Where is your heart?

Homily

Tuesday of the 5th Week in Ordinary Time

Optional Memorial for Josephine Bakhita, virgin, canonized 2000 by John Paul II

St. Lawrence Chapel at the University of Kansas

8 February 2011

Daily Readings

Today we pray with one of the Church's newest saints, the patron saint of Sudan, Josephine Bakhita. Bakhita was the name give her by those Arab slave traders who bought and sold her as a young girl. It means fortunate, although Josephine in her early years was anything but. She was bought and sold by Arab slave traders five times, and branded over 140 times and abused constantly. Her body was covered with scars from the abuse. So horrible was her childhood, that this saint could not remember her birth name, nor what year she was born.

The fifth time she was sold, Bakhita was sold to an Italian family, who had to eventually flee Sudan and took their slave with them. When her Italian owners had to take an extended trip, they left her with a group of sisters, where Bakhita first learned of Christ. There Bakhita, after suffering at the hands of many masters, learned that the ultimate master, the Lord, was good, and that although the masters she had had mistreated her, she found in the wounds of Christ a master who had always loved her and who awaited her in heaven. She was baptized at age 21 and entered the convent, and received the name Josephine, and served the rest of her days in quiet and holy service and simplicity. She finally discovered that slavery was illegal both in Sudan and in Italy, and decided to use that freedom to become a religious. She was an incredible sister. When asked how she was, even when she suffered greatly at the end of her life, Josephine said . . .. as the Master wishes.

Pope Benedict XVI featured this incredible saint in paragraph 3 of his second encyclical Spe Salvi. He goes on at length about Josephine, offering this new saint to us as a modern model of what it means to live in hope of salvation. All the suffering that Josephine endured did not destroy her heart, which always hoped for a better master before she even met him who made heaven and earth, and who alone is the true Master. When she did meet him, she forgave her persecutors and lived a life of prayer and service. Nothing of what she suffered destroyed the hope of this incredible saint. She is now the patron saint of Sudan, which continues to endure unimaginable suffering, and a political struggle for religious freedom and self-governance. The Catholic heavy has south has voted to secede from the heavily Arab north, but no one knows how bloody and difficult and long the struggle will be for the impoverished south of Sudan. They need the prayers of their powerful saint, and ours as well.

Jesus tells us through his undressing of the Pharisees that our relationship with him must be heart speaking to heart. The life of St. Josephine Bakhita shows us what holiness is - it is not looking clean from the outside in, it is living with faith and in hope despite every reason to abandon these virtues. It is moving beyond our excuses and rationalizations to stay where we are, to move to where God can speak to us heart and heart, and help us to live in the pure hope for which St. Josephine is greatly honored.

We pray for the Church, especially for bishops and priests and leaders of the Church in southern Sudan, that they may lead their people through this difficult struggle for religious freedom and justice, we pray to the Lord

We pray for the world, especially for those who are persecuted, that they may not live without hope, and that their dignity as children of God will be respected, we pray to the Lord

We pray for the mission of the St. Lawrence Catholic Campus Center, to bring the light of the Gospel to bear on the learning at the University of Kansas, we pray to the Lord

We pray that through the intercession of Josephine Bakhita, there may be an increase of vocations to the priesthood and religious life in our country, we pray to the Lord

We pray for all those for whom we have promised to pray, and those to whom we wish to offer the fruits of this Mass, especially, the lonely, the sick and the doubtful, we pray to the Lord

Heavenly Father, through the intercession of St. Josephine, listen attentively to the prayers of your faithful people, and help us to live with greater detachment from ourselves and with greater hope in seeing you face to face, we ask this through Christ our Lord. Amen

Salt and Light

Homily
5th Sunday of Ordinary Time
St. Lawrence Chapel at the University of Kansas
6 February 2011
Daily Readings


Within the next 10 years, if things keep going the way they are going, it will be just as likely that the person sitting next to you on plane will be agnostic as it is likely that he will be Catholic. Catholicism is holding steady in the US at around 20% of the population, neither growing nor declining at a great rate. Agnosticism is climbing exponentially, however, especially among former Catholics. Even with our pro-life pro-family position, and the influx of Hispanic Catholics here in the United States, our Catholic sacraments and conversion statistics are flat. We're not dying, but we're not thriving as well. For every place where the faith is doing well, there are places where we are getting crucified, so to speak.


