It's About Much More Than the Letter of the Law . . .

        In the Gospel for February 16^th, Jesus says to his disciples: “I tell you, unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.” This was powerful and radical stuff back in Jesus’ day. It challenged the religious authorities and the local power structure. And it ignited a firestorm that would eventually lead to his arrest and crucifixion.

       The scribes were legal experts on the Law, the Commandments given to Moses by God; and the Pharisees scrupulously followed and held others to the letter of that Law. They were very big on rules and regulations.

      But Jesus tells them, and us, that it’s about much more than the letter of the law. It’s about mercy and forgiveness and inclusion and the choices we are faced with in everyday life. It’s about loving and honoring our neighbor just because he or she exists, just because he or she is a fellow child of God.

      Jesus affirms the Law, the commandments handed down to Moses: we shouldn’t kill each other, we shouldn’t cheat on our spouse, and we shouldn’t perjure ourselves.

      But he goes beyond that. He tells us that God’s law is not only a matter of external actions like killing, or committing adultery, or lying under oath. God’s law is also about what goes on deep within our hearts and minds. It’s about anger and hurtful words; it’s about gossip, bullying, hate and exclusion; it’s about lustful thoughts, and dishonesty in our transactions and our relationships.

      In the end, it’s all about the choices we make. The choices between good and evil that we hear about in next Sunday’s first reading from the Book of Sirach; and the hidden wisdom that St Paul tells us about in the second reading: the wisdom that God has implanted within our hearts calling us to know the difference between right and wrong.

      How radical was Jesus: “If you bring your gift to the altar, and when you get there you remember that another person has something against you, leave your gift at the altar, go first and make peace with that person, and then, and only then, come back and offer your gift.”

      Each night before we go to sleep, before we say our prayers, and each Sunday before we come to the Lord’s Table, let us look deeply within our hearts and ask ourselves if there is any unfinished business in our life, any anger, any dishonesty, any lust, any meanness.

      And if the answer is ‘yes’, let us go and make peace with the persons we may have hurt, peace within ourselves, and peace with our loving God.

      Jesus wasn’t kidding around or just making a suggestion. He really meant what he said.

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Readers of this blog might enjoy these books by Deacon Lex. Both are available on Amazon.com:

Just to Follow My Friend: Experiencing God’s Presence in Everyday Life

http://www.amazon.com/Just-Follow-My-Friend-Experiencing/dp/1456360728/

Synchronicity as the Work of the Holy Spirit: Jungian Insights for Spiritual Direction and Pastoral Ministry

http://www.amazon.com/Synchronicity-Work-Holy-Spirit-Spiritual/dp/1463518781/

We Are Called to be Godparents for Our World

      In the middle of our church, right next to the baptismal font, there is a very special candle. It is called the Pascal Candle, better known as the Easter Candle. It is blessed by our pastor at the Easter Vigil Mass and it represents Christ as the light of the world.

      When we baptize a child the priest or the deacon will take the child’s baptismal candle, light it from the Easter Candle, and hand it to the godparents. They in turn will take the baptismal candle and stand next to the child. This is very symbolic. It represents the responsibility of the godparents to carry the light of Christ to the newly baptized child, and to help keep that light burning brightly throughout the child’s life.

      In a broader sense the Easter Candle is also symbolic of our own job, the job of every disciple of Jesus, every Christian across the globe and down through history. We are called to be godparents for our world, to carry the light of Christ and dispel the darkness wherever we go.

      The readings for January 26^th, the third Sunday in Ordinary Time, speak to us about Christ as the light of the world and our own individual call to dispel the darkness.

      In the first reading, the prophet Isaiah tells us how the people of Northern Israel were enveloped by great darkness in the 8^th century B.C. Their land and their homes were destroyed by the Assyrian Empire, and they were taken away as slaves. But Isaiah promised that a great light would come to dispel the darkness. That light came in the person of Jesus. He began his ministry almost 800 years later in the very same region of Northern Israel where the darkness had struck. Jesus was the great light foretold by Isaiah. Christ is the light of the world.

