Family Tree

Feast of the Holy Family – Cycle B

Sir 3:2-6, 12-14 Psalm Ps 128:1-2, 3, 4-5 Col 3:12-21 or 3:12-17 Lk 2:22-40

Today we celebrate the Feast of the Holy Family, and I wanted to share with you this idea that the family is a tree that starts out as a seed, and when watered by the love of God grows into the a beautiful and peaceful community of love.

I married my Sister..?
This past summer I went to California and married my Sister

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Ok, that sounds very wrong. Let me be a little more precise. This past summer I had the great joy of officiating the wedding vows when my brother-in-law John married my Sister in California.

Marriage – the Seed of Love
Weddings are a time of incredible joy – because it is the birth of a new family. Part of the reason why we celebrate Marriage with weddings is because married love calls us to commitment, to faithfulness to one another for the rest of our lives. This is the principle difference between marriage and co-habitation, in marriage we go before God, the Church, and the whole world to publicly and freely declare are total commitment to love one another for richer and poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part. The consequence is that family is born out of that commitment to love. There is intensity in that love, it is like a flare, that burns hot, bright and nothing can quench – not even the sea. Another way of describing this love is that it is like a seed – it is packed with all of the blessings, and struggles that lie ahead for that couple, all that is necessary for a good and holy life. Marriage is a seed that is packed into an intense little bundle, just waiting to get out.

Riding a Bike
Entering into the sacrament of marriage is like learning to ride a bike. We can watch movies about it, we can read books about it, we can watch other people live it out, but until we say I do, we have no clue what marriage is really like. I remember the day when I married my wife Tina, I remember standing at the altar, and watching her come up the aisle towards me. I had no clue what I was getting into, but it did not matter, because I knew that this was a vocation that God had called us to, and that He would be the one to back us up.

Relationship is the focus of the readings
The focus of our readings today is on relationship. The birth of Christ reveals to us that God is all about relationship. It is the relationship of love between the Father and the Son with the Holy Spirit that we are invited by Christ to share in. In the first reading from Sirach, we learn of how husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, sons and daughters are to relate to one another. God is helping us to understand a right relationship with our families in order to prepare us to be in relationship with Him for all eternity.

Ribs Sunday
One of my brother Deacons refers to this Sunday as “Ribs Sunday” – because when we get to the part of St. Paul’s letter where he says “Wives, be subordinate to your husbands, as is proper in the Lord.” Some husbands will often nudge their wives in the ribs and give a “knowing” look. This is followed a few moments later by a responding dig in when the next verse is read – “Husbands, love your wives, and avoid any bitterness toward them.” How do these attitudes towards relationship help us to grow in love for one another?

Wives be subordinate to your husbands
Let’s start with the wives part, When St. Paul says “Wives, be subordinate to your husbands, as is proper in the Lord.” He is expressing an idea of mutual love that is more clearly stated in his letter to Ephesians, where he says that “husbands and wives are to submit to one another as unto the Lord”. This is a difficult scripture for us to hear today, so I think that we need to struggle with it in an honest way. All too often this scripture has been used to justify some truly destructive behavior and situations. St. Paul is not trying to relegate women to a second-class status, or to justify remaining in abusive situations, but rather it is an expression of trust in our relationship of love that is backed up by Christ. When we freely submit ourselves to Christ’s love we can be confident that He will care for us because He has our best interests at heart.

Husband’s love your wives…
Now let’s move on to the husband’s role. St. Paul says to us “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ Loved the Church” – How did Christ show his love for the Church?

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He died for her!

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Brothers – let us love our wives!
Brothers – let us remember our commitment to be good husbands to our wives – to give up our lives for our families. This is not an easy challenge because it calls us to conversion, to change our ways. Take a moment to think about the actions or habits that we have that are sucking the love out of our marriages. What habits of sin do we allow to rob our marriages and families of life?

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We have been entrusted with the sacred duty to guarding our families from the evil that kills them. We are called to sacrifice, as Christ sacrificed, to bring about abundant life for our families.


Husband and Wife Homework
I want to invite all of the husbands and wives here today to reflect on these passages from Colossians as an examination of conscience for our marriages. Honestly share with one another where our relationships are filled with “heartfelt compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience, bearing with one another and forgiving one another, if one has a grievance against another; as the Lord has forgiven you, so must you also do. And over all these put on love, that is, the bond of perfection. And let the peace of Christ control your hearts, the peace into which you were also called in one body.” Let us give thanks to God for the areas where we do these things, and work towards changing those areas of our marriages where we fail.

