Feast of the Epiphany, 2020

Matthew 2:1 - 12

For many families, ours included, the Christmas season is a time when we go out of our way to be with those we love. In our house by the time the season is over we will have been to several parties given by our children or ourselves; we will have had house guests every day for about three weeks; and we will have our days disrupted in other ways. And when everyone is gathered together our thoughts will go to those who can’t be with us as well. And yet, in this age of the internet, why could we not have simply gone to our computers and set up a skype conference or something like that. We could still see and hear each other, and we would not have to put ourselves out to be in each other’s presence.

Of course no one wants to skype when you can be in each other’s actual presence. We human beings are designed that way. And all of us know that even though we can’t explain it, being in the presence of someone beats phoning or skyping or communicating in any other way. In fact, it’s one of the last things to go in patients with dementia. They lose the ability to talk or feed themselves, but another person’s presence is often the one thing that will bring them peace, will calm them down when they are upset.

The Feast of the Epiphany celebrates God’s presence among us. The Magi learned from their studies that someone really important would be born in Bethlehem at a certain time and place. But when you read the whole story from Matthew, it turns out that they weren’t the only ones. The Jewish scholars had the prophecies of Isaiah and Daniel to tell them the same thing, and thus they were able to answer Herod’s questions, which eventually ended in the slaughter of all the boys under two years of age in Bethlehem. The Magi went to great trouble to be in the presence of the Messiah, the promised one. And when they found the little boy and his parents in a decidedly lower class home, they did not go away disappointed; they rejoiced exceedingly. They saw the child with the eyes of faith. The Jewish scholars knew that the prophets had predicted that the Messiah would come at a certain time, and this was the time; and in a certain place, and Behtlehem was the place. But they are not moved to travel eight miles from Jerusalem to Bethlehem; and if they had, they might have been disappointed in what they found; they did not see with the eyes of faith.

Do you believe that Jesus Christ, the Son of God from all eternity, at the same time the son of Mary who walked the roads of Palestine two thousand years ago, is made present in the form of bread and wine at this Mass and at every Mass through the words of consecration pronounced by our pastor? If you don’t, you are in good company. Only one third of those who identify as Catholics actually believe that. About seventy percent believe that the bread and wine are symbols, not reality. And yet Vatican II proclaimed that the Eucharist is the source and summit of the Christian life. When I deal with elderly people in nursing homes, I’m surprised at how many of them are Catholic, but have long ceased to practice their faith. I’m sure you have as hard a time as I do when you wonder how a young man who once wanted to dedicate his life to Jesus and the Church can become a serial abuser. In 1960, latin Americans were 90% Catholic; today it’s closer to 65%. The statistics are depressing. And I wonder whether much of this can be blamed on the fact that we no longer appreciate the unique nature of the Eucharist, the very presence of Jesus Christ, God and man, in our midst.

Blaise Pascal, a French philosopher, was on to something when he proposed his wager -- If we behaved as though revelation was true, and it turned out we were wrong, we’d just be dead. If we behave as though revelation is false, and it turns out we were wrong, we would be in hell for all eternity. I think we could say similar things about the Eucharist. If Jesus is really present in a unique way in the Eucharist, how are we demonstrating that in our words and actions? If it is possible to be in the physical presence of the Second Person of the Trinity who became man, died for our sins, and rose again to conquer death for us, what are we doing that shows we believe this? If we believe Jesus feeds us with his body and blood so that we have the grace to become other Christs, adopted children of Jesus’ Father, how carefully do we prepare to receive this great gift?

I know I’m preaching to the choir here. But I wonder, if you and I made a resolution to increase our devotion to the Real Presence of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament during the coming year, what might happen? Would some of our fallen away parishioners return to our fellowship? Would some of our children decide to become priests or religious? Would couples living together feel called to sacramental marriage? Would we ourselves experience a more vibrant faith, a faith that would give us strength to make a difference in our world?

