Sunday, June 12, 2011

Homily Pentecost Sunday, Year A


Following is my homily for Pentecost Sunday which has a different set of readings than the Pentecost Vigil. I used some material from the homily for the Vigil Mass.  This particular Mass was a Mass of Thanksgiving for my Priesthood Ordination that I celebrated at St. Athanasius parish in Louisville, KY – I had been assigned there for my Pastoral Year as a seminarian and celebrated my Diaconate Ordination there last year.

I am so happy to be here this morning! Around this time last year I celebrated my Diaconate Ordination with all of you. And now I stand here as a priest, thanks to God's grace and your prayers! And I am bringing to this Mass all of the wonderful memories I have of the academic year I spent with you a couple years ago. How powerful the Holy Spirit is, to have brought us together in this way, under such joyful circumstances! I am also glad to have been at the presbyteral assembly this past week with Fr. Gary and all of the priests of the Archdiocese. I am happy to be Fr. Gary's brother priest.

Add to that the fact that today is Pentecost Sunday! Aside from Easter, if you were to ask someone what the second most important Feast Day of the year is, he would probably say "Christmas" or "Halloween"… maybe even "St. Patrick's Day"! But, I would argue that Pentecost is the second most important Feast Day of the year. It brings to an end what we call "The Great Sunday," the 50 days of the Easter Season. It marks the birthday of the Church as it is sent forth, empowered by the Holy Spirit, to proclaim the praises of God and to forgive sins. All of this gives a special meaning to this day for me.

    Today the Church has placed us in the middle of two of the most powerful events in salvation history. The Risen Lord appeared to the apostles on the evening of Easter Sunday, breathed into them the Holy Spirit, and gave them the power to forgive sins – a sort of foretaste of the Spirit the Apostles received in full, 50 days later at Pentecost. Then, the Holy Spirit almost seems to be breathed into them from the lips of God the Father Himself – "suddenly there came from the sky a noise like a strong driving wind, and it filled the entire house in which they were."

This isn't just one among many miracles. The power breathed into them on Easter Sunday and the filling of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost are intimately connected. The only other times in Scripture when God breathed on mankind, was in the beginning – in the book of Genesis, when "the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life" (Gen 2:7) – and in Ezekiel, where God raises an army of corpses to new life by the breath of the Spirit (37:9). Just think of how the apostles felt! They probably remembered when Jesus breathed on them on Easter Sunday and they knew the Scriptures of Genesis and Ezekiel. All of this comes together in one magnificent moment in which the apostles receive a newfound courage and zeal and the ability to praise God in languages they didn't even know. Their hearts, and souls, and minds are filled with God, the Holy Spirit. The Church is on fire and alive! Today this moment is ours too! We are that same Church today. We are the Church of the Apostles, still alive, still on fire, forever young with the exuberance of the Holy Spirit!

    God the Holy Spirit wants to fill us too. He wants us to receive the same fullness of Himself that the Apostles received on this very day, over 2000 years ago. In fact he has done this already. He infused in our souls Faith, Hope, and Love through the waters of our Baptism and he enhanced and completed these gifts when we were Confirmed. But He hasn't stopped there! The Holy Spirit wants to fill our souls every single day so that the Church 2000 years from now will still be on fire and alive.

    We have our own part to play in this. Most importantly, I think, would be to simply pray to God, the Holy Spirit. Often times we have no problem praying to God, the Father, because we can imagine a fatherly figure, with gray hair, and a beard! And we can pray to God, the Son, because Jesus Christ is so vividly depicted in the Gospels and in artwork. But the reigning image of the Holy Spirit is a dove! We don't pray to doves! Most of the time we think of God, the Holy Spirit, simply as a force, or a power, that comes and goes, as if He is the magic pixi dust that God sprinkles on us every now and then! He is much more than this! He is God.

    Throughout my childhood and still today, my Dad always encouraged my brothers and me to pray to the Holy Spirit. Any time we were nervous about a minor league baseball game, or a test at school, or an argument with a friend, my Dad would always tell us to pray to the Holy Spirit for wisdom and guidance. I recommend that for us today. If you have not been in the habit of praying to God, the Holy Spirit, today is the perfect day to start, the day when we celebrate how generously He filled the apostles, and us, with courage and zeal.

