Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, cycle A

Matthew 11:25-30

There are certain things which we all know are true. A catastrophe can strike. We can develop a severe illness, or Alzheimer's disease, or have a stroke or heart attack or cancer. In a moment our whole future would change and not for the better. We all know that our world is pretty fragile. If North Korea fires a nuclear missile, we might end up at war with China, and our life style would definitely suffer. Our government seems fragile. Even before our current president, people were defying the law of the land and getting away with it. It's happening even more now. When the law breaks down, it won't be long before some other form of power takes its place; and that probably won't be a good thing.

None of us like to think about these things, because we really don't want our lives to be disrupted. And yet, we know these things are true.

Jesus talks about how The Father has revealed things to the little ones that he has hidden from the wise and learned. And I think Jesus is getting at just what I was talking about. Those of us who are wise and learned get that way because we want to control our lives. We want to understand everything, because understanding is the beginning of control. And unfortunately as we learn more and more about how the world works, and as we find that we can to a certain extend control our lives, we begin to think deep in our hearts that we can control everything – even though we know we can't. But maybe a better way of putting it is that we live as though we are in control; we live a lie.

Jesus speaks of little children but was extending that term to the people who followed him. They were mostly poor and lived from day to day. They all lived close to catastrophe and death. Roman soldiers would confiscate their crops leaving them to starve. You never knew when you might get leprosy and get kicked out of your community. If you were a woman there was a pretty good chance you would die in childbirth. And you knew that you had no control over your life, whether you lived or died. And oddly enough, when you lived knowing those things, you lived like a little child; you enjoyed what you could; you valued your friends and relatives over possessions. Since you had very little it wasn't that hard to part with a little so that someone else might get a bite to eat; after all, you knew that someday the shoe would be on the other foot. Those with nothing, even today, seem to find inner peace and inner joy more easily than those with a lot, the wise and learned.

Jesus looks at us like a loving mother looks at her child. She sees her toddler stumble and fall, or try desperately to do something that he can't do. She looks at his frustration and anger, and listens to his cries – such heartfelt cries – over little things that don't really matter. And she holds out her arms to gather her child to herself and comfort him. That's what Jesus promises us – if we hide ourselves in him, if we put our trust in him instead of ourselves, we will finally be at rest. If we are in Jesus,deep nothing can really harm us, and knowing that means that whatever happens, the fact that we have come to Jesus reminds us that deep down nothing can really harm us.

Jesus goes on further to say that his yoke is sweet and his burden light. In parts of the world, they still use cattle to pull plows. Left to their own devices, cattle live kind of random lives. They spend most of their daylight hours grazing, because it takes a lot of vegetable matter to keep a cow going. And if you've ever watched a rodeo, you know that one thing that really irritates cattle is having someone try to ride on your back. So cattle that are trained to pull a plow have to go through a major conversion. They have to submit to wearing a yoke and pulling a plow. But there is a reward; they are given much more nutritious food – grain, corn, and so on – and they are cared for, sheltered, kept well, because for the farmer, he had to purchase the animal and train it. But what about freedom? You might say. I would venture that cows trained to pull plows and cared for in a humane manner are probably not at all concerned about that.

Jesus says we are kind of like those cattle. If, instead of pursuing our own foolish goals – more money, more power, more security, more stuff – all of which eat into our time and instead of making us more free, gradually chip away at the little freedom we thought we had, and we become slaves to our stuff. If on the other hand we accept Jesus' yoke, work for Jesus' goals, carry his burdens, we find that he is doing most of the heavy lifting.

All of us know how fragile life is; how everything we love can disappear in a heart beat. But we live a delusion; we live as though that isn't the case. And living a lie always takes a lot of work. Today Jesus calls us to step into reality and begin living the truth – begin making all our decisions knowing that everything in this life is transient, and in the end can't do anything to bring us what we truly want. If I want inner joy, than I have to turn away from what substitutes for joy in my life right now. If I want to have real security, real permanence, then the only way I can do that is to rest in Jesus, because he has those things. And if I want a life of real meaning, of real consequence, then in some way I have to allow him to lead, to point me in the right direction, knowing that when I am domesticated, life will be a lot better, here and in the next world.

Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, cycle A

Matthew 10:37-42

Many years ago when my family was young and we lived in Buffalo, we took a drive one Sunday up to the shore of Lake Ontario. We had four little kids at the time; it was a hot day. Our old car just gave out and there we were, stalled by the side of the road. There was a house nearby and I went over to see if I could make a phone call. In those days they didn't have cell phones. I was invited in and the elderly couple inquired about my family. They told me to bring them to the house. While I was frantically trying to find someone who could help me, the lady of the house gave my children some juice and a cookie or two. I finally reached triple A and they told me that with my level of membership they would tow my car to the nearest repair shop, which was a long way from where we lived. As I was relating all this to my wife, the man of the house overheard me. He said that I should borrow his car and I could bring it back when my car was fixed. I couldn't believe someone would loan a car to a total stranger, but there it was. In any event, they took my car to the local garage, I drove my famly back home in a very nice sedan, and the next day Joan and I drove back to pick up my car and drop off their car. I offered to pay, but they weren't hearing it. The man was a retired judge, and he told me he was good at reading people and he could tell that I could be trusted.

Today's first reading talks about hospitality. Jesus in the gospel reading also talks about this. We have a few other sayings of Jesus, about being worthy of him, and losing our life so we will find it, but I tried to tie all these sayings together in another sermon, which fortunately you won't have to hear. I want to talk a little bit about hospitality. Jesus thought it was important, the author of the first book of Kings did also, and in the book of Genesis, we could read many examples of hospitality, especially the one in which Abraham offers the three strangers a meal and they in turn promise that Sarah will bear a son.

So what is hospitality? Why is it so important for a Christian, or a Jew, or a Muslim – I think every religion humans have practiced prizes hospitality.

Hospitality is not the same thing as charity. With charity, we recognize the need of another person and try to fill it. We give food to the hungry, clothing to the naked. Charity says that I have something, you need it, and I will give it to you. You are the recipient of my generosity. In this particular area, I am your superior. Charity, I have to say, is a really good thing, and there is nothing wrong with us rich people helping out poor people. And hospitality is not something you have to do. Having your boss over for supper might fall into that category. But hospitality is different.

Anyone can show hospitality to anyone else. You don't have to be rich, the recipient doesn't have to be poor. The person being shown hospitality doesn't need what you offer. But there is a certain reciprocity to hospitality. There is the person doing the offering and the person doing the receiving. We can see in the life of Jesus that he not only offered hospitality, as when he fed the five thousand with the loaves and fishes, or when he washed the feet of his disciples, or prepared breakfast for his apostles on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, but Jesus readily accepted hospitality as well. We remember many such occassions – being waited on by Peter's mother in law, taking part in the wedding feast at Cana, having supper with Martha and Mary, or with Simon the Pharisee.

So what is hospitality, then? I think a good definition is that it is the attempt by two or more people to create a mutual space in which both lay down their defenses. We all go through life with our defenses up. We don't like to have our personal space violated. When we sense that such might happen, we all have ways of defending ourselves. We avoid eye contact. We make excuses that we have to be somewhere else. We conspicuously look at our watches. Or we may just smile, say a few words of greeting, and move on. In summary, we treat the other person as an annoyance, a bother, an “it”.

When we exercise hospitality, though, we deliberately attempt to relate on a person to person level. This means giving up time, giving our full attention, setting up a relaxing atmosphere to the extent that we can. That is why hospitality is so often associated with a meal. In that situation, whether we are waiting on or being waited upon, our body language and our actions say, “you are a person worthy of my time and effort, you are a person from who I will accept kindness.” Hospitality makes us more human.

I think that's why we see so many acts of hospitality in the scriptures, and indeed, we see Jesus himself calling us to hospitality. Jesus says, “He who receives you receives me, and the one who sent me.”