God is everywhere; but Jesus, who is God made Man, is always truly present in our Eucharist, always here in our Church. Jesus stands before us in the Blessed Sacrament during formal adoration. Are we like the wise men who physically and at great personal expense came into his presence? Or like the Jewish scholars who knew what the Magi knew, but did not leave the comfort of their homes to visit the living God made man?

Christmas, 2019

Luke 2:15 - 20

My mother was a very bright woman. She had a marvelous sense of humor and on a good day could bring tears of laughter to the people around her. But she would have mood swings which were unpredictable, and when they swung low, she could lash out at everyone, including my poor dad. We learned that if we waited a bit and stayed below the radar, she would swing back up again and everything would return to some sense of normal. None of us, of course, had an idea of what her inner life was all about; to my sisters and I, she was just Mom.

A cousin in Montana just sent me a sort of autobiography my mother had written. This was in response to another cousin’s attempt to collect these from my mother and her nine siblings. So I was reading through this document, written in 1993, before the Alzheimer’s, after she had buried two husbands and was living in California with her third. And I was struck by the way certain life events stood out. How when she was in grade school, her shoes were damaged, and her mother made her wear an old pair of her brother’s to school. Until she got a new pair of her own, she made sure no one could see her feet. She remembered the tears in her father’s eyes when he told his children about their stillborn brother. She wrote about when she met my father -- she a just-graduated nurse and he a young man on the surgical unit after an appendectomy, and how it was love at first sight.

There were a lot of other events that stood out in my mother’s mind; and it was obvious that they were things that must have affected her deeply. I could see a reason for her mood swings, for her sense of humor, for many things about her that I had always taken for granted. They were mere moments in her long life, but they were things that she must have reflected on in her heart, that had become part of her story.

We are coming to the end of the Christmas story. Although part of that story is told in the Gospel of Matthew, that part focuses on Joseph. The telling of the story in the Gospel of Luke, on the other hand, seems to be made up of things Mary would have remembered -- in fact, things that only she or she and Joseph could have remembered. Things like the annunciation, the visit to Elizabeth, the taking shelter in a stable, the birth of her baby, the appearance of the angels, the adoration of the shepherds, the presentation in the temple, ,,, and we imagine that some time many years from the actual events Mary recalls them for the writer of the Gospel. Surely there were many more things Mary could have told Saint Luke about Jesus; maybe she did. Down through the ages many people, including Mohammed, added things to the story of Jesus’ childhood. But Saint Luke wrote down those things that Mary would eventually reflect on in her heart, things that would have shaped this first, this perfect Christian, the one who first bore Jesus within her body and soul.

There have been many thinkers who came to the conclusion that the best explanation for why we are here is that there is a God, one God. Socrates, Plato and Aristotle and indeed many others before and since the lifetime of Jesus’ mother were convinced of this. But the greatest of these thinkers concluded that God was without limits, that he had no form; that he was unchanging because to be capable of change would be to be limited; that he had always existed, that he was all powerful, that he was all good -- and it is not easy to love a God like that.

Human beings are designed to love. We have been loving each other since before history began. Genesis points to the ideal love between husband and wife, a love that would forshadow the love of Christ for his Church, and such a natural thing that most human beings attempt to enter that kind of relationship, even though the reality is always marred by original sin. But all of us long for love and long to be loved.

The memories of Mary are recorded by Saint Luke so that we too can reflect on them, so that those memories can shape us and make a difference in our own lives. The almighty God who has an infinite love for all of his creation, and indeed each of his human children knows that it is almost impossible for us to love a God without limits, a God we cannot see or hear or touch; so he became a baby, helpless, limited by time, born and destined to die, because it is easy for you and I to love a baby.

When we reflect on something with our hearts, we take it into ourselves, we allow it to change us, we keep going back to see if there is more there than we thought the first time we reflected. And on this Christmas morning Mary invites us to reflect again on the miracle of the incarnation, when God entered history as her newborn baby, so that we could love him and become one with him.

