tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12104914152700525082024-03-18T08:51:55.767-04:00BIG C CATHOLICSUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger3594125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1210491415270052508.post-30267221966932236822024-03-10T12:11:00.000-04:002024-03-10T12:11:48.887-04:00Homily for Palm Sunday, March 24, 2024, Year B<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPoxyxKpTRTjkEnMu8AcAnetPkUn9-4sXcsVdYTJRIAtXokcu36FExRSFaBSv8QU0ec88tdFZc8PMkuKLvhd14vzWckLC-U73mEEVmVXS0i6jBfDC6Po2HbtI1HmHyqFZvrMAi2ZOEvVsQRHO4VIe9dBrI3li3rqK5SkiSQNWTGGwSUno8pcNlNgHJOUDJ/s1140/Christ%E2%80%99s%20Entry%20into%20Jerusalem%202.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Christ enters Jerusalem." border="0" data-original-height="786" data-original-width="1140" height="442" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPoxyxKpTRTjkEnMu8AcAnetPkUn9-4sXcsVdYTJRIAtXokcu36FExRSFaBSv8QU0ec88tdFZc8PMkuKLvhd14vzWckLC-U73mEEVmVXS0i6jBfDC6Po2HbtI1HmHyqFZvrMAi2ZOEvVsQRHO4VIe9dBrI3li3rqK5SkiSQNWTGGwSUno8pcNlNgHJOUDJ/w640-h442/Christ%E2%80%99s%20Entry%20into%20Jerusalem%202.jpg" title="Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem, by Jean Hippolyte Flandrin, c. 1845" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">Fr. Charles Irvin</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">Diocese of Lansing</div>
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<div style="text-align: center;">
(<a href="https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/032424.cfm" target="_blank">Click here for Sunday’s readings</a>)</div>
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Christ walks ahead of us into the mystery of evil. He knows suffering. All who suffer now have Him with us. Without giving us answers to why there is evil in the first place we are instead led by Jesus Christ to deal with suffering and death head on. The ultimate mystery is that sin has taken us all into rejection of God. It is prideful human rejection of God that is the root cause of all human suffering, separation from the source of our happiness, namely our turning away from the happiness of union with God. All of us have sinned; all of us are accomplices in bringing evil and the suffering that results in our world that results from it. <br />
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How, then, are we to deal with it? Can we deal with it apart from Christ? The events of Holy Week give us answers. <br />
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The voice in today’s first reading is the voice of the Old Testament’s Suffering Servant, the one who personifies not only the eventual Messiah but also the one who represents Israel, the community of sufferers. Compassion is the primary virtue to be shared; it is a community activity. The very word “compassion” means “to suffer with” and therein we can begin to answer to the question of how we are to deal with suffering. <br />
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God knows of our powerlessness. Knowing of it, and loving us as He does, He came among us in compassion, to share in our suffering, the consequence of evil. God the Son, Jesus Christ, takes on our human condition by joining Himself into our humanity while at the same time allowing us to join ourselves into His humanity. <br />
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We need to recall that the medieval theologians referred to the whole corporate body of the baptized and confirmed as the “Mystical Body of Christ.” At the same time they referred to the Blessed Sacrament as the “Mystical Body of Christ.” They recognized that the Eucharist makes the Church while the Church makes the Eucharist. Together the baptized and confirmed constitute the Mystical Body of Christ. Likewise, together we are all joined into the Suffering Servant. That is what the liturgies of Holy Week are all about. <br />
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In his letter to the Colossians, St. Paul writes about suffering, his own suffering, while recognizing that he is talking about all who suffer: "Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ on behalf of his body, which is the church… " [Col 1:24] In writing these words St. Paul is speaking of the solidarity we all share not only with each other but our solidarity with Christ in His redemptive suffering. The meaning of solidarity is that we share each other’s burdens. Christ is yoked with us. <br />
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Our Psalm response today is taken from Psalm 22 with the words My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? It is spoken repeatedly. Once again, the voice is that of the Old Testament’s Suffering Servant. But at the same time those were the last words Jesus uttered at the moment of His death on the Cross. Truly, God has not shielded Himself from the consequences of our sins and the human suffering that results from it. He knows us through and through… and He has compassion on us… He, in Christ, suffers with us. <br />
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But God’s compassion turns into mercy and opens up to us our eventual victory over sin, over suffering, and even over death itself. For as the early Christians sang in our of our earliest hymns: <br />
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"Have among yourselves the same attitude that is also yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God something to be grasped. Rather, he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness; and found human in appearance, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross. <br />
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"Because of this, God greatly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, of those in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father." [Philippians 2:5-11] <br />
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In Jesus Christ God loves us to death… and after that He loves us back into life just as He did with poor Lazarus, just as He did with His only begotten Son, Jesus Christ.
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1210491415270052508.post-77551676856403944542024-03-10T11:30:00.000-04:002024-03-10T12:32:00.692-04:00Homily for Easter Sunday, March 31, 2024, Year B<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTokpYw0zMo1dVLHTNWNWc2HfBFnAK1C-g60Oj2sFFTXKm4iecub8jN3bMApK3FTEJLh5iW5IGOvhNe97wKtn1ha5at8atUM4YbA-32bQXHlD80iBZK27IwIETE91gPkSlaNiZSWHuf1fg0f59URNdmhKyeyoPVb9BIh9DC0IRk-mKzslX6nAnaismNR0z/s944/Christ%20is%20risen%20The%20Resurrection%20of%20Our%20Lord%20Jesus%20Christ.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="The Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ" border="0" data-original-height="700" data-original-width="944" height="474" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTokpYw0zMo1dVLHTNWNWc2HfBFnAK1C-g60Oj2sFFTXKm4iecub8jN3bMApK3FTEJLh5iW5IGOvhNe97wKtn1ha5at8atUM4YbA-32bQXHlD80iBZK27IwIETE91gPkSlaNiZSWHuf1fg0f59URNdmhKyeyoPVb9BIh9DC0IRk-mKzslX6nAnaismNR0z/w640-h474/Christ%20is%20risen%20The%20Resurrection%20of%20Our%20Lord%20Jesus%20Christ.jpg" title="Christ is risen" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">Fr. Charles Irvin</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">Diocese of Lansing</div>
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(<a href="https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/033124.cfm" target="_blank">Click here for Sunday’s readings</a>)</div>
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In Act 1, scene 4 of Shakespeare’s Hamlet we find Hamlet declaring: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” William Shakespeare writing in the late 16th Century had in inkling that moved him to bring us thoughts of realms beyond the world we live in. We are limited… our vision, our intelligence, and our beliefs about reality are limited. Can we definitively claim that there is no reality beyond that which we can see? <br />
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In Celtic Britain and Ireland spiritual people spoke of Thin places, places, and times where the veil between this world and the world of reality beyond us is thin. When we find ourselves in such thin places, we sense the two worlds overlapping and bleeding into each other. Some recent novels have been written about such places, such overlapping encounters with a reality beyond what we can see and experience. Scientists and astrophysicists are writing about the parallel universe theory. Perhaps they should join into discussions with philosophers and theologians who study cosmology. All engaged in such a dialogue would be energized, I am sure. <br />
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To discern the difference between an ordinary place and a thin place, one must use a spiritual perspective and be open to a sixth sense, one beyond our natural five senses. In simple terms a “thin place” is a place where the veil between this world and the parallel universe is thin; where the parallel universe is near. Perhaps it is better said that we are nearer to it; the other world is more near. As Hamlet observed: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” <br />
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Mahatma Gandhi in his Spiritual Message to the World in 1931, speaks of this. <br />
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“There is an indefinable, mysterious power that pervades everything. I feel it, though I do not see it. It is this unseen power that makes itself felt and yet defies all proof, because it is so unlike all that I perceive through my senses. It transcends the senses” <br />
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With that background let me now take you into today’s Gospel account which is St. Mark’s account of the Resurrection. It begins in the first light, the dawn, of a new day, those moments when light transforms darkness. The dawning is gradual, lest we be overwhelmed and blinded by the light. It is in these moments of diffusion and that the resurrection of Christ dawns upon our world in an event that is extra ordinary, way beyond what is ordinary, beyond our powers of intellect. <br />
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We need to note that women were the first to see and experience this event. Later the apostles would be the first to suffer for it. For all of us, however, the stone must be rolled away from our hearts, not so much that Christ may come forth but so that we might enter into the place and time of it, so that we might enter into the experience of the Christ event as it bursts into our world. The Virgin’s womb was opened and so the tomb was likewise opened. Heaven was opened to us. <br />
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The women had prepared their spices at the conclusion of the preceding day, the Sabbath of the Mosaic Covenant. Christ rose from the dead on the first day of a new week in a new world, a newly refashioned world. Something beyond us was here, something unheard of and undreamed of before. The myrrh brought by the magi, those mystic earthly kings of old, was now brought to be put to use. It was, however, not to be used. The child who had lain powerless and bound up in His manger had become the Christ who hung powerless and nailed on His cross. The woman who had borne him became the woman who stood under His cross and watched him die. Now she and her companions would be the first to honor Christ in His risen glory. The women entered the tomb; the apostles would soon enter into martyrdom. The women readied their oils; the apostles would soon our Earth with their blood. God’s light was beginning to overcome this world’s darkness… but it was only the beginning. <br />
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Who would roll away the stone? For the women, it was already rolled away. A young man dressed in a white robe was sitting in the tomb… a young man, youth entering into manhood, strong and filled with life. God’s new creation is mystically beginning. Man is remade new. Freshness, newness of life, another beginning is at hand. The messenger’s announcement is not only for the women, it is for us as well, perhaps particularly for us. <br />
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That stone… what is the stone we are talking about? The one that failed to contain the buried Christ or the one that is at the entrance to our hearts, the one that keeps us from entering into the Christ event? How many have shut their eyes and sealed their hearts so they are unable to experience the glory of the open grave and the emptiness of the tomb? <br />
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Who is it that is entombed, Christ or us? <br />
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Listen again to the words of Mahatma Gandhi: “There is an indefinable, mysterious power that pervades everything. I feel it, though I do not see it. It is this unseen power that makes itself felt and yet defies all proof, because it is so unlike all that I perceive through my senses. It transcends the senses” <br />
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It is reported that when Christ died on the Cross the veil in Jerusalem’s Temple was torn in two. The veil between this world and the next world was torn in two. He who raised the daughter of Jairus, who raised the widow’s son, and who raised Lazarus from the dead has likewise, by His Father’s command, been raised from the dead. Death no longer holds humanity in its icy grip. <br />
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Rising from the dead, Jesus vanquished death. He who took upon Himself our vanquished human nature, a nature subjected to death, in His resurrection vanquished death. <br />
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Quoting from the Prophet Isaiah, St. Paul cries out: “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?” <br />
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The joy of today has yet to be brought to fulfillment and completion. Our ancient enemy, the Beast, still slouches toward us intent on devouring us. We do not move from baptism to the rapture without passing through our own valleys of darkness, suffering, loss, and pain. What we do have, however, is the power to overcome any darkness that attempts to blind us and swallow us. We do have the power to roll away the stones over our hearts, to be healed of the scales that cover our eyes, and to have hearts filled with love instead of hate, minds that seek to find the truth rather that to settle for lies. We have, because of Christ’s resurrection from the dead, the power to be victims no longer…to walk now in the glorious freedom of the sons and daughters of God. Our spirits can now be young again… young, clothed in white light, filled with energy while announcing to those around us: “He is risen as He said He would.” He is out there in you world. Seek Him, find Him, feast with Him, share life with Him, and witness to His living presence in your life. <br />
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Today is Easter. This is a thin place and time. In Christ’s blood God’s world has bled into your world and into mine. When you receive His risen presence in Holy Communion, your world will be taken up into His world. The tomb is empty because our world cannot contain Him now even though paradoxically and mystically, He freely lives within us. <br />
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Christ is risen… Christ is truly risen… alleluia, alleluia, alleluia!
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1210491415270052508.post-51041512872821810382024-03-04T08:17:00.000-05:002024-03-04T08:17:21.920-05:00Homily for the 5th Sunday of Lent, March 17, 2024, Year B<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFwDeZog1BK_W8JmzoJ5aAg4vSkx51KJr01JvCJ0MwkTvuZFmyQleXP_7jQlkgjRY9djx8eBARVVIl-9_5stBJje78ujR6KTF8-PgEGvKho-nr4C58wI2IiV4kT9pRiaWWxDPtTceZ5ilNaPPHzGV8D-Vvmo1qgr8hr4VBpaQRjp_pWprNay2nuGlUuRRr/s523/Christ%20carrying%20His%20Cross%20Icon%20%5BWide%5D.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Christ the Bridegroom" border="0" data-original-height="295" data-original-width="523" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFwDeZog1BK_W8JmzoJ5aAg4vSkx51KJr01JvCJ0MwkTvuZFmyQleXP_7jQlkgjRY9djx8eBARVVIl-9_5stBJje78ujR6KTF8-PgEGvKho-nr4C58wI2IiV4kT9pRiaWWxDPtTceZ5ilNaPPHzGV8D-Vvmo1qgr8hr4VBpaQRjp_pWprNay2nuGlUuRRr/w640-h360/Christ%20carrying%20His%20Cross%20Icon%20%5BWide%5D.jpg" title="Our Lord the Bridegroon" width="640" /></a></div><br />Fr. Charles Irvin</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">Diocese of Lansing</div>
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(<a href="https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/031724-YearB.cfm" target="_blank">Click here for Sunday’s readings</a>)</div>
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When you encounter paradox, you’re close to the heart of the Gospel, a message in which we are presented with two statements that seemingly contradict each other.<br />
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So here, today, we find Jesus speaking about His cross, His path to glory through humiliation, life through death, good through evil. Nothing in human history is so totally paradoxical as the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. About to be displayed in degradation, He speaks of His glory being revealed.<br />
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In Roman times a crucifixion was supposed to be a public spectacle. Yet it is at the same time a personal matter for you and for me. Your salvation and mine are found in it. Yes, the crucifixion of Jesus Christ on Calvary was a spectacular event. The characters were momentous. Rome was there in her imperial power. One of the world’s great religions was there in an hour of critical decision. Yet it is also true that this historical and monumental spectacle of nearly two thousand years ago personally includes you and me. Sins of the flesh, sins of pride, sins of omission, sins such as yours and such as mine nailed Christ to His Cross. And they still do. All of those sins were there then as they are now. We were and are now personally involved, much as we’d like to deny it.<br />
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The Cross reveals the worst that’s within us; it reveals what evil we’re capable of doing to each other – battering, abusing, using, hurting, and killing human life in its beginning, in the living of it, and at its end… in a Holocaust that seems never to cease.<br />
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The Cross of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ likewise illumines and reveals the best that’s within us. It’s message is that our God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, your Father and mine, thinks we are worth, individually worth, what happened on that Cross. Our finite humanity, yours individually as well as mine, has been because of Christ’s Cross invested with infinite value, worth and dignity. The worst in our humanity in all of its stupidity and cruelty succeeded in crucifying the best that God could possibly give us, the most beautiful human being that ever existed. And in that monumental act of cruelty and evil, God brought out the best that’s within us – for which we are here to aspire in prayer and petition to God in Christ.<br />
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For the stupendous truth is that in dying for you, Christ died for something of infinite value within you – your immortal soul that now can never die.<br />
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The crucifixion of Jesus Christ was a crushing defeat for righteousness and out of it came the greatest victory that righteousness has ever won. “Except”, said Jesus, “a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die it abides alone, but if it dies it brings forth much fruit.” And the same is true for your life joined into His.<br />
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Each Sunday when we celebrate Mass here together we jointly and sacramentally enter into the Holy Sacrifice of Jesus Christ, celebrating a colossal failure that gives us infinite victory. Next week we celebrate Palm Sunday, that moment when Jesus Christ entered Jerusalem amidst shouted blessings and hosannas of the crowd, the same crowd which a few short days later would shout: Crucify him! Crucify him!… and then did so.<br />
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And He died a failure. One of His most trusted apostles, Judas, sold Him out for money. His prime apostle, Peter, sold Him out in three moments of swearing. The others had all fled. No one was there except a pagan military officer and his troops, Mary, His mother – along with Mary Magdalene, and a young teenage boy by the name of John. His own people, fearing God’s wrath for breaking rules of religious ritual conspired with a weak Roman governor who thereupon buckled under fear of not being liked, wanting to please the crowd as well as wanting to please Caesar. As evening fell, all of Christ’s enemies felt that they had finished Him off and that they were rid of Him forever.<br />
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Little did they then realize that those hands they had nailed to the Cross were lifting the whole world up before the eyes of His Father. Little did they realize that the heart they had pierced and emptied of blood was filled with a precious love that would save each and every human being given His Body and Blood in the Sacrament of Holy Communion.<br />
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There is perhaps much in your life and mine that is failure, loss and pain. And no doubt there will be more. Life is not fair; it never has been, and it never will be. Furthermore, the fickle human heart will believe any lie and follow any fable. Without faith in Jesus Christ we will believe anything and do anything.<br />
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But with belief in Jesus Christ and in Him crucified, all in life that is upside down can be turned right side up. All that is inside out can be pulled out into the open for all to see and share. The glory of the divinity that is the Living God present within us can now, in the broken Body of Jesus Christ and in the crushed grapes of His humanity, be shared by all of us in a Holy Communion in which God comes to us in the fullness of His Presence, His Power, and His Love.<br />
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The great paradox of your life along with the great paradox of mine finds meaning, purpose and fulfillment in the momentous paradox of Christ’s suffering, passion and death. For with it now, God our Father, in your life and in mine, brings good out of evil, meaning out of absurdity, order out of chaos, glory out of humiliation, holiness out of sin, and life out of death.<br />
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And because of what we as a Church are about to share in common celebration over these few weeks, all of it is yours, O Christian.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1210491415270052508.post-26154871248060843162024-02-25T11:07:00.000-05:002024-02-25T11:07:19.413-05:00Homily for the 4th Sunday of Lent (Laetare Sunday), March 10, 2024, Year B<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-wt1mOk6yOFs/WqK5tqT0wlI/AAAAAAAALTg/-pKqaHb_M5IfqLKVWumuh9_RtTFBbfRnQCLcBGAs/s1600/Nicodemus%2Bvisits%2BJesus%2B225x400.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Christ speaking with Nicodemus" border="0" data-original-height="225" data-original-width="400" height="360" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-wt1mOk6yOFs/WqK5tqT0wlI/AAAAAAAALTg/-pKqaHb_M5IfqLKVWumuh9_RtTFBbfRnQCLcBGAs/w640-h360/Nicodemus%2Bvisits%2BJesus%2B225x400.jpg" title="Detail, Jesus in conversation with Nicodemus, William Brassey Hole, c. 1905." width="640" /></a></div>
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Fr. Charles Irvin</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">Diocese of Lansing</div>
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(<a href="https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/031024-YearB.cfm" target="_blank">Click here for Sunday’s readings</a>)</div>
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“A body in motion tends to stay in motion, while a body at rest tends to stay at rest.” I’m sure many of you have heard that phrase used in an often-repeated TV commercial that has been airing recently. The phrase has caught my attention especially when I have been a couch potato watching more TV than I should. It’s the “staying at rest” that I am talking about because I am so often afflicted with laziness and lethargy. I resist getting in motion.<br />
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Well, you may ask, what do those words and that thought have to do with the readings from today’s scripture passages that we just heard?<br />
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Today is Laetare Sunday. Joy is its theme, joy because we are halfway through Lent and thus very close to the joy of Easter when our Elect will be baptized, confirmed and receive Holy Communion and our Candidates will be received into our Communion of Faith and likewise receive Holy Communion. There is joy, too, because in spite of our sins God in His love has acted to enter our sinful world and redeem our sinful souls. God has not remained passive in the face of our failures and sins. He has taken action, decisive action. He has been in motion… perpetual motion… and we are the recipients of His energy, His energetic love.<br />