The Love of Christ is Water and Light…
The Sacrament of Marriage puts into right-relationship the love of husband and wife. When we enter into the Sacrament of Marriage, we root ourselves in the love of Christ, we ask Him to be the guarantor of our vows. In marriage, we invite Christ into our relationship of love, so that we can learn from Him who is the creator of all love. When Christ walks with us He strengthens and purifies our love for one another. The love of Christ is like water and light to the seed, it causes the seed to germinate and grow.

Children are a Blessing from God
Another one of those “riding your bike” moments found in family life is the blessing of children. The Jews always considered children to be a blessing from God. We see this in Sirach when he says “Whoever honors his father is gladdened by children”. Again, in the Gospel a few weeks back we heard of how God blessed St. Elizabeth in her old age when she conceived John the Baptist, and again, God blessed Abraham and Sarah with children when they conceived Isaac. If we go all the way back to Adam and Eve, we see the original intention of marriage, that “the two should become one flesh”, and that God “blessed them and said – be fertile and multiply”.

From Seed to Sapling - Children
Children bless our marriage, because they transform our lives from being this focused seed of intense love into a sapling. Watered and fed by the light of Christ marriage blossoms and grows. In this way married love reflects the creative love of God. Our love overflows and must be shared with children. Children bless us because they call us to a new level of love, to sacrificial love. Think back to those first moments that you shared with your children, as your mind wrestled with the idea that God has entrusted this soul into your care.

Contraception destroys the love of marriage
As a culture, we find it more and more difficult to identify with this idea that children are a blessing from God. One of the reasons why is the prevalence of contraception in our society. Our culture teaches that if we don’t practice contraception then we are irresponsible and foolish. Our Church teaches that when we do practice contraception we are sinning against the 6th commandment because we are rejecting God’s blessing by intentionally destroying His gift of fertility.

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Children become a burden
When we loose sight of the fact that children are a blessing from God they become a burden, an inconvenience, a trophy of accomplishment, or a commodity that we can buy and sell at the fertility clinic when we want.

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From Sapling to Tree to a Forest
As our family tree grows up, it matures from a sapling into a tree. That creative love that began as a little seed of love between husband and wife grows to be open to children and to life. When our children become adults they fall in love and our family grows yet again, as we welcome into our marriage in-laws and then best of all grandchildren. Eventually, if we allow God to work in our lives the tiny seed of love that we began with all those many years ago will grow into an entire forest of trees, each with its own special gifts and hidden treasures. The question is – are we willing to let God order our family relationships so that our families can become Holy Families?

Standing Watch

23rd Sunday Ordinary Time – Cycle A

Standing Watch

Ez 33:7-9 Psalm Ps 95:1-2, 6-7, 8-9 Rom 13:8-10 Mt 18:15-20

Pirates!
A pirate with a peg-leg, hook and eye patch decides to give up his life of piracy so he goes to confession. After making a good confession, the priest asks him - "How did you end up with a peg leg?" The pirate replies, "I was swept overboard and my leg was eaten by a shark.” "That is terrible," says the priest. "What about your hook?" "Well," answers the pirate, "I lost my hand to a Spaniard whose treasure ship we had boarded to steal his gold.” “Incredible. How’d you get the eye patch?" "Eating grapefruit - I was eating my grapefruit when the juice squirted into my eye”. “That’s doesn’t sound like that would destroy your eye.” said the priest. "Yer right Father,” says the pirate, "but it was my first day with the new hook."

Ships are symbols of the Church
From the time of Noah and the Ark until now the image of the ship has always been a symbol of the Church – a place of safety on the storm-tossed waters of the world. The readings today speak about two different senses of the Church, the Family, and the Church gathered here today.

The Family is the Domestic Church
When John Paul II described the family as the Domestic Church he wanted us to understand the mission of the family as the first place where the Gospel is lived out. As parents we have the primary responsibility to witness the love of Christ in the way that we give ourselves to each another as husbands and wives. We show the love of Christ to our children in the way that we sacrifice for them and each other in our washing the laundry, keeping the house clean, going to work, doing the dishes – the list goes on and on. All of us have experienced self-less love to varying degrees. Some of our parents were evangelists “par excellence” of this Christ-like love, others not so much.

Children in the family have a responsibility to proclaim the Gospel to one another, and into the world. All of us are called to imitate the love of Christ as Brothers and Sisters. We do this in how we learn to love each other and forgive one another as Christ forgave us. Christ chose the family relationship to help us grow in our relationship with God. It is not always easy, but it is ultimately rewarding.