Fourth Sunday of Advent, cycle A

Matthew 1:18 - 24

When we read the gospel today and indeed all that the gospels tell us about Joseph, we can’t help but form an impression – obviously colored by the various pictures we've seen. Sometimes he is pictured as a grandfatherly figure with a long beard, someone who is no threat to Mary’s virginity; and sometimes he is pictured as a young, handsome man who works steadfastly in the carpentry shop, leads his wife and her child through the desert to Egypt, or stands silently behind Mary as she hears the prophecy of old Simeon that a sword would pierce her heat, or is upset with Jesus when they find him in the temple. Joseph’s lack of any speaking parts makes him seem bloodless, something other than human; and where does that leave us? What do we learn from Joseph?

I sometimes think we overlook the human being here. First of all Matthew tells us he and Mary are engaged. This meant that a wedding was in the planning; it meant that at some level the young couple were attracted to each other. Maybe it wasn’t the stuff of a Hallmark movie; people thought about marriage differently in those days. But the way it worked was that Joseph was preparing a home for them to live in, and the ladies of the town were helping Mary get things ready for that day. And I suspect both of them were eager to please each other, and when they got together, supervised, of course, the two of them would talk about the future. We Catholics emphasize Mary’s virginity, but in those days being a mother was the pinnacle of a woman’s success, not virginity, and Mary, like all young ladies, was looking forward to that. And then one day, Joseph is shocked because Mary is with child. If he didn’t love her, he could simply accuse her of adultery, but because he loved her, it was with a broken heart that he planned to divorce her -- meaning that he was willing to let friends and neighbors believe Mary was carrying his child, but he no longer wanted to spend his life with her. Did he feel relief when the angel told him this was the child of the Most High, who was destined to save his people? I think on one level Joseph may have felt cheated; God had stepped in and changed everything. Joseph had no say in the matter. But he soldiered on -- and the next several years were one unsettling thing after another. Mary had the child in a stable, probably unattended by a midwife. He would be sleeping peacefully and an angel would tell him to get up and take Mary and Joseph to Egypt. He would finally get established in Egypt and an angel would tell him to go back Israel. He wondered about the prophecies of the two old people in the temple; he grieved with Mary when Jesus remained behind; and he must have felt a special pain when Jesus said “I must be about my Father’s business” -- this child who had grown precious to him, this child he worked with every day, passing on the skills of his trade.

We hear nothing more about Joseph after the finding of Our Lord in the temple. Some people who are amazed at Jesus’ preaching ask each other, “Isn’t this the son of the carpenter?” But Joseph came on the scene, cooperated with a plan he had nothing to do with, and just as silently stepped off the stage. In the Cathedral of Saint Helena which was my church as a child, there is a stained glass window in a side chapel which shows Joseph lying on his death bed with Mary at one side and Jesus on the other. But, we only imagine that scene. Joseph may have fallen off a roof or died of some more gruesome cause than old age; or he may have lived long past Jesus’ crucifixion. No one knows.

John Lennon wrote a song with the line “Life is what happens when you are busy making other plans”. I think that describes Joseph’s life. And ours as well. You and I are like Joseph; we think we know what we are going to do tomorrow, where we will be next year. If we are mature adults we know there is a lot of uncertainty in our predictions; but emotionally, we still cling to the illusion that we are in control. And not being in control is upsetting.

Joseph discovered very early in his relationship with Mary that he was not in control; that God was doing the directing. Matthew says that Joseph’s life was directed by angels -- God’s messengers who told him where to go and what to do. I wonder if we are as well. Angels are simply messengers of God and every one of us has been directed by things that happen to us. God still speaks to us through such angels even if we don't realize it at the time..

For Christians Joseph is seen as the model protector, the ideal provider. He was essential to the survival of Mary and Jesus. But I wonder how he felt when all this was going on? I suspect that at some point he realized that he was not in the driver’s seat; he realized that Mary and Jesus did not belong to him, but he belonged to them. And for those of us who have raised families and are well into our twilight years, like Joan and I, we can look back and see that God’s hand directed our lives, despite our own plans; and we can say, that’s a good thing; I only wish I had been more cooperative -- like Joseph was.

