Merry Christmas, Day 14! We get 15 days of Christmas this year and I am using them all! I just got my Christmas cards out on Wednesday.
There’s a meme that says if there were three wise women instead of wise men, they would have asked directions, arrived on time, helped deliver the baby, cleaned the stable, made a casserole, and brought practical gifts. There is more, but you get the idea.
Let’s talk a little bit about these gifts of the Magi. As the meme points out, they are not all that practical. Yet, emphasizing them, Matthew is making the point that this little baby Jesus really is the Messiah.
In the Isaiah 60;1-6 we see the nations coming to worship in Jerusalem, bringing gifts of gold and frankincense. This was for a very good reason. The long-awaited Messiah was to be a great priest-king who would reestablish true worship and the Kingdom of Israel. Gold represents the tribute that would be given a king. Frankincense is the proper gift to a priest who would offer it as a pleasing fragrance to God on the altar of incense.
Thus, it makes perfect sense that the Magi, representing the nations, would bring gold and frankincense to the new Messiah, as befitted a priest-king.
But the Magi bring something else—myrrh, an aromatic balm typically used in the preparation of bodies for burial. That seems a bit out of sorts until you realize that the gift of myrrh is a foreshadowing of Jesus’ passion and death. What Matthew is saying is that Jesus is indeed the expected priest-king Messiah, but it is by his passion and death that he will win the victory and establish the Kingdom.
The gifts are symbolic, not practical. They are also a good reminder to us not to get wrapped in our own expectations of what we expect Jesus to be and pay closer attention to who Jesus really is. Seeing Jesus for who he really is allows us to give a more authentic witness of him to the world.
One of my favorite actors is Anthony Hopkins. The man can take on any role most convincingly. It is he who quipped, “I make my living by pretending to be other people.” Believe it or not, my favorite role of his is not Hannibal Lecter, but as St. Paul in the 1981 miniseries, Peter and Paul.
St. Paul is a very intense, and very intriguing character. Unlikely as it was at the time, it is no surprise that Christ chose him to be the apostle to the Gentiles. This is a guy who could think and pray outside and inside the box and then act decisively on the fruits of his deliberations. He fully embraced what Christ meant in today’s gospel when he completely reordered his life after meeting the Risen Christ on the road to Damascus. In short, he received Christ totally and completely. He “lost” his previous life and found new life in Christ. Pretty cool.
In his letter to the Romans that we read today, he helps us understand this teaching of Jesus. For Paul, baptism is the portal through which the Christian dies to his former life and begins to live anew in Christ. “Are you not aware,” he says, “that we who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?”
Whether we do this at our baptism as adults or embrace it later if we were baptized as infants, for each Christian there is that moment when we must each decide in our heart of hearts whether our life will be in Christ or in the world. This “fundamental option” as it is sometimes called, will make all the difference.
How, because Paul does not stop there. It is not enough to leave the old life behind. There is so much more. Dying with Christ in baptism leads one the Resurrection in Christ.
Now, there is a temptation to think of the Resurrection as some distant, far off, eschatological reality. That’s only partially true. St. Paul had a very good sense that to be a Christian was to be a person of the resurrection from the moment of your baptism. “Consequently, you too must think of yourselves as dead to sin, and living for God in Christ Jesus.” For St. Paul and for all of us, heaven begins now.
Pedro Arrupe, the late Master General of the Jesuits said it well. He said,
“Nothing is more practical than finding God,
That is, than falling in love in a quite absolute, final way.
What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination will affect everything.
It will decide what will get you out of bed in the mornings,
What you will do with your evenings,
How you spend your weekends,
What you read,
Who you know,
What breaks your heart,
And what amazes you with joy and gratitude.
Fall in love, stay in love, and it will decide everything.”
Hey, Church fans! Sorry for the long break. Two things at play. First, in the “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” category, Microsoft in their wisdom has decided to take a very simple process of trimming a video and make it exceedingly difficult and time consuming. Second, I have been pretty busy on Sundays between Masses when these things usually get done.
That said, I’m not preaching this weekend, but here is my column for the week. You can always get them on the parish website: https://www.st.patsak.org or our parish Facebook page: stpatsak .
Primed and Ready.
When I was Director of Vocations for the Archdiocese, I was always fascinated by the story of the call of the first disciples as depicted in the second part of today’s gospel reading. On the one hand, you have to admire the faith of the first disciples leaving everything to follow Jesus. At the same time, it does seem a little quick. In the real world, successful business owners like Peter, Andrew, James, and John do not simply just get up and leave everything, no matter how attractive or compelling this Jesus was. Also, we can read of several others (the rich young man, for example) who received the same invitation as they did and yet did NOT leave everything to follow him. There has to be more to the story.
