Homily - 32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time - Holy Trinity of Popes

2 Maccabees 7:1-2, 9-14

2 Thessalonians 2:16-3:5

Luke 20:27-38

                                               

            Are we there yet?  How many parents have heard these words on a long car trip?  How many kids have uttered those words?

            Well, guess what?  We’re there.  Jesus has finally arrived in Jerusalem.   And the messages he speaks here in Jerusalem are some of the most important of his ministry.  Because he’s speaking them to Pharisees, and Sadducees, and others who are angered by his preaching, teaching and living the Word of God.

            Kind of reminds me of someone else right now.  In eight short months, Pope Francis is stirring up some of the same controversy.

            I heard an interesting joke recently.

            A dad is sitting in his living room when he hears a ruckus upstairs.  He goes up and is startled to see his kids sitting in a circle on folding chairs, screaming their lungs out at each other:  “You’re an idiot.”  “You’re completely wrong and I can prove it!”   “No.  You’re a dope. You’re wrong and I can prove it.” And so on. 

            The father steps in and demands to know, “What in the world is going on here?”

            “Ah, don’t worry, dad,” one of the kids says, “We’re just playing Church.”

            How true is this in our Catholic Church today? 

            There‘s rancor and division in the Catholic Church especially in United States.  We U.S. Catholics are among the most polarized in the world.  Ask our brother and sister Catholics in other parts of the world.  “I’m right, you’re wrong” is the theme of the day in America in our journey of faith.   Sounds a little like partisan politics in our nation’s capitol.

            Sadly, some of these divisions even exist in and between our own two parishes right here in Everett, Washington. 

            Jesus is talking to all of these warring parties in today’s Gospel message and asking us all to take a collective breath and focus on Him.  He loves us all because, after all, he realizes there’s a sinner and a saint in each and every one of us. 

            Pope Francis has become a lightning rod the way Jesus was to the Sadducees and Pharisees of his day.

            How sad.  Do we realize how blessed we all are to live in these exciting times in the Catholic Church?  Our last three Popes have been remarkable, each in his own unique way.

            Blessed Pope John Paul the Second (soon to be Pope St. John Paul the Second next April) nearly single-handedly defeated the Evil Empire, the Soviet Union, by reminding us to “Be not afraid.”

            Bishop of Rome Emeritus Pope Benedict helped us to understand our Christian faith better than any other pope in modern history.

            His book “An Introduction to Christianity,” written as Joseph Ratzinger in 1968, is the definitive work on Christian faith belief, and not just read at Catholic seminaries. 

            Pope Benedict’s recent books on Jesus will bring any Christian closer to the face of God.

           

               And Pope Francis’ simple, plain-speaking ways are being heard by Christians and non-Christians, even atheists, and helping all to better understand why the people of faith believe what we believe.  And he leads by marvelous and poignant example.

            I call these three the Holy Trinity of Popes.  We will likely never see so many great men as the Vicar of Christ ever again.  In so many ways, we are blessed to live in these times.

            But still some Catholics bicker about our faith and who is a true Catholic.   And Jesus weeps every time we do.      

            Today, I want to urge us all to raise our minds to the mind of Christ and resurrect our thinking about our faith.  To do this, we may have to lose some attachments to whatever trips our ecclesiastical triggers and unite behind Christ.

            So, here’s a question for all of us. 

What is it that needs to die in us to produce new life? 

What attachment do we need to let go of so we can grow closer to the mind of Christ?

            Like the story of the father whose kids are “playing Church” we Catholics sometimes are tempted to do the same thing.  After all, religion is all about our deepest passions and sometimes these passions are breeding grounds for division instead of devotion to Christ. 

Scripture scholars have written about this weekend’s letter from St. Paul, saying, “When God’s light shines into places where darkness (has) allowed evil to flourish undetected, it makes people nervous, then angry, then malicious.” 

Does everybody believe the Gospel when it is preached?

Some who hear it but do not really believe it may “well resort to plotting and violence against those who preach it.”

Isn’t that what the Sadducees are doing in their ridiculously absurd query of Christ about marriage? 

In our Gospel message, we are shown that the attachments we have in this world are not important in the next world.  All of our attachments.  Yes, even our spouse (Apologies to my wife).

The only attachment that matters is to Jesus Christ.

Sadducees in Jesus’ world were the conservatives, the traditionalists, who only believed what was in the first five books of the bible (or Pentatuch) and believed that God could only be found in the Temple in Jerusalem.  The Sadducees didn’t believe in resurrection or in angels.  Jesus is having a little fun with them by drawing Moses into the discussion to make his point to men who only followed the Law of Moses.

