DO YOU REALLY REALIZE THAT YOU ARE LOVED NO MATTER WHAT?

 

What if I wish to give this last one the same as you?

Am I not free to do as I wish? Or are you envious because

 I am generous?

Matthew 20:1-16a

 

If you were to die today and you stood before the gates of heaven and you were asked this one simple question test to see whether you got in or not, could you answer that one simple question? Here is that question. “Who does God love?” 

Well, if you are not sure, I am going to give you the correct answer - not my answer, but the answer found in today’s gospel reading. It is so simple, yet unbelievably astounding! Who does God love? He loves everybody – everybody - no ands, ifs or buts about it! 

One of the parables that most brings this point home to me is this parable of the vineyard workers. The parable of the “Vineyard Workers” is enough to make wine growers all over the world cringe! This parable is not an instruction on to operate a profitable vineyard. If you followed this example, you would be broke in no time! No, it’s a story about how God treats us, a story about God’s unbelievable generosity! For Jesus, the whole purpose of this parable is to shock in order to teach! This parable is insane, according to human thinking, but that’s the whole point of the parable. That’s its genius! It tells of God’s unexpected insane love for us, no matter what we have done or what we have failed to do! That’s why it is called “the gospel,” “the good news!”

Those who had “worked all day in the sun” were the religious authorities, those who felt entitled because they had served God faithfully for years! Those “hour before quitting time” workers were the “tax collectors and sinners,” those who felt unworthy in God’s eyes, the simple people who failed at following Jesus!  You can imagine how both groups reacted when they heard the punch line, “Give them all a full day’s pay!” You can imagine those who had worked all  day screaming in outrage!  “Give them all a full day’s pay?” "Are you out of your ever-lovin' mind? That's just not fair!" 

This message is very close to the message of another parable, the one we call the Parable of the Prodigal Son.  In that story, the father loves both his sons, the one who stayed home and followed all the rules, as well as the one who strayed away and got down with the pigs! The message is simple: God loves all his children, not matter what they have done or failed to do! Yes, we certainly can reject God's love, but God never quits loving us- even if we reject his love and choose our own condemnation!

The tax collectors, sinners and rejects were delirious with joy when they heard that message! The Scribes and Pharisees, who taught that God’s love depended on people’s behaviors, were outraged. In the words of Jesus, they were “envious because I am generous.”  They made the mistake of believing that there is not enough God-love to go around!

One of the worst things to happen to the church, in my estimation, was when it started to “conditionalize” this “good news” and started teaching people that God loves you when you are good, quits loving you when you are bad and starts loving you again when you shape up!  It is not uncommon to hear some religious people tone down the “good news” because it is “too dangerous.” I was often criticized at the Cathedral by them when I welcomed home hundreds of fallen away Catholics by preaching this message. Their worst nightmare is that if people really believed the message of the parables and the church really taught it, all hell would break loose! People would start doing any damned thing they wanted! That’s the same thing that worried the Scribes and Pharisees. In reality, the opposite was true in Jesus’ day and the opposite is true in ours! People’s lives are transformed by that message! They are converted by this message! This message inspires them to love others the same way they have been loved by God – friends and enemies alike! 

What do you believe? Are you one of those people who still believes that God’s pays us with love depending how many hours we have loved him? Are you one of those people who still believes that God turns his love on and off depending what we do or fail to do?  If you are, really listen to the message of the parables. If it sounds too good to be true, then you have gotten the message! God’s incredible unconditional love does sound too good to be true, but the fact of the matter is, it is true! “While we were still sinners, Christ died for us!” He didn’t die for us as a reward for our shaping up! While we were still sinners, Christ died for us!

 

"CHURCH CHAT" #46

 

 

 

FORGIVENESS, MORE OFTEN THAN NOT, IS A FAMILY ISSUE

A man had two sons. He said to the older son, “You have been here with me the whole time, but now we must celebrate and rejoice because your brother was lost and has been found.