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In today’s first reading we learn that God inspired a non-Jew, Cyrus, King of Persia, to release the Jews from their captivity in Babylon and allow them to return to their native land. Not only that, but Cyrus was also inspired to rebuild God’s house in Jerusalem! This was quite amazing, even more so when we learn that the Jews had been unfaithful to God. Today’s first reading began with these words:<br />
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"In those days, all the princes of Judah, the priests, and the people added infidelity to infidelity, practicing all the abominations of the nations and polluting the Lord’s temple which he had consecrated in Jerusalem. Early and often did the Lord, the God of their fathers, send his messengers to them, for he had compassion on his people and his dwelling place. But they mocked the messengers of God, despised his warnings, and scoffed at his prophets…"<br />
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The Jews had suffered from their own infidelities because sin brings with it indifference toward God. Sin makes the soul lazy. Sin stops movement toward God. It causes us to wallow in our own darkness of soul. Sin makes us spiritually flabby.<br />
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God’s love, however, is a fire that cannot be extinguished and so in our second reading we hear St. Paul exhorting Christians in Ephesus:<br />
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"Brothers and sisters: God, who is rich in mercy, because of the great love he had for us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, brought us to life with Christ – by grace you have been saved, raised us up with Christ…"<br />
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We rejoice because this gift which God has given us, given to us even when we have been sinners, has united us to Christ, and has given us the right to share in His glorious resurrection and inherit heaven with Him and through Him.<br />
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All of this brings us now to today’s Gospel account in which we find Jesus speaking to Nicodemus saying:<br />
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“Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life. For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.”<br />
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What has been our response to all that God has done for us? That question is the big question of Lent, the question we must all face and answer. If you are anything at all like me, you feel uncomfortable in answering that question. I know I am uncomfortable because I have not been in motion. To paraphrase the quote that began today’s homily: A soul in motion tends to stay in motion, while a soul that is wallowing in indifference tends to continue in simply not caring.<br />
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Isn’t that what sin does? Doesn’t sin simply not care about God and the things of God? We know that it does. And so, a sinful attitude continues by using a lot of lies… lies like: “I’m too busy,” or “The Church is filled with hypocrites,” or “there is no life after death,” or “God is going to save me anyway,” or other such seductive lies. The greatest lie of all, the lie that is becoming more popular in our culture each day is: “There is no God anyway.”<br />
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This is Laetare Sunday, “Rejoice Sunday.” We have much about which to rejoice. I realize that there are many voices telling us that the world is in a mess, that dreadful things are upon us, that our Church has much within it that is wrong, and that the Second Vatican Council was a bad mistake. Many want to take the Church back to its pre-Vatican II state. I disagree with them. I disagree with them because the voice of Saint John XXIII still speaks to my heart and soul.<br />
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Allow me, therefore, to quote Good Pope John’s words that he spoke in his opening address to that great Council held back in the early 1960’s. In his opening talk he declared:<br />
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"In the daily exercise of Our pastoral office, it sometimes happens that We hear certain opinions which disturb Us—opinions expressed by people who, though fired with a commendable zeal for religion, are lacking in sufficient prudence and judgment in their evaluation of events. They can see nothing but calamity and disaster in the present state of the world. They say over and over that this modern age of ours, in comparison with past ages, is definitely deteriorating. One would think from their attitude that history, that great teacher of life, had taught them nothing. They seem to imagine that in the days of the earlier councils everything was as it should be so far as doctrine and morality and the Church’s rightful liberty were concerned.<br />
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We feel that We must disagree with these prophets of doom, who are always forecasting worse disasters, as though the end of the world were at hand."<br />
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Good Pope John’s vision was a vision of hope, a joyful vision of hope, hope for the world and hope for the Church based on his unshakable faith in the love of God and his awareness of God’s active and powerful hand at work in our world.<br />
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And so, I repeat the words of the antiphon for beginning today’s Mass: “Rejoice with Jerusalem, and be glad for her, all you who love her; rejoice with her in joy…” The Church is God’s New Jerusalem, loved by Him and renewed over and over again in the power of His unconquerable love.<br />
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And so, I close using St. Paul’s words in his letter to the Philippians:<br />
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“Rejoice in the Lord always; again, I will say, Rejoice. Let all men know your forbearance. The Lord is at hand. Have no anxiety about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which passes all understanding, will keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.” (Philippians 4:4-8)Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1210491415270052508.post-67366904507404823132024-02-18T11:36:00.000-05:002024-02-18T11:36:37.060-05:00Homily for the 3rd Sunday of Lent, March 3, 2024, Year B<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTbeYMoIttFD3icFnKI0DuTNlSB83WBpuLW1bzwN2H7_qzf8hISmKfhiDb-atstbHqrTD0oCsn9buuLavXrFa2zlCe_tZ8Dx2DLa_pf8lI1MgzpGvhol7q2r4XqUps9681qltoRDUPGNZuosdw4UVjRjkpK7r5VCQxZzlqbHjohEdj_4QfBxDcXeo95-Ne/s562/Christ%20cleansing%20the%20temple.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Christ cleansing the Temple" border="0" data-original-height="351" data-original-width="562" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTbeYMoIttFD3icFnKI0DuTNlSB83WBpuLW1bzwN2H7_qzf8hISmKfhiDb-atstbHqrTD0oCsn9buuLavXrFa2zlCe_tZ8Dx2DLa_pf8lI1MgzpGvhol7q2r4XqUps9681qltoRDUPGNZuosdw4UVjRjkpK7r5VCQxZzlqbHjohEdj_4QfBxDcXeo95-Ne/w640-h400/Christ%20cleansing%20the%20temple.jpg" title="Detail, Casting out the money changers, Giotto, c. 1305, Scrovegni Chapel, Padua, Italy." width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
Fr. Charles Irvin</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">Diocese of Lansing</div>
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<div style="text-align: center;">
(<a href="https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/030324-YearB.cfm" target="_blank">Click here for Sunday’s readings</a>)</div>
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Why was this church building built? If everyone who is here wrote down their answer and I read them all back to you, you might be surprised at some of the answers. The answer that is obvious to me might not be so obvious to some of you.<br />
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Well, why then was this building built?<br />
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My answer is that it was built to be a temple. It was not built just to be a meeting place, or an auditorium, or a theater where we go to experience a drama. A temple is a building that is purpose-built. Our church building here has one chief purpose, namely to immerse us in the drama of our relationship with God. Note that I said “our” relationship with God, not “my relationship with God.” While we may come here for private prayer, the main reason is because this where we as God’s family play out our roles in the great drama of God coming to us and our going back to God our Father.<br />
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A temple is certainly a building dedicated to God. But it is more than that. It is a dedicated space, a sacred space, a space unlike all others in which we enter in order to be with God. A temple is God’s house, not a theater, a lecture hall, an auditorium, or a place where we go to have churchy sorts of assemblies. It is a holy place where you and God and I can be together with each other in Christ who takes us back to the Father.<br />
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God is present here. This is God’s house, not just our house. That flickering red candle with its eternal flame always burning is a signal telling us that the Eternal One, the risen Christ dwells in this space. We therefore ought to conduct ourselves reverently in this space. We genuflect to the Real Presence of Christ dwelling here in this tabernacle. Out of respect, men do not wear hats. We respect those who are praying, and we conduct ourselves in ways that are not ordinary. This is extra-ordinary space in an extra-ordinary building that is God’s house, a temple of the Lord.<br />
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All of this helps to explain the angry and violent reaction of Jesus when He entered the Temple in Jerusalem and found it being treated more like a shopping mall, or a bank building. Any time what is sacred, what is God’s, is desecrated it’s a slap in God’s face. To corrupt that which is holy is a terrible and personal insult to God. The corruption of the Temple’s sanctity caused Jesus to blaze out in anger.<br />
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But the reality of God’s temple is more than being simply a church building.<br />
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Each one of us here is a temple that is purpose-made. Because of our baptisms each one of us here is a temple of the Holy Spirit. Each one of us here was brought into being and designed by God for a purpose, namely the purpose of making Him present to others, especially when they enter into who we are. Each one of us here is a walking, living temple in which God is made present and available to others.<br />
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What sort of trafficking goes on inside your temple, inside the temple that you are? What sorts of activities are being carried on inside you? Your answer to that fundamental and radical question is the substance of Lent. Lent is given to us each year so that we might examine, change and clean up what’s happening inside of us.<br />
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God’s expression of Himself, God’s Eternal Word, is made flesh and blood in each one of us here. We receive the living Body and Blood of Jesus Christ in Holy Communion in order that He might not only dwell within us but also become actually who and what we are as persons. We constitute the living stones of God’s temple here on earth.<br />
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On the night before He died, during His Last Supper with His disciples, St. Jude asked Jesus if He was going to reveal Himself to the whole world. Christ’s answer to St. Jude is instructive. He said: "If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we shall come to him and make our home with him." (John 14:23)<br />
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Moments later, when Jesus was speaking out loud to His Father, He prayed:<br />
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"They do not belong to the world any more than I belong to the world. Consecrate them in the truth; your word is truth. As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world, and for their sake I consecrate myself so that they too may be consecrated in truth. I pray not only for these, but for those also who through their words will believe in me. May they all be one. Father, may they be one in us, as you are in me and I am in you, so that the world may believe it was you who sent me. I have given them the glory you gave to me, that they be one as we are one. With me in them and you in me, may they be so completely one that the world will realize that it was you who sent me." (John 17:16-23)<br />
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There are quite a few passages in the Bible in which we are told that we are, each one of us, “temples of the Holy Spirit.” If that is so, if that is the mind of God, if that is why you are walking the face of the earth, then what goes on inside the temple that you are is of immense importance, not only to you but to God Himself.<br />
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Lent comes to us in the springtime, a time when we all get into what we call “spring house cleaning.” We open up the windows and let the warm spring breezes blow through our house to clean away all of the stale winter air. We blow out all of the germs and viral bugs that bring winter’s sicknesses to us. We plant flowers, we paint the walls, and we fix up and clean up so that our dwelling places can be healthy places in which to live, and inviting places for others to enter.<br />
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Shouldn’t we at the very least do the same for God? Or do we allow who and what we are to be nothing more than sleaze that insults God and we carry on like the money changers in God’s temple? If we simply don’t care, then the fate of those money changers there in God’s temple may be ours.<br />
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You are a temple of the Holy Spirit, a temple baptized into Christ so that God’s Holy Spirit dwells in you not just for your sake but for the sake of others too.<br />
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You are here to be sent.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1210491415270052508.post-64611217288416679662024-02-14T11:20:00.000-05:002024-03-10T12:38:57.020-04:00Homily for the 2nd Sunday of Lent, February 25, 2024, Year B<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Z3VjQbT8d40/WpcUSgEJFoI/AAAAAAAALJI/D3VS2YUr2VIncBDXZY9lkCikY7-bWOJdQCLcBGAs/s1600/Transfiguration%2Bof%2BOur%2BLord%2B%255BWide%255D%2BComp%2BScaled%2Bimage.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="The Transfiguration" border="0" data-original-height="289" data-original-width="513" height="360" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Z3VjQbT8d40/WpcUSgEJFoI/AAAAAAAALJI/D3VS2YUr2VIncBDXZY9lkCikY7-bWOJdQCLcBGAs/w640-h360/Transfiguration%2Bof%2BOur%2BLord%2B%255BWide%255D%2BComp%2BScaled%2Bimage.jpg" title="Modern Orthodox Icon of the Transfiguration" width="640" /></a></div>
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<div style="text-align: center;">
Fr. Charles Irvin</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">Diocese of Lansing</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
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<div style="text-align: center;">
(<a href="https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/022524.cfm" target="_blank">Click here for Sunday’s readings</a>)</div>
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If you read letters to the editor in newspapers, you will realize that many people have lost confidence in a loving God. Nowhere is this more forcefully indicated than in the debate over abortion and assisted suicide. Some have gone so far as to assert the Catholic Church wants people to suffer, that it’s a death dealing rather than a life-giving institution, and that it extols human pain and suffering.<br />
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In the world of art this attitude is reflected in works of self-proclaimed “art” that, in just one instance, portray the crucifix, Christ nailed to the cross, immersed in a jar of human urine.<br />
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Certainly all those who support partial birth abortion and “mercy killing”, along with others who advocate the position that we can terminate the lives of they declare to have a “miserable quality life”, vociferously oppose traditional Judeo-Christian teachings which hold that God and God alone gives life… that God and God alone takes human life. This teaching is found in the Old Testament’s Book of Job as well as in the teachings of Jesus Christ. Job, you will remember, having endured suffering to excruciating levels, cries out “The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.”<br />
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How we, both individually and as are society, are to deal with suffering is a major problem we need to deal with. Today’s first reading from Sacred Scripture along with today’s Gospel account put our faces into it.<br />
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Abraham’s first wife, Sarai, childless and in her 70’s, was in a jealous rage because her husband Abraham had a child by her maidservant Hagar. Hagar had given birth to Ishmael; the boy-child was a source of great joy to Abraham, who at age 86 had been able to sire a child.<br />
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Thirteen years later God offers His famous covenant to Abraham, now in his 90’s, and causes his wife, now called Sarah, to become fruitful. She, too, bears a boy-child and names him Isaac.<br />
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At the time of Isaac’s weaning Sarah demands that Abraham cast away Hagar and her child Ishmael by sending them out into the desert with a little bread and water, and to leave them there to die. Abraham relying on God’s loving care and providence sends his beloved son Ishmael out into the death-dealing desert. Most likely he thought Ishmael would die. It’s hard to imagine the levels of human suffering that were swirling around these people.<br />
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Years later, when Isaac grows to about the same age as Ishmael, Abraham is asked again, this time by God Himself, to dispatch his beloved son by plunging a knife into his heart. There are no promises given by God, no indications whatsoever, that there will be any divine protection given to Isaac. All Abraham has left, the only thing upon which he can rely, is God’s goodness and love. Abraham acts on pure faith alone.<br />
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And that’s the whole point, as well as that of the Gospel account. The spectacular scene just read takes place up on top of Mt. Tabor immediately prior to Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem, there to be sacrificed on the altar of the Cross. The very same Peter, James and John present for this moment of ecstasy on Mt. Tabor are likewise present on the Mount of Olives for Christ’s agony. The divinity within Christ revealed here will be just as present as the humanity within Jesus as he suffers on the other mount. Both reveal the whole truth about Jesus Christ, namely that he is truly both man and God, divinity and humanity, true God and true man. Peter, James and John are very much animated, very much alive to the moment of privilege on the Mount of Transfiguration. They will, however, sleep in the Garden of Gethsemane up on Mt. Olivet.<br />
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The Christian response to suffering is far too complicated to explain in a letter to the editor to the newspaper. And even though a crucifix immersed in a jar of urine is promoted in certain quarters as “art” deserving to be supported by public tax dollars, we nevertheless elevate the crucifix, the cross with Christ’s human body on it, high above our altars because of what it reveals about our human nature.<br />
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It is worthwhile in the current public debate over human suffering and the question of who controls the birth of human life as well as who controls its death to remember that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., built his entire civil rights movement on the theological notion of the effectiveness and power of human suffering. He knew full well its power to reveal the divine within our human nature; its power to change our consciousness of what it means to be a child of God, a human being created in the image and likeness of God. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. knew full well that it could stir the soul of an entire nation and change the direction of our entire American culture by changing our consciousness and therefore our consciences through passive, non-violent suffering.<br />
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Here in the middle of Lent, Holy Mother Church puts these two powerful readings from the bible in front of our eyes. She doesn’t glorify human suffering, nor does she rejoice that humans must suffer. Contrary to the propaganda of secularists, the Roman Catholic Church has devoted hundreds of billions of dollars to the alleviation of human suffering, the care of the sick and suffering, as well as the elderly. Likewise, she has devoted enormous resources to educating countless millions of people in order that they may be delivered from ignorance and given light for their minds with which to see reality and discern wisdom. Our Church needs no defense against her enemies; she stands with Abraham, Moses and Jesus Christ in the certain faith that God will not let the gates of hell prevail against her.<br />
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What then shall we say this day of our own personal faith at this stage in our journey through Lent? Can we really “let go and let God”? Shall we let go of those things that we cling to, let them go in the sure and certain faith that God will bring good out of evil, life out of death, meaning out of absurdity, and joy out of suffering? Abraham is, as we pray in the Roman Canon, “our father in faith”. If Abraham could let his beloved son go, whom God spared from death, and if God our Father in heaven could let His own beloved Son go, whom He did not spare from death, what levels of faith do we have with which to do the same? Just how much do we allow God to be truly God in our own lives by placing our lives in His hands?Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1210491415270052508.post-19563650065432665452024-02-13T11:11:00.000-05:002024-02-18T11:04:54.111-05:00Homily for the 1st Sunday of Lent, February 18, 2024, Year B<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-wEkPF9TUfJ8/WoRtr96yiOI/AAAAAAAAK8c/GvN-EqkkNI0tI0WOD9Zc326DE1te-tmWQCLcBGAs/s1600/Christ%2Bcasting%2Bthe%2BDevil%2Bout%2Bof%2Bthe%2Bwilderness%2B%255BWide%255D%2BComp.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="The temptation of Christ on the mount." border="0" data-original-height="399" data-original-width="707" height="360" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-wEkPF9TUfJ8/WoRtr96yiOI/AAAAAAAAK8c/GvN-EqkkNI0tI0WOD9Zc326DE1te-tmWQCLcBGAs/w640-h360/Christ%2Bcasting%2Bthe%2BDevil%2Bout%2Bof%2Bthe%2Bwilderness%2B%255BWide%255D%2BComp.jpg" title="The Temptation on the Mount, Duccio di Buoninsegna, 1308-11." width="640" /></a></div>
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<div style="text-align: center;">
Fr. Charles Irvin</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">Diocese of Lansing</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
(<a href="https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/0218124.cfm" target="_blank">Click here for Sunday’s readings</a>)</div>
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You and I have prayed The Lord’s Prayer countless numbers of times. In it we always ask God to “lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.” Some translations of that famous prayer have it “and subject us not into the trial.” Just what is it that we are praying for?<br />
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Well obviously there are various levels of temptation — some powerful and severe, others not so powerful and not so grave (not weighted with much gravity). Some temptations are of the flesh. Some temptations are of the spirit. Some involve passion… others involve cold calculation.<br />
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Whatever a temptation’s quality or type may be, at whatever level, it is always a time of testing. Our resolve, our spiritual muscle, is being tested. And if our character is spiritually weak and flabby, without any muscle power at all, we will be a pushover for the devil.<br />
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Jesus also had His times of trail. The first we know about was during His time out in the desert immediately prior to beginning His public ministry. He experienced being alone and abandoned, with only His own resources to rely upon. He had his desert experience; we have ours. He knew temptation and trial just as we know them.<br />