Sometimes when we think about our religion it seems to be a list of dos and don'ts, most of which are slightly unpleasant. Of course if they were all fun we wouldn't need a list, would we? But there are many things that our faith calls us to do that are actually sources of joy, and the call to hospitality is one of them. Jesus after all said that he came to bring us joy.

In the first part of today's gospel we hear about ways in which we are not worthy of Jesus – loving parents or children more than him, failing to take up our cross and follow him. But I think Jesus is reminding us that we aren't worthy of him, no one is. But He then tells us that if we work together to create that mutual space in which we exercise hospitality, in which we strive to see the other person as a person, not a thing, even if it is only a small act of kindness, Jesus will be there in our midst, along with his father. And that is indeed a great reward.

Twelfth Sunday in Ordinary Time, cycle A

Matthew 10:26-33

I had a friend in medical school who was very bright and destined for a great career. In the summer of our fourth year, he joined a group of medical students and a few professors and went to Mount Everest with the intention of climbing the highest mountain on earth. Through a freak accident he slipped while not attached to the safety rope and fell to his death. We, his classmates, couldn't believe it. What terrible luck. What an awful roll of the dice.

One of the mysteries that confront people who believe in God goes something like this: If God is good, why does he let evil happen? And if God is all powerful, why doesn't he stop evil from happening? And if Jesus promised that if we ask anything in his name, it will be given to us, why is it so obvious that this doesn't work?

There are many different answers to this theological problem. One, advanced by the mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, is that of all the possible worlds that could exist, this is the best. In other words, God has seen to it that everything is optimal, and if you were to change one thing, other things would change for the worse. This is the best of all possible worlds. And of course the response comes: how do you define “best”? Isn't this sort of a cop-out? Any human being could point out a few little things that could make everything better and if we are considering everything from a cosmic perspective, it is no consolation that there is innocent suffering and tragedy in this particular moment in space and time.

Our Muslim brothers hold that everything that happens is the will of Allah. Most Muslims are like you and I, they don't think too hard about what their religion teaches. But a few who realize the implications of this are the ones who will blow themselves up in a public square; after all, if it happens, it was Allah's will. And if you truly believe this, then whatever you do is Allah's will, even if it means that you end up in hell. There is no wiggle room, there is no freedom at all.

Alfred North Whitehead theorized that God was what he called “dipolar”. In his primordial nature he is unchanging, all powerful, present everywhere, all knowing – all those things we think about when we think about God. But God has a consequent nature as well; he is affected by everything that happens in the universe. Everything that happens is received by God, who saves everything that can be saved. God alone is the sum of everything that could be; and the things that make up the universe as yearning for permanence, for transcendence, which only God can provide. So God and the universe are interdependent, in a way. Professor Whitehead started a movement called “process theology” which still has many adherents. While this is a solution to the problem of why bad things can happen, it goes against the Judeo Christian conception of God as completely independent of the Universe.

But Jesus gives us an insight today. He talks about sparrows, and that not one of them falls to the ground apart from the Father's care. In other words, sparrows fall to the ground. The fact that they do does not deny that God cares. The fact that a sparrow falls is not a moment of bad luck, an unfortunate circumstance, a chance happening. At the same time it isn't something God causes to happen. It is as though God steps back, allows his creatures freedom, and then takes whatever happens and weaves it into his grand plan for the universe he created. Do we have anything to say about this? Not really. God's will will triumph, and we can't do a thing about it. But what we can do is align ourselves with God's will. We have the example of Jesus, who prayed, “Father, if you are willing take this cup from me, but not my will, but your will be done.” We have the example of Mary, our mother and Jesus' mother who said, “Be it done to me according to your word.”