There are tons of reasons for this, all of which are worth exploring, and many of which accuse the culture around us. Yet our Lord in tonight's Gospel I think wants his disciples to focus on themselves. Tonight I want to point the finger at those of us in the pews, those of us who practice our faith, and say something that needs to be said again and again. I know that most of us who go to Church regularly do not think we are part of the problem, that the people who aren't here are the problem, and in many ways, we are the good guys. But that is exactly what I want to speak about. We have to be more that the good guys, because just being the good guys (and gals) doesn't cut it anymore. It didn't in Jesus' time. It still doesn't make converts today. It just doesn't. The reason our Catholic faith is not thriving is that we have plenty of good guys and gals, and plenty of hypocrites and sinners too, but we have too few saints. There are not enough saints in our Church. I'm not here to say the problem is that we have too many sinners in the Church, although those seats are reliably taken. The problem is that there are too few saints. The reason agnosticism is climbing, the reason why our faith is so easy to ignore, the reason why most people see no particular advantage to being Catholic, is that most people have never met a saint, or they are not consistently around saints. Our faith is meant to build saints, not relatively good people. That is the only thing that distinguishes our faith, the making of saints. It is the only reason we exist, the only reason we should exist. Yes, the loss of religion says a lot about the people who are losing it, and they bear their share of the blame, but it always says more about us.


It's not just agnostics who have never met a saint. Most lukewarm Catholics have never met one either, or even if we have, we aren't around them enough, or we limit our exposure to them, or we ignore them, or there simply aren't enough of them. Most of all, we've lost our determination to become saints ourselves. Most of us eventually settle to be good compared to someone else, to rationalize and excuse ourselves into lukewarmness, comfort, and mediocrity. We can turn Christianity into a spectator sport. This not only fails to make converts to the Catholic faith, it is the surest way to kill our own faith.



I say that as sad as it is to see agnosticism growing around us, and so few Catholics living the full beauty of their faith, there might be God's will in all of this. Not that he desires a single soul to be lost, nor should we, but agnosticism may eventually be the means for Catholicism to find its heart again, for more souls to be saved, for us to realize that if our Church is not making saints, we should indeed fold up the tent. That is the challenge that agnosticism, indifference to God, proposes to us, and it is a worthy challenge. An argument can be made that it is better that agnosticism is growing instead of lukewarm Catholicism. Now I'll tell you why I say this. I say this because Jesus said it first. Jesus Christ tells his disciples after preaching the Sermon on the Mount that they are to be the salt of the earth, and the light of the world. They are to be different than those around them, not only from the outside in, but especially from the inside out. Jesus points to the unique dignity and opportunity that is given in the Catholic faith. He tells his disciples that they are to be uniquely the ones who preserve what is good for the future, who bring out the full flavor of human experience, who make barren those areas where evil tends to take root, and who show the world the full and incomparable dignity of man who may dare to use his freedom to participate in the divine love that made and redeemed the world, and the dignity of man as one who is called to participate in the divine life of God. Never will you see Jesus calling his disciples to be good people compared to others. No, he calls them to the highest of heights. He calls them to sanctity, to fullness, to transcendent goodness. When he tells them that they are to be salt and light, he calls them not just to be a good part of the world, but to be with him the co-redeemers of the world. He calls his disciples to be saints.



That agnostic who will sit next to you on the airplane tomorrow, and the next day, and ten years from now, deserves if he is sitting next to a Catholic, to be sitting next to a saint. At the very least, he deserves to be sitting next to a person who has not given up on being a saint. Most of us settle for sitting next to a person who is not annoying, who will just leave us alone, but beyond the categories of introversion and extroversion, and no matter what you level of etiquette and on a plane, if you are an agnostic and you meet a Catholic, you deserve to be meeting a saint, or someone who is pursuing sanctity with all his heart, and all his mind and all his strength.