The Sadducees were unlike their more liberal or progressive Pharisee brothers who followed not just the first five books of the Bible, but other teachings of other prophets.  The Pharisees believed in the resurrection and believed God could be found outside the Temple in Jerusalem, in fact, believing God could be found in the many synagogues around the known world of Jesus’ time.

They loved to bicker about who had the purest faith.    

We Catholics like to “play Church.”  We like to bicker about who has the purest faith beliefs.  We like to bicker in and between our two Churches and focus on our divisions instead of what should unite us.

But instead of focusing internally, shouldn’t we focus EVERYTHING on living the ministry of Jesus Christ for all to see?  Couldn’t we do a better job with the New Evangelization? 

I believe in my heart and soul we can.

How can we do a better job? 

First, it starts with giving up some of our biggest attachments in this world, our wealth.  It starts with tithing at a level that can make a difference in the lives of many more people than we touch presently.

(Introduce Stewardship of Treasure Cards)

All that we have is a gift from God.  Our very life is a gift from God.  Everything we own is a gift from God. 

So, let’s commit to dropping the attachments that divide us.  Let’s share more of what we have with others.  Let’s make the Kingdom of God a deeper reality by asking Christ to help us with our thoughts, our words and our actions in this world.

Because if we don’t allow ourselves to become too focused on what is “ours” in this world, “our” attachments to this world, only then can we truly UNITE and live for the world to come, the resurrected world headed by Jesus Christ.

Are we there yet?  No, we’re not there yet. 

We’re not in heaven, we’re still on the journey to the New Jerusalem, but we can bring the Kingdom of God to life better here in Everett.   

This is Jesus’ message, yesterday, today and tomorrow.  I pray we will hear this message loud and clear and live it out in beautiful new ways, resurrected ways, in the years to come.

 

Homily - 28th Sunday in Ordinary Time - Good Wolf vs. Evil Wolf

2 Kings 5:14-17

2 Timothy 2:8-13

Luke 17:11-19

                                               

Jesus has a challenging message for us all this weekend.

Just as there were in His day, there are lots of Pharisees in the Christian world today.

They preen around as “defenders” of the faith, but fail to fulfill God’s most basic demands like taking care of the poor and marginalized or loving their neighbor.

This is who Jesus is taking to task both then and now.

These hypocrites show their faces at church every week, but outside of church bad mouth their fellow church-goers, stabbing them in the back with unkind and mean words, stirring up all sorts of trouble in the community.

These hypocrites criticize the poor, saying, “Why don’t they just pull themselves up by their bootstraps and quit taking government handouts.”  They say about the poor and marginalized, “These people are the problem with our country today.”

Boy, does Jesus have a lesson for people who fail to live by His teachings.  And Jesus also has hope for those who are targets of these hypocrites.

This weekend’s message is about how we treat people we deem social outcasts or not like us. 

Ironically, we all have been outcasts in some way or another in our lives.  We’ve all stood outside the circle, feeling rejected or cast out or just plain unloved… maybe in our families or our circle of friends or at work or at school.

            We’ve all felt abandoned, lonely, desperate or despairing. We’ve all been bullied or betrayed in some way or another. 

Christ makes us all whole again and heals our wounds of being an outcast in this world. 

And Jesus marvels at how these healed people are the ones most grateful and filled with faith when they experience the healing power of God.

But Jesus is also pointing a finger at the Pharisees of our world and scolding us for “defending” the faith, but not actually living it by our words and our actions.  And we all have the capacity to be one of these people, too.

To illustrate what Christ is asking of each of us in today’s message, I’d like to share a two stories. You may see yourself in the reflection.  It’s OK.  I see myself, too.

                    ______________________________________________________

An old Cherokee told his grandson, “My son, there is a battle between two wolves inside us all.

One is Evil.  It is anger, jealousy, greed, resentment, inferiority, lies and ego. 

The other is Good.  It is joy, peace, love, hope, humility, kindness, empathy, and truth.”

The boy thought about it and asked, “Grandfather, which wolf wins?”

The old man quietly replied, “The one you feed.”  

________________________________________________________ 

The next story is a contemporary tale about the power of feeding the Good Wolf.  I found it on Facebook recently.

 ________________________________________________________

A woman pulls her car into the drive-thru line at Starbucks, and wonders why it was dozens of cars deep.

It wasn’t raining, yet it seemed everyone was driving through today.

It was as she entered the line that she saw the woman.

She was getting into line, too, and was leaving just enough room to not collide with the first woman’s car.

So, the first woman smiled, and gestured to her. “Are you next, or am I?”

The second woman became furious.

Thinking the first woman was trying to snag her spot to be next in line, she gunned her Suburban, rolled down the window, and let out a string of expletives that would make anyone blush.

“Go ahead, please,” the first woman said.  She really wasn’t sure who was first.

The second woman wasn’t buying it. She continued with the name calling without taking a breath.