Everything that happens is God's will. But we are not robots, we are not puppets in God's hands. God gives each of us total freedom, so that we an always choose to do his will or to resist it. And if we resist it, in a sense we create our own reality, in which we choose not to be part of God's plan, which ultimately is hell. Saint Theresa of Avila said two things about hell. One was that she had experienced a vision in which she experienced hell. It was not hot, there were no devils poking her with pitchforks. It was a state of having no sensation at all. She could not see, hear, taste, smell or touch; she was aware of being entirely alone – forever. She could not even experience the passage of time. When you think about it, that is worse than any picture of hell you might have imagined. Human beings, even hermits, are social creatures, and we define ourselves in relation to other people. To be deprived of this is devastating, and babies who are not touched and held and spoken to wither away and die.

Saint Theresa also said that she truly believed in hell, that there was such a state of being. She did say that she did not think there was anyone there.

So whatever we do, God's plan goes on. We see this in the Old Testament; whenever the Jewish people abandon God, he rescues them and gets them back on track. The individual people who might have lead the Jews astray may die, but the plan goes on, and it still does.

And the best thing is that God has revealed in Jesus his plan for the universe, his plan for the human race, and his plan for you and I. And as Jesus has shown, and as Mary has shown, those who embrace God's plan, those who choose his will over their own, they are the ones who can expect resurrection and eternal life. There is no chance in God's world, no bad luck or good luck. There is only the unfolding of the plan, and our freedom to be part of it or not. Today let us pray that we will be willing agents of God's plan by listening to His Son.

Corpus Christi, 2017

John 6:51-58

I go down to Baystate and Mercy hospitals now and then to see if I can find any parishioners. In the olden days, you could walk in, go over a list of patients who had been admitted and categorized by denomination, and look down the list for people you might know. Now you can only find them if they have listed their church and their denomination on their admission form. But I'm getting off tra here. What I notice more and more is that as you walk through the halls of the hosptals, everyone is looking at a smartphone. You can see a mother and father with a baby; the parents each are attending to their phones instead of the baby. You can see an elderly woman being pushed by someone who is probably a son, and he is looking at his smartphone. There was a recent article that some people consult their smartphones as often as 150 times a day – that's about every six and one half minutes if they sleep for eight hours. And the article went on to point out that recent studies have shown that smart phone addiction is now the second most common cause of divorce among young married couples.

I think we can all tell why. If you want to deepen a relationship you have to work at it. That's pretty straightforward and we all know that. And if you don't put down the smart phone and actually interact with your beloved you will never grow that relationship.

We Catholics, along with members of the Orthodox churches, believe that God has given his priests the power to take ordinary bread and change it into the Body of Christ; to take ordinary wine and change it into the Blood of Christ; and of course we go on to say that now that Christ is resurrected you can't really separate the body and blood anymore, so that Jesus Christ is fully present, body and blood, soul and divinity, in the Bread and in the wine. And that power is given for reasons we can't begin to fully understand. But part of the reason is that Jesus promised to be with his church always, even to the end of time, and this is one of the ways he keeps his promise. And most of us who come to Mass every week if asked, would probably say that, “Yes, I believe that Jesus is really present in the sacrament of the Eucharist”. And we would probably not give it much more thought.

It's interesting that he chose bread and wine for this sacrament. To the people of Jesus' time, bread was something like a pita. You used it to pick up pieces of the main meal or to dip in broth or gravy. Jesus is saying that if you want the good things the Father has to offer, you need him; he is essential. People didn't bake bread in individual portions, either. The dough was kneaded and stretched and placed over a fire on a flat stone or stuck to the wall of an oven. Indian bread is still made that way. But that meant you had to share the bread and Jesus means that as well. As for wine, in Jesus time everyone knew wine was good for you. If you mixed a little with water, you were less likely to get sick from the water. If you poured it into an open wound, you were less likely to get infected. Remember the Good Samaritan story? But wine also brought joy. People were well aware that wine lowered your inhibitions, aided your conversation, and helped you take your mind off your troubles. Of course you could overdo it, but in moderation the effects were all good. Jesus tells us that he is the source of healing and joy.