    The Holy Spirit comes to each of us in His own way. "There are different kinds of spiritual gifts," St. Paul said, and different forms of service and different workings. But, "To each individual the manifestation of the Spirit is given for some benefit." And, he continues, "For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body." Therefore, today we, myself certainly included, must ask ourselves: As one member of the entire Body of Christ… As one Catholic in the whole universal Catholic Church… How am I serving the larger body? How am I portraying the Catholic Church to the world around me? Do I make the life of a Catholic one that others would want to follow so that they too can be helped by the graces given to me through the Church? Does my life cause others to want to be one with Christ too?

    Being a faithful Catholic would be a heavy yoke, burdensome, and impossible really if we were only to rely on our own power. But, neither God nor the Church gives us responsibilities and then leaves us to our own devices. Rather, we have been given the power of the Holy Spirit, the Third Person of the Holy Trinity, the Lord, the Giver of Life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son and with the Father and the Son is worshipped and glorified. It is this same Holy Spirit, who spoke from all time through the prophets and through the Church today, who is our help, our advocate, our guide. He is the one who makes the yoke and the burden of the life of holiness, the life of a Catholic Christian, easy and light. He makes life as a child of God one of joyfulness, happiness, peacefulness, and calmness.

    We have only to acknowledge and remember the great things He has already done for us, plead for Him to come again and again, be willing to receive Him, and then be willing to live according to Him. The Holy Spirit will even help us ask. For as St. Paul says, "the Spirit too comes to the aid of our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought." With His help we can be a people who courageously speaks to all ethnic and social classes of the "mighty acts of God," exclaiming that "Jesus is Lord", sharing with them the true peace that comes only from the Lord, and drawing each other together as one Body united to our head, Jesus Christ.

Saturday, June 11, 2011

Homily Pentecost Vigil, Year A


Following is my homily for the Pentecost Vigil Mass, which has a different set of readings than the Mass on the day of Pentecost. This particular Mass was a Mass of Thanksgiving for my Priesthood Ordination that I celebrated at Bl. Teresa of Calcutta parish in Fairdale, KY – I had been assigned there for two summers as a seminarian and celebrated my Diaconate Ordination there last year.

    I am so happy to be here this evening! This very time last year I celebrated Pentecost Sunday and my Diaconate Ordination with all of you. And now I stand here, thanks to God's grace and your prayers, again celebrating Pentecost Sunday, but now as a priest! How powerful the Holy Spirit is, to have brought us together in this way, under such joyful circumstances! I am also glad to have been at the presbyteral assembly this past week with Fr. Bob and all of the priests of the Archdiocese. I am happy to be Fr. Bob's brother priest.

    As part of my seminary formation, one of the things that the Church requires of us is that we take what is called a "canonical retreat." Canon Law, the law of the Church, requires that we take a five-day retreat in order to prayerfully prepare, in a more intense way, both for our Diaconate Ordination and our Priesthood Ordination. For each one I chose to go to the Passionist monastery of cloistered nuns in the Diocese of Owensboro, where I am originally from. I highly recommend this monastery to all of you. Their chapel has a unique feature that is especially relevant for the feast of Pentecost that we celebrate today.

    It was most often the case before the Second Vatican Council that if a religious order was cloistered – meaning that they devoted their entire lives to praying in one place, as the heart of the surrounding diocese – then their privacy was strongly guarded so that they could be single-minded in their prayer and not be distracted by the things of the world. This would often mean that when the nuns were in chapel with other laypeople, they would be set apart by a screen or a wall with a type of window. After the council this type of separation was kept in place but relaxed so that the People of God, consecrated religious and laity, could pray better together as one Body of Christ.

A view of the channel from the font to the altar
    In the Passionist monastery, the nuns are set apart by a water channel with about a two-foot stone boundary that runs from the steps of the sanctuary all the way down the center aisle of the chapel to the entryway that has a waist-high holy water font. In this way, the laity pray on one side of the channel and the nuns on the other and both are still in view of each other. What makes this water channel so beautiful is that it maintains the cloister that the nuns require but it also gives deep meaning to the chapel and the liturgies that are celebrated there. Ultimately, it is a symbol of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit who are often symbolized by water in Holy Scripture.