The challenge of agnosticism is a good one that must be answered by the lives of real saints. The challenge to us by agnosticism is that you do not have to be religious to be a good person. There are many good people who do not go to Church, plenty of hypocrites who do go to Church, and many heroes who are not consciously motivated by their belief in God. These are the arguments we must meet, and meet by answering the call to holiness, or we should admit defeat, and fold up our tents. Beyond the anecdotal evidence that the Church is not producing enough saints to renew the faith, are the intellectual arguments that religion distracts people from solving real problems in the real world, that religion causes as many arguments as it resolves, and that religious people are of two kinds, those who are insecure about themselves, or those who are deceived into thinking that they can live and act for something outside of their own evolutionary self-interest.

The challenge of scientism is that human freedom is not transcendent or spiritual, but only works within the parameters of the world, so that even when a person claims he is acting for a higher purpose, he is really only acting for himself within a closed system governed by the principles of evolution. Scientists then want a more realistic version of morality where a man recognizes that acting morally is ultimately about utility, and the more we give up on religion, the more we can agree on a common baseline of morality and quit arguing about whose God is right. It is not in itself a worthless project.

But St. Paul answer this objection beautifully by pointing us to the cross. He says that I as a disciple of Jesus am not very smart, so you should not pay attention to my arguments, and I am not that good, so you should not pay attention to my goodness, for I am a sinner, but I come among you hoping that you pay attention only to Jesus Christ crucified. Whenever you are tempted to think you do not have to be religious to be good, whenever you think that science can provide a better baseline for morality than religion, then look at Jesus Christ crucified. Even though the creation of all the universe could not add one iota to God's glory, but He created it anyway, and even though the redemption of one sinner could add nothing to God's goodness, He redeemed us anyway. The cross speaks not of necessity, but of freedom and love that originate beyond the confines of the world. The cross speaks a wisdom that begins to answer the true questions of spirituality that found the moral life. Why is there something rather than nothing? Where is there me instead of not me? Is there someone that loves me more than I love myself, and loves me more than He loves Himself, and who loves me for my own sake to the point of forsaking Himself? Is there within me the possibility of loving someone more than I love myself, and of giving myself not because of anything I would receive back, but out of sheer love for the other?

These spiritual questions are the true ground of the moral life. It is not the goodness that is naturally found in the world, to which man is called according to the laws of nature. This is real goodness, but the goodness that founds the moral life is a goodness that man does not naturally discover in the world, but the goodness that first created the world, and a goodness that appeals to a freedom that is not confined to the laws of time and space, matter and energy. It is the goodness that is revealed most perfectly in the cross of Jesus Christ.

Pope Benedict reminds us that just as a scientist sees no end to the questions he can ask about the universe, the athlete never ceases to set new records that beforehand were thought impossible, and telling an engineer that something is impossible makes no impact on his desire to do it anyway, so it is saints who are drawn to strive for the goodness and holiness made present to us by the cross, who set the standards of morality of the world. Just as we are inspired not by people who do what is most reasonable, but people who never give up hope despite all the obstacles in their way, so also the baseline of the moral life is not set by the goodness that exists below us, but by the saints striving for the goodness that lies beyond us. Pope Benedict reminds us that unless the world has saints, striving to love God with all their heart, and mind and strength, that humanity will eventually forget what goodness is.

There is a good reason to be Catholic and not agnostic. Being Catholic is no guarantee of holiness, it doesn't automatically make you a better person, even though it may protect you from many evils it is not a golden ticket to heaven because you are better than someone else. No, being Catholic is the best chance to realize the best that is within us. It is our best chance to be a saint, and to be as Jesus has asked us to be, the salt of the earth, and the light of the world.

happiness 2.0

Homily
4th Sunday of Ordinary Time
30 January 2011
St. Lawrence Catholic Campus Center at the University of Kansas
Daily Readings

Almost every scientist and philosopher agrees now that our universe has a beginning. The universe is neither necessary nor eternal. The universe is not God. It can be measured and a date can be given to its beginning. So far all efforts to show that the universe always existed or always will exist have failed. The most interesting debate currently, is between those smart people who postulate that the something of our universe arose out of the nothing of possibilities. Such agnostics point to the theoretical possibilites of billions of parallel universes to explain how such a statistically improbable universe like ours came from nothing. Theists instead say that it is takes less faith and is more reasonable actually to conclude that given the immense improbability of something coming from nothing, the beginning of the universe points to the action of a supernatural metaphysical intelligence that is the ground of all being.