      In the gospel that light calls the first disciples, the first Christians, Peter, Andrew, James and John to help dispel the darkness for the whole world and for all time.  It later called St. Paul and the people of Corinth that he wrote to in the second reading. That light is still calling. It calls every one of us.

      God has planted each of us somewhere in the garden of time and space. Wherever we are in that garden, we are meant to be instruments of God’s healing and love.

      Each time we go into our church, let us look at the Easter Candle and remember: we have been called to be godparents for our world; we have been called to carry the light of Christ; we have been called to dispel the darkness wherever we go.

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Readers of this blog might enjoy these books by Deacon Lex. Both are available on Amazon.com:

Just to Follow My Friend: Experiencing God’s Presence in Everyday Life

http://www.amazon.com/Just-Follow-My-Friend-Experiencing/dp/1456360728/

Synchronicity as the Work of the Holy Spirit: Jungian Insights for Spiritual Direction and Pastoral Ministry

http://www.amazon.com/Synchronicity-Work-Holy-Spirit-Spiritual/dp/1463518781/

We Are All Called to be Holy Families

            One of the really great things about being a deacon is that we can be married and have a family. Wanda and I have been a family for 46 years. Over the years our family grew into sons and daughters and grandchildren and in-laws.  It also grew to include several cats and a wonderful little beagle named Kate.

            When I was ordained a deacon my family grew again to include the members of our parish, and all those with whom I minister in psychiatric hospitals, in spiritual direction, and in support groups. I have been blessed to know and live the meaning of family.

            On December 29^th we will be celebrating the Holy Family. We look at the family of Jesus and Mary and Joseph and see the ideal of what every family should strive to be: a relationship based on mutual love, respect and trust. And today, in the third millennium, we recognize that there are many types of families. There is the nuclear family, and the extended family; the work family, and the parish family; and many variations of each. Wherever there is a human relationship built on love, there is a family. And whenever that love is unconditional, there is a holy family.

            Throughout his preaching Jesus calls us to love and forgive each other as God loves and forgives is – unconditionally without any strings. He calls us to never close the door of our heart to another person, even when another’s heart has been closed to us. Jesus calls us to be a holy family to one another. We are all called to be holy families, despite the drama and dysfunction we sometimes find ourselves mired in; despite the mistakes we inevitably make; despite the hurts and scars we bear and sometimes inflict. We don’t have to be perfect. We just can never give up, never stop loving, never stop reaching out.

            On this upcoming feast of the Holy Family, in this season of Christmas, let us examine the relationships, the families that we are, or once were, part of. Let us reopen any locked doors in our hearts and take the first step to reach out across the house, across the miles, across the years, even beyond the grave to heal any relationships that have been broken.

            With the grace of our loving God in our hearts, we can be that holy family we are called to be.

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Readers of this blog might enjoy these books by Deacon Lex. Both are available on Amazon.com:

Just to Follow My Friend: Experiencing God’s Presence in Everyday Life

http://www.amazon.com/Just-Follow-My-Friend-Experiencing/dp/1456360728/

Synchronicity as the Work of the Holy Spirit: Jungian Insights for Spiritual Direction and Pastoral Ministry

http://www.amazon.com/Synchronicity-Work-Holy-Spirit-Spiritual/dp/1463518781/

Advent: A Reminder That It Is We Who Are On Our Way Back Home To God . . .

December 1^st is the first day of Advent. Traditionally we have seen Advent as a time of waiting for God to come to us. But Advent is really a reminder that it is we who are on our way back home to God; and that when our time on earth comes to an end, we will have to account for what we did and what we failed to do along the way.

The readings and gospels during Advent call us to wake up, to snap out of it and pay attention to our own readiness to stand before God. In the first reading on December 1^st, the Prophet Isaiah tells us to put away the weapons of anger and bitterness and to walk in the light of the Lord. In the second reading Saint Paul tells us to awake from sleep, to stop kidding ourselves, lying to ourselves about what’s important in life, and to throw off the works of darkness. In Saint Matthew’s gospel, Jesus calls us to remember and not repeat the mistakes of the people in Noah’s time. They were so preoccupied with their own wants and needs; they didn’t believe anything bad would ever happen, that they would ever be called to account. And then one day out of nowhere the flood came and wiped out their work, their preoccupations and their lives.