Jesus becomes our food and drink for many reasons, the primary one, perhaps, being that he wants to form a relationship with us. He is showing us how far he will go – he will allow us to consume him, he will seek a union deeper than any we can have with another human being; Being God, he becomes food and drink; and being man, his body becomes part of our body, and our bodies become part of his. Some of our Protestant brothers and sisters talk about developing a relationship with Jesus; but for us Catholics that relationship goes far beyond being a friend, or even a lover.

But we suffer from cell-phone-itis. Our living, breathing Lord makes himself available to you and I as food and drink, and we consume him and off we go, immersing ourselves in our day to day concerns until then next encounter.

We Catholics used to have a Eucharistic spirituality. We treated the consecrated bread and wine as we would treat Jesus himself. We did it in ritual, to be sure, but ritual is the beginning. There was a fence between the congregation and the altar, not to keep the people away, but to show that this was holy ground. When the priest consecrated the bread and wine, he would hold his thumbs and index fingers together until after communion, because they had touched the body and blood of Jesus. When communion was distributed the altar servers would hold a golden paten under the priest's hands, so that if the host were accidentally dropped, it would be caught. And we were told never to chew the host, because that was how we ate ordinary food and this was by no means ordinary food.

And we would have benediction, when we would take the Blessed Sacrament from the tabernacle and place it in a monstrance so that people could look at Jesus and commune with Him in a special way. We still do that, by the way, but only a small number of our fellow Catholics take advantage of this special time. And we would have Eucharistic processions in which we would carry our Lord out into the streets of the city, showing the world that we were Eucharistic people.

Now I'm not trying to be nostalgic; I'm not one for saying we should go back to the old ways. But if we believe in the Real Presence, we should express that belief in our actions, and the more we do that, the more we will believe, the more we will come to know Jesus in the breaking of the bread. So today on this feast of Corpus Christi, the feast of the Body and Blood of Christ, put down your spiritual cell phones and turn to the one who has become food and drink to nourish you spiritually, to become one with you, to give you the means to become like him. Begin a conversation with him, if even for a short time; make him your only concern, if even for a few minutes. Speak to him as you would to a friend, if only for a few words of love. Jesus has become present to you in what used to be bread and wine; it is up to you and I to become present to Him.

Trinity Sunday 2017

John 3:16-18

Today the Christian world celebrates a doctrine, not a particular saint or event in Christ's life. The doctrine of the Trinity sets Christianity apart from all other religions. But it's very hard to talk about, because our minds are limited. I cannot help but think of the three persons as – yes – three persons. In my case an old man with a white beard, a middle eastern Jew with blond hair and blue eyes, kind of like Robert Redford with a beard, and a bird. I know that those images have nothing to do with the reality, but they come. And then the obvious question is how are these three one? The Trinity is a maddening doctrine, because I literally can't understand it, and neither can you, and neither could Thoams Aquinas or Pope Francis. So why have it? What good is it that we know by faith that there are three persons in one God, that each peson is not the other, and yet each person is God, and that God is one? Historically the Church defined the doctrne of the Trinity because of heresies that popped up about the relationship of Jesus to God. The doctrine is the answer to many false ideas that circulated in the early church, that the Fathers of the Church recognized were wrong. So it must be important. But understanding how the Trinity can be is not the point. The point of the doctrine is to remind us of many things.

First, God is not a thing, or as one theologian said, God is nothing. God is not a being like you and I are beings. We cannot say here God is and there God is not. And because of this the arguments of atheists fall flat. You cannot debate whether God exists or doesn't exist; that debate implies that God is a being. God told Moses, “I am who am” – I am existence itself, I am that which everything that exists owes it's existence to – or as Saint Paul said, “in him we live and move and have our being”.