    Jesus, as St. John's Gospel tells us, stood up and exclaimed to all the people, "Let anyone who thirsts come to me and drink. As Scripture says: 'Rivers of living water will flow from within him who believes in me.'" And John explains, "He said this in reference to the Spirit that those who came to believe in him were to receive." For Jesus, timing is everything. This happened on the last day of the Jews' great seven-day celebration called, The Festival of Booths. During this annual liturgical celebration, pilgrims who came to Jerusalem would live in huts made of braches that they called "booths." One of the major rituals of the week would consist of the high priest drawing water from the Pool of Siloam, carrying it in procession into the Temple and then pouring it on the stone altar of sacrifice to commemorate the time in which the Lord God provided for his people during their Exodus journey through the desert by making water flow from a rock. It is against the backdrop of this celebration that Jesus stands up and exclaims that he is the source of spiritual water and that it is he who satisfies all that we thirst for.

    Plus, Jesus and the people both knew that the name for the pool that the priest drew water from, "Siloam," means "Sent." By connecting himself to that pool, Jesus helps them to know that as the Source of Life, he will send them Life Itself in the form of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost

    Everything that water means for the body, now has meaning for our soul. Just as water cleanses the body, gives us strength, and refreshes us, so the Living Water of Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, cleanses our souls of sin in Baptism and Reconciliation, gives us strength in Confirmation, and refreshes us in the Eucharist and the Anointing of the Sick. The Holy Spirit is active in all seven of the sacraments constantly forming and transforming us as the New People of God as we wander in our Exodus journey through the desert of this life to the Promised Land of Heaven.

    How are we doing on this journey? At times are we a "stiff-necked" people, doubting that the Lord can provide for us or rebelling against his commands? If we see ourselves as God's chosen people, bound to Him by a covenant, with the goal of following Him faithfully in this life so that we can be happy with Him forever in the next, then we can give our lives a proper context. We can ask ourselves, "Am I faithfully keeping my covenant with God? Do I avail myself generously of all that the Holy Spirit provides me through the Church in order to stay faithful to God? Or am I not content with these and turn to other things to satisfy my deepest thirsts?" It can be helpful, in trying to live as faithful Catholics day-by-day, to see ourselves as that Old Testament people and seeing the Holy Spirit as the giver of all that they needed and all that we need today.

    Our first reading began to describe how God forged the covenant with his people; it was done amid the majesty of Mt. Sinai, amid thunder and lightning, heavy clouds, loud trumpet blasts, columns of smoke and fire, and earthquakes. This was done in order to show His people that his might and power exceeds that of all the other pagan gods. God is the One, True, God of Power and Might. This was also done to show them the great significance of what they were being brought into, what it means to be the chosen people of such a powerful God.

    The Lord said to His People, then and now: "If you hearken to my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my special possession, dearer to me than all other people, though all the earth is mine. You shall be to me a kingdom of priests, a holy nation." Our covenant with God wasn't forged amid fire and lightening, rather, it was forged at our Baptism amid the fire and light of our Baptismal candle and the fire and light infused in our souls by the power of the Holy Spirit through the Holy Water. Just like the water channel in the Passionist monastery, we are sent through the Church to be transformed and to transform the world around us. Just like the water from the Pool of Siloam, we are Sent as God's People with the aid of all that the Holy Spirit gives us. With His grace, we become more and more God's special possession. In fact, we become, as Moses foretold, a kingdom of priests, a holy nation. As a people set apart, for all the world to see, as an example to the world of how they should live and what they are capable of with God as their Father, we must ask ourselves today: As one member of the entire Body of Christ… As one Catholic in the whole universal Catholic Church… How am I serving the larger body? How am I portraying the Catholic Church to the world around me? Do I make the life of a Catholic one that others would want to follow so that they too can be helped by the graces given to me through the Church? Does my life cause others to want to be one with Christ too? Do I act in a priestly way – and this question is for all of us. Do I make sacrifices for other people? Do I offer up my sufferings to God? Do I pray for my family and friends? In these ways we all, ordained or not, can become the holy nation that God wants us to be.

