What word has authority over you?

Homily

4th Sunday of Ordinary Time B2

28 January 2024

St. Lawrence Catholic Campus Center at the University of Kansas

AMDG

What word has authority over you?  Unfortunately, it's not always the word Jesus wishes to speak to you.  Too often the lie that evil speaks to us has an authority over us it was never meant to have.  You know the voice of the enemy well.  It is the voice of the accuser and the divider.  It is the word of shame, that you're not good enough.  I have four demons, four words, that constantly threaten authority over me - selfish, coward, loser, quitter.

I need the authority of Jesus to speak a word that will cast out these demons.  I need to hear I'm worth dying for, that I'm enough, that I'm beloved and forgiven.  I can never hear these words enough, and I pray that one day I can trust them completely, and always.

Paul's word of authority in today's second reading is celibacy!  Nice word choice, St. Paul!  Our reading gives voice to the Church's 2000 year history of being obedient to the path of marriage and celibacy written in our nature, the way to authentic love and self-gift our Lord has marked out for us.

The Catholic moral teaching on sexuality is astoundingly simple.  Sex finds its fulfilment when shared between a man and woman promised to each other in marriage and open to a family.  Those who are unmarried are asked to witness to the sacred dignity of sex by loving and serving each other in non-sexual ways in the celibate vocation.  Celibates love and give life and bear fruit through witness, service and prayer.  The Church's teaching on sexuality is really as simple as that. It's never changed, for its written into our nature and confirmed by the teaching of our Lord Jesus.

Pope Francis is trying to speak an authoritative word of compassion in relation to the Church's clear moral teaching on sexuality.  A lot of people have asked me why Pope Francis is changing the Church's teaching.  He is not. He never has, nor do I think he will or can.  Yet his word of authority received from Jesus and spoken into the modern human experience is one of compassion.  Pope Francis reaches out.  He stays in touch.  He admits that many do not see an authentic path of love for themselves in marriage or celibacy.  Many others do not experience their human nature as an intrinsic and simultaneous unity of body and soul.  Still others feel rejected by the Church.  

Whenever someone feels rejected, Pope Francis considers it our problem, not theirs.  For everyone has dignity as a child of God.  Everyone belongs to the Church if we dare to believe our Lord has begged us to be the shepherd and mother of all of humanity. Therefore, everyone is to be blessed who asks for the Lord's help to live and love well.  Blessings are for sinners who are trying.  That's me, and that's you, and that's everyone.

The Pope can speak this authoritative word of compassion from Jesus without confusing or changing the Church's life-giving and compelling teaching on sex.  He can bless individuals without endorsing unchaste relationships or behavior.  He can do so without changing the intrinsic meaning of our sexuality, and without bending to gender ideologies that confuse human nature.  He can do so while rejecting intervention that harm the unity of body and soul, and destroy lives.

If only the Church stays the course, and shares her true teaching in both compelling and compassionate ways, most people will arrive at a mature sexual integration that frees them to live the marital or celibate vocation with conviction, joy and fruitfulness.  But if we betray our teaching, or discard our neighbor, things will only get worse.  The Pope has faith that together, we can fulfill our capacity to love authentically in accord with our nature, and so lay hold of the fullness of life and love we were made for.

I pray that I can live this spiritual and sexual maturity with conviction and compassion. I pray the same for you, that this word of authority spoken to us by our Lord will case out the evils that threaten to divide us.

+mj

What is most urgent?

Homily

3rd Sunday in Ordinary Time B

21 January 2024

St. Lawrence Catholic Campus Center at the University of Kansas

AMDG

What has my attention?

Jesus is trying to get it.  His message at the beginning of his public ministry in the Gospel of Mark couldn't be any more straightforward.  Now.  Here.  Repent. Believe.  Does He have your attention?

I'm sure you're no stranger to things vying for your attention.  Because of the nonstop distraction and noise, we can find ourselves living virtually, far apart from reality.  I can get so off track, so out of touch with myself.   We can get stuck regretting the past, or obsessed about worrying about the future, that we miss being present to the reality right in front of us.  

A remedy is the word of God.  The word of God desperately wants your attention, to invite you into a sensitive and responsive mode of being, of engaging with reality.  That's where holiness and new life always is, for those who live in the here and now, with a desire to constantly change my mind and to discover new ways of doing things.