The second thing about the Trinity is that it tells us that God is fundamentally about relationship. The God of Islam is aloof, and while there are many words in the Koran that describe him, one that is not used is love. Were the God of Islam capable of love, according to their theolgians, then in some way he would share something with humanity, and not be totally other. For Muslims, the goal of life is to completely submit to Allah's will, and a certain mindlessness is needed. That's why its easy to be a suicide bomber; after all, everything that happens is his will, even you blowing yourself up. But Chrstianity, and indeed Judaism, insist that God is open, God is love, and love reaches out, love seeks to grow, to spread itself, to create new lovers, and lovers have to be capable of free will, and to make such beings is to risk being rejected. But the whole story in our scriptures is that when we go astray, God always moves to bring us back – of our own free will, not by compelling us. Because we are made to love, we are already entering into this relationship.

A third thing about the Trinity is that it tells us something about how we are to live. God is creator, and if we look with loving eyes at the world around us, at the people we know, we can see traces of God in everything, because he leaves his signature in everything. Only recently in human history have we come to understand that the fundamental nature of a proton or a neutron is three quarks bound together for all time. But we see God's signature in beauty – and beauty is touches us because we see something of ourselves there – that's oneness; beauty appeals because it is real – that's truth;; and beauty is almost by definition, a good thing; that's goodness. Beauty is the essence of God, and we are given minds and senses to appreciate this.

God is also Redeemer. We think about Jesus dying on the cross for our sins, and rising from the dead so that we can also rise. That's ok, we can think that. But redemption is much larger than that. Redemption is a pattern, God the Redeemer shows us how to live, shows us how we are to act in this world. Jesus said many things but not much that was particularly new. The thing that sets Jesus apart from other founders of religions is how he lived. And so it makes sense for us to know Jesus through the scriptures that were written by those who knew him when he walked the earth.

And finally, God is Sanctifier. That's a fancy latinized word, and like many things we talk about, we probably don't stop to realize that we don't quite understand what it means. But at the bottom, it means that God is faithful. Not only does God love the world, and us, into being, not only does he give us a pattern to follow, but he gets into his own creation to direct it toward it's ultimate purpose – to become one with him. Saint Paul tells us that the Holy Spirit prays in us for what we don't even know we need.

If I truly love someone, I want the best for them. I want them to have joy on this earth. I want them to live forever in heaven. If I truly love someone, I will do everytthing in my power to make that happen. And yet my love is weak and partial, and my power to bring about what I want for the ones I love is very limited.

Not so God. The protestant theologian John Calvin held that because God is all powerful and all knowing, he selects souls to be saved from the beginning of time, and the rest of humankind will be damned. His logic is that all deserve damnation because of sin, and God excepts some from this fate for reasons known only to him. But the Trinity, the logical consequence of the God who is love itself, says just the opposite. God does everything he can do to enfold us all in his heart and enjoy his presence forever; and only we can choose not to allow this to happen. God loves us so much that he will never take away our freedom.

So don't think about how the Trinity can be, one plus one plus one can be one. You can't figure that out. Think instead about what the Trinity tells us about the nature of God and how God acts in our own lives, and how we are to live. And then it becomes clear that how this teaching is the heart of Christianity.

Pentecost 2017

John 20:19-23

So it's Pentecost again, and we turn our attention to the Holy Spirit. We are not sure who he is or what he does. We get the Father, and even more his Son Jesus, but the Holy Spirit always seems like an afterthought. If any of you read the book “The Shack” you remember that the Holy Spirit was portrayed as a being just on the edge of perception, something like Tinker Bell in the Peter Pan story. So today we could try to talk about who the Holy Spirit is, but people have been burned at stake for getting that wrong; or we could talk about the gifts of the Holy Spirit, which is interesting, but what do we do with that? So let's begin with the gospel passage, when Jesus breathes on his apostles and says, “Receive the Holy Spirit”. Now our Church teaches us that we receive the Holy Spirit at baptism, and when we get confirmed, we enter into a sort of spiritual adulthood. So all of us have the Holy Spirit. What does that mean on a day to day practical level?

Saint Paul once said words to this effect: “Do not be drunk with wine, because that only leads to trouble. Instead, be filled with the Holy Spirit.” He is contrasting the effects of too much alcohol with being filled with the Holy Spirit. People drink alcohol usually to alter the way they see things. Cares slip away, one's conversation becomes more profound, people seem more interesting …” And Paul is saying the Holy Spirit is way better than the effects of alcohol, and there is no hangover.

