Feast of Pentecost, Year B

Feast of Pentecost, Year  B

Today is traditionally thought of as the birthday of the Church. We have been in Easter time for the last 50 days, and after this week we go to Ordinary Time in the Church, although we have a few feast days yet to be celebrated on Sundays. But today is the culmination. The work of God on earth is completed. Jesus has come down to us, has died, is risen, is ascended, and what is left is to make sure that something remains behind, and that something is his Spirit. This is, of course, a mystery, one of the most beautiful mysteries of the church, one of the most comforting, one that gives us the most strength, the most faith, the most hope and the most love. Jesus, having ascended, is not just a memory, as with normal human death, but he becomes a positive force present in our lives.

The Feast of Pentecost took place on another Jewish Feast, a spring harvest festival, in which the first fruits of the growing season were brought to the Temple as an offering. It was always celebrated 50 days after Passover, gradually developing into a celebration also of the covenant that God made with the Hebrews at Mount Sinai. In his description of the event, Luke alludes to this when he says that the Apostles, the core group of Jesus ‘new covenant in his blood” receive the power from on high, by the descent of God’s spirit, which allows them to proclaim the Good News. The other allusion in Luke, to the fact that the Apostles were understood by everyone refers to the fact that the Spirit knows no boundaries – geographical or ethnic. Everyone can hear the message, the good news. This is also why so many people from different geographical places were present when the Apostles left the room filled with Spirit.  People from all over would have been present at the Temple for this Spring Harvest Festival.

Luke’s theology which is expressed in his story when everyone heard the Apostles in his or her own tongue is a reversal of another Biblical story, The Tower of Babel.  In that story, because of man’s pride, trying to raise themselves up to God, there is a breakdown in communication – they were dispersed and their languages were all confused.  Now we have the reverse happening. When God’s spirit comes down on them, the barriers and division are broken down and they all understand.  The Church needs to recognize this more and more in a world which is so divided ethnically, racially and geographically. God’s spirit CAN make us one!.

In the Gospel today of John, we recall the original promise made to the apostles by Jesus, that after his ascension he will send an advocate, a Paraclete, a spirit of truth. When I was a child I always heard ‘parakeet’ so for many years my image of the Spirit was not a dove as is so often depicted, but that of a parakeet.  However, the Greek word which is translated often as Paraclete has many overtones , and suggests legal aid, a helper, a consolation giver. This advocate, Jesus says, will continue his work by bearing witness to Jesus, teaching the disciples and helping us remember the teachings of Christ. As simply as possible, the Spirit is the continuation of the Christ-event in today’s world.

“Suddenly there came from the sky

a noise like a strong driving wind,

and it filled the entire house in which they were.

“Then there appeared to them tongues as of fire,

which parted and came to rest on each one of them.

And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit

and began to speak in different tongues,

as the Spirit enabled them to proclaim.”

Notice that these words describe what we call a  mystical experience. The writer is unable to say in literal terms what these people went through because it was not just an ordinary event, but a supernatural one. Mystics talk about their encounters with God in this way. They, and the writer of the passage above, can only make up comparisons to suggest what it was like.

They might have said, “Some kind of sound came from the sky, something that sounded like, uh, oh, let’s see, uh, wind! That’s it. It wasn’t wind but that is the closest we can get. And then things that looked sort of like tongues, you know, like tongues of fire. Only it wasn’t really fire. Or tongues either. But we were sure that it was the Holy Spirit, and it descended upon each person.”

Which raises a burning question (pardon the pun). Because we have not had as dramatic an entrance of the Holy Spirit does it mean that that we are not filled with the Spirit as they were?

Well, first, we believers today are definitely filled with the same Spirit that descended upon the apostles and their associates. But we receive the gift in a much less dramatic manner. You can see this manner developing already in Acts 19:1-8, where St. Paul found a dozen or so disciples who had never even heard of the Holy Spirit! He baptized them, “laid his hands on them, the Holy Spirit came upon them, and they spoke in tongues and prophesied.” It was a sacrament! Today, when we are baptized, we too are receiving the Holy Spirit. Because most of us are children when we are baptized, we also have the sacrament of confirmation which is the point in our lives when we ourselves, not our parents, choose to be Christian, and we ask the Holy Spirit to descend again on us.

Second, why don’t we all get to prophesy and talk in tongues? Paul handles this question beautifully in the First Epistle to the Corinthians. The answer is certainly cultural as well.  We are not a culture that subscribes to prophesy and tongues.  In our society it is more likely to get you locked into an psychiatric facility. But the answer is also found simply by realizing the identity of the Holy Spirit. In spite of all the gifts resulting from its presence in each of us, the most essential thing we can say is that the Holy Spirit is primarily and only God. Yes. The third person of the Holy Trinity comes to dwell within us. All the rest is just a result of that union.

Third, like anything planted so deep in us, it has to have time to make its way into our actions, our words, our deeds. Whenever we find patches of charity or joy in ourselves, or patience and kindness, or the ability to endure hardship and injuries; when we are tempted toward mildness and modesty, then we can be sure that the Holy Spirit is at work within us.

These kinds of qualities are now the signs of the Holy Spirit, much more than heavy winds and tongues as of fire.

If you’re someone who’s at all concerned about community, family, church, justice, education, culture, or civic issues, you will, no doubt, find yourself at a lot of meetings. : “When they write our history, they’ll simply say, ‘They met a lot!’”

Indeed we do. We meet a lot. There are an endless variety of issues that call for our participation in group discussion and community discernment: It’s a bottomless well and all those meetings can seem like a huge waste of time and energy, a distraction to real work. Moreover, at a point, we can’t help wondering too: “Are all these meetings changing anything? Would life be any different (other than more leisured and pleasant) if we stopped having all these meetings?” It’s easy to grow tired, discouraged, and cynical about all the meetings we’re asked to attend.

But we should keep something in mind: Pentecost happened at a meeting! One of the central events that shaped Christian history and history in general, happened not to an individual off praying alone or to a monk on a mountaintop or to a solitary Buddha meditating under a tree. None of these. Pentecost happened at meeting and it happened to a community, to a church congregation assembled for prayer, to a family of faith gathered to wait for God’s guidance. Moreover it happened in a common room, a meeting room, in one of those humble, church- basement, type of rooms. It can be helpful to remember that. Our search for God should take us not just into private places of quiet and contemplation but, equally, into meeting rooms.

Where Christianity is different from most other world religions is partly on this very point. In Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism, spirit and revelation break into the world very much through an individual, particularly an individual who is deeply immersed in private prayer. God speaks deeply to those who pray deeply.

To find God, to receive God’s spirit, it’s important that, at times, we pull away from the group, that we set off to the desert, to the chapel, to the lonely place, the quiet, to be alone with God. We see Jesus do exactly that.