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We need to pay attention to important words that come to us from important sources. We need, here, to pay attention to the biblical difference between what is a temptation and what is a trial. In the bible, a trail is always something far more profound than a temptation. The consequence that follows a trial has finality to it. There is a final, complete, and total outcome to a trial. Deliverance from the sort of trial Jesus is talking about in teaching us His prayer is nothing less than our trials by battle with the devil himself.<br />
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We, therefore, pray that God will protect us in the time of temptation and deliver us from the trail, we are asking God to be with us when we face the devil himself. All by ourselves we are weak.<br />
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The problem we face is that the devil always comes to us disguised… disguised as something or someone good. The chief weapon of the devil is to corrupt what is good. He takes goodness and then devalues it, debases it, corrupts it.<br />
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Do you have the gift of charm? Do you have a personality that can delight people? You can use it to seduce others. Do you have power over words? Are you a good wordsmith? You can use your tongue to corrupt others. Do you have the gift of intelligence? So does the devil! You can use your power of intelligence to corrupt the truth and twist it into a lie. One of the names given in the bible to Lucifer is “The Father of Lies.”<br />
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You see, just where we are the strongest the devil will come to challenge our strength to prove his greater strength.<br />
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All of this is presented to us in the trial of Jesus Christ. His spectacular trial was before the Roman governor of Judea, Pontius Pilate. It was the Roman governor, Pilate, who sat on the bench, called in witnesses to present evidence, made a judgment, and declared Jesus to be innocent. Nevertheless, immediately thereafter, in his weakness, Pilate ordered that Jesus be executed by crucifixion. In that most famous time of trial in history, was it Jesus who was on trial or was it Pontius Pilate?<br />
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We also have a glimpse into the spiritual trial Jesus suffered immediately before He was betrayed by one of His twelve apostles, Judas Iscariot. It was Judas who turned Jesus over to the Roman authorities. And what a trial it was — it is reported that Jesus suffered so terribly that He even sweat blood.<br />
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There are trials in which we are simply overcome. There are temptations that quite overwhelm us. We get into a level of evil that’s over our head. We drown in it. Which is why the waters of baptism are a counter-symbol. Christ converts the waters of death, which threaten to drown us, into the waters of life because we are drowned in His life.<br />
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Out in the desert, there at the beginning, the first temptations the devil put to Jesus were those that called Him to corrupt the good, to compromise His principles.<br />
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This is the most insidious aspect of the culture that surrounds us. It suggests that we compromise with evil. It suggests that we follow the easy way. Its first and most effective ploy is to get us to whine that “everybody’s doing it,” to feel sorry for ourselves, present ourselves as victims of an autocratic authority and scream about their unfairness. It’s unfair to deprive us, we whine, because “everybody else is doing it”. Then, if we can get just the slightest compromise, we can start the whole thing down a long descending slide until the point where all restraints end up on the ground.<br />
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Then we can redefine sin. We can change the definition of something that is wrong into something that is okay, just so long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else. After that we can ridicule the whole idea of sin. We can turn the devil into a cartoon character, declare that hell doesn’t exist, and depict holy people as ridiculous, unthinking, mindless robots who can’t take care of themselves. Religion then becomes a throwaway item, a nice sort of sentimental fancy that isn’t real in the world in which we must live.<br />
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Jesus final temptation, you see, the one suggested to Him as He was dying while nailed and writhing in terrible pain upon the cross, was to simply give up.<br />
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St. Augustine tells us that really evil people are not even tempted anymore because they are totally lost. It’s not necessary for the devil to waste any energy tempting them since they are totally corrupt. These kinds of people laugh at the idea of temptation – for them, temptations are silly things that don’t even exist. They simply don’t understand them because they don’t know what’s good any more. Like Pontius Pilate who, during his trail of Jesus, asked: “Truth? What is truth?” the question today is: “Good? What is good?” Indeed, just what is it that our culture holds up to be “good”?<br />
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How many of those around us do you suppose have sold out to evil, have sold their souls to the devil and given away their souls? Do you admire them? They are often, in today’s media, presented to us as gods and goddesses, media stars whom we should want to be like.<br />
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Evil, you see, truly is the corruption of Goodness, and the battle is going on deep within us, in our very own immortal souls. And so Christ teaches us to ask His Father to “…lead us not into temptation and deliver us from the trial.” AmenUnknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1210491415270052508.post-31740826156698829232024-02-11T09:53:00.000-05:002024-02-11T09:53:54.811-05:00Ash Wednesday | 2024<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCUHbhp3gh9AEIT_uQwNDcpmsqe1ENVFTY7I9g-n6ig6xiCiFNyhZOUJxmJ1aX9eNQguZNKOfm6h0hlqOv2JMC67MngmlP8PmHSm81_kK0sd1pucXnWXtM8xAExhEd1tYfD6-Ns3QVsIH6PkqPah3wjpfIQJVSNB68mZL6q-GCyQrWDHZmFp93o5eZ1rXx/s548/Christ%20carrying%20the%20cross%20icon%20(2).jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Christ carrying the cross" border="0" data-original-height="334" data-original-width="548" height="390" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCUHbhp3gh9AEIT_uQwNDcpmsqe1ENVFTY7I9g-n6ig6xiCiFNyhZOUJxmJ1aX9eNQguZNKOfm6h0hlqOv2JMC67MngmlP8PmHSm81_kK0sd1pucXnWXtM8xAExhEd1tYfD6-Ns3QVsIH6PkqPah3wjpfIQJVSNB68mZL6q-GCyQrWDHZmFp93o5eZ1rXx/w640-h390/Christ%20carrying%20the%20cross%20icon%20(2).jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b>February 14, 2024 </b></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: center;">
<i><b></b>"Remember that thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return."</i></blockquote>
On Ash Wednesday, Catholics receive ashes in the shape of a cross traced on the forehead. The rite evokes Saint Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians: "For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive." (1 Corinthians 15: 21 - 22) Adam’s sin condemned man to sin and death. But the instrument of our salvation, the cross, reminds us that in Christ, man is redeemed, and the gates of heaven are opened.<br />
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The original injunction conferring ashes: "Remember, O man, that dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return," contrasts with the words of the Nicene Creed concerning the Incarnation: "For us men and for our salvation, he [Jesus] came down from heaven: by the power of the Holy Spirit, he was born of the Virgin Mary and became man." In becoming man, Christ assumed our iniquities: offering himself as a supreme sacrifice in expiation for man’s sins. The forty days of Lent culminate on Easter Sunday. Christ’s joyous Resurrection fulfills God’s promise to save humanity and reveals our final destiny, if we persevere in love.<br />
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Almighty Father, as we begin this Lent, give us the grace to be steadfast in our resolutions, drawing ever closer to you by means of our prayer and sacrifices.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1210491415270052508.post-6704111285459560102024-01-28T11:11:00.000-05:002024-01-28T11:11:02.103-05:00Homily for the 6th Sunday in Ordinary Time, February 11, 2024, Year B<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5VtHKurpzUI/YCADI6yf_cI/AAAAAAAAMEs/ddkQHDuN5xMGOO8FGVYfRWBV3YHftdTeACLcBGAsYHQ/s440/Jesus%2Bheals%2Bthe%2Bleper%2B%255BWide%2BLarge%255D.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Christ healing a leper." border="0" data-original-height="247" data-original-width="440" height="360" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5VtHKurpzUI/YCADI6yf_cI/AAAAAAAAMEs/ddkQHDuN5xMGOO8FGVYfRWBV3YHftdTeACLcBGAsYHQ/w640-h360/Jesus%2Bheals%2Bthe%2Bleper%2B%255BWide%2BLarge%255D.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">Fr. Charles Irvin</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">Diocese of Lansing</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
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<div style="text-align: center;">
(<a href="https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/021124.cfm" target="_blank">Click here for Sunday’s readings</a>)</div>
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The gospel account we’ve just heard is part of St. Mark’s introduction of Jesus. It has to do with Jesus’ identity, as have the gospel accounts over the past few Sundays. From the Sunday we celebrated the Baptism of the Lord through the Sunday before Ash Wednesday St. Mark is presenting us with the question: “Who is this Jesus?”<br />
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Mark’s answer? “The One who has come to bring outcasts back in.” He has come for the outcasts, the outsiders, the lepers, the sinners, and those we disdain. The great irony is that Jesus, the One who came for outcasts, Himself had to get out of town. Note that in several of these gospel accounts we’ve heard, St. Mark reports: “Jesus could no longer go openly into any town but had to stay outside in places where nobody lived.”<br />
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That’s true even today in our surrounding culture. It is not politically correct, we are told, to talk about Jesus in public. He has to be kept from where people are living. For instance, at Christmas we’re supposed to suppress references to Him; we’re supposed to dilute the meaning of Christmas down to calling it “The Winter Festival”, or just another holiday for gift giving, or another holiday for family get-togethers. We’re supposed to submerge Christmas into other reasons for it being a festival celebration. So also Easter is for bunnies and Halloween is for spooks. At Christmas, keep Jesus out back in the manger; don’t allow Him into the inn where everybody else is gathered together.<br />
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The One whom the Father sent for outcasts becomes Himself THE outcast. But, we must ask, just who are the outcasts? We, the ones who have been cast out from the Garden of Eden, we are the outcasts. We are the ones God the Son has come to heal from the leprosy of sin. What irony it is that we become the ones who cast Him out, crucified Him outside the walls of Jerusalem, and keep Him, like a leper, at a safe distance so He can’t touch us.<br />
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At another level we need to take a close look at the question: Who’s “out” and who’s “in”? That question surrounds us each and every day. Think about the number of television shows are based on that question. Think of the American Idol show and the survivor shows. Think of the media’s concern about who is “in” with President Trump and who is “out.”<br />
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Teens are terribly concerned with the question: “Who’s in and who’s not?” They have their own set of outcasts, people with whom they don’t want to be seen in public. And so do adults. And so do families. We all have those with whom we no longer wish to associate, even family members we scorn and don’t want to invite into our homes.<br />
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If you think religion has nothing to do with life, or that the bible has nothing to do with life, then think again. Today’s report from St. Mark speaks directly to us, to our attitudes, and to how we’re living with those around us. It speaks to how we are living with others. We all have those who we don’t want be near us or touch our lives.<br />
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Is your relationship with Jesus a part of your life or not? Will Jesus be a part of what you think, say and do tomorrow? Or is He out of your life until next Sunday’s Mass? Is He “in” or “out” of your inner circle, those close to you, the community of people among whom you live? Is He “in” or “out” of your daily life?<br />
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Try this little test during any regular day of this week. Bring Jesus with you into any conversation. Bring Him in from being outside and then observe the reactions of those around you. I’ll bet that in any number of cases He will be the leper that people will want to shun. And if you allow Him to touch you, to touch your attitudes, your heart and your ways of thinking…? Well, then, you will have contracted His “leprosy” and folks will begin to shun you. You’ll quickly become an “outsider”, yourself an outcast.<br />
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As for your own personal relationship with Jesus, you may want to pay some attention to the part of the gospel you just heard where Jesus tells the leper to “go, show yourself to the priest…” As a part of your healing and re-entrance into God’s community of believers, present yourself to the priest. It’s what your religious tradition tells you to do. What He told them to do back then is what Jesus tells us to do when we are tainted with the spiritual leprosy of sin. He tells us to go to the priest and confess.<br />
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So when was the last time you went to confession, revealed your sins and showed the priest your own spiritual leprosy… and then received from him God’s healing power in the Sacrament of Reconciliation? If you think that going to confession isn’t important, then perhaps you’d better take a long, hard look at what Jesus had to say to us, lepers that we are, and about how we get back into God’s family. And just what is the role that God has assigned for the priest? The answer to that question isn’t simple. Forgiveness of sin isn’t simply tossing off an easy “I’m sorry” to God.<br />
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To return to my opening remarks, the gospel account we just heard is at the end of St. Mark’s first chapter; it concludes Mark’s introduction of Jesus. It has several levels to it. One level deals with who Jesus is…His identity. Another level it deals with who we are and the condition we’re in, namely our own leprosy of sin. Yet another level deals with what will happen to Jesus at the end of His public ministry. For by reporting that Jesus could no longer go openly into any town, St. Mark is suggesting that He who came from God to save outcasts, we who have been cast out from the Garden of Eden, will Himself become THE outcast, crucified outside the walls of Jerusalem. The beginning of Mark’s gospel hints of its ending.<br />
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It’s the end of the story, however, that’s the real clincher. For at the end of St. Mark’s gospel accounts we find Jesus, as Mary Magdalene did, in another Garden, the Garden of the Resurrection. With Mary Magdalene and her companions, we find ourselves healed, outcasts no longer, able to walk this earth now in the glorious freedom of the sons and daughters to God, redeemed sinners, a people healed of sin’s leprosy, victims and outcasts no longer.<br />
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So the next time you find yourself talking about who’s “in” and who’s “out” maybe it would be a good thing to think about who Jesus considers to be “in” and who is “on the outs” with him. For when it comes to God’s attitude, the only outcasts are the ones who have made themselves so.<br />
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When we cast God out of our lives, we ourselves become the outcasts.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1210491415270052508.post-90792899277807225032024-01-21T11:16:00.000-05:002024-01-21T11:16:59.140-05:00Homily for the 5th Sunday in Ordinary Time, February 4, 2024, Year B<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-lo8-wydITxw/Wm4H_hoW_BI/AAAAAAAAKyI/vb-oj8mLSZoZFhvshQdS7lBkR_c26cSRwCLcBGAs/s1600/Christ%2527s%2Bmost%2Bprecious%2Bblood%2B%255BLarge%255D.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="The crucifixion of Christ" border="0" data-original-height="296" data-original-width="523" height="362" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-lo8-wydITxw/Wm4H_hoW_BI/AAAAAAAAKyI/vb-oj8mLSZoZFhvshQdS7lBkR_c26cSRwCLcBGAs/w640-h362/Christ%2527s%2Bmost%2Bprecious%2Bblood%2B%255BLarge%255D.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<div style="text-align: center;">
Fr. Charles Irvin</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">Diocese of Lansing</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
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<div style="text-align: center;">
(<a href="https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/020424.cfm" target="_blank">Click here for Sunday’s readings</a>)</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
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My life is nothing but drudgery; I am filled with sadness, tired of dealing with the mess other people have made of this world. Life is an unbearable burden. Will it ever end? Is there a God out there who cares what happens to us, or are we helpless pawns on some cosmic chessboard, only accidentally born?<br />
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If God is so good, why does He allow us to experience pain, loss, terrible depression, and various disasters?<br />
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Answering the question “why?” gets us into a long philosophical and theological discussion. Suffice it here to say that God has chosen to put us into an incomplete world, living in our own personal incomplete lives. But by His grace we have the enormous dignity to be His co-operators, to work with Him while investing our own love and determination into the task of bringing ourselves and our world into completion and wholeness. This is a great gift – an act of faith that God has made in us. We can be who He dreams we can be, IF we work with him, IF we place our selves in His loving presence and allow His power to enter into us. That can happen only in a world — and in lives — that challenge us.<br />
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There are huge forces at work on us, both natural and supernatural. We wrestle, says St. Paul, with angels, principalities, powers and spiritual forces on high. AND we wrestle with our own selves, trying to put down the demons that beset us deep within our own hearts and souls.<br />
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There are demons against which we struggle, forces of evil that are outside of us — cosmic and worldwide, as well as forces we find within us, personal and deep within us. There are those who are uncomfortable with publicly talking about evil, such as when our own president uses the term. Using the term “demons” discomforts many, thinking perhaps it smacks of voodoo, witchcraft, and medievalism. But if we’re in denial then how can we mobilize our efforts to rid the world, ourselves, and those around us of what besets us? Rid our selves and our world of the demonic?<br />
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The time comes when we simply have to put aside questions of “why?” and take action. How to deal with all that threatens our peace and well-being becomes more important and urgent than to theorize over why. Then, too, perhaps the road to happiness is to set our selves to the task of freeing others of what besets them rather than thinking only about our own misfortunes and lack of happiness. This is what St. Paul urges us to do.<br />
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To be sure there are times when a good look into ourselves can be necessary. There are things within me that cause my own unhappiness and which thereupon bring unhappiness to those around me. Such things come to mind when I think about pride, anger, envy, gluttony, lust, avarice, sloth, and self-centeredness. Taking a moral inventory of my self is quite necessary from time to time.<br />
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How can I bring health, happiness and good news to those around me if I do live in with those things within me? I cannot give to others what I do not have myself. If I am to help in bringing better lives to those around me then I need to identify and cast out my own demons so that I might better live in the power of God and then share that exorcising power with those around me.<br />
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If we do nothing, if we give up the struggle to grow spiritually and grow in the love and power of God, then all that will be left for us is to moan and groan about life and all its unfairness.<br />
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God chose not to remain isolated in His nice, safe and cozy heaven. God chose to get himself mixed up in our miserable humanity and therein release His power and love in our humanity so that His kingdom might come here on earth as it is in heaven. Jesus, the Son of God, knew what it was like to live among the sick, the suffering and the oppressed in a land held in subjugation by the princes and powers of this world, namely occupying army and governors of Imperial Rome.<br />
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The Good News of Jesus Christ is the news that God is casting out evil and establishing His kingdom here among us. The challenging news is that God is accomplishing all of that in us when we respond to him, when we submit ourselves to His will, when we choose to work with him, co-laborate with him, co-operate with him. We must surrender our autonomous selves into the love and care of God, for without Him we can do nothing. Without Him we are poor and weak. With His Presence within us we are richly endowed and full of strength. Then we can face the world and all that life hurls at us.<br />
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To be sure there are times when each one of us simply sits back and demands that God do it all for us. To be sure there are times when we are exhausted, depressed, and seemingly beaten down. But, then, so was Jesus. The question put to us every day is: “Will I be controlled by sin, by evil, by all that is demonic around me? Will I allow life to entomb me?”<br />
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The stones of our tombs have been, by God’s power, rolled back. He unbinds us and cries out to us: “Come forth! Rise from whatever is death-dealing, victims no longer. Walk in the glorious freedom of the sons and daughters of God.”<br />
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Job suffered – the saints suffered – the righteous have suffered – Jesus Christ suffered. And so will we. The question is: What are you going to do about it? What are you going to do about it in your own heart and soul, and what are you going to do about it when it comes to removing it from the lives of others?<br />
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If we do nothing, then indeed life will be uncaring, threatening and over-powering. If we do nothing we will have nothing left to do but complain and shake our fists at God. If, on the other hands, we enter deeply into the life and Spirit of Jesus Christ then we shall have the power to face any and all evils, internal and external. Then life’s challenge will be an opportunity; then all that confronts us will become promises. Then we will have the wherewithal to cast out the worst of demons and reveal the presence of God’s kingdom here on earth as it is in heaven.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1210491415270052508.post-54953196258564839852024-01-17T10:17:00.001-05:002024-01-17T10:17:22.435-05:00Homily for the 4th Sunday in Ordinary Time, January 28, 2024, Year B<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZRKC4AI0v5F9cswcWm-6iYcL-V1ZVUzAGj1RsFC-ho2w8bkHJV5FA09OWpKDppZN-bV-9tVE5-hJSxy-tgjTeiPB9GNSFlROVoJ9pbz_jl7ZbuCOuu5CzUjw8Ry8FmY715aVtGjNycgKQgxiSsAa8ScHlIHb-kMpEyT68MMtxiAcHQu57GxS6ukKc9nV2/s1222/Jesus%20and%20the%20possessed%20man%20in%20the%20synagogue%20(2).jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1222" data-original-width="1202" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZRKC4AI0v5F9cswcWm-6iYcL-V1ZVUzAGj1RsFC-ho2w8bkHJV5FA09OWpKDppZN-bV-9tVE5-hJSxy-tgjTeiPB9GNSFlROVoJ9pbz_jl7ZbuCOuu5CzUjw8Ry8FmY715aVtGjNycgKQgxiSsAa8ScHlIHb-kMpEyT68MMtxiAcHQu57GxS6ukKc9nV2/w630-h640/Jesus%20and%20the%20possessed%20man%20in%20the%20synagogue%20(2).jpg" title="The Possessed Man in the Synagogue, (Le possédé dans la Synagogue) James Tissot, c. 1894." width="630" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">Fr. Charles Irvin </div>