Smart people likewise disagree on the moral universe. There are some who think the universe proposes a morality, a natural law, that can be agreed upon by human minds without reference to metaphysical universals or supernatural revelations. There are others who say that matter and energy while obeying physical laws have no capability of defining good and evil; as such, natural law must be grounded in divine law, a law that supersedes nature. Because of this we have a divergence between smart people who think that human actions while appearing to be free are ultimately determined by broader evolutionary laws, and those who find a radical spiritual freedom in man that is irreducible by nature.

Finally, there are smart people who argue that religion is the greatest problem in the world, for it distracts people from a real humanism that solves real problems in this real world, and those who while admitting that religions will always be filled with sinners, find in the contemplation of God's revelation of Himself, and obedience to God's commands, the most enduring hope for man understanding his deepest dignity, actualizing his greatest happiness, and realizing his greatest destiny.

Smart people will continue to debate these questions at the highest level. We should join them as much as we can, for such questions are always worth considering, and they pay great dividends for those who pursue better answers. The world will continue to be changed by smart people engaging such questions as well as they can, just as the world is changed by the honest debate between liberalism and conservatism, between capitalism and other economic systems, between democracy and others forms of government, between Christianity and other kinds of religion. The list can and does go on and on. The discussion goes on and on and on, like the rivalry between Mizzou and K-State and KU. Most of us have taken sides on many of these questions, and perhaps we're pretty sure of our position, and pretty sure we'll never understand how the other side thinks, just as we'll never fully understand how smart and good-hearted people can root for the Wildcats and the Tigers. Still, we know the discussions and the rivalries and the questions will persist, and human history will be written by how these questions play out.

The smartest people among us continue to make amazing discoveries and human knowledge grows at an exponential rate, so much so that college freshman today are the most anxious of any group of freshman in history, for you are going into debt so that one day you might find a way to be successful in a world that is changing faster than anyone can predict. Yet as much as human knowledge is progressing, an argument can be made that we are forgetting as much as we are learning. The great promise of progress gives way to discouragement when we see that we are not becoming better people. The science that can save lives can also be used to destroy lives. We have as much war, famine and persecution as ever. The same religions that produce saints are used as cover by suicide bombers. We have moved past the age of Enlightenment into the age of postmodernism, an age that desperately wants to hope but is devoid of new ideas on how to define and secure human happiness.

Happiness. This is Jesus' theme for tonight. What is happiness? Who is happy? Jesus on the surface in his beatitudes seems to try to trick his disciples, convincing them that misery now will pay off with happiness later. Yet contemplation of the beatitudes produces another payoff that goes beyond making an exclusive backroom bet or trade with our Lord. Jesus in pointing us toward heaven offers a transcendent happiness that can be lived from the inside out even as we try to realize a happiness that is delivered to man by the world from the outside in. In departing from the natural definition of happiness in such a radical way in the beatitudes, Jesus is proposing a transcendent happiness that begins not merely in a heaven far away from here, but a happiness that begins precisely where heaven and earth meet in the human heart.
So even as the fire rages on in the world, and the world is changed by human debates and struggles, between the smartest and the most powerful, and even as those of us with courage go into the world as Jesus taught us to redeem it by the bold proclamation of the Gospel to all people and nations, today's contemplation of the beatitudes command us to pay greater attention to how God desires to redeem the world from the inside out. Jesus chose to begin his mission with the weak of the world, with those who were sick in body and in spirit, and he never deviated from this mission until He had given His life like a lamb led to slaughter. Jesus never tried to win over the smartest, the most powerful or the most religious. He served the poor and defenseless, and gave his life like a lamb as a ransom for many, and in this He has changed the world more than any human person ever has. So St. Paul reminds us Jesus' disciples, that God chose the foolish of the world to shame the wise, and God chose the weak of the world to shame the strong, and God chose the lowly and despised of the world, those who count for nothing, to reduce to nothing those who are something, so that no human being may boast before God.