Luke 15:11-32

I believe with all my heart that if the whole Bible were to be lost except this one story, it would be enough! This parable is really a short play, narrated by Jesus as a parable, that teaches us in the clearest way possible just how much God loves each and every one of us – no matter what! He loves us without condition, no matter how far we stray or how faithful we stay! To me it teaches us that nothing can separate us from the love of Christ as St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans will tell us in this coming Sunday’s second reading.

This parable is about God and his relationship to us. God plays the role of the father. We, when we sin and fall short in our relationship to God, we play the role of the younger son. We, when we follow all of God’s rules and end up smug and withholding and jealous, we play the role of the older son. The only hero in this play is God. Both sons fell short in their relationship with God: the younger son who asked for his inheritance before his father even died and then wasted it on prostitutes, got down with the pigs and had to come crawling home and the older son who withheld forgiveness from his brother and refused to celebrate their father’s love for both of them, no matter what they did or did not do! The younger son represents us when we fixate on our freedom without responsibility and the older son represents us when we fixate on our responsibility without freedom.

The famous 17^th century Dutch painter, Rembrant, tells this story beautifully in his famous painting “The Return of the Prodigal Son.” He pictures the younger son kneeling like a servant, ragged, barefooted, humiliated and hoping to get a menial job in his father’s house as a servant. The older son is standing, with his arms crossed glaring in disgust, judgment, resentment and pride. The father, who had run to meet his youngest son and did not give him time to deliver his well-rehearsed apology, embraces him tenderly. Rembrant adds a tender touch to the scene. The father’s hands on the younger son’s shoulders are very interesting. One hand is large and more masculine and the other hand is smaller and more feminine. The father’s hands represents God’s masculine attributes and God’s feminine attributes!

Both the parable of Jesus and the painting of the artist Rembrant tell a moving, memorable and educational story about God’s forgiveness and unconditional love. It is worthy of our study, consideration and imitation. This beautiful parable is really about God’s unconditional love and the importance of reconciliation in families and communities - among parents, siblings, relatives, neighbors – and, yes, even with our enemies!

With that said, let me speak directly to all of the families reading this post today. In the last couple of weeks we have been focusing on the importance of forgiveness, especially in our Sunday readings. As a priest, I know from fifty-six years of ministry that your family and mine are not exceptional. Grudges, hurts, disappointments and misunderstandings are rampant in families - always have been and always will be! I have never met a family free of such problems. 

Wherever we are in this gospel parable, know that God loves us no matter what we have done or failed to do. He loves us no matter where we end up on the scale between our wanting our own personal freedom and our responsibility to our families. With God, we are always welcome home! With God, we have always been loved and we will always be loved! With God, there is always a welcome home party waiting for us! 

OUR PROBLEMS ARE BIGGER THAN MORE PARISH CLOSINGS

 

As he was setting out on a journey, a man ran up, knelt down before him, and asked him, “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus answered him, “You know the commandments: ‘You shall not kill; you shall not commit adultery; you shall not steal; you shall not bear false witness; you shall not defraud; honor your father and your mother.’” He replied and said to him, “Teacher, all of these I have observed from my youth.” Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said to him, “You are lacking in one thing. Go, sell what you have, and give to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” At that statement his face fell, and he went away sad, for he had many possessions.

Mark 10:17-22

We hear a lot about the "shortage of priests" and more than a couple of popular "solutions" about how to solve it. The most common solutions being proposed are, of course, to "ordain women priests" and "let priests marry." From what I hear, both Protestants and Jews, have the same "shortages" while they have both women ministers and rabbis and married ministers and rabbis. Allowing more married priests and ordaining women in the Catholic church, in theory, might help relieve the shortage of priests in the short run, but I still don't believe it will be that hoped-for "magic solution" for our shortage in the long run. 