 

However, where Christianity and Judaism differ somewhat from some of the other world religions is in our belief that there is an equally privileged experience of God that can be had only in a group, in community, in family, at a meeting. We don’t just meet God in the desert or in the deep quiet parts of our souls. We meet God there, surely, but we also meet God in the group, the community, the family, at the church gathering, at the meeting: “For where two or three meet in my name, I shall be there with them!” In Christian and Jewish spirituality there are two non-negotiable places where we meet God, alone and in the family. These are not in opposition, but complementary, relying on each other to keep our experience of God both deep and pure.

Pentecost, it is important to note, happened to a group at a meeting, not to an individual alone in the desert. That can be helpful to keep in mind when we tire of meetings, despair of their effectiveness, or resent that they pull us away from important private endeavors. The fact that pentecost happened at a meeting can also be helpful in keeping us focused on why we are going to all these meetings in the first place.

Meetings are the “Upper room”, the place where we wait for pentecost. And what are we waiting for? Why are we in the music room, at a meeting? Because we are waiting there, with others, for God to do something in us and through us that we can’t do all by ourselves, namely, create community with each other and bring justice, love, peace, and joy to our world.

And so we need to go to continue to go to our Sunday meetings. We need to spend time together waiting for God, waiting for a new outflow of heavenly fire that will give us the courage, language, and power we need to make happen in the world what our faith and love envision. And that is what we do at our meeting each and every Sunday.

This is the Good News I bring you today.

Fr. Ron Stephens, St. Andrew’s Parish, Warrenton VA

Homily for the Feast of the Ascension, Year B

Homily for the Feast of the Ascension, Year B

[2nd Reading is from Ephesians 4]

I heard someone on the radio this week say that whenever a President or government official starts a sentence with “I want to make this absolutely clear”, what follows is always totally ambiguous or off topic, or doesn’t answer the question.  I was reminded of this in the first reading when the Apostles ask Jesus a very direct question: Lord, is this time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” And what was Jesus answer? Like a good politician, he says: “I want to make this clear: It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority.” He really doesn’t answer the questions asked at all which was: is he going to restore the kingdom to Israel. But he does make a campaign promise to them: You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you, and you will be my witnesses.” We’ve all heard these promises. Right now the paper is full of presidential indictments that the president has not fulfilled his campaign promises – right!  After one term in office. But we are not a patient people, and neither were the Apostles.

I like to imagine what a thrilling and frightening time it must have been after the crucifixion. Jesus died.. they felt deserted. Jesus returned – they felt disbelief, amazement, finally relief. And just when they felt security again, he said that he had to go – and with a few promises, he leaves them again – standing there – looking up to heaven. How confused they must have been.

My mother’s oldest sister who was at my ordination and died recently had had dementia the last few years, or perhaps Alzheimer’s.  By last year the only person she recognized by name was my mother – who was ten months younger. My aunt always seemed confused unless my mother was around, and then she had someone to grab on to – and she did – she never let go of her hand even. It didn’t matter that she had other dedicated caregivers – her daughter who was with her 24/7 was known only as “that girl”.  But my mother – she had a name and Aunt May knew who she was. And whenever my mother would leave, she would get sad and all disoriented again.  In order to get her to do anything, they would have to promise that her sister Bertha was coming,  so she better behave or get ready, and she always did.

I see a little bit of that situation with the Apostles now.  I imagine they were disoriented and only felt at peace when jesus was there. They counted on him to make everything right both for themselves and for their people. When he wasn’t there, it was confusing, and even when he was there it was confusing – how did he get into the room? did he walk through walls? how did he appear. He tells them he has to go and they won’t see him any more. How frightening that must have been given all they went through. But he makes a promise – he will send the Holy Spirit and that will give them power. And Jesus does keep his promise – the one we will celebrate next week: Pentecost Sunday.

So what then is the Ascension all about?  We celebrate the Ascension as the feast of the enthronement of Jesus in heaven. From this time on God exercises his sovereignty over us through his Son, Jesus. And in turn Jesus promises that his church will be established on earth with the apostles as witnesses and spreaders of the faith to the whole earth. Jesus could no longer stay with his friends. he had already died, as we will have to one day – and had given himself up totally to His father for us. Now he had to go back to the Father, and he was only here long enough to tell us about what had happened and to give us comfort. Then he had to go.  However, as our second reading said: They were to be filled “with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace…one body and one Spirit.”

Our Gospel reading today is presumed to be a tacked on ending to Mark’s Gospel.  Those of you that took my course in Mark will remember that it is almost universally accepted that the author of Mark did not write these words, but they were added some 200 years or more later, probably by some well-meaning monk. That doesn’t make them worthless, however. What we have here is a compilation of 200 years of tradition that was added to the Gospel. It too is a description of the Ascension and develops the mandate of Jesus to spread the Gospel tot he whole world, an idea which is contained in other Gospels.  The controversial material is probably the signs that will accompany the apostles – driving out demons, speaking new languages, holding snakes in their hands, drinking poison and healing the sick. Surely we aren’t to take all of these literally as some Christian sects do.

So what does the Ascension mean for us today? If we are to be like Christ, it means that we must touch each other’s lives by being present to others, speaking words to others that nurture their growth, doing things that build up the life of the church, by silence as well, and by accepting our own leaving the earth and preparing people for our own good-byes. Preparing for a good death allows those we leave behind to feel a peacefulness and a warm presence.

We often have this kind of experience, simply in less dramatic ways. Parents, for instance, experience this, often excruciatingly, when a child grows up, grows away, and eventually goes away to start life on his or her own. A real death takes place here. An ascension has to happen, an old way of relating has to die, painful as that death is. Yet, it’s better that our children go away. The same is true everywhere in life. When we visit someone, it’s important that we come, it’s also important that we leave. Our leaving, painful though it is, is part of the gift of our visit. Our presence partly depends upon our absence.

The ascension deepens intimacy by giving us precisely a new presence, a deeper, richer one, but one which can only come about if our former way of being present is taken away. Perhaps we understand this best in the experience we have when our children grow up and leave home. It’s painful to see them grow away from us, painful to say that particular goodbye, painful to see them, precisely, ascend.

But, if their words could say what their hearts intuit, they would say what Jesus said before his ascension: “It’s better for you that I go away. There will be sadness now, but that sadness will turn to joy when, one day soon, you will have standing before you a wonderful adult son or daughter who is now in a position to give you the much deeper gift of his or her adulthood.”

So Jesus’ going away was in the long run, good for us and the result of that goodness will be seen next week when he comes back to us and is always present to us through the Holy Spirit. And that is the Good News I bring to you today!