Third Sunday of Advent, cycle A

Matthew 11:2 - 11

When I was young, growing up in Montana, we Catholics were aware of two things: we were different from our neighbors – we almost had a separate culture, with our own schools and Catholic organizations like the Knights of Columbus who dressed up in great costumes for special church occasions; and of course nuns in habits in hospitals and schools. In my town there was even a separate hospital run by the Sisters of Charity. The other thing we knew was that we were on the winning side. We could see new churches being built, new priests being ordained and new sisters being consecrated. We had so many priests in the Diocese of Helena that our Catholic college was staffed with diocesan priests who had degrees in economics and mathematics and science; they lived in their own residence, taught in the college, and said mass on one of eight small altars on the first floor of their residence. And we were told that someday the whole world would be Catholic.

I read the other day that only one third of the millennial generation identify with any religion, let alone Christianity or Catholicism. Churches are being closed. Scandals are happening. Vocations seem to be drying up. Dioceses are declaring bankruptcy.

Zachary, the father of John the Baptist, knew that his son was called to be the forerunner of the Messiah. Elizabeth, his mother, knew that John’s conception had been impossible. John by rights should have become a Jewish priest, because that was sort of hereditary. But I’m pretty sure from the time he was able to understand, he knew from his parents that he had a special destiny. And John seemed to embrace this destiny. He was to prepare the world for the Messiah. He put on the clothing of a prophet, he called people to repentance, he gave advice as to what to do to prepare for the Messiah, and when he saw sinful behavior, he called it out. And when he baptized Jesus, he heard a voice from heaven -- “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased” and that must have been a moment when John knew he had made the right choice as to how he would spend his life.

But now he is in prison, and knows that getting out of this alive is not going to happen. And he wonders -- maybe he made a mistake. Maybe Jesus wasn’t the Messiah. After all, the Messiah, according to the scriptures, was supposed to take over David’s throne; he was supposed to free the Israelites from foreign domination; he was to lead the people of God to a future full of peace and prosperity, and all the earth would stream into Jerusalem to learn what God wants for every people. The coming of the Messiah was supposed to be splashy and triumphant. And so John sends his disciples with the question, “Are you the one who is to come, or should we look for another?” In other words, “Is everything I devoted my life to false?”

Jesus, of course, reminds John of the prophecy of Isaiah, but doesn’t give a straightforward “yes” or “no” answer. And Jesus, of course, compliments John to those who are around him. But John is off in prison, and hears none of this, and goes to his death wondering, because his question to Jesus was not answered. Because there were people around who were healers, as there had always been. It seemed. Elijah, Elisha, even Moses had healed with God’s power, and they weren’t the Messiah. And there were people around who preached good news to the poor -- Jesus wasn’t the first. In fact, just as is true today, there were revolutionaries in Jesus’ time who started movements with the promise of overthrowing the Roman rulers and bringing on a new political system where those at the bottom would switch places with those at the top. And they weren’t the Messiah, because they had all been killed by the Romans.

What can we learn from John? These were, after all, his last recorded words. Another John, Saint John of the Cross, wrote a mystical poem -- some people think it was a revelation from God rather than something he composed himself. John went on to write two rather long books about the poem, which sort of favors the idea that John didn’t think up those lines himself. The poem, to which we have given the name “The Dark Night of the Soul” John explains is about the soul approaching its destiny, God Himself. And as the soul gets closer, more and more is stripped away -- all the attachments that we love so much; and this is painful. And finally, certainty itself is lost, and we are in the dark night, where the only thing that sustains us is faith. John of the Cross commented that every soul has to go through this, some in this life, most in the next. And we can’t possibly become one with God unless we go through this. And maybe that is what we see in John the Baptist -- as he goes through his life, told by his parents that he has a special call; having this confirmed by his success at bringing people to repentance; having the mystical experience of hearing the Father Himself identify Jesus as “Son”, and then having his whole world crash, his followers dispersed, he himself locked in prison, soon to die, and nothing Messiah-like is happening, and at some point John like all of us, had to make the choice -- do I believe even though everything seems to be going wrong? Do I trust that God will carry out his promises? Is Jesus really the Messiah? John is the greatest born of woman up to that time; and John had doubts. We are living in a time where faith is greatly challenged; some of our shepherds have turned out to be wolves; can we trust our priests; my children don’t go to church anymore; they just closed the church in which I was married. And we are called into the dark night, where only faith sustains us.