Pope Francis has given the 3rd Sunday of Ordinary Time to be forever known as Word of God Sunday. It's when we start meditating on a synoptic Gospel for the 30 weeks of Ordinary Time.  What's supposed to happen during ordinary time?  Well, if I dare to let the word of God have my attention above all things, whether that be the internal word of my conscience or meditating on the word Jesus is speaking to me through the Gospel, then a new ability to reorder my way of doing things can emerge!  This is what makes life exciting, a desire and ability to change in response to what I am hearing.

It's perhaps always the best new year's resolution, to let the word of God have my attention.  The Ninevites respond immediately to the preaching of Jonah.  St. Paul urges us to flee from attachments to the way things are now.  The apostles are radical and immediate in their response to the word Jesus speaks to them.  All who hear and respond gain a new and greater capacity to live.

So what has my attention in this new year?  For me, work and sports and my phone will try to dominate, and keep me stuck with the way things have always been.  Yet Jesus is speaking a word to me, inviting me not to be afraid to be an affectively mature spiritual father, one who can truly delight in fishing for Jayhawks, even though Jayhawks aren't fish, and in seeing my children grow spiritually into the fullness of life they are made for.

Jesus desires to speak a word of life to you too.  Can He have your attention?

What's my resolution?

Homily

Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God

1 January 2024

St. Lawrence Catholic Campus Center at the University of Kansas

AMDG

What's my resolution?

It's actually a bad question, because life in the new year is not all about me.  But I'll stick with it anyway.

I have a couple friends who like to toss around ideas for a 'word of the year.'  It's not a terrible exercise.  It can be a reflective and prayerful and fruitful one, to receive from God a word that He wishes you to live into during the new calendar year.

Yet I wonder if Mary ever conjured up a word of the year for herself.  I doubt it. She was too attuned to what God is doing to seek a word just for herself.  In today's Gospel, the mother of God is collecting information from the shepherds, noticing how the ancient promises of God are being brought to fulfillment.  

I can spend way too much time thinking about myself, wondering how to make this my best year ever, and to emerge from 2024 as the best version of myself.  But this isn't prayer the way Mary did it. It's just thinking about myself.  Mary never made herself the star of the show. She simply reflected with great sensitivity. Her desire was only to notice what God is about.

On this 8th day of Christmas, when Jesus receives His Holy Name, may my resolution for 2024 simply be to echo the great Magnificat of Mary.  The Almighty has done great things FOR me, and holy is HIS name.

What's a Holy Family?

Homily

Solemnity of the Holy Family

31 December 2023

St. Lawrence Catholic Campus Center at the University of Kansas

What's a Holy Family?

As far as I can tell, it's a family that stays fights for the will of God, and makes the risk of faith.

To live our faith is to take great risks.  Our faith is a passion for the impossible, and a trust in what lies beyond what I can control or understand.  Abraham is our father in faith, as is well attested in today's readings.  He travels to an unknown place by faith.  He receives a miraculous son by faith, along with the promise of countless descendants.  He is willing to sacrifice that same son Isaac, IN FAITH, trusting that God creates even from the dead.

That's crazy faith.  Abraham takes the risk, and is thus the father of a holy family.

The Holy Family of Mary, Jesus and Joseph also took great risks!  It does us not good today to idolize or idealize them, placing them on a shelf only to admire them, knowing deep down that my family will never be like that.  Quite the opposite, we invite this family in our Christmas experience, asking them to help us stay in the fight to love God's will, and to show us how God can bring holiness from the mess of our family life.

Yes, we have an idyllic scene of Jesus's consecration in the temple today, and we do well to remember that a family that worships together, stays together.  Yet we shouldn't for a second forget that this same family was once homeless refugees, setting off amber alerts as they went.  Jesus' ancestors and cousins were every bit as sinful and dysfunctional as my family is.  His family was destined to have their hearts ripped open by a sword, as they risked living vertically so that we could relate our human experience to theirs.

Yes, there was great care, silence, prayer and learning in the Holy Family, no doubt.  There was also great risk from a family that by faith dared to fight for the will of God.

If your family is toxic or abusive, by all means set the boundaries that you need to.  Yet to quit on family altogether is to quit on ourselves, for the risk of faith is meant to run through the family, as does the salvation of the world.  To trade family for tribalism, loving only those that affirm us, is a betrayal of Jesus' family example and the path of holiness He set for us.

What's a Holy Family?

It's a lot of things, but most of all, it's a family that fights for the will of God, and makes the risk of faith.

+mj

Why a bloody Christmas?