 

Fr. Ron Stephens, St. Andrew’s Parish, Warrenton VA

Homily for the 6th Sunday of Easter, Year B

Homily for the 6th Sunday of Easter, Year B

Today’s readings contain some of the most often quoted sentences from the New Testament. Because of that, they sometimes are not really heard any more because they are too familiar. “Love one another.” “God is love.” “God sent his only-begotten son..” “Love one another as I have loved you.” These have become almost cliche, bumper-sticker quotations, and I don’t know that we ever really hear them any more. But, in Christ’s time they were radical sayings, and they are radical today as well.

Today also happens to be Mother’s Day, so to help us look at these passages afresh, I would like you to ignore all the references to Father, today, and to use the word Mother. We all know that God is both masculine and  feminine. When he created man and woman, he created them in his image. Because of the patriarchal society from which the readings come, God was referred to as masculine, and Jesus himself most often uses the Father, Abba, image. But God is a parent, and in our culture, parents come in two sexes, so I want to look at the readings today from the feminine, Mother point of view. In fact, I feel strongly that most of what is said today is from God’s feminine side.

The second reading, a letter from John, not the Gospel of John, does not speak of God as either masculine or feminine. In fact, every reference is simple to God, and there is only one “him” used. This reading is a hymn to love. For John, love is the important gift and virtue. It comes from God because God is the personification of Love. It was love that caused God to create, just as a couple creates a child by their loving coupling. For John, we can’t even know God unless we love.

We know that God is love and that she loves us this much because of the action of the incarnation. God lowered herself to become one of us, just as a mother stops thinking of herself and devotes all her time and energy to a newborn child. How can we not love what we create, even when the creation disappoints us at times?  And even more, God knew what kind of world she was sending her son into, knew he would be called to die in order to a greater good for the world. That is real love. When we love our fellow human beings so much, that we are willing to die for them.

Which is a good lead in to John’s Gospel today’ We learn love from our parents – our first experience of love in our lives is our interaction with our mothers. The unconditional love of a parent is such a great gift to a child because the child knows that , no matter what, the child will always be loved. And God is like that, Jesus says. Jesus learned love from his heavenly and earthly parents and is able then to love in return. Jesus tells his apostles that “as my mother has loved me, so also I have loved you. Jesus then uses the word which is translated “abide”, but which has the meaning of “live surrounded by”. Jesus wants us to live surrounded by his love, and the only thing that can pull us away from that is our sin, for that is what sin is – our pulling away from the love of God. Jesus himself role-modeled living in God’s love.

At this point Jesus introduces the really revolutionary concept that the apostles learn love from him as though he were the parent. They were to love each other in the same unconditional way he did and his parents did him. Even if it means dying for someone!

We are not called upon often to die for someone, but how many mothers who have watched a child succumb to cancer or other diseases have prayed that it would be them and not their child? They would gladly die for their child. How many parents give up things so that their children can have a better life? We must feel that way about each other.

And now a little noticed line, something that Jesus says that seems to me to be so important, but so overlooked: “I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you.” My mother particularly likes it when I get up to Canada to stay with her. I feel badly, sometimes, that my brother who is always there for my parents tends to get overlooked, but the coming home of the absent child seems to give greater joy. After my mother’s last stroke she was kind of depressed and not doing very well. But her joy at having me home seemed to change all that. My dad commented on how much better she was when I was around. That is what joy can do!

And Jesus wants us to be joyous! How often we ignore that! I know so many dour Christians who seem to spend their time fighting sin and putting others down, and just don’t seem happy.  If we really hear Jesus message, we will be happy-  joyous, in fact!

What I have noticed about most of you in this congregation is that you are a joyous people. You seem to really enjoy coming to celebrate and greeting each other, often staying around afterward and talking – enjoying each other. I don’t want coming here to be anything short of that. I want to proclaim the Good News to you, and Good News should make you feel good about yourself and your relationship to God.

Even in the first reading today, Peter is spreading the good news of God showing no partiality, of loving everyone, even the non-Jew. It is this joyous good news of Gentiles receiving the Spirit that brought about the change in the early church’s movement to admit everyone into the church. Good news!  And even more good news comes at the end of the Gospel today when Jesus takes down the barrier of class. There are no more servants and masters, only friends. See how these Christians love one another. That is the joy of our faith, that is the joy of our God, who is both mother and father, and that is the joy of Jesus who has learned from his parental role models.

I celebrate all mothers today in particular because I feel that mothers are the strongest personification of love and that we learn from them as our first teachers how to love. May we love each other as our mothers love us, and may the joy that Christ offers fill your hearts and stay with you each and every hour of the day, comforting you when inevitable suffering or pain passes by.  And this is the Good News we need to share with each other every day!

Fr. Ron Stephens, St. Andrew’s Church, Warrenton, VA

Homily for the 5th Sunday of Easter, Year B

Homily for the 5th Sunday of Easter, Year B

Today we have one of the richest of the many metaphors in the Gospel of John.  In the Gospel of John we have many “I” metaphors that Jesus gives.  “I am the Way, I am the light, I am the Bread of life.. and so on.

Today we get the image of “I am the true vine”.  It is a rich  interesting and well-developed metaphor, but it is also a metaphor that has sustained Catholic guilt for many years. If only I were a better person, if only I had done the right thing, if only the world were different, if I had been dealt a better hand in the game of life, or, or, or, or. If I weren’t so full of guilt I wouldn’t have to be pruned. It is all my fault. Are we the branch that ill be taken away and burned in the fire! While Catholic guilt is something that is very true and often joked about, I would like to take a somewhat different approach to the Gospel today in that I think what we have here is the Christian answer to Job’s eternal question: why is there suffering in the world. And the answer, I believe, comes from this metaphor.

However, before I jump into that, I want briefly to look at the other two readings which are not thematically as close as they usually  are to the Gospel.

In the first reading we continue reading the Acts of the Apostles and watch as we have for a few weeks now, how the church grows in the first year or so.  In today’s reading we get one view of the first meeting of the apostle Paul with the original apostles. It is a little different than Paul’s own description of the event, but again, the writers had different purposes in their description.  In this account, the apostles could not believe that this man who had persecuted the young Christian church and were in fact afraid of him. The apostle Barnabas gathered his courage and brought Paul to them so that they could hear first hand from Paul about his conversion and subsequent change of heart. Paul apparently convinces the Apostles and they give him free hand to preach, which he does, but in so doing upsets the Greeks in the area to a point that they want to kill Paul for his preaching.  So the Apostles quickly get Paul out of town and send him to Tarsus. Interestingly, this story is told to show how the early church developed peace and learned to live with differing points of view. And all this was done through the Spirit.  Paul’s account of this explains that it wasn’t quite so peaceful, however, and one of the earliest controversies of the church involved whether Gentiles should have to follow Mosaic law or not. The Apostles had one view and Paul had another.  They did eventually agree, however, not as simply as Acts presents, but they all made peace with the problem and came to an agreement.

