do I need 2021 to be easier?

Homily

Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God

1 January 2020

St. Lawrence Catholic Campus Center at the University of Kansas

AMDG +JMJ +m

Do I need 2021 to be easier?  Absolutely not!

I might get booed for saying that.  Yet I really believe it.  2020 was indeed a monster!.  I was not prepared.  Yet shame on me if I didn't learn anything or grow last year.  There were so many lessons to be had.  Are not the greatest stories, those with real consequences, forged in conflict, not in comfort?  Like it or not, 2020 is what we are made for.  We are made for greatness, heroic virtue, and for swallowing up evil with courage and love.  We can do hard things!

Let's do more than just wish 2020 to be over.  I k now everyone wants relief from the hardships and heartache.  Yet what if 2021 is even harder?  Will we complain and lose heart, or rise to the challenge of the times?

Fear, hate and blame are not strategies for dealing with the evil that will surely come, oftentimes sooner rather than later.  It's great when distancing, escaping and avoiding work.  Yet can we persevere when they don't?

We celebrate with Mary today the 8th day of Christmas.  8 is a huge number for us!  The 8th day is the day that we are in.  It's the process of the redemption of the world from the inside out, from least to great.  It's the time to defeat evil, darkness, suffering and death, those previously undefeated enemies, through the mysteries of our salvation.  It's a day that you're invited to play your part in, just as Mary fulfills her role.

God is all in on this 8th day plan!  He allows a member of our race, a small innocent girl, to be the Mother of all that God is.  That's right!  If that doesn't blow your mind I'm not sure what would.  God is an inseparable communion of persons, so when God is joined to a human nature in the womb of Mary, She mothers not a piece of God, but all of Him!  This is to say that God is all in!  Mary is all in!  Are you?

To play your part in this unbelievable plan to redeem the world, you have to be all in.  There's no predicting, controlling or hiding!  There is not need either for things to get easier. Circumstantial change is just that, a change of circumstances.  Real, substantial change, the kind that confronts evil rather than avoid it, doesn't need things to get easier for them to get better.

Mary's faith is a strategy for our times.  She played her part at the birth and the death of Jesus.  Her heart remains open, not closed, so that our hearts might be laid bare.  There is no need to fear or blame or hate our way through another year.  Instead, our strategy is one of coming together, a response of faith, love and responsibility!

Do I need 2021 to be easier for it to be better?  Since you are not in control of that, I hope not!  Let's pray instead that our ultimate strategy for 2021 is our faith.  Let's be more prepared for anything!

do I want closure?

 Homily

Funeral Mass for Julia Scott

Corpus Christi Parish in Lawrence, Kansas

29 December 2020

AMDG +JMJ +m

Closure.  It's a buzzword for the grieving process.  That a life has been received, celebrated, grieved and let go of.  It's a good goal.  I'm not sure it can always be achieved, or should be, on this side of heaven.

Seeking closure is a bit like seeking a complete healing from an illness.  Sometimes you get it, sometimes it's not God's holy and gracious will, no matter how hard you pray, how hard you fight.  So it is with closure.  Sometimes you get it.  Sometimes you are not supposed to.

The thing is with Julia, I'm not so sure I even want closure.  I wonder if you do.  I hope I'm not barking up the wrong tree here.  I pray this homily doesn't go terribly wrong.  Yet I don't think I'm ready for closure with Julia.  I want her life to remain an open question, and an unfinished mandate for us all.  I want to live differently not just today but always because I know her.  Such is also your mission in response to the gift of Julia's life, should you choose to accept it..

Julia certainly deserves for this instead to be her canonization Mass.  What a beautiful gift from God Julia Wagle Scott is.  Praise God for her!  You all know something about her that you love and that touched and changed you.  Hold onto that please!   Don't ever let it go.

For me, I loved the special combination of toughness and care that I saw played out.  A few times, I gave up on her living.  I admit it.  It was so hard to see her suffer.  I just wanted it to be over for her.  I didn't see a way. She outlived all my doubts by a long shot.   She is a fighter!

