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Homily for the Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ, June 6, 2021
Click here for the Gospel reading.
When I was a kid, most of the phones were landlines with cords. They had those buttons you pushed when dialing the number. Those are “old school” now. One phone that was different was my Grandma Jubert’s rotary phone. With a rotary phone, you would find the digit you wanted to dial, you would walk it around the wheel, let it go so that it would go back to its original position, and then keep dialing the next digit. Those were old school then and now they are really old school!
Have you ever thought about what old school is for the Catholic faith? Old School is going back to our Jewish roots. Jesus didn’t come to abolish the Old Law but to bring it to fulfillment. Many Protestants see a rather complete break with the Old Covenant. However, both Scripture and Tradition suggest that the better we know about Jewish worship, the better it can help us in our Christian worship.
The Catholic Biblical scholar Dr. Scott Hahn recently spoke to the priests and deacons of the Archdiocese. One thing that he wanted to drive into us is how we should understand the phrase “the New Testament.” Dr. Hahn’s line is, “Long before the New Testament was a document, it was a sacrament.” The New Testament is the Eucharist. We see this even in our passage from the Gospel from Mark; Mark assumes that the audience is already attending a Eucharistic liturgy. Jesus is quotes as saying that His blood is the blood of the Covenant…what is the new and ever-lasting Covenant.
Jesus celebrated the Last Supper on Passover, which is a Jewish feast of remembrance. During the time of Moses, the Israelites were enslaved in Egypt. When Pharaoh would not let the Israelites go after sending a series of plagues, God promised to send one final plague: an angel who would kill all of the firstborn sons. In order for the Israelite boys to be spared, the Israelites had to follow very specific instructions with a lamb. Firstly, they had to take a male lamb without blemish (meaning it couldn’t have any defects) and kill it. Secondly, they had to spread its blood on their doorposts as a sign. Thirdly, the most important factor was that they had to eat the lamb. A simple way of saying these 3 actions with the lamb is: “Kill, spill, and eat your fill.” Now, what if the Israelites hadn’t wanted to eat the lamb (what if they were vegetarian or Vegan like some of my family members)? Could they eat a cookie cutout of the lamb and still be saved? No. They had to eat the lamb—the animal that died in their place.
Now let’s look at Jesus’ story. One of Jesus’ most common titles is the Lamb of God, and He too is an unblemished male, unblemished by the defects of sin since He was without sin. He was killed and His blood was also spilled on a crossbeam very similar looking to the mantle of a doorway. Finally – and here’s the pivotal connection – we now have to eat what died in our place. We can’t eat a symbol of this Lamb and be saved; through the Eucharist, we eat the One who died in our place and thus God spares us from the punishment for our sins. Jesus, the Paschal Lamb, has been killed, his blood was spilled, and now we are commanded to eat our fill of him. One again the 3 directions for Passover: kill, spill, and eat your fill.
My brothers and sisters, now that we have gone “old school” with the Eucharistic Sacrifice, how do we grow in love of the Eucharistic? How do we grow in our love for Jesus the Lamb of God? There are 3 things that I would like us to consider.
Firstly, we are to examine ourselves before receiving Holy Communion. St. Paul writes in 1st Corinthians: “Therefore whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner, shall be guilty of the body and the blood of the Lord. But let a man examine himself, and so let him eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For he who eats and drinks, eats and drinks judgment to himself, if he does not judge the body rightly” (1 Cor. 11:26-29). This is why we have a Penitential Rite at Mass, so that we can examine whether we are worthy to receive Holy Communion. If we receive Communion with an unconfessed mortal sin on our souls, then St. Paul says we are “guilty of the body and the blood of the Lord”; in other words, we are guilty of crucifying the Lord. As a reminder, a mortal sin is a serious sin that we know is wrong and do with full freedom. Here is a partial (that is, non-exhaustive) list of possible mortal sins—missing Sunday Mass or a Holy Day Mass after the dispensation to attend Mass is lifted on July 1st unless there is a serious reason, serious acts of impurity, using contraception, getting drunk, and being in a marriage that is not blessed by the Church (that is, living like a married couple even though the union isn’t blessed by the Church).