Our insight comes from the Gospel of John (1:35). Here we see that Peter, James, John and Andrew were not just quietly going about their business before Jesus showed up in their lives. Rather, reading John it becomes clear that they were very active in their faith. They were expecting the Messiah and were anticipating his manifestation. They were waiting for him.
Their faith made them ready. So when Jesus does show up, they could respond in faith. I suspect that they had already said “yes” in their hearts. Only this interior disposition would make possible such a whole—hearted response.
The lesson for us is clear. We all want to be like Peter, James, John and Andrew. The key is to prepare ourselves interiorly so that when, through the Holy Spirit, Christ does call us to some work for the Church, either big or small, we can respond with all our heart, soul, and strength. Daily prayer is an essential element of this spirituality of vigilance. Only then can we “await the joyful hope and the coming of our Savior Jesus Christ.”
Welcome Fr. Bill Hanrahan and Fr. Scott Garrett! Fr. Bill will be covering for me while I am out of town getting a little post-Christmas R&R. Fr. Scott will be sharing with us how we can support his mission to bring the gospel to the far western reaches of the Archdiocese. See you in February!
[Do you really have to hate your mother and father to follow Jesus?}
This week marks something of a milestone in space exploration as NASA is continuing to ramp up for a return to the moon.
I find this of great interest. One of my earliest childhood memories was crowding around the television in our basement watching the first lunar landing and seeing Neil Armstrong exit the landing craft and become the first human being to walk on the moon.
Space and things astronomical have always fascinated me. So it was with great anticipation that I awaited the first images from the Hubble space telescope as it was launched into low earth orbit in 1990. With great precision, the engineers pointed this amazing contraption into the heavens. Then they hit the button and awaited the first images to be beamed back to earth…
…The images were blurry. The telescope would not focus properly.
After no small amount of analysis, it was found that the problem was due to a simple error in math. One engineering team had been designing using the metric system and another had been using the imperial system. Fortunately, the problem was corrected three years later by a crew from the Space Shuttle and now even thirty years later, we can enjoy vivid, high-resolution images of galaxies and nebulae and all kinds of cool things that are out there in the great expanse of space.
I think of this embarrassing, and very expensive episode with the Hubble Telescope where the greatest minds of our time got it wrong, and I am reminded of a plaque that hung in the office of the Superintendent at the jobsite on Adak in the Aleutian Islands where I worked construction in the summers during college. It read:
In short, if you want to do the job right, you better know what you are getting yourself into beforehand.
That is essentially what Jesus is doing as he speaks with his disciples in this week’s gospel from Luke 14. If you are going be his disciple, you’ve got to know what you are getting yourself into.
Our Holy Father said this morning that these are very difficult words. Jesus is going up to Jerusalem. A great crowd is following him, many simply because he is a superstar. Jesus stops and tells them in no uncertain terms that discipleship is not for the faint of heart.
First, your relationship with Christ, must come before your family. This is not to say that you have to disown your family. But it does make sense. They say that “blood is thicker than water.” The question here could be WHOSE blood? When it comes to a case of facts, we have to admit that the blood of our family heritage that brought us to life in this passing world always gives way to the blood of Christ who has given us eternal life. The primary relationship HAS to be Christ for even our relationships with our family to be rightly ordered.
Second, being a follower of Christ will involves SACRIFICE. For Jesus to say, “Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.” would have made absolutely no sense to his listeners. Crucifixion was a brutal Roman means of execution. In our own day, it is as if he had said, “Whoever does not sit in his own electric chair cannot be my disciple.” Or “whoever does not lie on his own lethal injection table cannot be my disciple.”
What are we to make of this? If we listen to what he says elsewhere, we cannot escape the conclusion that if Christ is truly the center of our lives; if we try to be his disciples; even if we do this poorly, there are those who will find it very annoying. And finding it annoying they would like to see us removed from the public square.
This can happen on many levels.
In its most benign sense, it may mean that we will be snubbed and ignored in matters of public discourse. And this is certainly true. In the wake of the Enlightenment, truth is in the eye of the beholder.
It was Descartes who famously said, “I think, therefore I am.” In so doing he made himself the center of the universe around which everything else revolved.
How small is the intellectual leap from seeing truth as an objective reality to a subjective one. Unthinkable a few generations ago, now the airwaves and screens are full of those who hold sincerely that my truth is as real as your truth. This bodes ill for those of us Christians for whom the truth is not a something, but a someone – Jesus the Christ, who is the way, the truth, and the life.
Furthermore, it is a sad testimony that in the secular West, a person is free to embrace just about any religion…except Christianity. Among Christians, we Catholics are the most suspect.