I was blessed to see her at several of her weakest moments.  I went in scared and helpless, not knowing what to say.  I'd leave 90 minutes later exhausted from the conversation, with her ready to talk more, with no idea how she was doing but feeling that I had been cared for by her.  I'm not built that way.  I will never care or love like that.  She fought so hard. She cared so much.  In the ends, saints are measured by heroic love, and she had that in abundance.  

Yet with all this goodness and blessing to celebrate, I'm still not ready for closure.

Julia wouldn't want us to pity her, or try to hold on to her.  I'm sure of that.  She would not want us to be stuck in our grief, or wallow in the feelings of despair and helplessness that surrounded her death.  She would want us to live our lives courageously with great faith, the faith she shared, and to fill any darkness, discouragement, fear or doubt that linger with hope and love!

Yet again for me there seems to be a mandate from her life that remains open not closed.  I like things being open, not closed.  It doesn't seem right to me to try to tie a bow on Julia's life today and ship her soul off to a safe place where no more evil or suffering can touch her.  It's a beautiful thought, and shame on me if I wish her any less than all that, which she richly deserves.

Yet I wonder if someone as tough and caring as Julia wouldn't mind keeping her heart dangerously wide open, out of love for us.  Simeon prophesied that in her vocation and mission, which is ongoing, Mary's heart would be ripped open, so that the thoughts of many hearts would be revealed.  Just so, we celebrate Julia's funeral Mass not in a safe bubble, but under the heartbreaking sign of the cross.

This for me is Julia's legacy, to not be afraid of a reality where heaven and earth are not sanitized and separated, but where the two are mixed in wonderful and terrible ways.  Julia's story, especially the latest chapters, is an invitation to fill our helplessness and lack of understanding with the sign of the cross, where love is made perfect precisely in suffering, and death is embraced, conquered and transformed into new life.  

This mandate from Jesus, to love as He has first loved us, is the invitation also from Julia not to meet one last time here at her funeral Mass, but to keep meeting here, for the rest of our lives, at the Eucharist, where we are like Christ ground into heavenly bread, and by drinking the cup of suffering that comes to each and all sooner rather than later, to be pruned and pressed into the choicest wine at this altar, where the marriage of heaven and earth is consummated.

This is the closure I want.  At the end of my life, and not before, can I say that I loved more and lived differently because I know Julia Wagle Scott?  Can I say that her suffering was not wasted on me?  I want to honor her not by closing out this question today at one final Mass, but by leaving it open.  I invite you to the same. Amen. 

what makes a family holy?

Homily

3rd Day in the Octave of Christmas

Solemnity of the Holy Family

27 December 2020

St. Lawrence Catholic Campus Center at the University of Kansas

AMDG +JMJ +m 

Father, are you seeing your family for Christmas?  It's the #1 question I get at Christmas.  Not are you holding Jesus in your heart, but are you seeing family?

It's actually the perfect Christmas question.  The question is written right into the Church's liturgy, the second of four critical stops in the twelve days of Christmas.  Today is the Solemnity of the Holy Family during Christmas.  Father, are you seeing your family for Christmas?

Thankfully I did see my family.  I know many didn't, or couldn't because of death or distance.  Isn't everyone tired of that word distance?  Bye bye 2020!  It was a gift to be close to my widowed dad and five siblings.  My crew is far from idyllic, but I pray we haven't give up on being holy.  Everyone is making a go of it, taking a bite out of life, and trying to do it together.

That's what makes a family holy.  It's the risk of faith.  It's not settling or quitting when it all turns out harder than we thought.  It's about keeping faith when we lose control, and conflict, suffering and sacrifice become the heart of family life.  For our families are the crucibles where love is tested and learned and purified.  They are the privileged places where great stories are written, and the ultimate consequences of our lives are played out.