As much as the world is changed by exchanges between the richest, the most powerful, and the smartest, Jesus tells his disciples that the most enduring human progress is not achieved by these people, for too often we forget more than we learn, and too often we repeat the same mistakes, but man progresses most of all by those saints and heroes who pass over from earth to heaven in their hearts. Humankind only makes progress when that progess begins first in the human heart, in those who are not proud, who can weep for their friends, who want little for themselves, who work for justice, who know how to forgive and bring people together, who are single-hearted, and who offer their sufferings, and allow their blood to be shed, so that others may have life. This is where human happiness begins, deep within the heart of a human person who is capable of responding to Jesus' command to love others just as He first loves us.

In this week, we KU basketball fanatics will be changed more by praying for Thomas Robinson and his family, by mourning with him, and by supporting him as he moves through the grief and uncertainty of his situation to continue to sacrifice and to love and to become his greatest self despite having reasons not to. We will watch closely as Gabrielle Giffords in the coming months perhaps miraculously survives an unthinkably evil and senseless shooting, and pray God one day returns to the House floor to serve our country. More than any weather forecast or stock market report or debate about the origins of the universe, these stories and others like them, will continue to change the lives of real people like us as we watch people walk that line between earth and heaven drawn in the human heart, and we too seek the happiness that comes to those who are invited by Jesus tonight to cross over.

Paul and Mary

Homily

Conversion of St. Paul the Apostle

25 January 2011

St. Lawrence Catholic Campus Center

Daily Readings

Paul was a proud person before his conversion. If Mary was the most humble of all the apostles, the one who proclaimed that the Lord looked upon her lowliness, the one who was most ready to receive Jesus Christ, then Paul was the opposite. Paul and Mary represent the bookends of the apostles. One was perfectly humble and ready to receive Jesus. The other was perfectly proud and ready to persecute Him. One was chosen even before Jesus' birth, and carried Him in her womb. The other never met the Lord face to face, but only met Him after His ascension into heaven. Yet both became super-apostles, the apostles of the apostles, the apostles par excellence. Paul, because He eventually was called to outwork the other apostles in the mission of evangelization. Mary, because from her beginning she was to be the pattern of the apostolic Church, teaching us how to receive Jesus before being sent by Him. She too, like Paul, eventually outworked all the other apostles, eventually winning converts by the millions, most notably here in the Americas sixteen centuries after Her assumption. If there is any apostle who has brought the Gospel here to the Americas, it is Mary herself, and our Lady of Guadalupe is the apostle to the Americas.

The vocational stories of Mary and Paul could not be more different really, and yet their lives bear similar fruit. They are both zealous for the law of Moses, Mary by virtue of her Immaculate Conception lived the law of Moses even more perfectly and intensely than did Paul, whose life was based on enforcing righteous laws that preserved goodness, not only for himself but out of love for God and nation. It can easily be said that Paul loved the law to the point of neglect to the law-giver, and Paul would be the first to say that his conversion was from being a murderer to being an apostle, yet the zeal with which Paul lived the law of Moses was exactly what God desired for the preaching of the Gospel. The conversion of Paul is the greatest conversion in history; it is God's healing of pride and turning that extraordinary pride that Paul possessed into a zeal for souls that the rest of the apostles could never dream of imitating.

Paul ended upon proclaiming, as does Mary in her magnificat, that God looked upon his lowliness, his unworthiness, and began to love Paul and to heal Paul and to call Paul precisely beginning at that point where Paul was weakest, where because of his pride he did not yet know the love of God. Paul then like Mary boasted only of his lowliness, and teaches us to boast to others only of our weakness. Our proclamation to the world as Christians is not to show how the law of Christ has made us better than other people; even if it has, this is not the story that is to be proclaimed. No, our story is to proclaim with Paul the story of our conversion, of how Jesus Christ comes to visit us in our lowliness, how he has personally healed my sinfulness, and beginning with my weakness, has called me into His great apostolic mission.