So what does it mean to be filled with the Holy Spirit?

A couple of years ago I visited a man every week to sit with him and bring him Holy Communion. He had advanced Alzheimer's disease, and after his caregiver cleaned him up, he would be placed in a recliner and the TV switched on. He would stare at the TV with bathroom breaks and breaks for food. He would be moved around at times to prevent bedsores. He couldn't carry on a conversation. When I tried to talk with him, he just stared straight ahead. I knew I was wasting my time, and so I took his hand and said a silent prayer and prepared to leave. But he gripped my hand and I asked if he wanted communion. I made the sign of the cross, and he sort of did as well. And I said the Lord's prayer, and his lips moved, and I gave him a small piece of the host and he took it and swallowed it. And this went on with every visit. The Holy Spirit reminded me that in God's world, everything matters, and no act of loving concern is wasted.

And there is a lady I visit. She also has advanced Alzheimer's disease. I sit down next to her and she is clutching a doll. I ask her how she feels, and try to get a glimpse of recognition; her nurse tells me that now and then she does say a few words. But I must scare her, because in our encounters, sooner or later she looks at me with a horrified expression on her face and sometimes she cries. In those moments I feel the immense separation between us, the distance. But the Holy Spirit reminds me that at some level this women and I are one – because God is one, and everything comes from God, and there is a unity not only between God's people, but even between people and things.

And for a long time I visited another patient. He was a Vietnam veteran, who had developed severe PTSD, and when he returned from the war he took to alcohol, lost his family, lived on the street for a while, eventually developed a severe neurological disease probably from the alcohol, maybe from something he got exposed to in Vietnam. When I met him he could still get from the bed to the toilet and operate a motorized wheelchair. But a year later he couldn't do anything for himself – but his mind was intact and he could speak and listen. And I thought, what a wasted life. What a purposeless life. But in that terrible situation, he made peace with his wife, was reconciled with his daughter, began receiving the sacraments again, and eventually died peacefully. And the Holy Spirit reminded me that everything has a purpose, that this universe has a plan.

Our Western Civilization tells us that nothing matters, that this life is all there is, that religion is a superstition, that human life, from conception to advanced old age, is cheap and disposable. The Holy Spirit reminds us that that's not true, everything matters, even things we think are total wastes. Because, as the old saying goes, God doesn't make junk. So when you do the laundry or mow the lawn or clean the toilet, those things matter, and they are worth doing well.

Our civilization says that some people are friends and some are enemies, that one political party is on the side of good and the other on the side of evil. We are increasingly told that there is no room for compromise; that people who believe differently than me and my friends are “reprehensible”. But the Holy Spirit says that we are one, because we reflect God, and God is one.

Our world says that this life is all there is, that everything is relative, that one civilization is as good as another, because good and evil are subjective terms. We are just random collections of atoms floating on a ball of mud in a purposeless universe. But the Holy Spirit says that God has a plan, a plan that extends from the fate of the Universe to whether a sparrow falls from it's nest. And that you and I are indispensable parts of this plan.

So he is constantly whispering to us, “everything matters; everything is connected; everything has a purpose.” And when we let that soak in, when we keep listening to his voice – guess what? We experience love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Because we realize, as the poem says,
Earth's crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God, but only he who sees takes off his shoes...