<div style="text-align: center;">Diocese of Lansing</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
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<div style="text-align: center;">
(<a href="https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/012824.cfm" target="_blank">Click here for Sunday’s readings</a>) </div>
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Two words in the Gospel account you just heard captured my attention… “astonished” and “amazed.” St. Mark reports that the people in Capernaum’s synagogue were astonished at Jesus’ teaching and all were amazed. So the question arises: Why? Why were they so astonished and amazed? After all they thought Jesus was a rabbi, someone who speaks God’s word, and they were, after all, in a synagogue, a place where one would expect to be hearing about what God had to say. So why were they so astonished and amazed?<br />
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First of all we need to notice that this event occurred at the very beginning of Our Blessed Lord’s public ministry. St. Mark reports this event in the first chapter, twenty-first verse of his Gospel account. Jesus has just finished gathering His twelve apostles and was now “going public,” so to speak. Jesus had not as yet performed His dazzling miracles. He had not as yet cured the blind, healed the lepers, healed the crippled, and raised people from the dead. The most astounding miracle of all — His own resurrection from the dead — had not yet occurred.<br />
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Why then was there astonishment and amazement at His first words here, at the beginning of His public ministry? It was common, we know, for rabbis to have followers and to move from synagogue to synagogue. What was so amazing about Jesus? Wasn’t He teaching the way rabbis taught? Wasn’t Jesus proclaiming the word of God to His people – something all rabbis did?<br />
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What I want to point out is the particular the style of speech used by Jesus and to note the way He taught. He did not say “The Lord’s words for you today are…” Nor did He say: “The God who sent me says this…” No. Jesus spoke in His own name, on His own authority. There is, you see, a big difference in Jesus’ speech here. He is telling everyone what He, the Christ is declaring to them. He is not speaking on behalf of God — He is speaking as God!<br />
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In another gospel account, St. Matthew, reports Jesus as saying:<br />
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"You have heard the commandment imposed on your forefathers, ‘You shall not commit murder; every murderer will be liable to judgment.’ What I say to you is …everyone who grows angry with his brother shall be liable to judgment. “You have heard the commandment, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ What I say to you is: anyone who looks lustfully at a woman has already committed adultery with her in his thoughts. “You have heard the commandment imposed on your forefathers, ‘Do not take a false oath; rather, make good to the Lord all your pledges.’ What I tell you is: do not swear at all. Say, ‘Yes’ when you mean ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ when you mean ‘No.’ Anything beyond that is from the evil one."<br />
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The Ten Commandments were revered by the Israelites. Those commandments and the tablets upon which they were written connected them — directly connected them — with God Himself. To alter or tamper with them was, for the Jews, absolutely unthinkable. To hear Jesus expand on those commandments was, to say the very least, astonishing and amazing. What Jesus taught was marvelous. It was luminous, enlightening, and brilliant. But how He taught was mind boggling because the way Jesus spoke was as God speaking. He didn’t speak about God. He didn’t begin by saying: Thus says the Lord…” No. He simply and directly spoke as only God would speak. Nothing could be more astonishing than that. Either Jesus is who He claimed to be and demonstrated Himself to be, or else He was a charlatan, a fraud, and a liar. He is either God the Son made human flesh, or He is not. One has to choose. One cannot escape making that choice.<br />
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Have you ever heard it stated that it really doesn’t matter what religion you belong to since they’re all leading us to God? When you hear that said you should realize that sort of thinking flies in the face of what we just heard about Jesus Christ, both in today’s passage as well as in many others. Because if it is true that Our Blessed Lord is God made flesh for us, then it really does matter what religion we have. The devils themselves recognized Him. Why do those who claim to be religious people refuse to acknowledge who He really is? It wasn’t the devils that gave Jesus a bad time. They simply vacated; they simply fled from His presence and went elsewhere to do their dirty work. It was the religious know-it-alls who gave Jesus a hard time. The more they realized that Jesus of Nazareth was really Someone, the more they understood what He was claiming to be, the more they wanted to rid themselves of Him. He spoke with God’s own authority. He was a terrible threat to the claimed authority of the big know-it-alls.<br />
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Now there are many ways people try to rid themselves of Christ. They tried to kill Him, bury Him in a tomb and then post a detail of soldiers to guard that tomb. We know, however, how useless that was. Another way is to simply ignore Him. Many have done that, are doing it now, and will do it in the future. The danger about ignoring Him is equivalent to the danger of ignoring the instructions on drug prescriptions, or ignoring the directions on how to fly an airplane.<br />
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Still another way is to claim that Jesus is just another interesting religious figure in human history. You simply decide that Buddha or Mohammed or some guru from the Far East is just as good as Jesus it comes to journeying to God. But if that’s true then why bother with going to church? Why not simply start your own church? I mean, after all, if you really believe that one religion is just as good as another you can probably do a better a job with organizing a religion than the ones we’ve got. But when you do, let’s see you cure people with various diseases, make the blind see, restore crippled limbs, and raise people from the dead. Finally, and most importantly, let us see you rise from the dead three days after you’ve been buried.<br />
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So is it really true that one religion is just as good as another? Do we take the words and teachings of Jesus with ultimate seriousness or do we just relativize His life, death, resurrection and teachings? Is His voice just one of many? Or is He the Word of God spoken for us?<br />
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Now I’m quite aware that all of you here today do not dismiss Jesus. You wouldn’t be here listening to His words and receiving His Body and Blood if your hearts and souls were elsewhere. But I’ll bet you have heard members of your families reduce religion to something equal to a cafeteria choice by declaring it doesn’t really matter what you pick and choose. Will you simply let those statements pass by unchallenged? Will you let your children, your grandchildren and members of your family, as well as your friends who say these things, go on without responding with your own convictions about Jesus Christ? We need to love them enough to call them to take Jesus of Nazareth seriously. After all, He really does speak with authority, and not like the others.<br />
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We’ve all heard a lot of talk about evangelizing. Evangelizing doesn’t mean that we have to go around town knocking on doors and preaching at others about our religion. It can be something far less difficult and far less offensive than that. Evangelizing can be as easy as simply and clearly stating the truth about Jesus and telling folks “We have never heard anyone else speak with such authority.”Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1210491415270052508.post-77869401003254047872024-01-07T09:48:00.001-05:002024-01-07T11:49:42.932-05:00Homily for the 3rd Sunday in Ordinary Time, January 21, 2024, Year B<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-cNC7muBON7o/Wltpj5l72qI/AAAAAAAAKqA/McTDDB1HPEwRFMzFilvFE_JPJok3fdE_wCLcBGAs/s1600/The%2Bcalling%2Bof%2BSts.%2BJames%2Band%2BJohn.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="The calling of James and John" border="0" data-original-height="324" data-original-width="500" height="413" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-cNC7muBON7o/Wltpj5l72qI/AAAAAAAAKqA/McTDDB1HPEwRFMzFilvFE_JPJok3fdE_wCLcBGAs/w640-h413/The%2Bcalling%2Bof%2BSts.%2BJames%2Band%2BJohn.jpg" title="Christ Calling the Apostles James and John, Edward Armitage, 1869" width="640" /></a></div>
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<div style="text-align: center;">
Fr. Charles Irvin</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">Diocese of Lansing</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
(<a href="https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/012124.cfm" target="_blank">Click here for Sunday’s readings</a>)</div>
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Nineveh was the oldest and most populous city of the ancient Assyrian Empire. Its ruins are located on the east bank of the Tigris River opposite the modern city of Mosul in Iraq. The Ninevites were a great empire known for their ruthlessness. They were the sworn enemies of the Jews. Each despised the other and yet Jonah, a Jew, was sent by God to them. The Ninevites were going to end the Israelite civilization in a few years, but it was to them that God sent Jonah.<br />
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Jonah definitely did not want to go to them, but God made sure that he did in spite of Jonah’s efforts to avoid the task to which God had called him. After the episode with the whale Jonah finally ended up on their shore. He went to them, and they repented of their evil ways. They acted immediately on God’s word. Jonah was there only one day in what was to be a three-day journey. That’s the key idea. On hearing God’s word proclaimed to them by Jonah they acted immediately and changed their ways.<br />
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In today’s second reading we hear St. Paul proclaiming a similar message. I tell you, brothers and sisters, the time is running out. From now on, let those having wives act as not having them, those weeping as not weeping, those rejoicing as not rejoicing, those buying as not owning, those using the world as not using it fully. For the world in its present form is passing away.<br />
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Like Jonah we have a propensity to procrastinate, to put things off with the idea we will tend to them another day. We should, however, consider what that’s saying to God and what God feels about that.<br />
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The theme presents itself to us in today’s Gospel account. Peter and Andrew were grown men who were in the fishing business. They experienced God’s call and immediately dropped everything, left their business, and followed Jesus. Jesus, today’s gospel account reports, walked a little farther and met James and his brother John who with their father Zebedee were likewise fishermen. At Jesus’ call they immediately dropped their nets, left their father Zebedee, and followed Him.<br />
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I want now to give some attention to the young men and women who are here with us today. Could you, in a less dramatic way, be experiencing a similar call from God? Could you respond as those first disciples did? A vocation is a call from God. In one way or another we all, each one of us here, have a vocation. But what about the Jonahs among us? It’s very likely that some young men or women are feeling God’s call inviting them to go out into our modern-day world, a world much like Nineveh’s, with His message… a challenging call indeed. It’s sort of like being called to be one of God’s Marines.<br />
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I know there are those of you young men who may be hearing God’s call to serve Him as a priest.<br />
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Some of you young women may be experiencing similar thoughts about being a sister in a religious order or in some form of a dedicated life in the Church. There are young men and women who are hearing God’s invitation to serve Him in a special way. You may be still in school, or you may already have a professional career. God’s call is not limited. Men and women already working in a profession, or a business may very well be hearing God’s call to leave what they are doing and follow Jesus along a special path.<br />
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Often the media present young men and women as self-centered and pleasure seeking, awash in sensual excesses. But we all know of young men and women in the military who are serving our country in very self-sacrificing ways. We have all seen accounts of young men and women on their spring breaks travelling great distances to build homes and in many other ways help folks who have suffered from poverty and other misfortunes. There are seminaries and religious orders of women that are experiencing growth not only in numbers but in the quality of young people who are joining them.<br />
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All that being said, our Faith tells us that by our baptism we are all baptized into the Priesthood of Jesus Christ. In the Sacrament of Confirmation we have all been anointed by the Holy Spirit to bring Christ into our lives and into the world that, like Nineveh, surrounds us. Our Church teaches that we are all baptized into the Priesthood of the Faithful and that by being members of what St. Paul calls “the Mystical Body of Christ” we bring His Priesthood into the world around us. We can all be heartened by the fact that many young men and women have come to realize that grace and are responding to God’s call to them.<br />
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Those are not just pretty words. Those are challenging words, just as challenging as those directed to Jonah. Bring a priest is not easy. Bringing Christ’s message to those around us is not easy. We prefer set that task aside.<br />
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God isn’t giving us another program; He isn’t giving us a “how-to manual” or some agency to which we can refer people. No. God is calling us to bring His presence to individuals, something that we can only do individually… personally.<br />
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It is my belief that society has no problems that cannot ultimately be traced back to the individuals who make it up. I believe that because that’s the way Jesus saw it. That is the way, and the truth, and the life He challenges us to live in so that we can change the world around us.<br />
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When I start seeing the problems that exist in others then I begin to see myself. I keep running into myself when I run into the sins, faults, and failures I see in others. We live in profound connectedness and in radical complicity with each other. The theological analysis of this reality begins with the doctrine of original sin, that statement of reality that puts us radically at the root cause and source of our world’s miseries.<br />
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Jesus cries out to us and tells us that a better world is within our reach; it’s within our grasp. “The reign of God is at hand,” He tells us. A better world begins when we begin to change our own personal life. “Reform your lives,” He tells us, “and believe in the Good News.”<br />
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Taking life by the yard is hard, but life taken by the inch is a cinch. Take life as it comes to us one day at a time. Expect perfect happiness in the next life only after being reasonably happy in this life. That is the only way to deal with reality.<br />
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And so, if we want to change the world, are we willing first of all to change our own selves? How can I have the energy to change the huge systems surround us unless I at least have the energy to change myself?<br />
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The call of Jesus to twelve individuals, the call we just heard about in today Gospel account, is not a call issued only to twelve Jewish men over 2,000 years ago. It is an insistent call, and urgent call, a demanding call that comes down to us through 2,000 years in this Church of ours to you, to you here and now, to you today, who have been called by God to receive the Bread of Life from this altar and then to leave this church building on a mission. We are to leave here as those who are sent, sent with the twelve apostles to change the world by first changing our own lives.<br />
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For the simple truth is that when you do in fact change your life, you will have begun to change the whole world. What are you seeking? What is God whispering to you deep down within you? To what and to who to you want to give your life?Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1210491415270052508.post-33341526119893564382023-12-31T10:57:00.001-05:002024-01-07T10:02:05.507-05:00Homily for the 2nd Sunday in Ordinary Time, January 14, 2024, Year B<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibIOdLb4QJDn67_KNVEqwJCPdX74a-2PIPbdR7XwT3F36iXgus8khmQef8IDhYkDd2e4JCil0TAbBcgm9fPiBNYr4SIdM_IjVhMe8ZWSFHYGZAkM2fEVnCK5rC7FUUg6XRpgFtiX0BaGBVrpTkuOGxXFXmZY7Seitc_OIOc78oIds6bfJyzOBB_hEbZdnw/s600/The%20calling%20of%20Sts%20Peter%20and%20Andrew%202.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="The calling of St. Peter and St. Andrew" border="0" data-original-height="371" data-original-width="600" height="396" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibIOdLb4QJDn67_KNVEqwJCPdX74a-2PIPbdR7XwT3F36iXgus8khmQef8IDhYkDd2e4JCil0TAbBcgm9fPiBNYr4SIdM_IjVhMe8ZWSFHYGZAkM2fEVnCK5rC7FUUg6XRpgFtiX0BaGBVrpTkuOGxXFXmZY7Seitc_OIOc78oIds6bfJyzOBB_hEbZdnw/w640-h396/The%20calling%20of%20Sts%20Peter%20and%20Andrew%202.jpg" title="The Calling of Saints Peter and Andrew, Caravaggio, c. 1603–1606" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">Fr. Charles Irvin</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">Diocese of Lansing</div>
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<div style="text-align: center;">
(<a href="https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/011424.cfm" target="_blank">Click here for Sunday’s readings</a>)</div>
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Here we are at the beginning of a new year with high hopes that this year will be better than 2011. We have our hopes even though we know that there is much in our world that is wrong. Without going into a long, dismal list of the many things that are wrong let me point out just a few of them. The gap between the rich and the poor is widening, not closing. Political corruption and the politics of gridlock darken our perceptions of those we have elected to office. Terrorism and abortion along with Mexican drug cartel murders cause us to realize that human life is cheap and is too often regarded as disposable. We face much that is sinful, evil, and criminal in our world. All of these things we know quite well are exceptions to the way things ought to be; they are out of the general order of what should present in our relations with others.<br />
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How do we know that? What gives us this perspective and recognition of what is good, what is just, what is fair, and what ought to be? Today’s Gospel gives us the point of reference. It takes us back to the very beginning of the Christian movement, the movement of God into our humanity in Jesus Christ. The story is so familiar, so simple, that we easily lose sight of its overwhelming importance. The jingle bells of Christmas divert our attention to the magnificent truth that God has entered into our humanity and thereby blessed it with His holy presence in all that it means to be human. In Jesus Christ God brings His Light to what it means to be human and how we should live with each other.<br />
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John the Baptist initiates this coming of God to us by introducing two of his own disciples to Jesus, Andrew being the key player. John points Jesus out to them by exclaiming: “Look, there is the Lamb of God!” It’s sort of like being at a social function when a very significant person enters the room and a friend says to you: “Well, look who’s here!”<br />
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A conversation then develops between Andrew and Jesus, a conversation sprinkled with seeking words like, “What do you want?” “Where do you live?” “Come and see,” and “Come with me,” all of them filled with the relational words of friendship. Let me emphasize here that these are the inviting words of friendship, not the commanding words of submission and obedience. These are words that invite us to live closely with Jesus and with Him come to know how we should live with others.<br />
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My point is that our religion in its most distilled form is a friendship between ourselves and God in Jesus Christ. It is the one operative principle throughout Christ’s entire life. Even at the end of His life during the Last Supper, Jesus gets down on His knees, washes feet, stands up and looking each one in the eye says: “I no longer call you slaves … I call you friends.”<br />
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Jesus had no army. He neither needed one nor wanted one. He had the only one power with which to conquer the human spirit, the power of a loving friendship. That is the only thing that can invade and conquer the human heart. Brute force always fails; love always wins.<br />
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Our Catholic Faith is one of the largest and most influential in the world and it’s membership is presently over one billion souls. It has built thousands of churches, hospitals, children’s homes, nursing homes, schools, and even universities. It has rites, rituals, ceremonies, and the holy Sacraments of Jesus Christ. It has theologies, philosophies, systems of ethics, moral codes and even a Code of Canon Law abound. It is vast; it is intricate; and it is complex. But it is built on one thing and one thing alone, namely a personal, warm, intimate, and loving friendship with Jesus Christ. From that flows all of Christianity’s hope, power, and vision of the truth about who we are.<br />
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Jesus was tempted to be a military leader, a dazzling magician, a revolutionary who would construct a new social order, and a universal healer and provider for us in all of our hurts, wants, and needs. But He resisted all of those temptations and asked for only one thing from us – friendship! He loved us, and still does, even when we don’t deserve it. He forgives us even when we can’t forgive ourselves. He gives us far more than we ask for or even expect. He gives us a loveliness that is not pretty but is powerful. He asks us to be more than nice; He asks of us everything. And in the midst of war, famine, despair, and powerlessness He gives us His friendship bringing with it the one gift our humanity needs more than anything else, namely hope.<br />
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Whenever we feel lost in a religious life that seems too complicated, or whenever we feel lost in a world that seems to be unmanageable and out of control, and whenever we’re tempted to give up on ourselves, remember that our faith in its purest form is the personal friendship we can have with Jesus. That is how it began with Andrew and his brother Peter. And that is the solid rock upon which our relationship with Jesus is grounded.<br />
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For no matter what happens in our world, or in our spiritual lives, or in our relationships with others, we can always find our way once again with those seeking and questing words we heard in today’s Gospel message to you and to me. “What do you want?” “Come and see!”<br />
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Listening to God’s voice is of the essence of religion, it is the nourishment of our spiritual lives. When we come to celebrate the Mass the first thing the Church does is to offer us God’s word. Then having received His word for our hearts and minds we receive His Word made flesh for our human nature in Holy Communion.<br />