March for Life 2011

Saturday marked the 38th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion in our country, and began a civil rights moment seeking to re-establish the right to life from conception to natural death ni this country. This movement, while doing incalculable good in the minds and hearts of Americans, and saving many lives, has yet to return the right to life to a right guaranteed by law. I have had the honor, as a post Roe v. Wade survivor, to march in Washington many times and to demonstrate before the Supreme Court, praying for the unborn, and speaking for the millions in my generation whose lives have been lost to abortion. I pray for what has been lost, commending all who have been hurt by abortion to the mercy of God, but perhaps even more, I pray for family life and for the virtue of chastity to be strengthened in our country. For the longer I am part of this battle for life, the more I see clearly that the battle must be won in the family if it is definitively to be won anywhere else. I preached on the feast of the Holy Family this year during the Christmas season, that unless we pass on to the next generation to ability to hear and to answer the call to sacramental marriage, as established by Christ and understood fully by the Church, then we are living without hope. For as the family goes, so goes the nation. I want to take this chance to honor all our seminarians, young people, their sponsors, and our Church, for standing up for life today in such a beautiful way as they March on Washington. I am with you in spirit and in prayer.

The event will probably be underreported, but it is awesome!

unforgivable sins

Homily
Monday of the 3rd Week in Ordinary Time
24 January 2011
St. Lawrence Catholic Campus Center
Daily Readings

Most of us have encountered this biblical passage before about the unforgivable sin, but it appears so rarely in the Gospels that there can be large gaps between our meditation on what it really is. Over and over and over, we hear of Jesus forgiving sins, of his desiring that not one person be lost. This makes his words about the unforgivable sin all the more shocking to us. We are almost never ready to hear them. We might even say that they don't sound right coming from Jesus, almost as if he got up on the wrong side of the bed. Of course, we ascribe no such thing to Jesus nor to the Gospel authors. Jesus means what He says. Sins against the Holy Spirit truly are unforgivable.
The Catechism helps us to understand what Jesus must mean then. He doesn't mean just any blasphemy, but specifically a refusal to believe that the Holy Spirit can forgive sins. This makes sense in the context of today's Gospel. Even for Jesus, whose mission is to love sinners and to forgive every sin, there must be a sin, if our freedom is real and God respects our choices, that is unforgiveable. That sin against the Holy Spirit is a refusal to believe that forgiveness of sins is possible. This is a denial of the action of the Holy Spirit. In the Gospel, it is attributing the casting out of demons, and the forgiveness of sins, to the work of the devil, not the work of the Holy Spirit.
The unforgivable sin does not limit God's power nor His desire to forgive every sin. It preserves a correct anthropology of human freedom, and a correct understanding of salvation as something offered but something capable of being rejected by men who are made in God's image and likeness. Hell is a possibility not because God desires it, but because man can possibly desire it.
St. Frances de Sales is honored today for his zeal in defending the true faith agains the errors of the reformation. Along with great figures like St. Vincent de Paul and St. Jane Frances de Chantal, his special love for the poor, his expert defense of the true Church, and His zeal in teaching people how to live a devout life, saved the Church from losing many more souls, and helped Her to preserve the deposit of faith against all attackers. His example gives hope to all those who lament the endless splintering of Christianity, and who long to see the unity of Christ's Church which is a gift of the Holy Spirit working within Her.

A bruised reed He will not break!

Homily

Baptism of the Lord

8/9 January 2011

St. Lawrence Catholic Campus Center

The Church Fathers teach us that Jesus is not made holy by the waters that baptize him. He is already holy. Even John the Baptist knows this. He asks Jesus - what is the world are you doing? Holy people should baptize sinners, not sinners baptize holy ones. Yet Jesus' baptism was still necessary. He was not made holy by the water, but He made the water holy by allowing Himself to be baptized.