Homily

4th Day in the Octave of Christmas

28 December 2023

St. Lawrence Catholic Campus Center at the University of Kansas

AMDG

Why such a bloody Christmas?  Isn't is supposed to be Silent Night, Holy Night, all is calm, all is bright?  The lovely carol notwithstanding, the Christmas message was not just proclaimed gloriously by the angels on high.  It was made known as well by blood-curdling screams as the Holy Infants too gave witness to the presence of the newborn King.

Jesus was born to shed his blood for us, and to die.  That's a fact, not only for Him, but as predicted, so too for  his disciples.  For those in our world who do not belong to Christ, who perceive Him as a threat to privacy, choice and control, will try to cancel Him, and anyone who belongs to Him. Terribly, this has always been true.  The sacred dignity of children was elevated through the appearance of God as a helpless baby. So those who kill innocent, vulnerable, children even today are those who have rejected the Christmas message.

Yet we rejoice on this bloody Christmas day, for Jesus through the shedding of his blood manifested a love stronger than death.  To God who is love, all are alive, most especially these Holy Innocents who testified to the real presence of the love of God, by  being the only martyrs who died in Christ's stead.

 

What does Jesus want for Christmas?

Homily

Solemnity of Christmas

25 December 2023

St. Lawrence Catholic Campus Center at the University of Kansas

What do I want for Christmas?

Well it's equal parts scandalous and pitiful to say.  For the fourth year in a row, I want someone to hold me.  When I first confessed this desire during COVID, people assumed social distancing has gotten to me.  I got more than a few pity hugs.

But I'm not ready to give up on this Christmas wish, at least not yet.  It's still what I want.  It's a primal need and desire for every baby born into the world.  I'm still a baby, maybe we all are.  I can't live without love, without someone to hold me.  It's what makes me most human. Maybe it's what you want too.

More importantly, I dare say it's what Jesus wants for Christmas.  His pivotal question is the best one for Christmas.  He appears most intimately as a baby on Christmas night to ask you a deeply personal question. Will you hold me?

For a baby, need and desire are blurred.  At Christmas, Jesus dons the disguise, inviting you into the paradox of this strangest of nights.  Jesus disguises His desire for you, as need.  He helps you by being helpless.  He loves you by begging your love.  On this ridiculous night, when everything is turned upside down, He doesn't stop there.  He feeds you by being consumed.  He finds you by hiding, betting on your faith to search for Him.  He restores life by getting killed.  He crushes enemies through the defeat of poverty, nakedness, homelessness and rejection.  Jesus makes sense of you by becoming an absolute joke.

Yet the already too foolish scene of Bethlehem is about to give way to Jesus' most surprising disguise.  How will He ask you the ultimate Christmas question - will you hold me?  In just moments, the cave gives way to this altar, and the manger to that place in your soul where only Jesus in the Eucharist can reach.  You're about to put the Mass in Christ's Mass, you see, for the original and precise and only meaning of Christmas is what you let happen when Jesus asks you through the gift of his body to the very depths of yours - will you hold me?

I have no idea how your touch and your answer will save the world.  I just know that's what Jesus wants for Christmas.  His whole trick tonight is designed to slip by your defenses to reach that place where you're still afraid, alone or stuck.  If He asked you what you wanted for Christmas, you might get scared and say I'm fine. Don't worry about me. So instead he asks for what He wants, and begs you to hold him.

The fate of Christmas turns on your answer, and your touch. That's His decision to bet it all on you, not mine.  So He is born for you tonight, just in case any or each of us may dare to say yes, Lord.  I will hold you.  On this strangest of nights, my yes might be flipped into the discovery that I'm the one being held. The dream of what Jesus and I both want for Christmas, might really come true.

+mj 

Do I expect surprises?

Homily

23 December 2023

Late Advent Weekday

St. Lawrence Catholic Campus Center at the University of Kansas

AMDG

Do I expect surprises?  Do I live for them?

I can find myself too often guarding against surprises.  Out of fear of new things, things beyond my control, I tend to play things too safe, constantly falling back to self-reliance on the familiar.  

Lots of surprises are exploding in the hill country in today's Gospel.  Amazement and fear attend these events in tandem.  What will this child be?  Such surprising signs accompany the birth of John the Baptist.  

It's said that whenever a child is born, it's a sign that God won't give up on the world.  Upon seeing a new face enter the world, wonder at the love story that is possible for this young one touches us all.  It's a source of great hope.   

Christmas belongs to children and the rebirth of those of us grown too attached to the careful.  Christmas is a plunge into the faith that expects surprises, and welcomes them.     

Any chance God could surprise me this Christmas?   

+mj