It was this way for Jesus.  He didn't drop into the world as an individual.  He was born into a family.  A very sinful and dysfunctional one, if you look at his ancestors besides his parents.  His was certainly the most non-traditional family the world has ever seen.  There's no need to sentimentalize or idealize the Holy Family.  I'm sure Nazareth was a quiet, peaceful place.  The world is converted most intimately and fully by the conversation that takes place at an ordinary dinner table.  Yet Nazareth was not a bubble insulated from the harsh realities of real life.  Mary and Joseph were at times refugees fleeing murderous threats.  At other times, they were setting off amber alerts.

Like Abraham the father of our family of faith, they had to trust in the unbelievable, ridiculous calling that required the total risk of faith.  That's it, the risk of faith.  It's that, not sentimental idealism, that makes a family holy.

Too many of us have given up on families because it's so hard, and the risk so great.  There is a temptation to choose something easier, rather than surrender to the vocation, sacrament and mission of the family.  Yes, it would be much easier to redefine family as those individuals that I as an individual choose to affirm my choices in life.  Yet if we make family only a choice based on the convenience of adults, we will continue to avoid God, and fear and kill children.

Yet this is not reality.  It's not our nature.  It's not the makings of a great story.  No, we were all dropped into a family, like it or not.  Ultimate meaning and relationship run through the family.  Our families is where our freedom and destiny are gifted and play themselves out.  God Himself is a family.  He is not a collection of individuals. That's capitalism.  He is not a machine of parts.  That's communism.  God is not capitalist or communist.  He is family, and so are we, created in His image.

By all means, if your family is abusive or toxic or disobedient to God's will, detach from that.  Don't get stuck in a family.  Yet to give up altogether on family is to give up on ourselves.  Family is who we are.  What makes a family holy is that we do not stop taking the risk of faith.   Yet at the heart of family life is suffering and sacrifice.  So what!  We are not made for lives of comfort, but for lives of great consequence.

John Paul II says the future of the world runs through the family.  Mother Teresa said if you want to change the world, go home and love your family!  Blood will always be thicker than water.  God invites us into His family, and asks us never to give up on family, through the gift of His own blood.

Father, are you seeing your family for Christmas?  It's a great Christmas question. Yes, and I'm praying that Jesus will show His face to my family this Christmas, and renew our embracing the vocation, sacrament and mission that is family life.  I pray that my family will be holy and keep making the risk of faith.

will you hold me?

Homily

Solemnity of the Nativity of the Lord

25 December 2020

St. Lawrence Catholic Campus Center at the University of Kansas

AMDG +JMJ +m

Will you hold me?

Last year I asked you what you wanted for Christmas.  I confessed that I wanted someone to hold me.  It was embarrassing to admit.  Yet it's still true this year.  It's all I want.  In that smallest place where I am alone and afraid, I want to be loved.  In that weakest place where I am convinced no one understands, no one cares and nothing can change, I want someone to hold me.

This year I have a better question, though.  What does Jesus want for Christmas?  Do you know?

It's a strange question perhaps, on this night we celebrate Him as greatest, and purest, and most needed gift.  Yet the question is right there in the Christmas story.  Jesus is not only gift, He is also in desperate need.  Jesus comes to reveal that God is both love given and love received.  So are we, made in His image.  So I dare say Jesus wants for Christmas what I want.  Where He is alone and afraid, where He is poor, naked, cold, homeless and vulnerable, He wants someone to hold Him.

He appears at Christmas to tell you what He wants, and to ask you the ultimate Christmas question.  Will you hold me?

You might be asking how does this question help?  How does it save me and the world?  Yet this is the great paradox of Christmas.  Jesus helps by being helpless.

He knows nothing else can work.  If Jesus appears first as a warrior King, my defenses will go up.  If He asks first how He can help, I'll tell Him what I always do.  I'm fine.  I got this.  Keep your distance.  Are you familiar with this word distance?  It's the buzzword of 2020.  It's a dangerous word.  It might preserve existence for a moment, yet distance always ends in death.

Knowing my defenses, Jesus has to slip behind enemy lines.  He has to trick me.  Yet even begging me to hold Him as a baby is not enough.  He knows I can avoid, and fear, and even kill a baby to defend my fear and doubt, my control of that space where I know nobody understands, nobody cares and nothing can change.