The second reading  is interesting to me because it clearly shows how the Protestant concept of justification by faith alone is not correct. In this reading the author clearly states that we are saved by faith, that is, belief in the Jesus Christ, but also through acting on our love for each other, which the protestants call “works”. The epistle writer goes on to talk about truth – which is probably what binds it to the Gospel today when Jesus talks about the “true” vine, and assures us that we belong to the truth.  And the truth is simply that to be saved we must follow the two great commandments of Jesus, loving God and loving our neighbor in word and action.

The Gospel connects now because the branches (us)  of true vine (Jesus) have to bear fruit. That is, there must be something to show in our lives. What kind of fruit have we bore? This now is, of course, where the guilt comes in.  Have I done enough?  Have I been good enough? Have I done the right things? Have I loved God and my fellow man enough?

I would like to develop the metaphor in a slightly different way, however.  And it is all about pruning. In the long run, a plant growing naturally assumes the shape that allows it to make the best use of light in a given location and climate. There is pruning that takes place in nature without much intervention – animals walk by and break off a branch, branches break in storms, etc. Here’s the important thing in pruning, however, when it is done by humans.  Pruning is done not as a punishment, but to make the bush better. When we take away some diseased element from a plant, or cut back the branches we are removing plant parts to improve the health and value of the plant. For me, the blade that does the pruning is suffering.  When things go wrong in our lives, we can approach it in two ways.  We can give up which is like cutting off the branch completely, or we can use the suffering to make us better people.  It is a lot like the idea of “no pain – no gain” I guess.  But if we can see suffering as nature’s way of improving us, making us stronger, making our blossoms, our good works, brighter, than suffering can be used as a positive effect in our lives. This does not mean we enjoy suffering or that we ask for suffering, but we use the pruning to make our lives a little better.

Continuing the metaphor, we also know that we are part of something greater.  That Christ is the vine and this the source of our nutrition and our health, and that without him, we can really do nothing.  But maybe this is reciprocal as well. Perfect love takes cultivation. We might see cultivation is described in terms of grafting into the vine.  We need not fear losing our identities, though.  When you graft a cherry branch to an apple branch, you still get cherries. God’s vine can be very colorful and various.

So what must we do?  What can we take home with us today? First, decide whether you are bearing no fruit at all. None. If that is really what you feel is happening to you, then you need to get help from someone, because spiritually you are dying. Remember that most of us do bear good fruit—it is just that we don’t remember that we do.

Second, with that settled, review what pruning is. It is a way to make things better, make a better plant, a better tree, a better orchard. If you cut tired old branches from your philodendron, the plant begins to thrive again, not wither. Pruning is done to encourage new growth and the overall health of the plant or tree.

Seen in that way, you and I do need to be trimmed regularly, don’t we?   The reason pruning would help is not that we should be punished, but that it promotes the health of the whole person, the whole garden, the whole orchard—the mystical body of Christ.

Trust the steadiness of God’s gardener hand. Trust even while suffering. Drink in your overflowing share of trust at Sunday’s table of the Lord. Let the Word instruct you, let the body and blood of Christ, which was pruned to almost nothing, fill you and shape you.

Then you can say to the Lord with the rest of us, go ahead, trim whatever gets in the way! We are not the vine, we are the branches. Our job is not to be perfect, it is to remain in you, Christ, and to let you do good within us and through us.  God prunes from us whatever does not give life, and nourishes within us whatever does.

And this is the Good News I bring you today.

Fr. Ron Stephens, St. Andrew’s Church, Warrenton, VA

Homily for the 4th Sunday of Easter Year B

Homily for the 4th Sunday of Easter Year B

Sheep are really very stupid animals. I bet you have never gone to a circus and seen any trained sheep! Sheep have a very strong flocking instinct and seldom act independently.  They are apparently the only domesticated animal that can’t go wild.  If they get separated from the flock, they don’t know how to survive and so probably will get eaten. Similarly, they are ill-prepared for survival on their own. I mean this physically as well as mentally. They have no body part that protect, like claws or shells. They do have wool, but that only allows the enemy to grab and pull them down. Even their voices are kind of whiny and certainly wouldn’t scare anything. Baaaaah. They can be willful, stupid and stubborn.

And this is what we are compared to in the Bible!?

Not only that, but shepherds don’t fare very well either. At the time of Jesus, they were seen to be the lowest of the low in terms of profession. Their testimony wasn’t accepted in courts of law. They were seen as bandits and thieves…low life. You probably wouldn’t be happy if your son or daughter wanted to be one!

Even so,  if you have seen pictures of the Holy Land, you know that sheepherding would be a tough job. The land is not very conducive to grazing. It is very hilly and the green pastures and still waters of the Psalm 23 are not very easy to find. There would be a lot of walking to find any pleasant valleys.

And yes, this is what the Bible and Jesus draw upon as something that we can be compared to. I hope you can find some humor in this as well.

As a people we can be very much like sheep. We can go along with the crowd and not make our own thoughtful decisions about things. We can get caught up in the rat race of our work lives where we just move from one thing to another as if by rote. We can subscribe to the economic philosophy of success at any cost, and that they more things we have, the happier we will be. We can be herded into the idea that we create our own successes.

And these things carry over into our religious or spiritual lives as well. We think we can do things that can get us closer to God. We are achievers, but we have only learned that we can never achieve enough. The happiness that comes from achieving is never quite within our reach, because we always seem to need more achievement.

That is why God is laughing at us today. That is why Jesus has chosen the imagery and metaphors that he has. The whole point of the shepherd and the sheep, it seems to me, is that we can “stop trying to achieve a life, and choose instead to receive one.”

Because we are like the sheep, we have to depend on the shepherd more than we do. Jesus is the good shepherd, the one who leads his sheep. A bad shepherd pushes from behind. Jesus knows the sheep by name. And in speaking to them, the sheep listen, and know his voice, and follow him.

It is so important that we realize that Jesus is talking to us. We must learn to recognize his voice, and then follow him. Other voices will only distract us, hurt us. “The sheep follow him because they know his voice…. They do not know the voice of strangers.”

By letting Jesus lead us, by giving into his leadership with trust that he will protect and guide and do all the wonderful things of Psalm 23, by listening to his voice, by simply being grateful for all the care he gives, we can free ourselves from many of the burdens of this life – the anxiety of trying to be a great success in work, in marriage, in parenting, in life. We can take the time to look at the wonderful graces that are already a part of our lives, the gifts that God has given, the graces we have received, and concentrate on the positive in our lives.  Sure there has been sickness, death, discouragement, but by giving all that to God, by finding the ways God has been good to us, by listening to God’s voice, we might eventually find the happiness and peace we have been working so hard to get on our own. Jesus says: “I came that [you] may have life, and have it abundantly.” We can look up and see God smiling at his sheep!