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There are those who defend themselves from intimacy; there are those who are afraid to love. Because of their fear of losing their own independent autonomy they either flee from religion or turn it into something ridiculous. Some seek to turn religion into a series of laws, rules and regulations that must be followed. That approach, however, requires only mindless obedience and thus misses the whole point about our relationship with Jesus.<br />
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The truth is that God has a word for you, personally. He has something He wants to say to you. The story of Samuel we heard in the first reading today is a story that we should make our own. The story in today’s Gospel account is a story we should likewise make our own. For God is calling you and inviting you to come and stay with Him, to come and be close to Him.<br />
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I don’t know how you pray your morning prayers, but I would suggest that a good way to start your day is to repeat Samuel’s words each morning. When you begin the day with your first morning thoughts about God say: “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.” And then at the close of each day when you interpret the events of the day and try to make some sense out of them, repeat Samuel’s words: “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.” Each time you pray, after having told God about all that’s happening in your life and about all that you need from Him, say: “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.”<br />
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God has a word for you. He has something to say to you in words of friendship and love. For the sake of your own soul, let Him!Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1210491415270052508.post-61949920303510528002023-12-26T08:34:00.001-05:002023-12-31T10:26:39.364-05:00Homily for the Epiphany of the Lord, January 7, 2024, Year B<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-IaNAP7MF3dc/X-iemsN5lTI/AAAAAAAAMAU/QnlpTMdNCAIlQZHiAR_7EZfllXGeCaL3QCLcBGAsYHQ/s490/Epiphany%2Bof%2Bthe%2BLord%2B%255BWIDE%255D%2BCOMPRESSED.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Adoration of the Magi: The Epiphany of the Lord" border="0" data-original-height="276" data-original-width="490" height="360" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-IaNAP7MF3dc/X-iemsN5lTI/AAAAAAAAMAU/QnlpTMdNCAIlQZHiAR_7EZfllXGeCaL3QCLcBGAsYHQ/w640-h360/Epiphany%2Bof%2Bthe%2BLord%2B%255BWIDE%255D%2BCOMPRESSED.jpg" title="Adoration of the Magi, Gentile da Fabriano, 1423" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">Fr. Charles Irvin</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">Diocese of Lansing</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
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<div style="text-align: center;">
(<a href="https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/010724.cfm" target="_blank">Click here for Sunday’s readings</a>)</div>
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In today’s scripture passages the language is epic, the imagery apocalyptic, the action dramatic. There is ominous danger from a tyrannical and insanely jealous king, a king who mercilessly slaughters innocent babies. There are worldly rulers of great power, wisdom, and wealth, on a quest. There is a great escape, a long journey into the land of the pyramids, that land wherein the waters of the great river Nile push back the boundaries of the death-dealing desert in order that humans might live. The hero-child, the God-Man baby, is saved in order to grow in wisdom, strength, and knowledge so that He may push back the boundaries of arid human living, and even death itself, that we might live in eternal life.<br />
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Light struggles against darkness. Discovery follows wandering and searching. Truth vanquishes deception. Good prevails over evil. A heavenly guiding star shines in night’s darkness, a darkness that does not overcome God’s Light entering the dark void of chaos, reminding us that in the Book of Genesis God’s first act of creation was to create light in the darkness of chaos.<br />
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In our time there are those who say that light and life happened because of blind chance. We are who we are, they claim, as a result of a blind and chaotic development of an evolutionary force. But how, we are entitled to ask, can something come from nothing? Isn’t it true that the only thing that nothing can produce is nothing? And how can evolution create light out of darkness?<br />
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For us, when we look at the cosmos, the world, and our own human nature, we see evidence of a cosmic creative intelligence. The sun, moon, stars, and the creatures that inhabit our world, are manifestations, epiphanies, of God’s creative sharing of His love and life with us.<br />
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The Magi are nobles; noble human beings possessed of great earthy power and wisdom, trekking for the truth. The epic Star Trek series of movies finds its origin in today’s biblical narrative. Finding what they quest, the Magi fall down and acknowledge the Source of Life which they have come to recognize. They bring gold to honor his kingship and dominion; they bring frankincense to acknowledge His Divine Being; and they bring myrrh, the ointment used for burial, knowing that the worldly will try to rid themselves of His presence among us. Gold, frankincense, and myrrh were those days, back in the Eastern world, priceless and precious substances, treasures of the utmost value in the life and times of people who lived there back then.<br />
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Immediately the Darth Vader of the day, King Herod, Satan’s agent, leaps into action. Evil is the first to be alert to the approaching presence of goodness. We see that in our own lives, don’t we? Try to advocate taking the good path, the moral option, and note what happens around you. Accusations of being “holier than thou,” accusations of being a hypocritical Christian, will quickly surface. You will be mocked, especially for being a Catholic, ridiculed, shunned, and cast out of the world’s inner circle of the elite, the moment you attempt to be an epiphany of God’s purity and goodness. Evil is the first to jump into action when goodness manifests itself.<br />
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Why do history’s Herods fear the child? Why do we fear the child within us? Is it because a child lays claim to our time, our energy, our caring concern, and our commitment? Commitment requires the closing off of other options. And, as the Evil One knows full well, as he whispers into our ears, the false notion that to be like God, to be god-like, we must keep all of our options open. The presence of a child is quite limiting. So is love. Why? Because it is focused.<br />
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Or can it be the fear of love that is rebelling against the child? Children require love. If love is a threat then the baby must be eliminated. This Herod knew full well. No wonder that even in our world of today, not just back when Jesus was born, children are at risk.<br />
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A self-indulgent culture attempts to reduce the claims of children. It needs to eliminate their insistent calls of love. As a result the world needs to marginalize the demands of commitment. In a culture that exalts living together for pleasure without the restrictions of commitment, marriage itself must be marginalized and put to flight.<br />
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Narcissism, instant gratification, sensuality without limits, and the withholding of promised commitment, are the tactics of the Father of lies, the great Deceiver, the Seducer of Souls. Euphemisms are his literary form so that death is cosmetically covered over and benignly renamed “termination of life;” killing is made to seem merciful; only beautiful children are called “wanted,” and the suffering and dying are called upon to voluntarily step aside for the sake of the sleek who want more out of their limitless lives.<br />
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The Herodian consciousness isn’t something remote and distant, something that came and went 2,000 years ago. Oh, no. The Herodian consciousness is quite alive, and quite active, right here in our time. All forms of innocence are to be slaughtered before they gain much life and strength, before they can establish claims on our hearts.<br />
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It is good, therefore, to ponder the meaning of the very last words in today’s Gospel narrative: “…and having received a message in a dream, they returned home by another route.”<br />
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What route are we taking on our trek back home to heaven? A route that takes us back to Herod, or a route that is prompted by the message of angels? Love requires choices. What choices have we made? What choices will we make?Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1210491415270052508.post-80767721297690552932023-12-19T08:00:00.000-05:002024-01-04T11:00:11.587-05:00Homily for the Feast of the Holy Family, December 31, 2023, Year B<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjncYl5XIcjofOLVqus87M3uaM2j3GmuK8PoE9giEa3q3UUgYcPwaKsc3UkO47_KNRjmJXU5sYeaJrZeQs_N_U1GWTQ6SgzeFv55D3K4JbVMQZE2yDx4aIDIi7qqjDEpZGZa_oAHRQepMZXH89laULPAZ7HG_OBxOQTLbQj5x0NnKFCzAqSKHQIxIuOlLTa/s637/Presentation%20of%20the%20Lord%20wide.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="The Holy Family presenting Christ at the temple" border="0" data-original-height="405" data-original-width="637" height="406" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjncYl5XIcjofOLVqus87M3uaM2j3GmuK8PoE9giEa3q3UUgYcPwaKsc3UkO47_KNRjmJXU5sYeaJrZeQs_N_U1GWTQ6SgzeFv55D3K4JbVMQZE2yDx4aIDIi7qqjDEpZGZa_oAHRQepMZXH89laULPAZ7HG_OBxOQTLbQj5x0NnKFCzAqSKHQIxIuOlLTa/w640-h406/Presentation%20of%20the%20Lord%20wide.jpg" title="Presentation of the Christ Child in the Temple, Ludovico Carracci, c 1605" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">Fr. Charles Irvin</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">Diocese of Lansing</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
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<div style="text-align: center;">
(<a href="https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/123123.cfm" target="_blank">Click here for Sunday’s readings</a>)</div>
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Today we continue our Christmas celebration with a consideration of the Holy Family. This feast has the same first two readings every year but one of three different Gospels. The first reading is always the reading from Sirach about the honor that children should extend to their parents. The second reading is always the reading from Colossians about respecting each other’s position within the family. It is not a divine decree that women should be subordinated to men any more than was St. Paul’s admonition to slaves to be faithful to their masters is a divine endorsement of slavery.<br />
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In today’s Gospel Mary and Joseph present Jesus in Jerusalem’s Temple in fulfillment of their religious tradition. You parents can remember when your children were infants. You couldn’t wait to show them off to family and friends. You probably had a big celebration on that very special day when you went to your parish church and presented them to the Lord to receive his life in Baptism. They left the church on that day of their baptism still your children — but also the Lord’s. Mary and Joseph must have loved showing Jesus off just as you loved showing your babies off. They must have enjoyed the fuss that people made about him, just as you enjoyed people stopping by to see your babies and say a kind word or two to you.<br />
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When you first held your children, when you brought the baby home from the hospital, when you survived that first night when your baby would not get to sleep, you probably asked yourself, how will I, how will we, deal with the challenges this new life is going to bring? Perhaps you are still asking yourselves that question. Certainly there is not a parent here who has not wondered: how can I be the best parent possible? What will happen to my child during his or her life? What sort of person will he or she become?<br />
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Today the Church bids us to look to the Holy Family. They kept their union with God as the foundation and glue of their lives. This resulted in a tranquility that let them meet each challenge they faced…conquering the surrounding chaos instead of being destroyed by it.<br />
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This is why the constant battle that you parents fighting against sin in your lives is a responsibility you owe to your family, not a matter of individual choice. This is why the efforts you make to nurture and develop your prayer life, your union with God, is not a matter of your own individual relationship with God but is fundamental to the stability and the tranquility of your family.<br />
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You parents live in a society that does too much but not enough. Other forces tempt you to do too much. They convince you that if you are going to be good parents you have to have your kids in every activity possible, be a part of every organization you can, be the perfect homemaker, cook, provider, repairer, and referee. They convince you to do too much… but not enough. For many parents there is not enough time to develop the union with God that is the heart of your family. You try too hard… but not hard enough. You try to be the perfect parent in every way but sheer exhaustion results in your not being able to spend the time you need to spend in prayer. Your prayer time should not be something you throw into your day. It should be the ground upon which you build your day.<br />
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The sudden and unexplained collapse during the last fifty years of the institution we know of as family is a great mystery. Why, during these times, have so many young people simply begun living together as a family when they really were not? Fully one third of the children born in America today are born out of wedlock. The numbers of children who are being shaped and formed without a father and a mother living with them is staggering. Who are their grandparents, and how many sets of grandparents do they have, given the number of stepfathers and stepmothers they have? What sorts of values are being displayed in the lives of the adults with whom children live?<br />
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Much is said these days about the troubles within our American public-school system. While a lot may be wrong in the system, the chief thing that has gone wrong is the absence of genuine families in which the children are being raised. All too often they are not being raised with mom, dad, and siblings. Too many are being formed many hours of each week away from home. Schools cannot replace families. Do you know that 60% of the felons in our prisons don’t know who their fathers are?<br />
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And a lot is being said these days about so-called “family values”. What values? In what families? We are told that public schools are not supposed to teach morals and values and that these should be taught in the home. But what homes? And what is meant by the word “home”? Certainly not very many kids have the good fortune to be living in and raised in the traditional nuclear family. The nuclear family constitutes only 25% of the households in which children live these days!<br />
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Yet it was in my family that my character, personality and individuation were formed. I became an individual and a person with a distinct character because I lived in a family. For a family makes an individual, and individuals in turn constitute the family.<br />
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It is in our family homes that we learn a philosophy of life. It is there that we acquire principles by which we should live and relate to others. It is there, in the domestic church, that God is acknowledged, that prayer is learned, and devotion is formed. It is there that our soul is nurtured at the family altar, the family table in which we share a communion of food for the body, the mind and the soul.<br />
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It is in our family homes that our intellectual formation really takes place, where books are read, articles are discussed, and critical thinking is developed. It is there that we learn revere that which is above and beyond what is merely popular. For what is popular is ever-changing; it has no absolutes, nothing that lasts; only things that evaporate with the coming of the next new fad.<br />
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How can all of this vital formation happen if one is not being raised in a family? Without it education, religious devotion, and the formation of our hearts and souls in the art and skill of loving commitment… all collapse.<br />
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Is it any wonder, then, that our Church pays close and reverential attention each year at this time to all that it means to be family? For even God himself chose to come among us not as some sort of space alien that stepped off of a cosmic space ship, not as some sort of mysterious guru discovered in a mountain cave, but rather a member of a human family, with all that it entails.<br />
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So in thanking God for the gift of the Christ Child, let us also thank God for our mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, and the wonderful gift that we have been given, our family.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1210491415270052508.post-86522228687261569972023-12-18T08:41:00.002-05:002023-12-24T09:32:59.995-05:00Homily for the Solemnity of the Nativity of the Lord, (Christmas) December 25, 2023, Year B<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjABs6fgtBj5TVH3zsViBIMyaxTbyUJKiwA7GR1FQb25R2xPsYv7pjQOAg1qBuI2y_8gPss9pDBwgs46s2KybJ88pxBYiyXDDy3CcOevvYDSEiKdM6FyDkYK0iKA7oGl-xafMSmtBpopLFQNccXqRWgl5lCHFFrePTCG_H4ZtARm3nghsRInWOlqW69_cz2/s700/Nativity%20of%20Christ%20Orthodox%20Icon.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="476" data-original-width="700" height="436" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjABs6fgtBj5TVH3zsViBIMyaxTbyUJKiwA7GR1FQb25R2xPsYv7pjQOAg1qBuI2y_8gPss9pDBwgs46s2KybJ88pxBYiyXDDy3CcOevvYDSEiKdM6FyDkYK0iKA7oGl-xafMSmtBpopLFQNccXqRWgl5lCHFFrePTCG_H4ZtARm3nghsRInWOlqW69_cz2/w640-h436/Nativity%20of%20Christ%20Orthodox%20Icon.jpg" title="Nativity of Christ Orthodox Icon" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">Fr. Charles Irvin</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">Diocese of Lansing</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
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<div style="text-align: center;">
(<a href="https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/122523-Day.cfm" target="_blank">Click here for Sunday’s readings</a>)</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
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All of the shopping, all of the rushing about, all of the busy-ness of Christmas is now over. Today the streets are deserted. A quiet and peaceful stillness lays over all. Now the religious meaning of Christmas is allowed to emerge from beneath all of the mall music, the shopping, and the frantic preparations for this day.<br />
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But to what do we turn our attention? To peace on earth toward men of good will? Yes, and something more. To the sharing of love with family? Yes, and something more. To joining together with the ones we love? Yes, but more. Christmas is more than having a lovely time, more than family sharing, more than the so-called “happy holidays.”<br />
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We celebrate today what so many are looking for. We focus our attention today on that which will give peace to many who are lonely, uneasy with themselves, and who are searching for meaning in their lives.<br />
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The centerpiece of the Mass, the essence of Catholicism, and the core of our belief is what we consider today. The only essential and ultimately important reality is the joining of humanity with divinity. This joinder is the genius of Christianity and the core of Catholic devotion. It is that which unites liberal and conservative, saint and sinner, European and American, black and white. God and man at table are sat down.<br />
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The birth of Jesus Christ is not the birth of one religious prophet among many, one founder of a religion among many, the birth of one good man among many others. It is rather the joining of humanity with divinity.<br />
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In a few short moments we will make it all happen again. All over the world, in the Vatican as well as in Baghdad, in Jerusalem as well as in Cairo, Catholics celebrate the Incarnation… God becoming human flesh. We don’t say that our humanity is perfect. It certainly is not. We do say, however, that we are loved so much by God that He has become one of us. We are loved and being redeemed sinners. In every Mass, God becomes one with us.<br />
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The long tradition of a sinners’ church is perhaps the most commanding reason for the survival of Catholicism. Catholic theology is by no means a theology of the elite and the elect. Nor is our theology one of predestination. However much our understanding of hell may be dim, we all recognize that it is still quite possible for one to lose his or her soul… or to save it.<br />
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The salvation of a sinful humanity, a sinful humanity that constitutes the Church, is the saving grace of our Church. Today a savior has been born for us, Christ the Lord. He was born, lived, and died as one of us. He is Emmanuel – God with us – in every aspect of human living.<br />
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He was born in very humble circumstances. He lived a modest life. Thirty years of His life were lived in hidden obscurity; in the ordinary daily life we all live as members of a family. He never stormed the places of power; He ran for no political office; He refused riches, and more importantly He refused to succumb to the temptation of His own popularity. He lived with ordinary people and He chose very ordinary men to be His apostles. His proclamation was uttered in simple words, in parables of universal appeal in their simply clarity. Finally He died a shameful death, the death of a crucified criminal, alone, quite helpless, and apparently defeated.<br />
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What, then, do we celebrate? After all, He did not give us a free ticket through life, a life free of loss, pain, and suffering. We still have to rise each morning and face days loaded with pain, loneliness, and self-doubt. We worry, we fear, and we are uncertain.<br />
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What we celebrate is the fact that God has become very much a part of His creation. God has entered the process of creation with us. He is not simply alongside of us, He is part of us as we struggle to bring order out of chaos, as we suffer in world straining to be born anew, living in a frenzied drive to bring perfection to a world that is far from perfect.<br />
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God and man are now conjoined. God is not dead nor doth He sleep. His is not aloof. He is not “out there in the cosmos” living in grand and disinterested isolation from us. What we celebrate is that God is living out, with us, through us, and within us, the full measure of human suffering. He is saving us within all that we face. Unto us a savoir is born. He is Christ, the Lord!<br />
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This is the cup of my blood, He tells us. Take it and drink it. Take my life and mingle it with yours. Take and drink the life-supporting and live-giving blood that is mine. It is now yours… and your blood is now mine. Sinful blood, human blood, sinful flesh, human flesh, your flesh and mine are now joined. God and man at table are sat down.<br />
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And so today we celebrate the centerpiece of all Catholic theology… the foundation of the Eucharist and its core meaning… the central dogma of all who call themselves Catholic.<br />