    All of his would be a heavy yoke, burdensome, and impossible if we were formed as God's people and then sent forth to rely on our own power. But, neither God nor the Church gives us responsibilities and then leaves us to our own devices. Rather, we have been given the power of the Holy Spirit, the Third Person of the Holy Trinity, the Lord, the Giver of Life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son and with the Father and the Son is worshipped and glorified. It is this same Holy Spirit, who spoke from all time through the prophets and through the Church today, who is our help, our advocate, our guide. He is the one who makes the yoke and the burden of the life of holiness, the life of a Catholic Christian, easy and light. He makes life as a child of God one of joyfulness, happiness, peacefulness, and calmness. Does this describe our lives today?

    The Holy Spirit comes to each of us in His own way. But we can find hope in knowing that the Holy Spirit has indeed come to all of us. At this Vigil Mass we anticipate and long for Him to come again in our lives. This is His desire too. We have only to acknowledge and remember the great things He has already done for us, plead for Him to come again and again, be willing to receive Him, and then be willing to live according to Him. The Holy Spirit will even help us ask. For as St. Paul says, "the Spirit too comes to the aid of our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought." How happy the Lord will be to look down upon his people and see in each one of us rivers of living water flowing forth in a life of holiness and a world transformed by His Power in us.

[picture credit: the nuns' blog]

Sunday, June 05, 2011

Homily Ascension Year A


    I am so happy to be with here with all of you today. I was ordained a priest just last weekend and I still can't believe it; it hasn't fully sunk in yet. Last summer I was assigned here to St. Gabriel as a deacon and I cannot say enough how grateful I am to Fr. John, Fr. Jim, and all of you for that experience. Even as a deacon Fr. John and Fr. Jim treated me as a brother in ministry which helped me to begin to experience the life of a priest. My first times preaching during Mass were here at St. Gabriel, and I appreciate your patience as I continue to develop the art and science of preaching. My first Baptisms were here too, a set of five boys that Deacon Bowling helped me to keep organized. During my last year of seminary, I studied the theology of the Eucharist, Ecumenism, and pastoral leadership; and I learned how to celebrate the Mass and the sacraments of Reconciliation and Anointing of the Sick. But the ministry of Holy Orders began here and I am so thankful to all of you for your continued support and for allowing me to celebrate this Mass of Thanksgiving with you.

     Reflecting on the Solemnity we celebrate today, the Ascension of our Lord into heaven, I remembered one of the most significant developments in my spiritual life since I entered seminary in 2005: that is, when I finally transitioned from appreciating what is said in the Bible as if it was a museum piece to appreciating it for what it is saying to me and to the Church. For too long, I was accepting the Scriptures as something good but outside of myself. Seminary, thank God, helped me to interiorize what the Scriptures mean for me personally. I am convinced now that I would be a lousy priest if I had not made that transition. In fact I would be a lousy Christian! Until we accept from God his Holy Word into our hearts and minds, we can never really be transformed by It. If I had not been receptive to God in this way, I would have been no different than a secular historian who appreciates an ancient text of human history.

     The texts that describe Jesus' Ascension into heaven are some of the most challenging – and consoling – texts for us personally. After Jesus rose from the dead and appeared to many of his disciples as proof of his resurrection, his apostles still had troubling believing Him. They did not believe Mary Magdalene when she described how Jesus appeared to her in the garden outside of the tomb. They did not believe the two disciples with whom Jesus walked on the road to Emmaus. All told, the New Testament records 11 separate appearances of Jesus after his Resurrection. Despite all of this, today's Gospel says, when the apostles saw him, "they worshipped, but they doubted." Even so, Jesus did not give up on them. He knew their hearts and knew what they would be capable of once they received the gifts and fruits of the Holy Spirit. So he gave them the Great Commission: "Go… and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you."

     If we receive this scenario for ourselves, we can see that we too have been sent and are being sent on this great commission, in our own lives and in our own ways. But we have had our own doubts too, haven't we? I, for one, when times were hard at the seminary, sometimes doubted if I had what it takes, if I could cut it as a priest. Perhaps you have had doubts about God too: when a loved one died, or when there was a divorce in your family, or when a child stopped going to Church, or when there were lay-offs at work, or when you failed in some way at school. Due to this fallen world and our fallen nature, hardships inevitably have come and will come to all of us.