The Church uses the readings and gospels during Advent to help us recognize the transitory nature of much of what preoccupies and consumes us. None of it will last. This doesn’t mean that we become piously detached from everyday life and its responsibilities. We can still plow the fields and commute to work; we can still grind the flour and raise our families. But we can do all this in a mindful way that carries God’s love and mercy into all the circles of our life.

While most of what preoccupies and consumes us will not last, the one thing that will last is love. Throughout the gospel Jesus tells us that we must love and forgive others unconditionally: this includes those who are most in need, and those whom we may not like very much, and even those whom we have a hard time forgiving or embracing. This is the measure against which we will be held accountable.

Advent is our reminder that one day when we least expect it, we will stand before God to account for how much we really did love and forgive other people. Let’s not be like those people in the time of Noah. Let’s stay awake and be ready for that day. There can be no unfinished business.

http://deaconlex.blogspot.com/

Time

Jesus said, "All that you see here — the day will come when there will not be left a stone upon another stone.”Will you and I be ready to face that day when it comes?

Next weekend we will celebrate the feast of Christ the King. It is the last Sunday in the Liturgical calendar and it marks the end of the Church year. The Church has been preparing us for this over the last few weeks with readings and gospels that speak about the last days, the end of time as we know it. 

We can look at today’s gospel as a prophecy about the end of the world. We can see it as foretelling a cataclysmic moment in human history when the righteous will be swept up to heaven in rapture, and the not-so-righteous will be swallowed up into hell. Or, we can see it as a wake up call, a reminder that, through our Baptism, each one of us has been hired by Jesus to be a construction worker, a builder, of the Kingdom of God — and time is running out.

No one knows how and when the world will end. What we do know is that time, our own unique individual time, will end some day. The end of the world will come for each of us at the moment we cross the threshold of life into death. And when our end time does come, we will be asked to account for what we did with the precious time we were given.

I believe that when we die each one of us will sit alone in a little room with God and watch the movie of our life. And in that movie we will see where we loved and where we failed to love. And sitting there next to God, the source of all goodness and love, we will judge ourselves on how much we loved, really loved; how much we forgave, really forgave; how much we helped others to find goodness and wholeness and healing in their own lives, their own unique circumstances.

The Church, in preparing us for the end of the year with these readings, is helping us call to mind our own mortality, our own inevitable end time. None of us knows how much time we have left. Each new morning, as we open our eyes, God gives us 1,440 brand new minutes to use. We can use them with love to heal our world and cherish our relationships with others; or we can waste them in bitterness and anger.

The great thing about the end of the Church year and the reminder about the end times, is that we still do have time — time to love, time to forgive, time to come outside of ourselves and be present to others. We have this gift of time to fix whatever is still broken in our lives; to heal any damaged relationships; to make ourselves whole.

Like Jesus says in today's gospel, "All that you see here — the day will come when there will not be left a stone upon another stone." We don't know when the end of the world will come; but we do know that it will come for each of us. And when that day does come, all that will remain for eternity is the love we gave while we still had time.

http://deaconlex.blogspot.com/

The Pharisee and the Tax Collector

Luke 18: 9-14           

Jesus told this parable to those who thought they were very righteous and looked down on everyone else: “Two men went to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood up front by himself and prayed: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get to the temple.’ But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner. I tell you that this tax collector, rather than the Pharisee, went home justified before God. For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”

Jesus has a way of turning our preconceived notions upside down. Over the past few months we’ve heard a couple of gospels that have ended with an unexpected twist. We heard how a priest and a Levite, the Jewish equivalent of a deacon, crossed the street to avoid helping a man who had been beaten unconscious by robbers and left to die in the gutter. It took a Samaritan, a resident from the wrong side of the tracks, a despised foreigner from a tribe that proper Jewish society looked down upon as a bunch of ungodly social outcasts, to stop and treat the wounded man with compassion and love. Jesus tells us that this Samaritan, this despised social outcast, was much closer to God than the priest or the deacon.