Then something really strange happened.

Instead of getting mad or yelling back at the other woman, a sense of empathy overtook the first woman. 

She looked at the angry woman again, and this time saw someone different, someone who wrenched her heart.

Her eyes were red and puffy. Her hair was pulled back in a natty ponytail.  She held her phone in her palm, glancing down at it every few seconds.

And she was driving that big ole’ Suburban, the first woman’s own car of choice when she had three kids at home and a carpool every school day.

Dear God!  The first woman realized she was looking at herself ten years ago. Same car, same ponytail, same frustration.

We’ve all been there. Dog vomits on the sofa. Both kids have strep throat. The garbage disposal chooses today to break, when you’re trying to get rid of moldy leftovers from the fridge. Husband is mad because you forgot to pick up the dry cleaning and he’s going on a business trip. Sound familiar?

The second woman gunned forward, just to show the first woman that she was first.

The first woman left her a wide berth, smiled at the other woman’s splotchy face.  The second woman shot her a sideways scowl, mouthed the mantra again.

Pulling up to the loudspeaker, the first woman said “I want to pay for whatever the woman in front of me has ordered. And please tell her I hope she has a better day.” And she meant every word. 

The woman idled in front of her for a good four minutes, talking to the barista who had leaned out the window.  The woman shook her head and handed over a bill. She drove around the side of the building slowly, this time no gunning.

“She wouldn’t let me buy?” the first woman said to the barista as she pulled forward.

“Nope. She said she couldn’t believe you wanted to pay for her drink after all the names she called you.  She said she couldn’t allow it, and said to tell you she was sorry.  She felt really bad.”

“Did you tell her I hoped she had a better day?”

“Yep. She said thanks— that it already was.”

As the first woman drove away, she began to cry. Not because she’d been called so many terrible names, or from the stress of the encounter, but because God had answered her very recent prayer—which was that He would allow her to see people as He sees them, not as we see them.  That she might be able to see the hurting inside, instead of just the hurtful outside.

______________________________________________________ 

            My sisters and brothers, we are all broken whether we want to admit it or not.

Jesus sees through our hurt and wants to heal us of our brokenness.

Jesus wants us to see the world and all its people the way He sees it.

Jesus encourages us to feed the Good Wolf and starve the Evil

Wolf.

            When Jesus heals us from our brokenness; our hurt, our pain, our sorrow, gratitude should be our response. 

When we are shown love and mercy from Jesus, love and mercy should be our response to others as a sign of our gratitude. 

Today, nine healed lepers returned to their old lives without saying a single word of thanks.

Today, one outcast Samaritan approached Jesus with gratitude. 

As we approach the altar today to receive Christ, will our response after Mass be gratitude by a display of compassion and love for others? 

Or will our response after Mass be ingratitude by showing a lack of charity and intolerance toward others, complaining, grumbling, being prideful, egotistical, or showing presumption in situations we do not understand?

This is the Evil Wolf speaking.  Jesus encourages us to always feed the Good Wolf.  Jesus encourages us to show gratitude over ingratitude always. 

            I’d like to pray this prayer for us all this morning:

“Lord, may I never fail to recognize your love and mercy.  Fill my heart with gratitude and thanksgiving and free me from pride, discontentment, and ingratitude.  Help me count my blessings with gratefulness and give thanks in all circumstances. Amen.”

 

Homily - 25th Sunday in Ordinary Time - "God and Mammon"

“You cannot serve both God and mammon.”  

               Or better put, you cannot serve both God and money or wealth.

In ­­today’s Gospel, Jesus is giving us clear instruction in the proper stewardship of money by sharing a cautionary tale about not becoming enslaved to wealth and all of its allures.

Boy does our American culture need to hear these words now more than ever. 

               We are so wrapped up in our materialistic world.  We spend ourselves silly, racking up credit card debt like no other generations before.

We love our consumer goods: our iPhones, our big screen TVs, our video games, our luxury cars, our big houses, our fancy vacations, the list goes on and on and one. 

We’re all guilty of it in some way or another.  Mammon or money has become a dictator in our lives.

Come on, admit it.  You lose sleep over money issues.  Right? 

How many times have you lost sleep over your relationship with God or worrying if you’re serving the kingdom the way God intended?

As we heard a few weeks back in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus told his followers to store up treasures in heaven:  “For where your treasure is, there also will your heart be.”

I know of a local Catholic family who lost sleep NOT over their wealth, but whether they were serving the Kingdom of God right way.

Maybe you’ve heard of Will and Diane Boegel.  They were longtime parishioners at St. Jude Parish in Redmond. 

Will was a successful doctor at Virginia Mason.  Diane was a surgery nurse at Evergreen Orthopedic Surgery Center.