Secondly, we can grow in our love of the Lamb of God by thirsting for Mass. Mass is the greatest place we can be on Earth since it is where Heaven meets Earth. So if we are on a vacation or visiting family, we want to plan on how we are going to get to Mass. Our thirst for Mass can take us even to thirst for Daily Mass, which is a short and intimate Mass. Maybe you aren’t able to get to Daily Mass at this season of your life due to work, or being responsible for children, etc., but the desire to want to be there is good. In the Our Father, we pray “give us…our daily bread.” We ask God to provide for our material needs but moreso for the Eucharist and even to receive it daily if we are able.
Thirdly, we can grow in our love of our Eucharistic Lord by visiting our blessed Lord in Eucharistic Adoration. We just moved back into our beautiful Adoration Chapel. There are people praying there basically 24/7. If you have never committed to a regular weekly hour (or haven’t in a while), you are invited to stop by the table in the Gathering Space after Mass to learn more.
My brothers and sisters, we went “old school” by learning how Jesus is the fulfillment of the Jewish Passover. Jesus was killed, His blood was spilt, and now we are commanded to have our fill of Him. May our love for Him increase each day so that we can be the saints He wants us to be.
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Homily for The Ascension of the Lord, May 16, 2021
Click here for the Gospel reading.
Usually there aren’t too many fans of 90’s rock in the congregation. The rock band “Creed” is by no means a Christian band, but they are sometimes mistaken for one based on their lyrics. For example, their 1999 song “Higher” has the lyrics, “Can you take me higher? To a place where blind men see. Can you take me higher? To a place with golden streets.”
The Ascension is the last mystery of Jesus’ mission on earth. It is connected with His Passion, Death, and Resurrection. After 40 days of appearing to the Disciples in His resurrected Body, Jesus leaves Earth and ascends up to Heaven. Not that we can hop in a spaceship and go there; only God can bring someone to heaven.
I have been blessed to see where Jesus supposedly left the Earth. On top of a hill outside of the games of Jerusalem, near where Jesus underwent His Agony in the Garden, is a small circular building. It used to be a church but now it is a mosque. Christians are only able to worship there once per year, on the Feast of the Ascension. But to the best of our knowledge, this is the location where Jesus’ feet last touched the Earth.
We want to reflect on why Jesus ascends (and I count 3 reasons). The first is to send the Holy Spirit (more on that later). The second is to go prepare a place for us—our eternal dwelling place in Heaven. The third is to take His spot to reign at the right hand of God the Father.
Now what does the Ascension mean to us here in 2021? It means that we can be united to Jesus. Although we might desire to be able to have Jesus interact with us in human ways like a sharing a meal together, it is better for us that He is in Heaven. He can survey all of the troops—all of us Christians throughout the world and throughout time. Just as Jesus was never separated from His Heavenly Father on Earth, He is never separated from us on Heaven. We heard about the Mystical Body of Christ in the 2nd Reading. Well, we know that where the Head has gone, we go. And not just sometime in the future, when we die, but now! We can enter into the reality of Heaven while still on the Earth. Heaven is the place where God’s beloved will be united to Jesus for all eternity. So we set our minds and hearts on what is above. This sentiment we pray for in the Eucharistic Prayer when all of you say “we lift up [our hearts] to the Lord.” Having heavenly thoughts, like daily prayer with God and reading good spiritual books, helps us to be lifted out of our worldliness—like our phones, politics, concerns about the pandemic, sports—and keeps us from falling into sin that could damn us.
Jesus tells the Apostles that they will be baptized with the Holy Spirit, which happens at Pentecost. Jesus says the following to them: “you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, throughout Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” Jesus calls them to be his witnesses.