Second Sunday of Advent, cycle A

Matthew 3:1 - 32

Every year on the second Sunday of Advent we go out into the wilderness to meet John the Baptist, with his camel’s hair coat and peculiar diet of locusts and honey.. John somehow attracts large crowds. I wonder if he could do that today? We’d probably rather stay at home and watch television than go out into the desert and listen to someone threatening fire and brimstone. John would either be all alone or maybe put in jail for disturbing the peace.

But we are invited to go out into the wilderness. To prepare the way of the Lord involves stepping back from our usual preoccupations. That’s part of what repentance means. The greek word, metanoia, means something like “get out of your mind”, which in turn meant to look at things a different way.

The people flocked to John and his baptism because they knew he was a prophet. Back in the era of the prophets -- people like Elijah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Hosea -- Prophets called attention to themselves by the clothes they wore and what they ate. They would perform prophetic actions, then explain what they meant. You remember how Ezekiel dug through the wall of the town and left during the night to symbolize how the Jewish people would be taken from Jerusalem? And of course John was doing a prophetic action -- baptizing. It’s said that he chose a spot on the river where Joshua had done the same thing Moses did when they escaped from Egypt, when he separated the waters to lead the people into the promised land. To be baptized by John was to recommit yourself to the people God had called for himself.

The old prophets had two kinds of messages: If you do something God wants you to do, God will see that something good will happen; and if you don’t do something that God wants, he will punish you. John’s message was a little different. God had already done something -- the kingdom of heaven is at hand -- and you could either get on board or get out of the way, but there was no in-between. Joining the kingdom meant two things: first, to repent, to take notice of where you are and where you are heading, and what you need to do to correct the course of your life; and second, to produce good fruit. We can't just repent, we have to show evidence of repentance.

It’s pretty clear that John has no use for the Pharisees and the Sadducees. He calls them a “brood of vipers”. To our ears it doesn’t sound so bad, probably because we don’t use the words “brood” and “viper” much., but to them it sounded more like “bastard children of snakes”. I wonder why he singled them out? After all, they weren’t all bad, and they had come out apparently hoping to be baptized as well. But everyone knew that the Pharisees spent a huge amount of time taking the law of Moses as a starting point and making all kinds of rules as to how to obey the law. If Moses said you could not boil a baby goat it its mother’s milk, the Pharisees figured that you couldn’t use the same dishes for meat and dairy products. If you were not supposed to work on the Sabbath, was taking a stroll around the neighborhood work? As it turns out, it depends on how long the stroll was. The Pharisees could tell you. And John saw this as a perversion; the law was good, but as Jesus would say later, “the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath”. The law pointed to something else; it was not meant to take the place of charity, of true devotion. There is some Pharisee in all of us, probably more now than fifty years ago. The whole culture of wokeness says that if you hold an opinion different from the woke people, you are not worth talking to, you will be in front of a firing squad if we ever get power. The opinion you hold is more important than you as a person. Or consider those who have decided that the Pope isn’t Catholic anymore. If you go to the website of Church Militant, you can see disagreement as reason for excommunication; lack of charity masquerading as true religion.

And the Sadducees. These were people that did not believe in an afterlife; but they also did not believe much in following the laws of Moses; in fact, many adopted Roman customs and most of the puppet rulers like Herod were Sadducees. And the Sadducees live today -- Christians who see no problem with same sex marriage, abortion, euthanasia, or using medicine and surgery to change a child from one sex to another. We Sadduccees speak with the late Governor of New York Mario Como, who famously said, “I’m personally against abortion but I have no right to impose my morality on other people”

During advent we need to ask, where is the Pharisee and Sadducee in each of us? How can we, with God’s help, practice true religion?