For me, our problem is not as much a battle between ordaining men or women, married or celibate, but a bigger cultural problem stemming from the shortage of young people being attracted to "service professions" in general. For example, we also have a shortage of nurses, social workers and teachers who tend to be lower on the wage scale. Our biggest problem may be the fact that we have fewer and fewer people, like the rich young man in the Scripture quote above, who are willing to move beyond the dream of "personal security" to serving the needs of the "common good" - as in "doing something great for God!" 

In the meantime, most schools, including some of our Catholic schools, have guidance counselors who keep asking the young, who are very much immersed in the present day culture, "what do you want to be when you grow up" rather than "what is God calling you to be when you grow up?" 

In a world where "making big money" is such an expanding and exploding value, why would anyone want to spend years being trained to be a priest, nurse, social worker or teacher, with their expensive advanced degrees, and then spend the rest of their lives serving other people, and often the least among us, for long hours and for such a minimal salary? Fundamentally, at its core, our shortages seem to me to be more of a question of "values." 

The accumulation of wealth is like drinking salt water, the more you drink the more you want to drink! The accumulation of wealth does give you the ability to make even more money. For an obvious symptom of our appetite for wealth, look no further than the growth of online gambling and the expanding sale of lottery tickets. Even for the growing number of the super rich, "too much" is still "not enough!" 

Our Church is losing the "values war" because of its expanding "spiritual leadership crisis." When we lost our power to force people to do what we say, we have not been able to replace it with an ability to convince people of the value of what we have to say. Having failed at convincing people, some among us naively dream of a return to our old methods of forcing people which is most certainly doomed to failure.   

The values of "the common good" and "my own personal good" are at war in our culture and "my own personal good" is winning by overpowering the values of "the common good." Such values are having a dramatic negative impact all the way down to things like "parish closures."

Here's a thought - just a thought! What I imagine will eventually happen in our "priest shortage crisis" is that we will shortly be forced to return to the "frontier days" of our own diocese when lay people led our parishes and priests moved around from community to community celebrating the Sacraments! To prepare for that eventuality, our Archdiocese could help establish an advanced degree program in Parish Administration for lay men or women at one of our local Catholic Universities (and maybe even partner with programs at St. Meinrad School of Theology) and prepare ourselves for the eventuality of paying them a living wage. To me this makes more sense than closing active parishes because of a "priest shortage."  

Seminaries would need to be challenged to adjust their training program to fit this new reality. Young priests and deacons, then, could be encouraged to focus more on developing a passion for expanding their "spiritual leadership" skills that would ideally lead to opening more parishes, rather than having to close more of those that we do have! 

Whatever happens, I still believe (and I have preached about it regularly) that "good" will eventually triumph over "evil" - in the end, when all is said and done! However, it's what happens between "now" and "then" that worries me! I suppose the best part of being 82, heading toward 83, is that I won't have to wait that long for "when all is said and done!" 

Don't bother trying to punish me! I'm retired! I'm just simply offering a few ideas of my own and hoping to encourage others to offer their ideas! As I have said several times before, "Our lack of imagination is our biggest shortage!" 

FORGIVENESS UNLIMITED

Peter asked Jesus, “Lord, how often must I forgive?

As many as seven times? Jesus answered Peter, “I

say to you, not seven times but seventy times seven times”

Matthew 18:21-35

This Sunday, for the second Sunday in a row, we are asked to consider forgiveness - not only for what we have done, but also for what we have failed to do - and that includes not forgiving each other! As I mentioned in last week’s homily, I read that Amazon.com lists over 160,000 books on the topic of forgiveness. That’s 32,000 more than books on sexuality. That alone should tell us what the human heart hungers for most and why the Church considers it so important to preach about!

Like the cartoon character Charlie Brown himself, good old Saint Peter craves affirmation. Like a needy little puppy looking for a pat on the head, Saint Peter is always on the look-out for ways to impress Jesus. No matter how hard he tries, he seems to keep missing the mark over and over again. You have to love this big klutz with a soft heart!