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It is the one thing that gives me hope in world filled with destruction, desolation, and terror. It is the one shining brilliant star shining above a world that seems terribly dark. It is the one tongue of fire, light, and warmth blazing in a world that seems to have gone cold in its darkness. It is the most tremendous source of hope I have, it is that which is the keystone of my faith and which I share with you today… HOPE! Hope because of Jesus Christ.<br />
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Back in 1970 a Belgian Cardinal by the name of Suenens was asked the question: “Why are you a man of hope even in these days?” He answered:<br />
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“Because I believe that God is new every morning, I believe that God is creating the world today, at this very moment. He did not just create it in the long ago and then forget about it. That means that we have to expect the unexpected as the normal way of God’s providence at work.<br />
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I am hopeful, not for human reasons or because I am optimistic by nature, but because I believe in the Holy Spirit present in His Church and in the world – even if people don’t know His name. I am hopeful because I believe that the Holy Spirit is still the Creating Spirit, and that He will give us every morning fresh freedom, joy, and a new provision of hope, if we open our soul to Him.”<br />
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And so we celebrate today the fact that just as God came to the Garden of Eden to search out Adam and Eve, so also did He come to us in Christ to search us out and fill us with God’s Holy Spirit. And we celebrated the stupendous reality that He comes to us in every Holy Communion to be made flesh in your flesh, and so mingle His blood with yours and thus to search out and enter into your heart.<br />
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This is God’s Christmas gift to you. What will you give to Him? Will you give Him the gift of yourself and your love?Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1210491415270052508.post-73817027845677637492023-12-10T11:30:00.001-05:002023-12-10T11:30:00.125-05:00Homily for the 4th Sunday of Advent, December 24, 2023, Year B<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-su3D0XFIOxo/WjaYJT0llHI/AAAAAAAAKWA/jhvfFohxsb4Lh7I4n8o5CWR7qiX8L3wlwCLcBGAs/s1600/Detail%2Bfrom%2BAnnunciation%2B1425-28%2Bby%2BFra%2BAngelico.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Archangel Gabriel’s Annunciation to Mary" border="0" data-original-height="324" data-original-width="575" height="360" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-su3D0XFIOxo/WjaYJT0llHI/AAAAAAAAKWA/jhvfFohxsb4Lh7I4n8o5CWR7qiX8L3wlwCLcBGAs/w640-h360/Detail%2Bfrom%2BAnnunciation%2B1425-28%2Bby%2BFra%2BAngelico.jpg" title="Detail from "The Annunciation", Fra Angelico 1425-28." width="640" /></a></div>
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<div style="text-align: center;">
Fr. Charles Irvin</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">Diocese of Lansing</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
(<a href="https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/122423.cfm" target="_blank">Click here for Sunday’s readings</a>)</div>
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As a young man, St. Augustine lived a hedonistic life, one in which sensuality and self-indulgence reigned supreme. Along the way, prior to his becoming a Christian he had a son by a woman to whom he was not married. Augustine was brilliant and renowned. By worldly standards he lived a spectacularly successful life. His mother Monica had prayed for his conversion for over thirty years and eventually her prayers were answered.<br />
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All the while Augustine’s heart was hungering for something. He was aware that his inner self was empty. Even though his life was filled with sensuality and pleasure, fame and popularity, he knew there was something more. He also knew that nature of the human heart was destined for a higher and greater realty than what could be found in this world. In his classic work setting forth his odyssey to Christianity, known now as <i>The Confessions of St. Augustine</i>, he wrote: “Our hearts were made for Thee, O Lord, and they will not rest until they rest in Thee.” With that realization Augustine eventually became a Christian.<br />
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This hunger for “something more than what this life offers” is a hunger found in all of human history and in all of its many cultures. In those moments when we shut off all of the noise of this world and set aside all of its busyness all of us long to escape the prison of the now; all of us are in search for lives of meaning and purpose beyond with is merely immediate; all of us are attracted to handing our lives over in the service of some great and noble cause.<br />
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In our Christian view of things, aided by God’s revelations in Jesus Christ, we see that God made us so that He could love us, and that in giving our love to Him in return we experience more and more of His love. Love is at the core of our Christian faith; love is at the core of our being human; love is our drive and our destiny. We were made to love and be loved in return.<br />
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If all that is true (and I am convinced that it is) it is hard to imagine that a God of love would remain distant, aloof, and unattainable. Love craves union. God would, it seems to me, be compelled to come to us and be present to us. Human history is therefore replete with instances wherein we built temples, shrines to the Deity, as well as our designation of certain places and spaces as sacred. What anthropologist has not studied these sacred buildings and places? What human culture is devoid of myths and epic stories of our human attempts to place ourselves in God’s presence? But the truth is that God has come to us. We have yet to come to God.<br />
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What is unique for us as Christians is the notion that God has sought us out first. The enterprise of religion, in the Christian view, is that religion is not something we have fashioned; it is something rather that God has fashioned. God first loves us and it is then that we respond.<br />
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The fact that God first loves us and then looks for our response cuts to the core of all that causes us such pain and suffering, namely it cuts away human arrogance, human egoism, and human pride. That’s what the biblical story of the Tower of Babel teaches us. For Babel’s tower was built according to human specifications, human standards, human expectations, and our own human agenda. In its collapse we learn that the real impulse is the other way around. Religion is not something we fashion, it is rather something that God fashions.<br />
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To return to my main point, I want to assert that Christmas is the fulfillment of what is in God’s heart. Christmas is all about God’s coming to us in love so that He and we can live in each other’s presence. But that is not all. There is more – a whole lot more.<br />
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Christmas is but a starting point. It is the starting point of our human saga, both collective and personal, in which our hearts finally find rest in the Presence of God. The fantastically wonderful thing, however, is that this happiness is found in the truth that God comes to us not just to become present <b><i>to </i></b>us, but to live <b><i>in </i></b>us!<br />
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What a wonder that is! God joins himself into us so that he can live in our very own lives It is God’s intention to dwell and abide (make His home) in us. No more need now for our efforts in building temples in which we can search out and find Him. No more need now for endless and satisfying searching for God. He Himself has done the searching out; He Himself has first come to us so that we can respond, and in our response, have the wonder of God Himself dwelling not only near us but abiding within us.<br />
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Our human response to God is initiated in the fiat of a little virgin girl named Mary, living in a remote little Hebrew village named Nazareth.<br />
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Imagine for a moment, if you will, an hourglass. The top half begins with wideness and is fashioned so that the impulse of each grain of sand it directed to a tiny, central point. All of the grains of sand must pass through that one point, and when they do the glass expands out once again into the wide area that comprises the bottom half of the hourglass. The critical thing, however, is that tiny, central opening, a sort of birth canal, if you will.<br />
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The Blessed Virgin Mary is that point for us. It was because of her openness, her virginal openness, that all of our religious prehistory comes to us. And it is likewise that through her, all of God’s love is poured out and made available to us throughout history ever since.<br />
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The great wonder of it all is that in Jesus Christ, who is at once both God and Mary’s son, each one of us can be another Mary. Each one of us is now a temple not only of God’s love but God’s very life living within us. Each one of you here is a sacred space. In each one of you others can sense the presence of the Living God. Like Mary, the living presence of God the Son abides within us, not just for our own sakes, but so that we, like Mary, can give Him to the world around us.<br />
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Each one of you, and I along with you, can make an infinitely significant response to God’s offer of love. When we are told that we are loved, and we respond with a “yes”, our lives are changed. Something is placed within our hearts that never goes away.<br />
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This Christmas give God a most precious gift – some of your time. Give Him your undivided attention, a period of time in which you do nothing but open yourself up to His presence. Even if you think that nothing happens, something will happen. We are all so concerned about what we must do, particularly at a time when we’re so caught up in doing things. The best thing we can do is to do nothing – do nothing but simply be in God’s presence.<br />
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Think of three good things about you, three really good things. Then thank God individually and specifically those three good things. They are God’s gifts of love to you. Wouldn’t it be a nice gift to give Him your gratitude? Wouldn’t that be a nice gift to give Him for this Christmas? There’s a hidden benefit for you in doing that. If you have an attitude of gratitude you cannot at the same time have a sour or negative disposition.<br />
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Also you could ask God what He wants for you. Ask God to reveal what He wants to say to you, what He wants to show you or give you. That’s another wonderful, precious gift to give God. He isn’t interested in a lot of memorized prayers, or a list of things you want Him to do for you. He’s more interested in having you simply give Him your inner self, your undivided and uncluttered attention, your loving presence to Him.<br />
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When you’re with a friend, what do you want? Isn’t it simply to <b><i>be</i></b> with your friend? We all know that being is more important than doing; that it’s who we <b><i>are </i></b>that’s more important to those who care for us than what we accomplish. Well, that’s true with God, also.<br />
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God has gone to great lengths, unreasonable lengths, to be your Friend. This Christmas, why not let Him?Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1210491415270052508.post-11223386148517402942023-12-04T09:57:00.007-05:002023-12-10T11:03:16.970-05:00Homily for the 3rd Sunday of Advent (Gaudete Sunday), December 17, 2023, Year B<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjn51jjYFnCM7MJ86MTnAng10ndxuAHhSZt1N7APn26HhdDsUYK6CYEBrRXUWP05edFkruK30JR04XolYf5n3OnUSHeOANG0I0v4oWamwVhqJapOMISdo-f7iUuvVH1sd5gd1E8q6dfBmyckN32HuQ3jdoskE3qGoRm1WgHcKw8sBbJQMdBmSPPckfy8o-Z/s1023/Preaching%20of%20St%20John%20the%20Baptist%20by%20Domenico%20Ghirlandaio.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="St. John the Baptist preaching" border="0" data-original-height="627" data-original-width="1023" height="392" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjn51jjYFnCM7MJ86MTnAng10ndxuAHhSZt1N7APn26HhdDsUYK6CYEBrRXUWP05edFkruK30JR04XolYf5n3OnUSHeOANG0I0v4oWamwVhqJapOMISdo-f7iUuvVH1sd5gd1E8q6dfBmyckN32HuQ3jdoskE3qGoRm1WgHcKw8sBbJQMdBmSPPckfy8o-Z/w640-h392/Preaching%20of%20St%20John%20the%20Baptist%20by%20Domenico%20Ghirlandaio.jpg" title="Preaching of St. John the Baptist, Domenico Ghirlandaio, 1486 - 1490" width="640" /></a></div><br />Fr. Charles Irvin</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">Diocese of Lansing</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
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<div style="text-align: center;">
(<a href="https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/121723.cfm" target="_blank">Click here for Sunday’s readings</a>)</div>
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One of the most important needs we have in life is to receive respect and esteem from others, no matter how high or lowly our position may be on the ladder of social importance. This is a good and legitimate need. Humility does not mean being a doormat upon which others wipe their feet.<br />
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But our need for respect and esteem can, as we all know so well, become unbalanced. Self-appreciation and self-affirmation can slip over into egocentrism, self-centeredness, arrogance and an aggressive “in your face” approach to others.<br />
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The result is certain … sadness, pain, and misery, not only in one’s own self but in the lives of those who must live near us. When the biggest thing in this world is self, there is no surer guarantee to misery. Preoccupation with one’s own public image and the everlasting pursuit of recognition leads us into the most merciless of all slaveries, with our ego as our tyrannical owner.<br />
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Happiness is, I said, one of the greatest needs we have in life. The quest for happiness is probably the most powerful drive we have within us. And so we should ask the question: When have we been happy? Have we ever been happy when we have been preoccupied with our own self? If we’re honest, we have to say never. Neither have others who are forced to live with us.<br />
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In his famous play “The Cocktail Party”, T.S. Eliot tells us: “Half the harm that’s done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm, or the harm does not interest them, or they do not see it, or they justify it, because they are absorbed in an endless struggle to think well of themselves.” People who are nursing their fictitious superiorities, people who are taking advantage of others in order to feed their inflationary ego drive, simply become blind to the harm they are doing to others and even more blind to the harm that they are doing to the very selves that they are trying to develop.<br />
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John the Baptist gives us a clue to the secret of human greatness. The lives of the saints give us insights into the way to respect and esteem. To be genuinely loved by others, to receive the affection and appreciation that we all crave, we simply must forget ourselves and dedicate our lives to some thing or some one that transcends our selfish interests and human pride. We have to give ourselves over to something that is superior. All of the really great people we’ve known, if we think about them, are people who have been astonishingly careless about their own importance. In fact, they really don’t even know that they are important. They lose themselves and forget themselves into what is, for them, supremely important. If human accolades come to them, they are quite appreciative of them, but then they go on about their task whether or not they receive any accolades at all from the crowd. Furthermore, I have found that really great people are often surprised when people pay them tribute.<br />
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All of this is to say that greatness finds you. You don’t find greatness. If you seek it you will never find it. Greatness, the esteem of the crowd, human accolades, the recognition of your nobility finds you. And it finds you only where it can, when you are located in the center of a life dedicated to a transcendent value or goal; when you are found engaged in the task of doing your Heavenly Father’s work here on earth.<br />
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John the Baptist was a great man. Jesus Christ said of him: “Of all of the men born of women, none was greater than John the Baptist.” THAT was quite a statement, considering its source! And what did John the Baptist say about Jesus? “I must decrease, He must increase.” In other words, John the Baptist’s awareness was centered on the presence of God in our midst. Ordinary eyes couldn’t perceive the Presence of God in the midst of our humanity, but John the Baptist’s eyes could. John was free to see reality, the way and the truth and the spirit of human life, and the spark of Divinity hidden within both Christ’s humanity and within ours.<br />
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Are you and I that much different from John the Baptist? In a lot of ways we are, of course, but we have some things in common. John was a messenger sent on assignment. But so are you. John was on a divine mission, but so are you. We are engaged in a task that is a whole lot bigger than just taking care of ourselves. You and I along with John the Baptist are sent into our world to point to God’s very presence among us. We have a high purpose for living. And being where we are we can, by the way we live and by faithfully attending Mass, point to the presence of Christ in our world. Others notice how we live. Never for a moment suppose that they don’t.<br />
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Your life is not a mere accident, nor is mine. Every life is given by God to accomplish His purposes, to bring His loving presence into a suffering world, to make His kingdom real by realizing it in how we live and how we treat people. No one is an outcast. No one is beyond the reach of God’s love. If Pope Francis´ ministry and life tell us anything, they tell us that.<br />
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Let me suggest to you here today, in the middle of Advent, that perhaps it would be good for us to examine the question: To whom and to what is my life dedicated? For that is where I will find honor and respect. That is where I will find happiness.<br />
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Advent is the time of the coming of God into our humanity, into your personal lives, and into mine too. It is that mysterious time of the year when we recognize the tension between what already is and what is yet to be; between what we ARE and what we CAN BE; between what has been accomplished and what remains unfinished in our enterprise of living.<br />
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My mother once told me: “Happiness is something to do, someone to love, and something to hope for.” If you and I can live lives dedicated to making the lives of others a little bit better than they once were, if we can find ourselves in the center of what is transcendent in life, giving love to the loveless and being loved in return, and if we can live each day fully in the Presence of Christ, or rather with His Presence reaching and touching others through us, that is no small thing to have happened to any man or woman.<br />
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If we do that, our lives will be judged accordingly, and we will have as our own the honor that Christ gave John the Baptist.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1210491415270052508.post-83878385193831445442023-11-27T09:19:00.000-05:002023-11-27T09:19:02.336-05:00Homily for the 2nd Sunday of Advent, December 10, 2023, Year B<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-xdAR6ZLVvVM/WiQrArQjytI/AAAAAAAAKJ0/QlxKXXAGuDQtCphEtP3NCZqx081yJTzKACLcBGAs/s1600/St%2BJohn%2Bthe%2BBaptist%252C%2Bfrom%2Ba%2Bmedieval%2Bbook%2Bof%2Bhours%2B%255BWide%255D.jpg"><img alt="St. John the Baptist" border="0" data-original-height="253" data-original-width="449" height="360" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-xdAR6ZLVvVM/WiQrArQjytI/AAAAAAAAKJ0/QlxKXXAGuDQtCphEtP3NCZqx081yJTzKACLcBGAs/w640-h360/St%2BJohn%2Bthe%2BBaptist%252C%2Bfrom%2Ba%2Bmedieval%2Bbook%2Bof%2Bhours%2B%255BWide%255D.jpg" title="St. John the Baptist, from a medieval book of hours." width="640" /></a></div>
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<div style="text-align: center;">
Fr. Charles Irvin</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">Diocese of Lansing</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
(<a href="https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/121023.cfm" target="_blank">Click here for Sunday’s readings</a>)</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
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Last Sunday we considered the broad sweep of Advent and reminded ourselves that Advent begins with us looking at the end of the world. It is right that we should be anxious and concerned about the judgment of God on the Day of Judgment. But we should not be held in the grip of fear because God’s judgment is that we are worth saving. God’s judgment comes to us in His grace and mercy, His grace and mercy given us in His Son, Jesus Christ.<br />
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That theme continues this weekend. The first words in today’s first reading come from the prophet Isaiah. God tells Isaiah to comfort His people. “Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,” He tells Isaiah, and proclaim to her that her time of trial is coming to an end. “Every valley shall be filled in, every mountain and hill shall be made low; the rugged land shall be made a plain, the rough country, a broad valley. Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed.”<br />
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Advent is a time of expectancy along with our waiting in hope. Advent is forward looking. It’s different from Lent, which is a time of reflection and examination. During this Advent season, we have our own sets of expectations, longing for a better world. While it is true that the reign of God has, in Jesus Christ, been established among us, it is likewise true that we humans have not responded to God’s offer, as we should. We long for peace. We cry out for justice. Security remains elusive. Dishonesty, corruption and greed still beset us. We lament the fact that the world in which we must live is in the condition that it is in. “Make straight in the wasteland a highway for our God,” Isaiah tells us.<br />
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The vision is both broad and personal at the same time. God speaks to us as a people, a people dear to His heart, while at the same time He speaks to us personally and individually. We have our responsibilities, both communal and individual. God’s judgment falls upon nations as well as upon individuals.<br />
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But just what sort of comfort do we seek? Are we looking to feather our own nests or are we seeking justice for the oppressed, relief for the burdened, and dignity for outcasts? Just how comfortable can we be when all around us we hear the cries of those who have been shunned, ignored, and treated with contempt? Just how comfortable can we be in the midst of the famines, disasters and oppression that beset millions of people in the world around us?<br />
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What changes do we want to occur in our world? What changes do we want in our own personal lives? Do we in fact really want any changes at all? Some might prefer to simply hunker down with what they’ve got and not risk any changes.<br />
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The problem with materialism and wealth is that they are narcotics. They dull our sensibilities. When we are over-fed we over-indulge and become sleepy and lethargic. John the Baptist’s message, we must recall, was intended to disturb the comfortable and to prod the complacent. It likewise a prod for those held hostage is fatalism, those who claim, “that’s just the way things are” and thereupon do nothing to change both their lives as well as the conditions in the world in which they live.<br />
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John the Baptist calls us to face change with expectant hope. Many, however, face change in fear and dread.<br />