First Sunday of Advent, cycle A

Matthew 24:37 - 44

There are two misconceptions about advent. One is that it is a penitential season, which we should treat like Lent. When I was growing up, we actually did, and it was referred to as “little lent” because it wasn’t as long, I guess. The second is that its purpose is to prepare us for Christmas. That’s true in a way, but it would be more accurate to say that it prepares us for the second coming of Jesus Christ. If you listened to the readings you heard Isaiah describing the world to come, a beautiful vision. But the Gospel is another story. Jesus is not the sweet baby in the manger, nor is he the crucified one or the one who is risen. Jesus compares himself to a thief in the night, someone who moves about in the shadows. And the message is, Keep watch! We don’t know when the end will come.

The Gospel of Matthew as it came to us was composed about 80 years after the birth of Christ. A father of the Church, Papius, stated that Matthew wrote his gospel in Hebrew, and people translated it into other languages as best they could. The oldest copies of Matthew’s gospel that we have are in Greek. Matthew was an old man when he wrote his gospel. He had seen lots of Christians, even other apostles, pass away. In the beginning everyone expected Christ would return soon, but it was clear that this was not happening. Matthew writes his gospel to emphasize his own theological insight.

There are Christians who see in this gospel the idea of “the rapture”. When we hear about the two in the field, one being taken and one remaining; and the two women working in the kitchen, one being taken and one remaining, they believe that the ones taken are whisked up to heaven, and the rest of mankind is left behind. But Jesus says that it will be as in the days of Noah -- the ones who are saved stay on earth; they have been paying attention and watching, and their reward is to remain on earth. They are the ones whose task it is to build a new earth. They are the ones who live as though Christ is coming, even though they don’t know when.

What does it mean to live this way? Because that’s the way we are being called to live. I think it means that we have to recognize that we are in danger of falling asleep; that we have been asleep. We pretty much go from day to day without much change except to add years to our life. But advent says we aren’t paying attention to the things that really matter. We can’t solve the world’s problems, it’s true. But we can throw ourselves into something meaningful, something that brings the reign of Christ closer.

It means that we should give up our certainties. When I sit and visit with elderly people, it’s common for them to express apprehension for the way the world is going, and long for the days long ago. All of us when we are young don’t sense the passage of time and the irrevocable changes that take place; We live in a false certainty that tomorrow will be like today. I drove past a nearly empty mall the other day, and realized that when I was a teenager, there was no such thing as a shopping mall; and now they are fading away. Nothing can be counted upon to stay the same, nothing in this world.

Advent means that we should be prepared to be robbed. Jesus compares himself to a thief and he wants to rob us of everything that stands between him and us. What is it for you, for me? Self-righteousness? Complacency? Anger, being unable to forgive? There are many false gods that we cling to, often unaware that they are false. But Jesus wants to take them from us so that we worship only the true God. That’s the thing that’s so awesome about our God -- he is unpredictable, he is unexpected. He is the Lord of the Universe who becomes an infant; he is the miserable failure of a Messiah hanging from a cross who comes back from the dead in triumph.

Matthew’s whole gospel is a meditation on what theologians call “eschatology”. This means that what Jesus promised is already here in one way, but not yet, in another sense. He is already here in his body, the Church. We don’t think about it much, but if you know something about history, you can see that since the coming of Christ the world is being gradually transformed. Slowly and painfully, it’s true, but in Jesus’ time slavery was common, there were no hospitals or universities; People’s choices were limited by their race, social class, religion -- even by their father’s occupation. And even though we think of science as agnostic, it is only because of the Church that there is such a thing as science. Women had no real rights. There was no social network for the people who could not cope with the world. The average life expectancy in the world, not just the United States, is 72 years; during Jesus’ time, it was 35 years. If we look at all the changes, they can be traced to the action of Christianity on the world. I don’t deny that things could be a lot better, and that there are still people and places who haven’t been reached yet. But Jesus through his church continues to transform the world into the one Isaiah described.

So Jesus is here already but not yet. You and I are part of his body. We have been left behind to continue transforming the world. I hope when my life is over I will have done my part. I hope you hope for that as well.