The second reading from St. John picks up on the idea that we are like children.  He doesn’t use the sheep image, but children in Jesus time were thought of very much like sheep in that they were possessions, meant to follow and do what they were told. John stresses that through our baptisms we have become children of God – we are reborn. And the hope that John stresses is that we will one day be like Jesus, raised, to be with him in the pastures of the heavenly kingdom. It is the clarity of the Christian vision that John stresses here – for “we will see him as he is!”

The first reading today is the only reading not about sheep, but about witnessing. If we think about being a witness in a court today, we are simply to tell what we know without embellishment or theorizing. And how do we best give witness to Jesus and the Good News? We do this by being good sheep, by showing people how God is creating good in our lives, and we show this by letting others see how thankful we are. They will know we are Christians by our love, we sing. Love of each other, and love of God. The image of Jesus as the cornerstone of a new covenant – one which the Hebrews had rejected – is a reflection on the psalm we sang today. When Luke says – there is salvation in no one else, I don’t think he is saying that one has to be Christian to get to heaven, but he is saying that Jesus died for all and it is only through HIS death that there comes salvation.

I would like to close today with a quotation from a lovely book I am reading called “The Pastor As Minor Poet” which I feel summarizes all I have been trying to say this morning about the poetry of the readings today. “I doubt there is such a thing as a measure of spirituality, but if there is, gratitude would be it. Only the grateful are paying attention. They are grateful because they pay attention, and they pay attention because they are so grateful.”

And this is the Good News I want you to be grateful for today!

Fr. Ron Stephens, St. Andrew’s Church, Warrenton VA

Homily for the 3rd Sunday of Easter, Year B

Homily for the 3rd Sunday of Easter, Year B

Our Gospel story today starts a little way into the plot of the story. The late Paul Harvey, the radio announcer, used to have a radio show called “The Rest of the Story”. That’s what we get today – the rest of the story. What had just happened was that Jesus had met two disciples on the road.  Luke wrote: “two of the disciples were going to a village called Emmaus,  about 11 kilometers from Jerusalem, and talking to each other about all these things that had happened.” Every word is pregnant here: For Luke, “Jerusalem” is more than a city. For him, it means the church, it means our faith-dream, and it means the place where Jesus was crucified (the place of pain, betrayal, crucified dreams, humiliation, and shame). On Easter Sunday, he tells us, two disciples were walking away from all that, namely, they were leaving the church, leaving their faith dream, and walking away from the place where they felt that dream had ended in shame. Moreover they were walking towards “Emmaus”. What is “Emmaus”?

Scholars tell us that there were several places called Emmaus, but they suspect that the one referred to here was a Roman Spa, a resort of sorts, a place of human consolation, the Las Vegas of that day. Thus, these disciples were doing what we invariably do when we get hurt, walk away from the hurt towards human consolation, towards something will take the pain away or at least distract us from it. And they were doing this out of depression; their dream is over and they are now walking inside the sadness that besets us whenever we feel betrayed, shamed, found to be naive in our trust.

Someone comes and walks along with them.  It is Jesus, but they don’t recognize him.  Jesus begins to explain to them the story of the Messiah as expressed in the Jewish scriptures. But it wasn’t until they ate with him in the breaking of the bread that they recognized him.

Now the rest of the story comes in today’s reading. The disciples went as fast as they could to tell the eleven apostles. We can imagine them, excited and happy and talking fast, when suddenly, without warning, Jesus appears to them in the middle of the room. They thought they were seeing a ghost and became terrified.

Jesus tried to calm them down, bring them to a peaceful place. He did some kind things for them. He explained that ghosts didn’t have flesh and blood and Jesus had them touch him. He showed them the wounds of the cross. And then, to really show he wasn’t a ghost, he told them he was hungry. That’s not very ghostly, is it!  He helped himself to the baked fish as he had many times before.

The Apostles are finally comforted and calmed down. Then he explains to them  all the things that had happened which apostles had thought disastrous. He told them the same things he had started to tell the disciples on the road to Emmaus. He explained the law of Moses, the psalms and the prophets foreshadowed him, and especially his suffering. He explained why the son of Man had to suffer, die and be raised.

I would love to have been a fly on that wall of that room!

But we get to know why, too.

The Acts of the Apostles which is our first reading today gives us the content of the very first homily ever given. It was given by the Apostle Peter and in it he explains to the people exactly what Jesus explained to him. Listen to it again: God has just brought to fulfillment what he had announced beforehand through the mouth of all the prophets, that his Christ would suffer.

And in the second reading today, from the letter of John, that apostle lays out further that his suffering was for the forgiveness of sin. It is interesting to note that in the Letter of John, John says that Jesus is the expiation for our sins, and not for our sins only but for those of the whole world. In other words Jesus has put an end to guilt for our sins – for everyone in the world’s sins.  And James says that we know him by keeping his commandments.  I would like to suggest that if a non-Christian keeps his commandments – that is, loves his God and his neighbor – that his sins are expiated. In my mind, I think this is why I believe that in heaven I will meet great men like Ghandi who were not Christian. Surely Ghandi kept the commandments of Jesus even if he did not believe in Jesus. This is probably a controversial idea, but I think it is suggested in our readings today.

Isn’t it interesting that, right in the middle of this season of Easter joy, the church focuses our attention on the suffering of the messiah? The prophets announced long ago that God’s messiah would suffer; it is written that the messiah must suffer; Christ had to suffer.

Jesus’ followers even today never have been able to come to terms fully with the idea of redemption through suffering. Surely suffering cannot be good, cannot be God’s desire for us! Jesus, however, turned suffering into a positive force, buying redemption with the single coin that has suffering and death on one side and resurrection on the other.

The amount of suffering in our world is staggering. Apart from the suffering that comes naturally with life, there is the suffering we inflict on ourselves through injustice, violence and war. The suffering of Jesus continues in our day, and we still have difficulty seeing its victims as our redeemers. The US Bishops in their “Economic Justice for All in 1986 wrote: “Jesus takes the side of those most in need, physically and spiritually. The example of Jesus poses a number of challenges to the contemporary Church . . . most radically, it calls for an emptying of self, both individually and corporately, that allows the Church to experience the power of God in the midst of poverty and powerlessness.”

Therefore, like other accounts of the risen Jesus, this one is amazingly wonderful. And despite the efforts of people over the years to reduce these stories to something neither quite so strange nor nearly so wonderful, one fact remains: The resurrection community that had experienced Jesus’ dying, now experienced his risen presence. And it was, quite insistently, an embodied one.