The great feast of Pentecost is just a week away. We want our prayer, like the First Disciples, to be, “Come, Holy Spirit! Fill us with your power!” This power from the Holy Spirit is for a purpose, though; it’s to make us Jesus’ witnesses to the world; in other words, we are to be disciple-makers.
I think it is good for us to reflect on the status of our parish. Do we at St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Church seem as focused as the early Christians on making disciples? I think most of us would honestly say, “No.”
That is not just an unfortunate thing; it’s a bad thing. We have gotten complacent. We want the pews here to be filled with young families. Well, how many individuals have you invited to come to SEAS? How many people have you intentionally asked about where they are at in their relationship with God?
We can all think of people who don’t practice their faith or don’t believe. How can we help them to become more open to the Catholic faith? Well, first thing first is to pray for them. We can also work at being good friends to them, ones that are interested in their lives. And then at some point, we just have to ask them if they have prayer requests or how their relationship with God is going.
Last year, two-thirds of people said that God was trying to get their attention during Covid. Well, can we encourage others to keep their lives simple and to focus on God?
As you may have heard, St. Elizabeth Ann Seton has hired an Evangelization Director. Her name is Laura Stierman, and she starts at the end of June. Although her full time job will be to help bring people—both already in our church walls as well as though who never step foot in our church walls—into an everyday relationship with Jesus Christ, it is the work of every one of us, as Jesus says, to be his witnesses to the world!
My brothers and sisters, our prayer is: Jesus, take us higher! Take us out of our worldly concerns and bring us into heavenly concerns. Holy Spirit, fill us with your power so that we can bring others into a living and loving relationship with God.
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Homily for the 6th Sunday of Easter, May 9, 2021
Click here for the Gospel reading.
Well-known Catholic speaker Bishop Barron says that to grasp this Gospel passage is to grasp the heart of the Christian message. Our Gospel comes from Jesus’ Last Supper Teachings. Jesus was preparing for His death, so He gives His Apostles his parting words (sort of like how if someone knew he was about to die, he might bring his family together to say a few things). Jesus tells us his disciples, “This is my commandment: love one another as I have loved you.” So the most important task for we as Christians is to love as Jesus loves.
But how does Jesus love? How does God love? On Mother’s Day, we honor moms who show us the best human love: the love of a mother for a child. As the Bible says, “Even if a mother forgets her child, God will not forget you.” In our 2nd reading, we hear that “God is love.” In other words, God is defined by His love. He always loves. He cannot help but love. Jesus shows us the fullness of His love shortly after the Gospel: Though sinless, He suffered and died for us to bridge the chasm between us and God through sin.
We heard today that “In this is love: not that we have loved God, but that he loved us.” The primacy of any love is with God; God initiates all love. Anything we think we “do,” any time we love, is in response to God already acting in our lives.
In John’s Gospel, we hear that non-Christians “will know that we are Christians by our love” (cf. John 13:35). There are many things that we will not be identified by. Christians don’t have particular language, food, or everyday clothing (except for maybe wearing a cross…and priests who wear clerics…it makes the decision as to what to wear easy in the morning!). The difference of the love of Christians is detailed in a letter [to Diognetus] from the 2nd Century (which still applies to us today): “Like all others, [Christians] marry and have children; but they do not expose them. They share their meals, but not their wives. They live in the flesh, but they are not governed by the desires of the flesh. They pass their days upon earth, but they are citizens of heaven.”
My brothers and sisters, we are citizens of Heaven. But we live in the world, and the world does not live by the Christian definition of love. The Devil likes to give half-truths to others (and to us). An example of a half-truth we hear regularly is “a person should be able to love whoever they want.” How is a Christian to respond to that? Well, the key word in the phrase is “love.” Every potential act of love can be judged—is it like Christ’s selfless love or is it a so-called “love” and selfish (like the Devil).