Christ the King, 2019

Luke 23:35 - 43

My wife and I tried to put together a bucket list a couple of years ago. We are still in reasonable health and wanted to make sure we would not miss out on something we had always wanted to do. However, we gradually realized that many of the things we had dreamed of doing when we were younger were no longer possible, or perhaps desirable. And there is a little regret that goes along with that. We won’t be taking an ocean cruise or hiking the Appalachian trail. I strongly doubt we will ever return to Jamaica or Bermuda or England, all places we enjoyed hugely.

But I think we all have experienced regrets about another kind of bucket list -- what we should have said or done that is no longer possible. My mother died with Alzheimer’s disease, and there was a time during that long decline when I realized I could no longer communicate with her in a meaningful way -- her memory and attention span, her sense of humor, everything that made up the person I had known, had slipped away. I wish I had had a few more moments with my dad, who died suddenly when I was off to medical school. I looked into the coffin and grieved that I would never have one of those deep conversations we both enjoyed. I had a cousin pass away a couple of weeks ago. She and her husband were very good to me when I was young, and I always hoped to visit them in Arizona. Now I never will.

I hope you are all feeling depressed now. But think about the two thieves that we heard about today. They are at the end of their lives. I wonder what kind of regrets went through their minds? One has heard the crowds mocking Jesus, and joins in himself. He has no hope of rescue, but his loneliness up on that cross might be alleviated a little bit by his participation in the mob that is laughing at Jesus; at least it takes his attention away from what is happening to him.

But the other thief, the one we call “good” who has somehow collected the name “Dismas” somewhere long after the scriptures were written -- this one, responding to the Holy Spirit, regrets his sin -- “We have been condemned justly,” he says, “for the sentence we received corresponds to our crimes”. He declares Jesus’ innocence. He recognizes that Jesus is a king, and in asking to be remembered, he asks for forgiveness.

And Jesus offers the most wonderful words you could hear if you were dying -- “This day you will be with me in Paradise.” Not at the end of time, not after suffering in purgatory until God is satisfied that you’ve suffered enough, but this very day.

I meet a lot of people who are even closer to dying than I am. I don’t see a lot of people who fear death; most are resigned, many look back and say, “I’ve had a good life”. But if you ask, they all have something they wish they had done differently, or something they regret not having done. And even very religious church-going Catholics say things like, “I’d like a few more years.” Because no matter how full a life you've lived, we always sense that there is something more, something we haven't done that we should do.

But I think something Dismas can teach us, something many great saints can teach us, is that regrets and bucket lists and thinking about what might have been are distracting us from what is really important -- to listen to the Holy Spirit who is prompting us to look at the one who is crucified next to us and see that God is faithful, God does not abandon us, God is ready to say “This day you will be with me in Paradise” if we just turn to him and abandon our regrets, abandon all the things we wish we had done, all the things we failed to say that we should have said, because they hold us back, they distract us from the one who is on the cross next to mine.

It’s interesting that the Church puts calls our attention to this scene from the Gospel of Luke, a scene which seems to have nothing to do with the final glory, with the triumph of Jesus as Lord of the Universe.

But the Church gives us three readings -- one in which David is made king of Israel -- a triumphant moment ushering in God’s favored one who finally unites all the Jewish people into one kingdom; a second which speaks of Jesus’ divinity, his power, his rule over heaven and earth; and the third in which a condemned man turns to another and finds paradise in that moment.

One king you admire from afar, and watch enviously as he revels in the luxury of his position. He holds the power to command you; he represents the nation to the world. And yet, despite his glory, he is fallible, he is a sinner, he takes Bathsheba as his wife after seeing to it that her husband is killed in battle.

Another king is impossibly distant, the creator of the universe, the one who rules the angels, He is almost unapproachable, it seems. He is the fullness of the invisible God, for God’s sake. That is a long way from where I am.

But the last king is one who stripped off his crown and joined you on the cross; he would never leave you alone to face death. And he promised you that death would not be the end, but that he would accompany you to paradise.

And it is as though the Church is asking, “which kind of king do you want for yourself?”