The stories of Saint Peter embarrassing himself are numerous, but the one we have today is typical. Jesus had just told his disciples that they must forgive one another. When Jesus finishes speaking, imagining that another chance to impress Jesus has presented itself, good old Saint Peter springs into action. Peter knows well that the rabbis had always taught that people needed to forgive three times. Peter gets out his little mental adding machine and multiplies three by two and adds one for good measure. Then he asks his question and answers it at the same time. “How many times must we forgive? Seven times?” He obviously expected Jesus to say, “Wow, Peter, how generous you are! You are better than the best! Seven times is way beyond the call of duty!” You can almost see his big eager grin melt like wax when Jesus told him to forgive, not three, not even seven times, but seventy-times seven times. In that culture, that was a way of saying – “forgive without even counting the times!”

The first mistake people make when it comes to forgiveness is thinking forgiveness is for the benefit of the offending party - that forgiving them requires that we let the ones who hurt us off the hook!  To be honest, it is the other way around! Forgiveness of others is actually a gift we give ourselves. It lets us off the hook! Think about it! Grudges consume vast amounts of time and energy: the incessant mental energy of rehearsing it over and over in our minds, the regular bad feelings it keeps generating for us in the constant retelling of it to anyone who will listen. We all know people who constantly bring up their festering grudges and we have to stand there and let them drag us through their “bag of stinking grudges” again and again and again!  Let’s all forgive so that we can make sure that we are not one of those people who drags a stinking bag of grudges around with us and makes sure everybody hears about it!  

While we are working so hard dragging around our grudges, the offending person is probably not even aware of the punishment we are inflicting on ourselves. As the comedian Buddy Hackett put it, “Don’t carry a grudge. While you are carrying the grudge, the other guy’s out dancing.”  Again, as Mark Twain so wisely said, “Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.”

“In the long run, it’s not a question of whether they deserve to be forgiven. You’re not forgiving them for their sake anyway! You’re doing it for your own sake! For your own health and well-being, forgiveness is simply the most energy-efficient option. Muster that heart power to forgive them and see it as a way of looking out for yourself! Forgiveness releases you from the punishment of a self-made prison where you are both the inmate and the jailer. Forgiveness releases you from the incredibly toxic, debilitating drain of holding a grudge. Don’t let people who have offended you live rent-free in your head and keep you up at night! If they hurt you before, why let them keep doing it, year after year, in your mind? Forgiving, even seventy times seven times, is actually a favor you do for yourself! Think about it! Forgiveness is a perfect way to keep rotting garbage from piling up in your own mind and heart!

The second reason to forgive is also for your own good – so that God will forgive you! The Book of Sirach, our first reading today, lays it out quite clearly. “Forgive your neighbor’s injustice; then when you pray, your own sins will be forgiven. Could anyone nourish anger against another and expect healing from the Lord?” Jesus put it this way, “Forgive and you will be forgiven. The measure you measure with, will be measured back to you.” Holding a grudge is a dangerous, as well as a self-defeating, thing to do to oneself!

In short, grudges are like cancers. They need to be stopped, cut out and removed before they kill us, emotionally and spiritually. As the first reading says, only a sinner “hugs them tight” and “nourishes them" in an insane need to be “right.” The need to be “right” is very expensive. The truth of the matter is that you can still be right, without you ever needing to convince the one who offended you that you are right! As the ancient Chinese philosopher put it, “One who truly believes in himself has not need to convince others!” Forgiving is ultimately “agreeing to disagree” and then letting it go for the good of you both!

How many old grudges are you carrying around in your mind and heart? Who do you refuse to forgive? Wouldn’t today be a good time to cut yourself free, emotionally and spiritually? Wouldn’t today be a good day to make up your mind to forgive whoever has wronged you! Do it today! Do it for your own good! Believe me, it could very well be the biggest step toward self-care that you will ever take!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"CHURCH CHAT #45