We grow in God’s love most especially at the Mass, which is the greatest sign of God’s love. The Mass (or the liturgy) is the work of God. At the beginning, we call to mind obstacles to receiving God’s love and our venial sins are forgiven. Then God speaks to us through the readings and (hopefully) the homilist. Next comes our response—reciting the Creed, the prayers of intercession, uniting our own sacrifice to that of the priest’s on the altar, who offers to God the greatest Gift—His very Son. And then we receive the Gift of the Sacrament of Love. And finally, at the end of Mass, the priest or deacon send us on mission to bring others into this love of God.
My brothers and sisters, we are called to love like Jesus loves. We can truly love like God loves after we have received God’s love, especially at Mass. May others first see that we are Christians by our love and then desire to live fully Christian lives themselves.
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Homily for Divine Mercy Sunday, April 11, 2021
Click here for the Gospel reading.
We are reminded of the misery of the Disciples in today’s Gospel. From Good Friday til Easter Sunday, the disciples were in misery. The Lord that they had followed for 3 years was dead. All of the Disciples except the Blessed Mother had lost faith in God. Their misery begins to change to joy when the Disciples meet the risen Lord. They realize, too, that their sins are forgiven.
The misery of Thomas was a deeper misery than the rest of the Disciples. His lasted 10 days--from Good Friday til the Sunday after Easter. In modern times, he gets nicknamed “Doubting Thomas,” but many of us would probably have been doubters if we were in his shoes.
If we might do a little thought experiment. Those of you who live with others, imagine that you were the only one of your household who didn’t encounter the risen Jesus. Like for our rectory, maybe I was doing a kind deed like out buying some of Fr. Dave’s favorite shampoo when the resurrected Jesus appeared to Fr. Dave. As he and I live and work together, it wouldn’t be just one time in the week where Fr. Dave would say, “Jesus is risen, and I have seen Him!” He would bring it up in different ways throughout the week just as your housemates would keep bringing it up. Thomas had spent 3 years with Jesus but vowed not to believe the news unless He saw Jesus’ wounds firsthand.
We can focus on the misery of the Disciples and specifically of Thomas, but it is more important to focus on the Mercy of Jesus. The greatest misery in life is to not believe that God exists. God is the source of joy, so we can only have joy from Him. For we who know God, our greatest misery is due to sin. It robs us of joy and peace. This is why Jesus repeats “Peace be with you” three times. We receive Jesus’ peace through Prayer, the Bible, and the Sacraments. As we heard in the Gospel, Jesus gave the Apostles the ability to forgive sins in His Name through Confession.
Jesus shows us the love of the Father. He forgives our sins. So there is no misery for those who live in Christ; there is only mercy. For us as creatures, mercy is God’s greatest attribute. This was an insight of St. Faustina, a Polish nun who lived about a 100 years. God has many attributes—all-loving, all-knowing, omnipresent. But for us as creatures—as fallen creatures--the fact that God is merciful is the most important attribute to us. Because we could never earn Heaven by our own efforts.
St. Faustina also had some private revelations (which never have to be believed) in which Jesus told her to spread the message of Divine Mercy through an annual feast day (what we celebrate today thanks to St. John Paul II) and a prayer called the Divine Mercy Chaplet. The Divine Mercy Chaplet is a quick set of prayers that uses the rosary beads that begs for God’s mercy for ourselves, our loved ones, and even those we will never meet. The greatest sinner has access to Jesus’ mercy even on his deathbed.
Jesus gives us a beatitude in today’s Gospel: “Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed.” We might be tempted to envy knowing that the Disciples were given the grace to see the resurrected Jesus in unveiled form. We encounter the resurrected Jesus through the veiled form of the Eucharist. Through the eyes of faith, our faith can be the same as the first Disciples. All else equal, there is more merit for not taking-in the unveiled Jesus with our physical eyes.
My brothers and sisters, we are at times miserable like Thomas was. However, we have encountered the risen Jesus. So I invite you today to identify your own misery. And then ask Jesus for His Mercy. Having received His Mercy, we can live in His Joy and Love.
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