Jesus' first public act is not to perform some great sign. It is to allow something to be done to him. It is to accept his mission to be identified with sinners. In allowing something to be done to Him, Jesus shows Himself truly to be the son of Mary, who was not known for her great signs she worked, but for her great yes, her acceptance of a mission to let something be done to her according to His word. The name Jesus, which means the one who will save them from their sins, indicates Jesus' mission to prefer sinners, to love sinners, to be with sinners. Jesus does not need to be baptized, no more than he needs to die in punishment for sin, but He allows it to be done to him, to fulfill all righteousness, to fulfill the mission given Him by the Father to identify with sinners. Jesus' first public act mirrors His last and greatest public act. Although He is not a sinner nor will He ever be, He refuses to separate Himself from sinners, but prefers to be called a sinner Himself, even being spat on and mocked, so that sinners might have a chance once again to live. The prophet Isaiah tells us precisely the mission of Jesus. He will not discard a single sinner. A bruised reed He will never break. Rather He will allow Himself to be bruised out of love and in solidarity and in hope for sinners. Jesus the full revelation of God shows God's desire to save us rather than judge us. He is willing to be judged in our place. His baptism is a willing entering into his eventual suffering and death of the cross. Yet thankfully, the cross is not the end of the story. The story does not end in God's defeat, nor in ours. The appearance of the Holy Spirit at the baptism is a foreshadowing of the same Spirit that will raise Jesus from the dead.

The baptism of Jesus is the first full revelation of the Trinity, the central mystery of our Christian faith into which we were all baptized - Father, Son and Spirit. The Father declares that He is well pleased with His Son, and He sees the same in us who through baptism are members of His body and truly children of God. How easily do we believe the worst about ourselves, and fear the judgment of God, even knowing Jesus' great desire and mission to forgive us rather than to judge us? In my experience as a priest, most Christians dwell on their sinfulness much longer than they dwell on the dignity of their baptism. If only each one of us would hear the Father's voice at the beginning of every morning, before ever having a negative thought about ourselves. You are my beloved son. You are my beloved daughter, in whom I am well pleased. My brothers and sisters in Christ Jesus, this is the dignity of our baptism, and the sure gift of faith, to be able to hear and to trust this voice in the depths of our being. You are my beloved sons and daughters, in whom I am well pleased. If only we could believe in how much God delights in us His children, before He ever counts a sin against us, I believe we would be different. I'm not saying that ours sins don't matter, I'm just saying that we will be converted by love far more than we will ever be converted by the law.

As we celebrate the great baptism of Jesus, and recall the greatest day in each one of our lives, the day of our baptism, the day when something was done to us that changed us far more than anything we could or will ever do to change ourselves, let us make it our goal this year to live out the Christmas mystery that we finish celebrating today, and to know how many times and in so many ways that the Lord wants to come visit us and make us holy by His presence in the coming year. No one who has been baptized into the death of Christ should turn his life into a self-improvement project. If we have been baptized, we are dead to this world. Nothing has to go our way in this world for us to be perfectly happy. If we focus on life in this world, and only hang around Jesus in case He has a lucky winning ticket for eternal life waiting for us after death, then we have no need of baptism. Those who are baptized only care about eternal life, a life that is not measurable but consists in depth of relationship with a person who Himself is the way, the truth and the life. If we have been baptized, life is not about self-improvement, it is about the self-forgetfulness that is the special mission of those who belong to Christ. Christ didn't worry one second about self-improvement. I dare say He never made a New Year's resolution. His mission was self-forgetfulness. That is all. Our only resolution in the new year, the only one that really matters for those who have celebrated Christmas, is to allow Jesus to come and visit us always as surely as He did on the day of our baptism. The only thing that matters to a Christian is to remember and most of all to believe in the dignity that we have as children of God, and to not allow the world to steal this dignity away from us. I'm not saying it is wrong to try to lose weight, or save money, or work on relationships. That is all fine and good. But for the Christian something else is primary. It is to use the gift of faith given at baptism to allow God to say to you at each moment of your life - you are my beloved son or daughter. In you I am well pleased. If we receive this dignity and truly believe in God and in ourselves, then we may not be perfect as the world judges things, but we will be the priests, prophets and kings in Christ that is the full dignity of our baptism. If we do anything new this year, let us be priests who pray for each other, let us be prophets who allow God's light to shine in new areas of the world, let us be kings who create a world in which people can believe in God and in one another. Amen.