So God who became a baby tonight is a baby who becomes bread.   Bethlehem means house of bread.  The ridiculous scene of Bethlehem merely sets the stage for tonight.  The Christmas question sentimentally and historically present at Bethlehem appears fully in mystery on this altar.  For the same God made baby is right here, right now, a baby made bread, conceived in the womb of the Church and destined for the roof of your body.

When I put the Mass in Christmas, tonight's Christmas question is asked from the inside of me, where only the Eucharist can reach.  Sneaking behind my defenses, Jesus now asks his question from the inside of me, where I can no longer distance myself.  At my smallest and weakest space, where I most fear and doubt, and where I am convinced nobody understands, nobody cares and nothing can change, Jesus asks me to love Him.  Will you hold me there?

It's a trick, and a darn good one.  My future, and the future of the world, await my answer. Will you hold me?

If I dare a yes, then the greatest of Christmas miracles might come true.  I may no longer fear the very thing I most want for Christmas.  In holding Jesus, in the depths of my heart, I will find that I am the one being held.  I am the one being saved.

Jesus helps then by being helpless.  As you receive the Eucharist tonight, ask Him what He wants for Christmas.  I dare say He wants to appear on this altar at Christ's Mass, and enter your body, simply to ask you the ultimate Christmas question.  Will you hold me?

are you ready to let it be done?

Homily

4th Sunday of Advent B

St. Lawrence Catholic Campus Center at the University of Kansas

20 December 2020

AMDG +JMJ +m

Father, are you ready for Christmas?  Don't ask me that unless you want to turn me into the grinch.  It's my only job as a Catholic priest, to be ready.  Yet I never am.  It's frustrating.  I need to have my best Christmas.  So do you.  If not this year, then when?  Yet here I am worried about what's left to do and how everything is going to come off during COVID.  I don't know if I'm going forward or backwards, with as many Christmas parties already past this year as remain in the future.

Yet I want to look forward with great hope and anticipation to Christmas, not just get it over with.  This year again, I need Mary to help me.  She always appears on the 4th Sunday to rescue my Advent.  Mary, are you ready for Christmas?  You got this thing started.  You're the mom of our family.  If you're ready that's all that matters.  I may as well entrust myself to you on these final days.  Mary, save my Christmas!  Are you ready, Mary?  Yes, Fr. Mitchel I am.  Let this be the best Christmas ever.  Let it be done to me.  Let it be done to you.

These four words are what matter.  Let it be done.  Before I have any chance to do Christmas well, Christmas must happen to me.  Christmas starts with receptivity.  The temple David wanted to do for the Lord was gifted to the world in the womb of Mary who let it be done to her.  That temple of God that is the Christ child, through whom God shows his face to the world, has invited you, a child of Mary, to also be his temple.  You are to become his dwelling place, his mystical temple and body.

That's how the prophecy of Nathan to David is fulfilled, through a temple and throne that is your body and mine.  That's why Christmas is ultimately named not after the scene in Bethlehem, but for Christ's Mass.  For what happens in your temple when you receive Jesus at Christ's Mass is the fulfillment of what is begun in the womb of Mary and made visible in Bethlehem.

Let it be done she says.  Make her response yours.  Your body is a gift you did not make.  It is where Jesus wants to be born and show his face this Christmas?  Will you let it be done?  Will I let him visit that place where I still want to be alone and independent, where I crave privacy, selfishness and control?  Jesus be born in me in that place.  Mary, teach me how not to be afraid.

That's how you do Christmas from the inside out.  If Mary our mother is ready, then so can you be.  Let it be done.

what does God love most about me?

Homily

Tuesday 2 Advent BI

Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception

St. Lawrence Catholic Campus Center at the University of Kansas

8 December 2020

AMDG +JMJ +m

What does God love most about me?

It's a hard question to answer.  Usually I don't allow God to delight in me this way.  I know best what is unlovable in me.