This Jesus is a person of sight and sound, of memories and relationships, of love and tenderness. He would take food and allow himself to be touched. Even his wounds could be examined. It was a recognizable and identifiable Jesus, a realization of his bodied existence. And yet – he seemed to transcend or go beyond what we think of as our bodies. He would appear out of nowhere, supposedly pass through walls and closed doors, walk on water, and reveal wounds -  startlingly different from the bodies we inhabit today.

We come across claims quite often today that this cannot be literally true. But what if it were true? Either this is all sham, or there is some kind of  bodied existence that is not the same as the sheer physical limitedness of our bodies that we have right now. We keep hearing myths about robbed tombs, Passover plots, DaVinci codes, mass hysteria, and orchestrated illusion. So what? It seems to me that the witnesses were describing something that was real to them and beyond words – how do we explain something we have no words for?

So two things I would like you to think about this week.  Since we claim friendship with God, is this shown in what we say and what we do? As St. John says, whoever keeps his word, the love of God is perfected in him.

And secondly, think about the resurrection and how you would have dealt with and how you are dealing with it now. In this Sunday’s gospel, Jesus invites all the disciples and all of us to do what  he invited Thomas to do last Sunday, “Touch me,” so we might come to believe in his resurrection.

Believing in the resurrection leads to preaching a gospel of repentance and forgiveness, which invites all peoples to “touch” Jesus and be raised to new life . And so this is the good news I try to bring you today.

Fr. Ron Stephens, St. Andrew’s Parish, Warrenton VA

Homily for the 2nd Sunday of Easter, Year B

Homily for the 2nd Sunday of Easter, Year B

I would like to talk today about ‘believing”. St. Thomas, the doubter, is central to our Gospel reading today and personifies the person who has to see to believe things. Jesus, as a result then, simply praises those who have believed without seeing.

What would cause us to believe something that we haven’t seen and that is out of the realm of the imaginable. If a neighbor, whom you thought highly of, came to you and said they were taken up by aliens in a field outside of town last night, would you believe them? I don’t think too many of us would. We would attribute the siting to many things – some with psychological explanations, some trying to make scientific or rational sense out of what they saw.

Thomas is not too different from most of us in that way. His friends have told him a story that seems to go against the laws of nature and what his own senses have told him cannot happen. People just do not rise from the dead. Only by experiencing for himself would he be able to come to terms with something so miraculous, so outrageous, so against nature.

And yet, you are all here today in this church. At some point in your life, you stopped acting like Thomas, and without seeing, without sensual experience you have come to believe in this man, Jesus of Nazareth, as more than just a man, a person who has defied nature, a person we have come to believe was God.

Or maybe you haven’t. Maybe you are still waiting for the experience – like Paul who went blind and was thrown off a horse – something that forces and grounds your belief.

There are Christians today who do not feel that Christ literally rose from the dead, but still believe that Christ is somehow alive in the world. Catholics believe, and restate each week in their Creed – we believe that “on the third day he rose again”.

Do we believe this? Or do we just put it in some dark corner of our mind and try not to think about it? What do we believe?

Why is it important to know what we believe and to think about it? Because what we believe is the direct cause of how we act and what we do. If we can believe, as did Thomas, that Jesus is “My Lord and my God!” so much can follow from that belief. The words of Jesus and the kingdom of heaven on earth now and beyond, becomes  meaningful in every act of every day for us.

If, instead, we hide it in a corner and never take it out and look at it, it is a hollow belief, if a belief at all. And the happiness, the security, the peace that Jesus promises will be hollow for us in our lives as well. If we want to trust and have faith in Jesus that all his promises will be true in our lives, we need to work on our belief.

In the first reading today from the Acts of the Apostles we can see what the belief of the early Christians led to. They were attempting to create the kingdom of God on earth by their belief and faith in Jesus and trusting the words and the pathway and the direction that he gave to them. Whether they were successful or not, their ideal as expressed in Acts was to be unified – one heart and one soul. They wanted economic equality – they sold their possessions and held everything in common. They wanted religious equality – they listened to the Apostles and were treated as a family.  They wanted equality of mind – they tried to live in unity with no prejudice of caste, of power, of race. From their beliefs came action, and the result according to Acts was that “great grace was upon them all.”

Furthermore, from our beliefs should also come great peace, great joy and absence of fear. The Psalmist in our most beautiful psalm today, singing about the day of the Lord, says “I shall not die, but I shall live, and recount the deeds of the Lord….[the Lord] did not give me over to death.” From our beliefs should come trust that there is something beyond our physical deaths, something that allows us to live in the present to create the kingdom, knowing that the fullness of the kingdom will be there for us afterwards.

The Second Reading from John also stresses another result of our belief. It is through our belief in Jesus that we are able to show the kind of love that changes the world. Our faith, our belief “is the victory that conquers the world,” John says. Our belief allows us to obey the commandments, not as burdens, but as ways of showing our love for the children of God. “Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God.” We become family by our beliefs, under one Parent, the family of God. We act from our beliefs by showing love, by breaking down prejudice, by fighting for God’s justice, by treating each other as family.

“Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.” That is us who are here. That is the Good News of today. We are family by our beliefs and we can change the world. The kingdom of God is here now, and it starts with our belief. Dust it off, strengthen it, pray for it, and accept the graces that it brings. We can be, like the first apostles “of one heart and one soul”. That is truly Great News that I bring to you today.

 

Fr. Ron Stephens, St. Andrew’s Church, Warrenton VA

Homily for Easter Sunday, Year B

Homily for Easter Sunday, Year B

[Using Acts 10:34-43, Psalm 118, 1 Corinthians 15:1-11, Mark 16:1-8]

I was reading somewhere someone’s answer to the question, What will you be doing on Easter?  It was probably typical for many people today. The person spoke of not being religious, so Easter was all about the Easter bunny, and baskets of candies or small gifts, Easter egg hunts, and so on. Her final comment was that Easter was all about kids.

I have to wonder how the reasons for a day of celebration can change so drastically and dramatically. When did Easter cease being a religious holiday and become a celebration of something else, like the Rite of Spring, perhaps?

Obviously, since you are here at Mass today,  this way of thinking has not totally permeated your consciousness, and you still see the religious significance of what we celebrate today, but it is sad that more and more, religious holidays are being taken over by marketing and secularism.

If you have been turning yourself around this Lent, if you have been using Lent the way it is supposed to be used, you have been preparing yourself for this day for forty days. It is impossible for us in this culture to spend too much time thinking about Lent, but hopefully, if only at Mass, you took the time to look over your life and stop for a moment and look at where you have been going and where you are. If you have found some time to meditate or fast, all the better.