     But the point is, at this Mass, we are his apostles, standing shoulder to shoulder with all of the hardships and doubts we have endured, together looking up to heaven trying to understand what God is telling us. Before the Eucharistic Prayer, I will say "Lift up your hearts" and the response will be "We lift them up to the Lord." Our hearts will be wide open for God to see. Yet I still, at the very end of the Mass will say, "Go in peace to love and serve the Lord." We will then each have to ask ourselves: "How will I love and serve the Lord? How will I make disciples and teach others to observe all that Christ has commanded me?" By that point though, we will have what the apostles didn't have when they asked themselves these same questions: the power of the Holy Spirit renewed in us by the Eucharist. True, they too received the Eucharist at the Last Supper, but they had not yet received, like we have, the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, the gift we will celebrate next Sunday.

     Today's celebration, the Ascension, is one of the reasons I am a firm believer in spending some brief time in quiet prayer before or after Mass or after Communion, giving thanks to God for the gifts he has given us and asking Him and ourselves "How will I love and serve the Lord? How will I make disciples and teach others to observe all that He has commanded me?" The instructions for the Mass, when describing the necessity of silence, say that the people should spend some time after Communion praising and praying to God in their hearts. "Even before the celebration itself," the instruction continues, "it is commendable that silence be observed… so that all may dispose themselves to carry out the sacred action in a devout and fitting manner" (GIRM 45). And Canon Law, the law of the Church, says that the priest too "is not to neglect to prepare himself properly through prayer for the celebration of the eucharistic sacrifice and to offer thanks to God at its completion" (can 909). If these readings are meant for us, how can we receive them if we don't spend the time to ask God "How" and "Why" and listen to His answer?

     Our youth who prepare for Confirmation and our parishioners who celebrated the Easter Vigil are especially primed and ready for this. They have been discerning in an intentional way how they have been chosen by God and what his great mission is for their lives. But just because most of us were baptized as babies doesn't mean that we can't have this same enthusiasm and zeal too. Each one of us, at our Baptism, died with Christ when we were lowered into the water and when we were lifted up out of the water, rose again with Him. The whole rest of our lives then is our experience of the Ascension that follows. For us, evangelizing all nations means more than just encouraging someone new to convert to Catholicism, it means helping to bring about the conversion of the entire culture, making every area of our lives more Christian. Being Baptized is only the first step in the process of growing in holiness and making our world holy.

     One of the treasures of the teaching of St. Josemaria Escriva, and the spirituality of Opus Dei that he founded, is that oneness with God is not only limited to our time spent at Mass or in the parish. It can be experienced and even cultivated in the midst of our day-to-day lives. At Mass we receive, in a special way in the Eucharist, the grace to go and live out God's Great Commission. And in our silent prayer we can discover how we are to convert our culture, how we are to love and serve the Lord, make disciples, and teach others to observe all that He has commanded us.

     When he ascended to the right hand of the Father, he never really left us. In the Eucharist, in the Gospel, in the person of the priest, and in all of us praying together and doing good works, he still lives and ministers to our fallen world. How will each one of us bring Him to our families, our friendships, our work, our school, our recreation, our parish?

     This will be different for each one of us, but it could take the form of saying grace before meals, even in a restaurant, if you aren't in the habit of doing this… or saying a decade of the rosary privately or together with family before going to bed. In our friendships this could mean not participating in gossip or working hard to be a good influence on each other. At work you could attend daily Mass during your lunch break or before the work day begins. The Cathedral downtown is within walking distance of many of the major business centers. And our late Archbishop Floerish made sure that there was a parish in almost every neighborhood. At our school we can be sure to continue to give religious education the highest priority. In our athletics and recreation we can avoid participating in things that only bring about anger or bitterness. And in our parish we can try to become more active Catholics, caring deeply about each other, even those we don't know, and praying together more often. We can do all of these things. We have already been given all that we need. We can continue to make St. Gabriel not a parish of the status quo, but of the Ascension – a parish of people who take their faith seriously and are not afraid to be counter-cultural, to convert our world, and to let God convert our hearts.