Seventh Sunday of Easter, cycle A

John 17:1-11

My wife and I were recently at a social occasion where we sat with some other people at supper. A young lady sat across from me. I noticed a mole on her neck and didn't like the looks of it. Finally I couldn't stand it any more and told her that she should have it checked out. She told me that I wasn't the first one to tell her that, but the mole had been there when she was born and hadn't changed in all that time. Now I realize that having a perfect stranger go up to you and tell you you should have something checked out does not generally happen in polite circles, but my point is that seeing a mole sets a whole lot of things in motion in my brain – because during my career I learned all about melanoma, benign moles, and how to tell the difference, and there were many times when the difference required more than just looking – a biopsy perhaps. My brain associates a long list of things with the word mole – because I'm a physician and cancer was my specialty. If you have a profession or a trade, you know that there are two types of learning – one has to do with how you do things, and the other has to do with learning the special vocabulary of that profession. When I hear my daughter who is a lawyer talk about torts, I have only the vaguest idea of what that means. But you mention mole to me, and I could talk about how they happen, how to tell if the mole is risky or not, how to manage moles change – I could go on and on.. And my daughter could do the same thing talking about torts. We'd probably bore each other silly, too.

The next three Sundays take up the mysteries at the center of our Christian lives – the gift of the Holy Spirit, the nature of God, and the mystery of the Eucharist. And today we hear Jesus tell us why we need to become specialists in what these things mean, insofar as possible.

Jesus is praying his so-called high priestly prayer at the last supper. He is praying aloud. And he talks about giving eternal life to all those the Father has given him. And then he clarifies – “This is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.”

When most of us hear the words “eternal life” we get a picture in our heads of white robes and harps, or maybe eating at a banquet that never runs out of good things and we never put on weight. But Jesus, who specializes in eternal life, tells us that that's not it. Eternal life is knowing God, whom we know through knowing Jesus Christ. Jesus is using the word “knowing” differently than we generally use it in English. When Adam and Eve knew each other, the result was their son Cain. When someone knows pain, it doesn't mean he has an intellectual understanding of pain. It means he is in a situation where he experiences pain. When we think about knowing in this sense it's more like the word Jesus used. Not only do we intellectually grasp the object of what we know, but we also have a relationship with the object.

So Jesus tells us what eternal life is – it's having a relationship with God through Jesus. And that relationship like any knowing, requires two things – just like becoming a member of a profession or a practioner of a skilled trade or a musician or you name it. There is learning how you do it and learning the vocabulary of the profession – what the special words mean.

What we are supposed to do to know God and His Son is pretty clear from scripture and tradition – to deepen our relationship with God we need to pray, to serve others, and to discipline ourselves – prayer, almsgiving, and fasting, to use old terms. Our Moslem friends are about to enter Ramadan, a month when they fast, even from water, from dawn till dusk. They do this with the intention of becoming more conscious of God and their utter dependence on him. If they can't fast for some reason, they are obliged to provide food for the poor. We Christians need to revive the practice of fasting in some way in order to be more conscious of God in our lives.

The other part of knowing is indeed deepening our spiritual vocabulary. Our Catholic church has a rich tradition of exploring the mysteries of our faith. We have brilliant thinkers like Thomas Aquinas, Eloquent preachers like Bishop Fulton Sheen, and relatively uneducated souls like Sister Faustina, all of whom were given special graces to shine their own light on the scriptures and traditions of the Church. Time spent in learning more about what we believe and why we believe it ultimately helps us know more about Jesus Christ and more importantly, deepens our relationship with Him.

In today's gospel selection Jesus tells us that he came to give us eternal life, and eternal life is to be in a relationship with God. If we were to read the rest of Jesus' prayer we would see that what Jesus wants for us is not wings and a harp, or even a a great banquet in heaven. What he wants is that we are drawn into the heart of the Trinity so that we participate in that same Love that he and the Father share, the Love which is the Holy Spirit. In that relationship there is no end, and while we can't even conceive of what it is all about, we do know that in that relationship is all that really matters, because it's what God wants for us, it's what we were made for. Jesus has already done the heavy lifting – he's made it possible, he's given us everything we need to get there. But a relationship cannot be one-way and that's why Jesus tells us that eternal life is knowing God and the one He sent into the world.

So as we travel through Pentecost, Trinity Sunday and the Feast of Corpus Christi, let us make a resolution that we will try to deepen and clarify what we know about these mysteries, and in doing so, enter more deeply into that relationship to which we are called.

And one last thing, I'm retired from medicine, so don't show me any of your moles.