If you have participated in the liturgies of the last three days leading up to Easter, you have an even better awareness of the religious significance of this feast and how at least once a year, we need to reawaken our awareness of Jesus, the Christ, and the remarkable thing his death and resurrection have accomplished.

Jesus lives on! That is the message of today. He has been transformed, just as we can and will be transformed. He has destroyed the idea that death is finality, infinite nothingness. He has so loved us that he gave his life for us and gave his life to us. He continues to come to us in the gatherings we have, in the Eucharist he bequeathed to us, in the Spirit that inspires us. The Christian needs to celebrate this day because it is something remarkable to remember and celebrate. The fact that we celebrate it in the Spring is a reminder that nature also comes back to life. We look at the fresh growth of the trees and flowers, the greening of the world, and we know that we shall experience the same thing.

Easter eggs, colorfully decorated, can also be a reminder of the Resurrection if we let them. Out of the egg can come new life, and if one has ever seen an egg hatch, it is a wonderful moment.

Try not to let the symbols or reminders overtake the actual event of the Resurrection and take a few moments to ponder the real miracle of today.  The non-religious, I suppose, have to invent reasons to celebrate today. But we don’t!

The reading from Acts today recreates a sermon of St. Peter for us. Peter is beginning to spread the Good News, and is quite clear in his statements.  He tells us that Jesus was raised from the dead on the third day. His original testimony in Acts was just a very clear statement that Jesus was put to death on a tree, raised from the dead, and was seen by him and a number of people who knew he was alive because they he did things that a live person could do, like eat with them.

Similarly, St. Paul, probably earlier than Act was written, affirms the same thing. He tells us that he was given the Good News himself, and that good news was that Jesus died for our sins, was raised from the dead and lived among people again for a short time before ascending to heaven.

The clarity of that message in St. Paul and Luke’s Acts of the Apostles should make it clear to us that this belief was the earliest in Christianity, permeating the thought of the earliest Hebrew-Christians, and was seen by them as the good news that needed to be told to everyone.

The end of Mark’s Gospel is not so clear and ends very abruptly with Mary Magdalene and the women fearful because the body was missing. Scholars feel that the section after this was added many years later because someone felt that Mark should have said more about the Resurrection and the appearances of Jesus. But, I personally, like the ending of this first to be written Gospel. If you remember, the very first line of the Mark’s Gospel makes it clear who Jesus is. All through the Gospel that question comes up again and again and the followers of Jesus seem almost clueless as to the answer to that question.  It seems appropriate to me that even after Jesus has been raised from the dead, the women and the others still haven’t understood what has happened.  In fact, it won’t be until Pentecost that everything is put together for them by the Spirit. The empty tomb at the end of Mark says it all, and if you think about it seriously, it should leave you with goosebumps and awe at the wonder of it. That is what Easter is truly about. So I urge you to celebrate today the good news of the Resurrection. Have fun with your bunnies and eggs and chocolate and family gatherings, but don’t lose sight of the fact that in the big picture, Jesus has given us a hope that we could never have had without him. A hope of eternal life. A knowledge that our journey is not stopped by death, but it is just a pause on the way to the completion of the kingdom of heaven we can start here on earth. Rejoice. Celebrate. This is the day the Lord has made! This is the Good News beyond all Good News. Rejoice and be glad of it! Happy Easter to you all.

Fr. Ron Stephens, St. Andrew’s Church, Warrenton VA

Palm Sunday of the Passion of the Lord, Year B

Homily for Palm Sunday, Year B

[My recommendation for this homily today is that it be used as an introduction to the reading of the Passion today, rather than as a commentary or homily afterwards. The power of the Passion should be its own homily...Fr. Ron]

Recently I have been reading a dense, difficult to read, book called “Jesus in Context” by Richard Horsley, a professor of theology in Boston. The thesis of the book, if I can summarize it accurately, was that the Gospels were written down over time, and that at first, stories we told, based on the memories of the people close to Jesus. If any of you have played the Memory Game, where someone starts a story or saying and it is passed around a circle, you know that the story changes as it goes around the circle, because each person remembers it a little differently.  Essentially, this is what Horsley says happened to the Gospels and is one of the reasons we have four different Gospels and each differs in some details. He also goes on to say that because of this, we should not be concentrating on small periscopes or passages out of context because originally it was the whole story that had meaning, not so much the small parts of the story taken out of context.

Obviously in the church each Sunday, we do exactly this.  We take something out of context and read just a small section of the longer work. Only if you come every week for an entire year might you hear the whole Gospel, making it difficult to see the forest for the trees.

At one point he uses this example.  If I brought in three bars of a Bach cantata, and the organist players the three bars, it wouldn’t make a lot of musical sense. It is too short to get the melody line or for people to see the overall movement or themes of the cantata. But essentially that is what we do each week is bring in three bars to listen to.

This week, however, with the longer Passion reading, we do get a chance to see the larger picture, and one of the benefits of this is that we get to feel the story, to experience it in a more emotional way rather than just an intellectual way.  If we really listen, we can’t help being moved by the events.  It is, still, out of context, though.

Mark’s Gospel has a movement to it, a story-line or plot which I have been trying to point out to you in each of my homilies.  In one sense it is a mystery story, with the hearers being in on the answer to the mystery from the beginning, but with the characters in the story unaware until the end. There is also a plot movement to Mark’s Gospel that puts the Passion into a context.

The Hebrew of Jesus’ time would not understand the American’s idea of separation of church and state. For the Hebrew it was all one. The hated Romans had conquered Judea but left the rule in the hands of the Jews, appointing a Jewish man as ruler. Many of the laws of the period were Jewish laws and we inseparable from religion. Jesus saw himself in Mark, as a prophet who was presenting an alternate vision of the world. He knew, either because he was the Messiah, or because he saw what happened to other prophets, that when they came into conflict with the ruling class, be it Roman or Hebrew, that the likelihood was of him being killed, just as John the Baptist had been.  Jesus decision to go into Jerusalem was a major one.  Had he stayed preaching in the countryside, he might not have come not conflict with the religious-political ficus of his day. Had he not entered Jerusalem to the acclaim of many people, had he not caused a ruckus in the Temple, he may not have been killed. But it was his conscious decision to go to Jerusalem.

That is the context of the Passion story is Mark.  Many people believe that this passion story is probably one of the earliest stories to be told about Jesus, and while there are a few details that differ in each of the Passion stories we have, the similarities are quite remarkable. The writers have Jesus say different things in each version, but that is because it is adapted to suit the theme of the story they are telling. What we need to see is the overall pattern, to hear the story freshly, to feel what the original hearers must have felt as they listened to the narrative.  It speaks volumes to us.  It affects our heart if we let it. In it we truly hear the Good News of our salvation.