They raised three kids, were in their early 50s, and at a point where most of us start living the good life:  sailing, golf, travel.

But none of that felt right to Will and Diane.  God was tugging at their hearts and pointing them to a different life.
 

               They’d volunteered on medical missions all over the globe and witnessed all sorts of horrible things.

But one experience serving orphans in Guatemala City changed their lives forever.  The experience shook them to the core and opened their eyes to new realities of children living in poverty. 

For Will’s 50^th birthday, they served in a mission working with orphans living near a landfill in the heart of Guatemala City.  

There they encountered children living in squalor with no hope and no family to call their own.

As Dr. Will explained, “Little kids 6 years and up spend all night on the streets huffing paint thinner.  They're homeless. The paint thinner keeps them warm and cuts their appetite. It fries their brains, and they end up dead or in prison."

After the emotionally grueling experience, Will and Diane had to get away and landed at beautiful Lake Atitlan for a little "R and R."  It was there they discovered a 59-acre estate owned by a wealthy family.  It was for sale. 

Hearing God’s voice ringing in their ears, they decided to walk away from the cushy life here in the United States and founded Opal House, a refuge for orphaned children.

That was in 2007.  Today, Opal House is a thriving dream come true.

The statement on their website reads, Opal House is “A Children's home (orphanage) and medical clinic in Lake Atitlan, Guatemala. Placed on 59 acres of avocado and coffee producing farmland, God has called us to create a refuge of hope for homeless children and provide medical and surgical care to the community and country of Guatemala.”

God sounds the warning in today’s first reading from the Prophet Amos, “Hear this, you who trample upon the needy and destroy the poor of the land!”

The Gospel takes it a step further by showing us one man’s efforts to tend to the poor who serve a rich man and Jesus reminds us, “No servant can serve two masters.  He will either hate one and love the other, or be devoted to one and despise the other.  You cannot serve both God and mammon." 

Mammon is a funny word.  “Mammon” is the Greek translation of an Aramaic word that actually means much more than wealth and riches.  It also means anyone who relies on titles, positions, honors and privileges in this world. 

In other words, “mammon is anything that takes our attention away from God, the true source of life.”

The interesting thing to understand about Jesus’ message here is to know what the rich man’s steward is doing.

It was common for the rich men in Jesus’ time to charge a usury fee for borrowed money.  This is like interest upon interest and was forbidden by the Law of Moses. 

What this steward is doing is erasing this extra fee, thereby reforming his old life and performing an act of social justice.

I guess the same could be said for the Boegels.  They took all the money they had accumulated in this world and put it to work for the poor, reforming their old lives and now living a life of social justice.

               When I was in Lake Atitlan in January with Maryknoll, I had the honor to meet Will and Diane who joined us for lunch at a Catholic church known for its social justice in the Lake Atitlan area.

They brought with them a group of parishioners from Sacred Heart in La Conner and Assumption in Bellingham.

With them that day was Fr. Tom McMichael, one of the few married Catholic priests serving in the Seattle Archdiocese and his wife of 26 years Karin.

When our Maryknoll group concelebrated Mass before hundreds of Mayan natives in Santiago Atitlan, we invited Fr. Tom to join us.  

In the audience at Mass that day were Dr. Will and Diane Boegel, Fr. Tom’s wife Karin and all those visiting from Washington state.  It was a true Holy Spirit-inspired, Kingdom moment with a Northwest flair. 



 

This summer, I returned to that same parish in Santiago Atitlan, Guatamala.  A group of priests and deacons from our Maryknoll trip in January held a fundraiser to upgrade the computer lab at the parochial school there. 

               I was blessed to be joined by my dear friend Maryknoll Father Dave LaBuda as the school community held for us a celebration, complete with native dancing, classroom visits and dozens and dozens of hugs from all the kids at the school.  It was an amazing and life-changing experience for the both of us.  Perhaps you saw the pictures on my Facebook page. 

Two families from our own parish community joined in that fundraising effort, and I am eternally grateful to them both. 
               Their names are now on beautifully framed embroidery and will forever grace the walls of the computer lab. 

This is what Jesus is asking of us.  Not be so tied to our money that we don’t pay attention to the needs of the poor in our community and around the world.

The bottomline of Jesus’s Gospel message today:  Mammon (or wealth) can seduce disciples away from God, yet disciples must use mammon (or wealth) – now in the Kingdom – as alms to the poor. 

There are many ways to serve the Kingdom right here in our own parish.  We have our parish community’s Day of Caring twice a year.  We have St. Vincent de Paul in both parishes. 

And I’m here to announce that we are planning a parish mission trip to Guatemala for next summer (and plan to serve at Opal House with Dr. Will and his wife Diane). 
            I invite you to find one or more efforts that speak to your heart and please join in.