Today I have to answer the question, though.  The Immaculate Conception begs my answer.  If God so delights in Mary, could He also find favor with me?

The answer is a resounding yes!  God cherishes you like nobody else.  He sees Mary before anyone else can know, cherish or protect Her.  He gave her a singular fullness of grace, the prevenient grace of Christ Her eventual Son!

There's no gift in history like it.  Listen to the greeting of the Archangel, defining the dogma of the Immaculate Conception in advance of the Annunciation!  Mary a little girl is hailed as greater than an archangel, the only creature ever deemed full of grace and God's favorite place to dwell!  All of this in preparation for Her fiat.  In today's Gospel fiat Mary declares even before she conceives Jesus that She is completely His, for she speaks just like Her Son.  Not my will, Lord, but yours be done.

What's the point, here?  The point is that God loves me where no one else can.  What does God love most about me?  It's something small, mysterious, surprising.  It's something I may not yet even be aware of.  It's something only He can see in secret, a love for me He has not assigned to anyone else.  That's the message of the Immaculate Conception.  God loves best and most at our most vulnerable point available only to Him. He is jealous lover in this way.  For Mary, yes, but also for me.

For us sinners of course, our most vulnerable and unlovable points coincide.  It is the point laid bare in the story of Eden, a point marked by first by doubt, then by fear and shame.  I have to let God love my there, to experience the freedom of faith, courage and transparency always enjoyed by Mary.

She instead is the guarantee, that if I dare to let God love me at my smallest point, my story will go like hers.  She also is pure gift, having received the Immaculate Conception not to distinguish Her freedom from mine, but so that she could receive the terrible responsibility of being my mother, until I am totally hers.  What does it mean to be devoted to Mary?  It means never letting doubt, fear or shame have the last say, but instead to trust that God cherishes me like He delights in her, beginning at my smallest point.

What does God most love about me?

who do I want to challenge me?

Homily

2nd Sunday of Advent BII

St. Lawrence Catholic Campus Center at the University of Kansas

6 December 2020

+St. Nicholas

AMDG +JMJ +m

Who do I want to challenge me?  Who do I want to give me a good old-fashioned chewing out?  Who do I want to rip me up one side and down the other?

If my answer is nobody, I am a fool.  For only fools try to motivate or guide themselves.  I must always be asking people how I can get better! If my answer is nobody, I will not be ready to have my best Christmas, and I may never will.

I need a prophet to help me.  So do you, and not just any prophet.  I need a prophet like John the Baptist, a ruthless one kicking and screaming and going nuts to get my attention.  Without someone to challenge me, I will remain forever just as I am now, and that's not good enough.

Granted, the standard for this person, this prophet, must be high.  It has to be someone trustworthy. It has to be someone who cares for me, knows me, believes in me, and desires my good.  It can't be someone abusive, manipulative or filled with self-interest.

Yet need this person I do! Without this prophet, I will surely miss the most important message, person and moment of my life.  I just will.  Fools try to motivate and focus themselves.  Saints respond to prophets!

John the Baptist always shows up on this 2nd Sunday of Advent as a ruthless prophet desperate to get our attention.  Why doesn't he just chill out?  Relax, Johnny boy!  It's because he just can't.  He announces not just a word, but the WORD after which none greater will ever be spoken.  He introduces not just another VIP, but the person prophesied by Isaiah who alone can recreate the world from the inside out.  He points to not just a big moment in history, but the moment greater than the Big Bang that will transform reality at its very core.

No wonder he's screaming louder than Bill Self at the referees!  Wake up!  Get ready!  Get your life together!  For to miss this word, this person, and this moment is to miss everything that ultimately matters.

I remember two words spoken to me by spiritual directors that changed my life forever.  You're the most ungrateful person I have ever met.  Your life is not about you.  The words stung, and they still do. Yet they were exactly what I most needed to hear.  I tremble to think who I would be if those prophets,  out of sheer love for me,  did not have the courage to call me out.

Who do I want to challenge me?