In its most extreme sense, this desire to remove us from society takes on the form of brutal, repressive persecution of the Church, even to the point of death. Earlier this month, President Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, forcibly closed seven Catholic radio stations and placed the Cardinal Archbishop of Managua under house arrest on charges of sedition and treason. Cardinal Alvarez’s alleged crime was that he supported student protesters who had demonstrated against the policies and practices of the regime. Namely, that all opposition candidates in the recent election had all been arrested and incarcerated before the last election.
We say to ourselves, “Oh that could never happen here!” Personally, given the momentum of history, I am not so optimistic. But neither am I worried if it does. Persecution is part of discipleship. The seeds of faith have always been watered by the blood of martyrs. Why should we think it will be any different in our own time?
In light of this, Jesus’ comment that “Anyone who does not renounce all of his possessions cannot be my disciple” is almost an afterthought. Still it bears reflection. They say that you spend the first third of your life wanting stuff, the second third of your life accumulating stuff and the last third of your life trying to get rid of stuff. Nevertheless, at some point each one of us must ask the question: “Do I own my possessions? Or do my possessions own me? The answer to that question will tell us much about ourselves and where we are on the spectrum of discipleship. In the end we know that we are stewards, not owners. We leave everything behind in this world. In the meantime, we are each given gifts of time, talent and treasure. The key is to use these gifts in a way that is pleasing to the Giver, and to return them to the Lord with increase.
The words of Jesus today are very hard in one sense, but they are very liberating in another. When we stop to think about it, Jesus is not asking us to do anything he has not already done himself. Furthermore, through the gift of the Holy Spirit, the power of God’s love alive in the world; the same Spirit that animated the life of Christ, descended upon Mary and the Apostles at Pentecost; the same Spirit that animates the life of every Christian; through this Holy Spirit, Our Lord has given us the means to live our Catholic faith in the midst of the world courageously and joyfully.
We stand in the truth in love in the world and for the world. In so doing, we transform the world and help it to become what God has created it to be.
Hey, Church fans! Had a great time last week flying a couple of kids around to see the local glaciers. This week, we hear Jesus say, “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” What’s he getting at? Check it out.
Are You Involved or Committed? XIX Sunday in Ordinary Time
Yesterday, I had had breakfast with a friend at a local iconic establishment.
We both ordered bacon and eggs.
As our food arrived, he looked at me and said, “You know, that’s the difference between being involved and being committed.
“How do you figure?” I asked.
“Well,” he said, “Look at your breakfast.”
“Yeah,” I said, “Bacon and eggs.”
“Yep, bacon and eggs,” he said. “Think about it. The chicken is involved…the pig is committed!”
He’s right, you know.
It raises a good question for each of us in light of Jesus’ words in the gospel today.
When it comes to being a disciple of Jesus in St. Patrick’s
Are you involved
Or are you committed?
One thing I like about St. Patrick’s is that we never do anything halfway.
We go all in. We sing every verse and we don’t leave Mass early, even when the donuts are right outside the door!
We do this for a reason. First know hat one should never be in a hurry to leave the House of God.
Second, we remember with sadness that Judas was the first one to leave Mass early…
We are here to praise God, to share our stories, to share communion and fellowship with God and one another, and to be sent back into the world to proclaim the Good News of the Resurrection and the forgiveness of sins.
But at certain point each one of us has to decided, “I am merely involved, or am I committed?”
How you answer that question will make all the difference.
This is what Jesus is getting at when he says, “Where your treasure is, there also will be your heart.”
If our “treasure”, i.e., that which is most valuable to us is our relationship with God and others, those relationships will take priority over everything else. That is when we become committed. That’s when we organize our time and our resources to building up those relationships.
I’ve said it before, “Show me your calendar and your bank statement and I will tell you what your priorities are.”
But such a commitment isn’t easy and it doesn’t come overnight. Such stewardship of our time and resources takes time, practice, vigilance.
There are lots of things that compete for our attention. Very few of these are bad in and of themselves. Indeed, if I was the evil one, I would fill your life with so many good things that you would not have time for the essential relationships that give life joy and meaning.
It we are not careful our lives can become like our garages, filled with so much cool stuff that we can no longer use it for the reason it was built.
We need to pay attention. We need to be vigilant. We need to be like “servants who await our master’s return.” We need to examine our priorities every day to make sure we are focused on who and what really matters.
As individuals and as a parish family, we have all been given so much. Thus, much will be demanded of us. At the end of the age, when we stand together as a parish before the Lord, he will ask us what we did to build up the Kingdom here in 99504.
Now is a good time to examine where our heart is. Now is a good time to look at our calendar and our bank statement. Is our relationship with Christ, with our parish family, with the Church our first priority? If not, where do we need to make adjustments? There is no guarantee of tomorrow. The Master could return at any moment. Now is the time to decide if we are involved or committed.