Fr. Ron Stephens, St. Andrew’s Parish, Warrenton VA

Homily for the 5th Sunday of Lent, Year B

Homily for the 5th Sunday of Lent, Year B

The three readings today are not quite as related as they sometimes are, but there are some interesting things about them. As we get closer to the end of Lent, the readings take on a more of a philosophic bent regarding the nature of death and suffering.

The first reading is from Jeremiah and is again written while the Jews were in captivity in Babylon.  The prophet Jeremiah felt that the Jews had broken the covenant with God that was made by Moses on Mount Sinai and that was why they were in captivity.  He was looking forward to a new covenant that God would establish where God would write his law, not on tablets of stone. but in the hearts of the people.

From the time of St. Paul, Christians have understood this new covenant Jeremiah wishes for, as having been created by Christ’s suffering and death, leading to the outpouring of the Spirit and allowing the covenant to be written on the hearts of the faithful. This is one of the only times in the Old Testament that the term New Testament is mentioned so expressly.

And so, in our Psalm response today we sing : Create a Clean Heart for me, O Lord” – a clean heart that can receive and live this New Testament.

In the reading from St. Paul, we would see in context that St. Paul was generally trying to prove the proposition that Christ was the heavenly high priest. Here he is trying to demonstrate, that although Jesus was not a Levite descended from the tribe of priests, he was yet chosen to be a priest by God. He takes the scene of Jesus at the Garden of Gethsemane where Jesus prays “let this cup pass from me, but thy will be done” as Christ unreservedly dedicating himself to God’s will. And St. Paul says, so he “was made perfect”.  Made perfect – here refers to reaching one’s goal, not moral perfection. Through his resurrection he becomes our high priest and our source for salvation. If you remember the high priest was the only human who could enter the Holy of Holies where they believed God was.

The Gospel today starts off with Greeks who are obviously Gentiles, requesting an audience with Jesus, but we never are told whether they actually got that audience or not. Jesus did make contact with non Jews, but we never find out if he met these. It seems like John forgot to come back to it.   Jesus often showed reluctance to bring the Good News to the Gentiles, although he did on a few occasions – it wasn’t until the church began spreading that this became a completely accepted mission.

Instead, Jesus begins a discourse which has two main themes which can be directly related to the problem of bringing the gospel to Gentiles: (a) a grain of wheat must die if it is to bring forth fruit; (b) and only by being lifted up will Christ draw all to himself.

First of all the grain of wheat riddle or parable.  The grain of wheat has to die before it can bring forth fruit. Biologically that is true.  The hard core or shell of the seed literally has to crack before there is new life.  The fruit that Jesus is referring to, though, is the conversion of the Gentiles.  He is saying that he has to die before the Gentiles can be converted.  Then he says the “Son of Man has to be lifted up” and this also must take place before the Gentiles can be converted. Why?

Jesus was a Jew and he came first for the Jewish people. He argued with Jewish opponents, he worked signs and he taught the Jewish people. But the authorities would not honor him or glorify him. So, the parable of the seed explains the exact way that Jesus will be glorified.  His death will be the source of life for many, both Israelites and non-Israelites. Those who follow Jesus will gain their entry into eternal life through death also. “Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will preserve it for eternal life”. That is why we must not be too attached to the things of the world, but must look forward to the life to come.

Years ago, when the Betty Crocker Company first began selling their cake mixes, they offered a product which only needed water. All you had to do was add water to the mix which came in the box, and you would get a perfect, delicious cake every time.

It bombed. No one bought it and the company couldn’t understand why, so they commissioned a study which brought back a surprising answer. It seemed that people weren’t buying the cake mix because it was too easy. They didn’t want to be totally excluded from the work of preparing a cake; they wanted to feel that they were contributing something to it. So, Betty Crocker changed the formula and required the customer to add an egg in addition to water. Immediately, the new cake mix was a huge success. Unfortunately, many people make the same mistake when it comes to “packaging” or presenting the Christian religion. They try to make the call of Jesus Christ as easy as possible because they’re afraid people won’t “buy it” if it seems too hard.

Jesus said, unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies it bears much fruit. Jesus then explained what he meant. He said, “The man who loves his life will lose it, while the man who hates his life in this world will keep it.” It’s true in life isn’t it? If we are going to get anything out of it we have to invest ourselves in it.

Lastly, today’s reading is about sin, something I have not preached a lot about, but is a very real condition in the world today. When we say that Jesus is the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, we are recognizing the fact that we live surrounded by sin. And what is sin but an estrangement from God and pulling away from the life of the world to come. We cannot be perfect, but with the death of Christ we have the ability to overcome sin through God’s gift of grace.

This awareness of our sinfulness is present at every Mass when we celebrate the penitential rite at the beginning of Mass and say the “I confess to God” and the Lord have mercy. In the Our Father we pray: forgive us our sins as we forgive the sins of others against us.

The lifted up body and blood of Christ at Mass, fulfilling the prophecy of Christ about being lifted up, takes away the sins of the world, and our response to that at Mass is that though we are not worthy, we are healed by the word of God.

The fact that we acknowledge our sinfulness shouldn’t embarrass us or hinder us from seeking God’s presence.  It simply means that God’s word is now written in our hearts as we heard in Jeremiah. It is the condition of the new covenant that Jeremiah talks of. “This is the cup of my blood, the blood of the new and everlasting covenant. It shall be shed for you and for all so that sins may be forgiven.” Do we ever stop and think about the meaning of those words we hear every week at Mass. The Consecration is actually incomprehensible if we think we are sinless. After all, it is the re-enactment of Christ’s sacrifice for the forgiveness of our sins.

Our admission of sin is the occasion for singing the glories of God. It is the appreciation of how happy we are to be called to the supper. It is the acceptance of this new covenant, Christ’s passion and death embodied in our Eucharist. When we take Communion, we take the new law, the new covenant, literally into our bodies, our hearts. And the promise of Jeremiah is realized in the flesh: “I am yours and you are mine. I will remember your sin no more.” It is as important to remember why Christ died for us as it is to remember that he did so. In fact, the paschal mystery, as well as the Eucharist, cannot make very much sense at all if we fail to understand how much we need both. “You have set us free, you are the Savior of the world.”

So what can we take from these readings today? First, the knowledge and assurance that Jesus has been raised up, and taken away our sins.  Secondly, we celebrate that ‘being raised up’, that new covenant, that paschal mystery, in the Eucharist each week, and we need to try to listen to those words and take them into our hearts. Lastly, we need to show our gratefulness that we are forgiven and saved. And this is the Good News Jesus gives us today.

Fr. Ron Stephens, St. Andrew’s Parish, Warrenton VA