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Change is forcing itself on our entire U.S. economy. Given the global markets in which we now find ourselves, we can no longer continue as a manufacturing economy. The question we face is how to face the change. In the past we successfully changed from being an agricultural economy to an industrial one. Cannot we now successfully manage another change of equal, if not greater, magnitude?<br />
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We face changes in the Catholic Church, particularly with respect to the way we manage the looming shortage of priests and the growing role of Catholic laity in the life of our Church.<br />
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The hardest changes of all, however, are those that are needed in our own personal lives. Many feel that attending Mass each and every weekend is not necessary. Countless numbers have abandoned going to confession. Many no longer bother themselves with what the Church teaches. Perhaps all of these things are indications of our unwillingness to change our attitudes and our ways of doing things. Have we allowed our Imperial Selves to become the sole and supreme arbiters of what we should think and do? Has the individual self become weary of living responsibly in community with others?<br />
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Advent is a time of looking ahead in expectant hope. Why? Because we need a savior. We need a higher power. Operating on just our own powers is not working. We find ourselves sinking into deeper and deeper isolation, cut off from the gifts and powers and God is offering us in His Son, Jesus Christ.<br />
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The words in today’s Gospel account are the very first words in St. Mark’s Gospel account of Jesus Christ. They come from Mark’s first chapter, verses 1-8. We should note that those words and thoughts are all about change, change that is coming upon us, change that we should face not in fear and dread but change that we should accept in faith and expectant hope. Why? Because we all need what God can offer us in changing not only the world around us but in changing our very own lives, which is perhaps the most difficult of all of the challenges we face. For Jesus came to empower us with God’s Holy Spirit, an empowerment that should give comfort to us all, a power God gives us to comfort those around us.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1210491415270052508.post-16254859322269520002023-11-20T09:15:00.000-05:002023-11-20T09:15:05.006-05:00Homily for the 1st Sunday of Advent, December 3, 2023, Year B<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-FxMeVncDszw/Whr-034qMJI/AAAAAAAAKDk/65hv9ZzcfjIkn9pOp2LSvIAITSM99Fo-QCLcBGAs/s1600/The%2BLast%2BJudgment.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="The Last Judgment" border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="1067" height="357" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-FxMeVncDszw/Whr-034qMJI/AAAAAAAAKDk/65hv9ZzcfjIkn9pOp2LSvIAITSM99Fo-QCLcBGAs/w640-h357/The%2BLast%2BJudgment.jpg" title="The Last Judgment, Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo, c. 1541" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
Fr. Charles Irvin</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">Diocese of Lansing</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/120323.cfm" target="_blank">(Click here for Sunday’s readings)</a></div>
<br />
Advent begins with us looking at the eventual end of the world. The passage in today’s Gospel account is taken from St. Mark’s report of Jesus speaking to His disciples about the end of the world, telling them (and us) to be watchful and alert because we do now know when the Last Day will dawn. No one does.<br />
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Advent, I say, begins with us looking at the end of the world. Advent ends with a beginning, the beginning of the kingdom of God that has been established here on earth by the One whom God has sent to us as our Messiah, Christ Jesus, the Son of God whose nativity we are about to celebrate.<br />
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It is right that we should be anxious and concerned about the judgment of God on the Day of Judgment. But we should not be held in the grip of fear. Why? Because God’s judgment is that we are worth saving. God’s judgment comes to us in His grace and mercy, His grace and mercy given us in His Son, Jesus Christ. Jesus tells us that God sent His only Son not to condemn the world but to save it. God’s judgment comes to us in His only-begotten Son whom He has sent among us to bridge the chasm between us and God and thus to give us the power of salvation, a power that can be ours if only we respond to God’s love for us. God’s ultimate judgment is His mercy.<br />
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Advent is a time of expectancy along with our waiting in hope. Advent is forward looking. It’s different from Lent, which is a time of reflection and examination. During this Advent season, we have our own sets of expectations, longing for a better world. While it is true that the reign of God has, in Jesus Christ, been established among us, it is likewise true that we humans have not responded, as we should. We long for peace. We cry out for justice. Security remains elusive. Dishonesty, corruption and greed still beset us. We lament the fact that the world in which we must live is in the condition that it is.<br />
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In today’s first reading we hear Isaiah’s lament. In it we hear echoed our own lamentations.<br />
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<i>You, LORD, are our father, our redeemer you are named forever. Why do you let us wander, O LORD, from your ways, and harden our hearts so that we fear you not? Return for the sake of your servants,the tribes of your heritage. Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down, with the mountains quaking before you, while you wrought awesome deeds we could not hope for, such as they had not heard of from of old. Behold, you are angry, and we are sinful; all of us have become like unclean people, all our good deeds are like polluted rags; we have all withered like leaves, and our guilt carries us away like the wind. There is none who calls upon your name, who rouses himself to cling to you; for you have hidden your face from us and have delivered us up to our guilt. Yet, O LORD, you are our father; we are the clay and you the potter: we are all the work of your hands.</i><br />
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Lamentations are a part of our Old Testament heritage. There is an entire Old Testament book devoted to them – the Book of Lamentations. It was written in the time when the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed and the Hebrews had been carried off in captivity to Babylon. Their prayers there in Babylon were laments. Laments are prayers.<br />
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We, too, cry out to God, wanting to know where He has been when calamities, injustices, and injuries have come upon us. We cry out to God and lament the fact that unscrupulous chiselers and oppressors hold their sway over us. Where was God when the tsunami took so many lives over in Japan? Where was God when Hurricane Katrina devastated us? Where is God’s wrath and justice when the poor continue to be oppressed by the rich and powerful in so many parts of our world?<br />
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And why shouldn’t we complain? To whom else should we turn when the world around us continues in its self-destructive path? All around us people ravish, over-consume, use up nature’s precious resources as if they owned them, while at the same time people slaughter babies in the name of freedom of choice, kill the dying in the name of mercy, and exercise God’s powers over human life as if they were God himself. No one seems to listen to our cries. Who, then, better than God, can care for the afflicted, the marginalized, and the oppressed little ones in our world? We have a right to expect Him to exercise justice when our own system of justice seems to have been bought out by the rich and famous, or held in the control of powerful lobbying political action committees.<br />
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Advent is a time to see the world for what it is, to acknowledge the mess things are in, to recognize our own failings, failings caused by our own indifference and apathy. We’re too distracted, lost in i-phone chatter, twittering and tweeting away¸ awash in e-mails. Advent can be a gift that allows to take time out to clearly see that we need a savior and in our hearts to listen to His voice within us. We need God to come among us and set us back on the right path for living on this planet among each other, as He intended we should. And, of course, Christmas is the celebration of the fact that God has done just that. In Christmas He has given us His presence, His power, and His love.<br />
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We have so many questions we put to God. We have all of these lamentations and cries for Him to act. But did you notice that Jesus has a question for us? He has an expectation of us. He asks: Where is your faith? Do you in fact have any faith? And, He asked, when He comes again in glory on the Last Day, will He find any faith on earth?<br />
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Again and again we hear about all we must do for the poor, the oppressed and those less fortunate than we are. It is right that we should be constantly reminded of our Christian duties in following Christ’s example in caring for the poor, the sick, and the oppressed. But what about the one duty upon which all of our social services are based, namely our duty to honor God, to believe in His love, and to live in faith, to pray and give Him worship?<br />
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Faith gives us the power of hope. If we see hopelessness we see faithlessness. Faith empowers us to act – to engage our surrounding world because we hope for better things. If there is one quality that stood out in the late Pope John Paul II it was that. He was a living embodiment of courage and hope, those powers that flowed forth from his deep faith.<br />
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Despair is always just outside our doors waiting to creep into our hearts and souls. Doubt, depression, disillusionment, defeat and despair are the chief weapons of the devil. They lead to denial of God and eventually to spiritual death. And Lucifer, who lives in an eternal hell of despair, wants us to give him company.<br />
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Love lives in hope. Love thrives on expectations. Love waits. Love is patient and kind; it is never self-centered, never puffed up about all that it does. Love is never conceited. It does not focus on other people’s sins. It is always patient, kind, and generously believes in the good intentions of others. Love is filled with forbearance, it is willing to suffer, and is able to set aside the demands and expectations we place on others. Love lives in the hope of what can be.<br />
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We need Lover with a love that is more powerful than our own. We need a power that is greater than all of our powers massed and combined together. Jesus Christ comes to us with that power. Christ Jesus, in His birth, life, death and resurrection, is God’s total gift to us of His power. It is all ours, if we have faith.<br />
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“But,” Jesus asks us, “when the Son of Man comes, will He find any faith on earth?”<br />
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Advent is God’s gift to us – the gift of time in which we can reflect upon and answer His question. God’s answer comes to us. When He arrives, will He find faith?Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1210491415270052508.post-73664475509718555772023-11-12T11:29:00.001-05:002023-11-12T11:29:15.877-05:00Homily for the Solemnity of Christ the King, November 26, 2023, Year A<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-z-R1BpUPMzk/WhCPIUg49zI/AAAAAAAAJ7c/boSFe42EPUUMMWIvB2ud8NKBqVlXVqXUgCLcBGAs/s1600/Christ%2Bthe%2BKing%2Bin%2BJudgment.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="The Last Judgment" border="0" data-original-height="899" data-original-width="1598" height="360" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-z-R1BpUPMzk/WhCPIUg49zI/AAAAAAAAJ7c/boSFe42EPUUMMWIvB2ud8NKBqVlXVqXUgCLcBGAs/w640-h360/Christ%2Bthe%2BKing%2Bin%2BJudgment.jpg" title="Christ in Judgment, the Baptistery of San Giovanni, Florence, Italy, c. 1300." width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
Fr. Charles Irvin</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">Diocese of Lansing</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
(<a href="https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/112623.cfm" target="_blank">Click here for Sunday’s readings</a>)</div>
<br />
Parables are teaching devices used by rabbis for instructional purposes. The wonderful thing about a parable is that we can identify ourselves with one or more of the characters in the story.<br />
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Read one or hear one and it’s sort of like seeing yourself reflected back, perhaps as in a mirror with some fuzziness, not with a whole lot of precision, but the general image is there. “This one’s about me” is the usual reaction.<br />
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You’ve just now heard one of the most famous of all of the parables used by Jesus. There are those on the right, and those on the left; there are the sheep and the goats, the saved and the damned.<br />
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But everyone in each group is surprised! When, they ask, did we treat you, or not treat you, in these ways? And Jesus then tells them.<br />
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What about you? Where do you see yourself in the story? Do you belong to those that care, the ones on the right, or those who simply didn’t have enough time to be bothered, those on the left? I daresay that you, like me, find yourself in both camps. We’ve given of our time, our treasure, and our talent – and we’ve withheld them, depending upon a number of factors, some of which we’d be ashamed to identify.<br />
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But there’s another group that we overlook. The parable’s message is so simple that we fail to see its big point. There were those who helped, those who couldn’t be bothered, and there were those who needed help!<br />
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Let me ask you this question, and it’s a big one. Perhaps your salvation hangs on its answer. When have you seen yourself as one who needed help? The answer is awfully important because Jesus identified Himself as one of those. And He didn’t identify Himself as one among those, no! He identified Himself as existing in them, as living in them! He was born poor and helpless, born in need and died in need. He lived and moved and had His being in need. And on the Day of Judgement the surprised will discover Him there.<br />
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Have you discovered your being in His? Have you admitted that you exist in need, that you’re not self-sufficient, that you`re on spiritual welfare, and that you and Jesus find each other in need?<br />
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That’s the big point of this parable – and it’s always missed! At the Last Judgment Jesus will be found in those who were in need. These are mine, and I am theirs, and they are in me, and I live in them. Jesus did not speak of them in the third person. No, He spoke of them in the first person.<br />
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And lets be honest with each other here. Isn’t it true that in most of the major instances in our life when we have refused to admit that we don’t have the answers, when we’ve refused to admit that we might be wrong, when we’ve refused to admit that we need our wife’s help, our husband’s help, and yes, even our children’s help, we’ve gotten into a whole lot of trouble? Isn’t it precisely true that a whole lot of trouble, pain, hurt, and estrangement have come to us when we’ve been arrogant, stubborn, and have refused to admit that we need help?<br />
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The great poet John Donne wrote a famous poem that I’m sure you’ve all read, called “No Man Is An Island“. No one of us is self-sufficient. No one of us is a god or a goddess (in spite of our own interior opinion of ourselves). You need my help, and I need your help. You need your spouse’s help, and even your children’s help, and they need yours.<br />
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Hell on earth enters the scene when either you or one of the characters in your life refuses to admit that simple, basic truth, and refuses to care. Whenever you encounter that, you get a taste of damnation.<br />
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So which group DO you belong to in the parable? Just how DO you identify yourself in it? And could it be true that you just might have to change how you identify yourself not only in the parable but in real life? In your relationship with those around you?<br />
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Perhaps this is a moment of grace for you; perhaps you and I are being touched again by God here in His house in the Presence of His Christ and in the life of His Holy Spirit.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1210491415270052508.post-4812855678648806092023-11-06T08:12:00.000-05:002023-11-06T08:12:40.757-05:00Homily for the 33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time, November 19, 2023, Year A<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-9fGuKMbAmtQ/Wgh8rv_-jlI/AAAAAAAAJ14/emC0IkOiCoIvlXrQBljbZUDsx_JvqL_9QCLcBGAs/s1600/The%2BParable%2Bof%2BThe%2BTalents%2Bor%2BMinas%252C%2BWillem%2Bde%2BPoorter.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Parable of The Talents" border="0" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="799" height="360" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-9fGuKMbAmtQ/Wgh8rv_-jlI/AAAAAAAAJ14/emC0IkOiCoIvlXrQBljbZUDsx_JvqL_9QCLcBGAs/w640-h360/The%2BParable%2Bof%2BThe%2BTalents%2Bor%2BMinas%252C%2BWillem%2Bde%2BPoorter.jpg" title="Detail, The Parable of The Talents or Minas, Willem de Poorter, c. 1607." width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
Fr. Charles Irvin</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">Diocese of Lansing</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
(<a href="https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/111923.cfm" target="_blank">Click here for Sunday’s readings</a>)</div>
<br />
The gospel accounts of last weekend, this weekend and next weekend are all taken from the 24th and 25th chapters of St. Matthew. The teachings presented in them by Christ are his last ones before he was to enter into Jerusalem and there be put to death. They are his final testament to his disciples, intended to guide them and us in the “already but not yet” time, that time between his presence here on earth and his Second Coming at the end of the world. These final teachings are therefore of great importance. And, when you plumb them to their depths, they are challenging – even menacing.<br />
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Last week’s parable told us about the five wise and the five foolish virgins. The foolish ones did not look ahead and make provision for the coming of the bridegroom. They were guilty of the sin of presumption – presuming that in their lack of oil for their lamps the wise ones would provide for them. Their even greater presumption was that once they finally arrived at the banquet the bridegroom would let them, along with the others who had prepared themselves, into the wedding feast. They found the door slammed in their faces.<br />
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Today’s parable is about the servant who lacked courage, and who being fear-driven, was consequently unproductive, excusing himself by accusing his master of being a hard man. This servant, like the foolish virgins, was looking for an excuse. He was in a state of denial, denying his own responsibilities.<br />
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Next weekend we will be hearing about others who were do-nothings, who were unproductive, and who found themselves to be outsiders because they ignored all that God had given them.<br />
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God has given us enormous treasures, talents, in Christ his Son. We have a powerful currency, the powers that God has given us. Christ is interested in productivity. He isn’t looking for passive dependent persons to follow him, to be his post-Ascension agents here on earth. He wants, rather, gamblers and risk-takers to be his followers and to vivify his Church. Doesn’t it strike you that the parables of Jesus center on farming, fishing and business activities, all involving risk–taking? Remember the man who found the pearl of great price and then risked all of his net worth to acquire it? Remember the fishing episodes when Jesus asked Peter to throw out his nets yet again even though he had gone through the whole night without catching a single fish? And remember, too, that episode when Jesus came upon a poor little fig tree that produced nothing and thereupon was going to annihilate it, but held back when the landscaper asked him to wait a year so he could manure it, tend it, and bring it to bear fruit.<br />
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Christianity without courage is Christianity without blood and spirit. God encourages us to jump into life and run the risk of growing. It doesn’t take courage to hide in our fear. It takes courage to risk something new.<br />
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All around us these days we hear talk about our sluggish economy. Experts, pundits, and commentators incessantly present us tiny bits of evidence upon which they predict that our economy is turning around and will come roaring back in another year. Productivity figures are bandied about. The University of Michigan Consumer Confidence Index is cited over and over again by Wall Street analysts and commentators.<br />
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What are our economists all looking for? Risk-takers! Go out and spend, they tell us. Invest, buy and get the currency changing hands again, they insist.<br />
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I hope you also notice that they are all asking us to have faith, to make faith-based decisions, to act, and act boldly, on faith.<br />
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Well, Christ is giving us the same challenge. He’s telling us that faith isn’t something we can get and keep all to ourselves. Rather it is the currency of the Divine Economy, the engine that drives it. And faith isn’t something we can hide, clutch, and hold only unto ourselves. It needs to be invested in the lives of others and thereby multiplied. Only then can it possibly bear fruit. Only then can our world get better. We were given the Faith not simply to save our own skins… but to save the world!<br />
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Turning the other cheek is a profound risk. It requires a tremendous investment in self-confidence to turn the other cheek. So does forgiving seventy-times seven times. One takes a tremendous risk when one tells another “I love you” and “I want to belong to you for the rest of our lives.” Assuming that others, even your adversaries, are acting in good faith requires a great expenditure of your spiritual capital. Showing compassion and giving tender loving care to those who are anything but loveable, who are self-concerned, self-centered and grasping, requires an investment of your own risk capital.<br />
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Having the courage to be openly Catholic is something that is personally demanding to each one of us here. It’s not easy to stand up for good priests and defend them in the face of the withering scorn directed at them and our Church these days, especially by the cultured despisers of religion and who are regular opinion columnists in our elite media.<br />
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Coming to Mass, especially when it’s not convenient, requires a risk, a risk that must be made in order to increase your own spiritual productivity, not the sort of productivity that benefits just you yourself, but that which is productive of good fruit in the lives of those around you.<br />
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There’s a lot of talk these days about accountability, usually the accountability that must be made by others – Enron executives, WorldCom executives, Wall Street banking and investment house officials, and Roman Catholic bishops. And I’m happy that they are being called into account.<br />
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But what about us? Do we realize that we too will face our own Day of Judgment; that our own little world will one day come to an end? What about our own productivity and accountability? Are our decisions fear-based or faith-based?<br />
