves, but not so much on God and God’s work.  

The bottom line is this: Jesus wants to free us from whatever keeps us from being as prayerful, as loving, and as generous as we would like to be. But Jesus can do this only if we approach him and open our hearts to him, which we can do best in the sacrament of reconciliation.

Are you feeling anxious? Then allow Jesus to drive the unclean spirit, the source of your anxiety, replacing it with the wisdom of his Holy Spirit. Instead of destroying us; the Lord wants to replace your anxiety with the wisdom that God is not terrifying, but gentle and loving. That is what makes his authority so real.