Then we heard how a local religious leader, a Pharisee, invited Jesus to his home for dinner, but failed to welcome and offer him with the customary courtesy of a washcloth to clean the dust of the street off his feet. It took an uninvited prostitute to wash his feet with her tears and dry them with her hair. Jesus tells us that this prostitute was much closer to God than the local religious leader.

The above gospel, about the Pharisee and the tax collector, also ends with a counter-intuitive twist. We would expect a parable about a piously scrupulous churchman and a greedy and dishonest public official to end with the churchman as a role model, but not so. Jesus tells us that it was this tax collector and not the churchman who went home justified in God’s eyes.

Who were these two people, the Pharisee and the tax collector? It helps to take a look at their background. The Pharisees were members of a sect within Judaism. They were looked upon as role models of piety. They believed in following every single religious rule and regulation to the letter. The tax collectors back then were not like IRS workers today. They were often wealthy men who purchased the right to collect taxes from local residents. They did this in a brutal and exploitative manner adding hefty commissions for themselves. They were hated as cruel and dishonest agents of the Roman occupying power.

The Pharisee in this parable is not praying with sincerity. He’s not even really praying to God but rather boasting and trying to reinforce his own self-esteem by judging and trashing someone else. The tax collector, in contrast, sits with his head buried in his hands, in the back of the temple examining his own conscience and humbly asking God for mercy.

Jesus uses this parable to show us how God wants a humble and contrite heart, and how self-righteousness and being judgmental of others really drives us away from God.

The above gospel puts a question to each of us: Am I like that Pharisee? Do I judge others whose lifestyles, marital status, or choices are different from mine? Or who vote differently than I do? Or who prioritize different moral issues? Are there times when I am tempted to look down on others; to feel that I am morally superior or closer to God than others; to think that another person is unworthy to call himself or herself a Christian, unfit to receive Holy Communion?

We cannot know what’s in the heart of another person. We cannot judge another’s relationship with God. We can only sit before God with our own humble and contrite heart.

This gospel also offers great consolation to us. There is nothing that we can ever do that will make God stop loving us. No matter what we’ve done in the past, no matter what sins we’ve committed or how bad we think we are God accepts our humble and contrite heart.

God is merciful and unconditionally loving. God calls us to love each other in the same way. In the end, this will be the only thing that really matters.

The Harvest is Abundant in Everyday Life

          

      Throughout the four Gospels we hear Jesus telling his disciples, and through them us, to go out and cure the sick, cleanse lepers, drive out demons and raise the dead. But what the Gospel writers left out was the part about raising our kids, cherishing our spouse, doing our best at our job, and being present to our relatives and friends and the people we serve.

      Curing the sick and driving out demons are valuable skills, especially in today’s economy. But serving God as a sister, a priest, a brother or a deacon are also wonderful and loving vocations. No less wonderful, no less loving, however, are the vocations of being a parent, a spouse, a sibling, a friend. Our vocation in life is right where we are, right where God has planted us.

      It takes faith to cure the sick, and courage to drive out demons. But it takes faith, courage, love, and stamina to raise a child to adulthood; to be a lifelong best friend and sweetheart to a spouse; to be a loving relative, friend, worker, or boss. These are the vocations in which God has planted us. The harvest of our vocation is abundant. That harvest is love.

      Yes, curing the sick and driving out demons are spectacular achievements. But channeling God’s love in everything we do and in every relationship we have, that’s a vocation.

      My sisters and brothers, the harvest is abundant in our everyday life.

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Readers of this blog might enjoy these books by Deacon Lex. Both are available on Amazon.com:

Just to Follow My Friend: Experiencing God’s Presence in Everyday Life

http://www.amazon.com/Just-Follow-My-Friend-Experiencing/dp/1456360728/

Synchronicity as the Work of the Holy Spirit: Jungian Insights for Spiritual Direction and Pastoral Ministry

http://www.amazon.com/Synchronicity-Work-Holy-Spirit-Spiritual/dp/1463518781/