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These last Sundays, bringing us to the end of the Church year, ought to challenge us – even disturb us. While it is true that Jesus is meek and mild, boundlessly compassionate and merciful, and that he loves us unconditionally, it is likewise true that he has great and high expectations of us. After all, God our Father didn’t create us to do nothing. It’s what he created us <i>for </i>that ought to occupy our attention, disturb our conscience, and prod us into spiritual productivity.<br />
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How else can we reveal God’s kingdom here on earth as it is in heaven?Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1210491415270052508.post-59816326523571564872023-10-29T11:09:00.001-04:002023-10-29T11:09:50.869-04:00Homily for the 32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time, November 12, 2023, Year A<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-OVQ999H1q5E/Wf802Nrho1I/AAAAAAAAJug/TRLaOBAjhZg7l6z7s5KAfaAyVQA0KaHxwCLcBGAs/s1600/The%2BParable%2Bof%2Bthe%2BTen%2BVirgins%2B%255BWide%255D.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Parable of the ten virgins" border="0" data-original-height="789" data-original-width="1403" height="357" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-OVQ999H1q5E/Wf802Nrho1I/AAAAAAAAJug/TRLaOBAjhZg7l6z7s5KAfaAyVQA0KaHxwCLcBGAs/w640-h357/The%2BParable%2Bof%2Bthe%2BTen%2BVirgins%2B%255BWide%255D.jpg" title="The Parable of the ten virgins" width="640" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
Fr. Charles Irvin</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">Diocese of Lansing</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
(<a href="https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/111223.cfm" target="_blank">Click here for Sunday’s readings</a>)</div>
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Wisdom is one of those often-used words the meaning of which, for many in our world, can be elusive. From time to time, we ought to pause for a few moments and reflect on its meaning. It’s a word that frequently appears in both the Jewish and Christian Testaments, particularly in the Jewish Testament, a word having a great deal of religious significance. Thus, we hear Jesus speaking of it in today’s Gospel account.<br />
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Prudence is a word closely associated with wisdom. From Our Blessed Lord’s statements, we might associate foresight even more closely with wisdom. Certainly, wisdom moves beyond mere data processing or the accumulation of facts. Facts and data are necessary in order to arrive at wisdom, but wisdom is something greater than simply knowing facts or processing data. The purpose and meaning of our lives should always guide our choices. It is wise for us to remember that we came from God and are returning back to God.<br />
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The Eighteenth-Century American essayist Henry David Thoreau once said that “…it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.” That’s a good description in the light of what we just heard Jesus saying in today's Gospel. The five foolish virgins were desperate. They had not exercised foresight and as a consequence they wanted the five-wise virgin to do a desperate thing. Being wise, however, they did not. They did the prudent thing.<br />
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I want to point out that it is quite possible for one to lose one’s soul, something that’s not much talked about and ignored these days. To put it another way, it’s quite possible to neglect our relationship with God and let that relationship die out. Just as the light on an oil lamp can sputter and die out for lack of attention, so too can the fire, the warmth, and the vibrancy of our relationship with God can sputter and die out for lack of attention. Wisdom, prudence, and foresight are needed to keep our relationship with God strong and vital. We came from God and we are returning to God.<br />
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In another parable that you will remember we find the steward who was about to be fired going to his master’s debtors and “cooking the books” so as to lower the amounts of their indebtedness. Our Blessed Lord didn’t commend his cheating in tampering with his master’s accounts and lowering their indebtedness, but He did commend the unjust steward for his prudence, his foresight, and his wisdom. That steward was looking ahead to make sure that his future would be secure. He took action; he pursued a goal; he didn’t simply sit back and let one of life’s tragedies sweep over him or sweep him away, nor should we. We came from God, and we are returning to God.<br />
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Wisdom is one of those virtues that require us to act. It’s not just a nice reward we receive for being good. It isn’t a virtue that naturally comes to us. It’s an acquired virtue. We should make a careful note of that because we are surrounded these days by institutions and structures that we expect will take care of us. All sorts of fail-safe devices protect us from our mistakes and provide for us in our need. In today’s movies and TV programs something in the end always comes to the rescue even of those who have been foolish.<br />
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But life, particularly our religious lives, and more importantly our relationships with others, requires us to take responsibility and to take action. This is never more true than in our relationships with the Persons of the Holy Trinity. There are no fail-safe devices in our personal relationships with others and in our relationship with God.<br />
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As we engage in our pursuits, seeking many things, things that are good, we would do well to ponder on the pursuit of wisdom. Seeking information and knowledge is one thing, seeking wisdom is quite another. We may perhaps be intellectually well endowed and possess an immense memory, a storehouse of facts and data, and we may be able to skillfully process, inter-relate, and analyze those things that we know all the while being devoid of wisdom. Our spiritual lamps will then sputter, die out, and lose their light. We would then have eyes to see and see not, ears to hear and hear not. We would be sighted in intellect but blind in spirit. It’s a very real and present danger that we should avoid. The parable of the wise and foolish virgins should have an impact on us.<br />
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Where, then, is wisdom to be sought? Along what paths is she to be found? Let me offer a partial, though by no means complete, suggestion. First of all, we should resolve to really listen to what is in the hearts and souls of others, not simply listen to their words. It’s foolish to act on impulse, on feelings or urges. It’s wise to think about what will follow. It’s foolish to judge others’ motives. It’s wise to ask them and to explain their motives. It’s foolish to act as you always have in the past. It’s wise to think about changing for the better. It’s foolish to act on fear. It’s wise to set fear aside and act on convictions. It’s foolish to be reactive. It’s wise to be proactive. When dealing with a problem it’s foolish not to consider the thoughts of others. It’s wise to realize that others have insights and knowledge based on their experiences and that we can learn from them.<br />
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By talking with those whom you perceive to be wise and by reading great literature we can gain access to the deep thoughts of human beings. The world’s great novels are a good source. Engaging in bible study is another, particularly the accounts of Christ and His teachings. Do you know that the Old Testament has an entire book devoted to Wisdom? We would all do well to read it and ponder from time the lessons it offers us.<br />
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So it is that we should hear again the words in today’s reading from the Book of Wisdom:<br />
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"Resplendent and unfading is wisdom and she is readily perceived by those who love her and found by those who seek her. She hastens to make herself known in anticipation of their desire; whoever watches for her at dawn shall not be disappointed, for he shall find her sitting by his gate. For taking thought of wisdom is the perfection of prudence, and whoever for her sake keeps vigil shall quickly be free from care; because she makes her own rounds, seeking those worthy of her, and graciously appears to them in the ways, and meets them with all solicitude."<br />
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Wisdom is offered to us by God, but God does not push her off on us. She is found and recognized only by those who are alert and actively seek her out as we make our way back to God, the God who has gifted us with His wisdom, the wisdom to seek and find Him in this life and in the next.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1210491415270052508.post-79626985372960084282023-10-27T09:28:00.001-04:002023-10-27T09:28:40.076-04:00Homily for the 31st Sunday in Ordinary Time, November 5, 2023, Year A<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-cYdD1m4pc-A/WfXbgNPGgWI/AAAAAAAAJqE/fShbXSoj5zwA-a3LlD9qEdHhLgDB_qZCwCLcBGAs/s1600/Jesus%2Bwith%2Bthe%2BPharisees%2B%255BWide%255D.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Do not be called 'Master'; you have but one master, the Christ." border="0" data-original-height="351" data-original-width="625" height="357" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-cYdD1m4pc-A/WfXbgNPGgWI/AAAAAAAAJqE/fShbXSoj5zwA-a3LlD9qEdHhLgDB_qZCwCLcBGAs/w640-h357/Jesus%2Bwith%2Bthe%2BPharisees%2B%255BWide%255D.png" width="640" /></a></div>
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<div style="text-align: center;">
Fr. Charles Irvin</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">Diocese of Lansing</div>
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(<a href="https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/110523.cfm" target="_blank">Click here for Sunday’s readings</a>)</div>
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Of all of the evils that Jesus confronted one of the greatest was the evil of hypocrisy. His strongest language was directed at hypocrites; they provoked his greatest anger. Furthermore, the greatest damage to our Church, at least during my time as a priest, has been the sexual abuse scandal, and the cloud of hypocrisy that has surrounded it.<br />
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In the first reading of today’s Mass, we heard fearful words from the prophet Malachi, thunderous words coming from one of God’s most famous prophets, words directly targeting priests:<br />
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<i>A great King am I, says the Lord of hosts, and my name will be feared among the nations. And now, O priests, this commandment is for you: If you do not listen, if you do not lay it to heart, to give glory to my name, says the Lord of hosts, I will send a curse upon you and of your blessing I will make a curse. You have turned aside from the way and have caused many to falter by your instruction; you have made void the covenant of Levi, says the LORD of hosts. I, therefore, have made you contemptible and base before all the people, since you do not keep my ways…</i><br />
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Catholicism down through the centuries has at times been called “the sinners Church.” The charge was intended to be derogatory. But to me it is a compliment. Did not God our Father in heaven send His Son to us not to condemn us but to save us? Who better to be in our Church than sinners? They are the object of God’s saving and redeeming love. I cannot help but notice here that Jesus had little trouble with sinners but had His greatest troubles with the religious leaders of His day, religious leaders who were hypocrites.<br />
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Jesus did not mince words when it came to religious hypocrisy. St. Matthew reports Him declaring: <i>Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites; because you are like to whited sepulchers, which outwardly appear to men beautiful, but within are full of dead men’s bones, and of all filthiness</i>. (Matthew 23:27) That, more than anything else, is what got Him killed. His death was a staged by hypocritical religious leaders who Our Blessed Lord exposed to the people under their authority.<br />
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Hypocrisy isn’t found just among clergy. Public figures are often skewered with the indictment. In a recent public debate between presidential hopefuls, one held in Las Vegas, one candidate charged another with having “the height of hypocrisy” thus provoking a rather testy exchange.<br />
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Some former Catholics have proclaimed that they don’t come to church anymore because it’s filled with people who think they are holy but live in unholy ways in their ordinary, everyday lives. They’re religious on Sunday but do not live religious lives Monday through Saturday. We need to also recognize that many who accuse others of hypocrisy are themselves guilty of it.<br />
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Christians are easily charged with hypocrisy. The standards set for us are so high that none of us can live up to them – unless we turn to God for help. Which is the whole point, isn’t it?<br />
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What, then, are we to do? The first thing we must do is to admit that there is a tremendous gap between what we are and what we ought to be. We need first, above all else, recognize the truth about ourselves and then, asking for God’s mercy, set about amending our lives.<br />
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In the seventh chapter of his Gospel, Matthew reports Jesus as warning us: <i>“Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get. Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when there is the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.”</i><br />
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It seems to me that there is only one difference between a saint and a sinner, and it’s this: The saint keeps on trying. The saint humbly admits that God alone is holy and that we all fall far short of God’s infinite holiness. The saint tries to be sincere, tried to not wear a mask, tries not to be pretentious. The saint tries to walk the Christian walk and not simply talk the Christian talk. The saint reverses an old saying, turns it around to say this: Do as I do, not just as I say.<br />
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Ask yourself this question: When have you ever heard a saintly person demand things of others that they don’t demand of themselves? The problem the Pharisees faced was that they loaded up others with heavy burdens placing impossible loads on other people’s shoulders without lifting a finger to help them. At the same time, they excused themselves of many of those same obligations.<br />
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Often, we hold up high expectations of others, holding them to extremely high standards in solving human problems without lifting a finger to help solve those problems ourselves. It’s good to have high ideals and high standards in how we live. We need to teach our children to have them and lead them in living out those standards and ideals. But at the same time, we should realize that children are quick, very quick, to see when we are not living up to them ourselves. We need to be sure we are giving good example and living in authentic leadership free of hypocrisy. We should always propose and never impose without observing our ideals in the ways we are living. No one, it seems, has a monopoly on hypocrisy. All of us could use massive doses of sincerity and truth.<br />
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All of which brings me back to the point: Why are we here? And why do we have our children enrolled in our Religious Education programs and our parish school? Isn’t it precisely because we recognize the fact that our lives are unmanageable and in need of a Higher Power? We are here because we admit that we are addicted to patterns of behavior that are dishonest, insincere and out of order. We are here and our children are in our school and religious education programs precisely because we are making a conscious decision to turn our lives and our wills over into the care of God as we understand him. And we are asking God to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves – to forgive us of our sins, and then to give us the power of His holiness, His truth, and the power of His Holy Spirit.<br />
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Yes – we are a sinners’ church. Yes, our pews are filled with people who don’t live up to the high standards and expectations God imposes upon us. And, yes, we are here to humbly confess our sins and ask God to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves – to forgive us precisely because we cannot forgive ourselves.<br />
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The worldly and the secularists who surround us may mock and sneer at us for being here at Mass, and they may make fun of the Sacrament of Forgiveness and our going to confession. But at least we are trying to humbly admit that, with God’s loving and gracious help, we want to keep on trying. We haven’t given up.<br />
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Nor should we, given that cross up there and the Person who is nailed to it.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1210491415270052508.post-29452860236364296852023-10-16T10:00:00.001-04:002023-10-16T10:00:22.851-04:00Homily for the 30th Sunday in Ordinary Time, October 29, 2023, Year A<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-M3B9qel8zp4/Weyw04iNbiI/AAAAAAAAJlg/5A0aTEf5QvUw_xriFhD1d5HXlNdOVmlQwCLcBGAs/s1600/Ernst%2BZimmerman%2BChrist%2Band%2Bthe%2Bpharisees%2B%255BWide%255D.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Christ and the pharisees" border="0" data-original-height="295" data-original-width="524" height="360" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-M3B9qel8zp4/Weyw04iNbiI/AAAAAAAAJlg/5A0aTEf5QvUw_xriFhD1d5HXlNdOVmlQwCLcBGAs/w640-h360/Ernst%2BZimmerman%2BChrist%2Band%2Bthe%2Bpharisees%2B%255BWide%255D.png" title="Christ and the pharisees, Ernst Zimmerman, c. 1910." width="640" /></a></div>
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<div style="text-align: center;">
Fr. Charles Irvin</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">Diocese of Lansing</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
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<div style="text-align: center;">
(<a href="https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/102923.cfm" target="_blank">Click here for Sunday’s readings</a>)</div>
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A fundamental theme that runs throughout the entire Bible is this: “God offers, we respond.” God’s offer of love for us is a given; His unconditional love is always offered to us no matter what. The result, however, is conditional. The result depends upon our response to His offer.<br />
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How, then, do we respond to Christ’s mandate that we love everyone as we love ourselves? First of all, we should take it for what it is – a mandate, a command. It is something we must choose to do with little regard for our feelings.<br />
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Feelings are important but feelings are not decisive. Convictions, things we are convinced of, are decisive. Feelings are not. More often than not, acting on our feelings leads us down wrong paths and into trouble. Then, too, we can be victimized by our feelings. We can feel sorry for ourselves and spend so much time pitying ourselves that we end up feeling like we are victims. We can imprison ourselves in a state of victimhood and seem unable to get of our self-made feelings of depression. They can even lead us into a state of self-rejection and even self-hatred.<br />
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At times, some feelings are good. But when it comes to giving ourselves to others in love we have to make decisions. No one can command you to have warm, fuzzy feelings toward another. Not even God commands that of us. We cannot even tell ourselves to have nice, warm, loving and intimate feelings toward another. Even if we could, would it matter? No. It’s what we do that matters, not how we feel. But Jesus is not speaking here of emotions and feelings. He knows how absolutely fickle and unreliable feelings really are. Feelings come and feelings go as they wish, leaving us quite alone with ourselves after they have left. Decisions can last.<br />
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“Falling in love” is a wonderful thing, even a beautiful thing. Young boys and girls fall in love. Young mothers and young fathers fall in love with their newborn babies. Emotions of affection and feelings of love are beautiful things, the stuff of songs and poems. There is nothing wrong with them.<br />
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Jesus is telling us here that love is something we do. Love is a choice, a decision, a commitment to do things. That is why Jesus is commanding us to love others. It’s what we do to others not how we feel toward them that matters.<br />
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When two people marry they promise to act toward each other in ways they will not act toward anyone else. They make a conscious choice to belong to each other, and to belong to each other exclusively.<br />
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Feelings come and feelings go – we have little control over them. Love and commitments, however, are choices. Furthermore, as psychologists tell us, feelings can be shaped by the way we act. Perhaps this is another reason why Jesus commands us to act toward others in a loving way, regardless of how we feel about them. Love makes commitments – feelings follow along.<br />
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All of us have feelings of fondness toward others. Even pagans feel fondness and affection. So there’s no particular Christian virtue in feelings of fondness for another person. It follows, then, that there is no sin in feelings of fondness toward another person. Virtue and sin are found in what we choose to do with other people.<br />
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Recall with me now the Last Judgment account depicted in St. Matthew’s Gospel. That Last Judgment account is all about deeds – feelings are not even mentioned. God does not say: “I was hungry, and you felt sorry for me. I was naked, and you felt embarrassment. I was sick and you had feelings of sympathy toward me.” God will be interested in what you have chosen to do for others, not in how you felt about them.<br />
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Having good feelings toward others is nice, and many preachers preach a gospel of nice feelings. For them, religion seems to be a matter of feeling nice toward others, of being polite and kind toward them. But isn’t Christianity something more than being nice or simply having nice feelings toward others? When did Jesus ever mention being nice toward others? Show me one place in the Bible where that was His teaching. The only thing that counted with Him was that the hungry were fed, the naked were clothed, and the lonely and abandoned were sought out and we stood by them.<br />
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Jesus Christ is the ultimate realist. He commands us, He mandates us to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. We are to especially love those who are unlovable, those who are particularly shunned and live out on the margins of our lives. He closes our little loopholes, our self-fashioned exceptions, and presents us with the most demanding of all Gospel messages, allowing us no compromises, no human “wiggle room.” The call from Jesus to us is to get extremely serious about what we do, not what we feel.<br />
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Christ’s mandate was an utterly simple one, one with no complexities whatsoever. It is sort of like a new income tax code that some are proposing in which the return can be sent in to the Internal Revenue Service on a postcard – 15% of all household income with no deductions, no special exemptions, no depreciation formulae, no wiggle room, one that is one that is simple, direct, straightforward and to the point.”<br />
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I don’t care how you feel, Jesus says to us, simply love your neighbors. Love them as your heavenly Father loves them. Love them, the good and the bad alike, with the unconditional love with which your Father in heaven loves them. Love all of your neighbors in what you do to them, in what you do for them, and in how you act toward them. All of those complicated and complex feelings of yours will eventually follow along. My religion, says Jesus, is a matter of what we do; it’s not a religion simply of nice feelings.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0