On Duty
The readings today give us some advice on how to grow these relationships. Among sailors, there is a responsibility that the entire crew shares called “keeping watch”. Keeping watch means that some of the crew is responsible for the safe operation of the ship for the entire time that the ship is at sea. These sailors have a responsibility to do their “duty” – The lives of their ship-mates depend on it. That duty might be keeping an eye on the weather, tending to the engines, or being alert for navigation hazards such as reefs or sand-bars where the ship might get stranded.

Keep Watch!
In the first reading today the prophet Ezekiel exhorts us to be attentive to our duty – to watch out for shoals where we might get stranded, or reefs that might tear out the belly of the ship. But he is not speaking in the nautical sense, but rather in the human sense – Ezekiel begins today with the exhortation – “Thus says the LORD: You, son of man, I have appointed watchman for the house of Israel;” he calls us to keep watch over the souls of our fellow ship-mates here in the Church. This statement of God leads us to ask three questions – How do I keep watch, what am I on watch for, and how do I sound the alarm.

What to keep watch for?
In keeping our watch, we are like those sailors aboard ship who are looking out for the safety of all the souls aboard their vessel. God has given us the job of speaking to those who are leading lives of peril, whose souls are in danger of floundering on shoals, or running aground on the sand bars of sin. The reading from Ezekiel reminds us that we will be held accountable for how we keep the watch that God has given us – it is a serious responsibility. When we recognize that souls are in peril, we have a responsibility to sound the alarm, so that the danger can be averted.

Listen to God in your heart
Our own relationship with God is an essential part of us keeping watch. If we do not have a relationship with God, then how will we hear his voice? Prayer – speaking and (more importantly) listening to God is the first part to doing our duty well. We listen to God by hearing him in our hearts – the place where we make decisions about how we are going to act. This is a slightly different understanding of heart than the modern American usage of the word – which typically means the place where we experience our emotions.

Authentic prayer disposes us to hear His voice.
Authentic prayer, speaking and listening to God can take many different forms, from a spontaneous sharing of your day with God in the evening, reflecting on scripture, or praying the rosary. All of us are called to foster a deeper relationship with God through prayer. All of these ways of listening to God invite us to perceive the world a little more each day through the perspective of God’s heart by allowing ourselves to be challenged by His word and the teaching of His church. To listen to God means that we hear him in our hearts and our hearts are converted. That is why the refrain from the psalm today is “If today you hear his voice – harden not your hearts!”

God speaks to us through relationships
Daily prayer disposes our hearts to be open and aware of Gods presence in the world, but God does not normally speak to us directly. It is rare in the spiritual life for God to speak to us like the Captain of an old sailing ship bellowing out – “Avast there Deacon– Stand by to come about!” The normal way that God speaks to us is through one another, in our relationships, and actions. Prayer sensitizes us so that we can see the work of God in our lives more clearly. It teaches us how to look for the footprints of God in the history of our lives. Sometimes the messages are “atta boys”, and other times they are a smack upside the head with the spiritual 2x4 when God calls us to face the painful truths about how we are carrying out our duty – and those messages are also important for our ongoing conversion.

Standing Orders
When sailors are trained to stand watch at sea, they are given “Standing Orders” which tell them what to do in case of an emergency. For the Jews, and for us the “Standing Orders” is the Law, the writings of Moses and the prophets that discussed what to watch out for and what to do. Living the Law trains us in how to love. Jesus often criticized the Pharisees and the Sadducees because they lived the law without love. St. Paul teaches us that the goal of the Law is to lead us to love. In his letter to the Romans St. Paul begins with “Brothers and sisters: Owe nothing to anyone, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.” What he means is that when we carry out our duty in our families, the law of love must always guide us so that our proclamation of the Gospel is living and effective.

Sounding the Alarm
So, shipmates, “If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have won over your brother.”

Sin is personal, it destroys relationships – either our relationship with God or our relationship with one another. Sin injures us, and it injures the one we sin against. Sin destroys the community – whether that community is the family (the Domestic Church) or this larger church community. When we witness sin we have an obligation to point it out – with charity. This means discerning the right place and way to communicate the fault so that healing can take place. This is why we need to be steeped in prayer and in love.

Seek the Truth with Love
Christ goes on to say that if this does not work, then take one or two others along with you, so that ‘every fact may be established on the testimony of two or three witnesses.’ – bring in additional people – to see the truth of the situation – not to take sides in a war of he-said / she said, but to see the truth.

In order for this to work, we need to be rooted in love and humility, so that we can truly listen to one another and accept correction from one another. This is not how the world works. In business we have contracts and penalties and judges – we have the law. The law is based on a fundamental distrust of individuals. In the Church we have the law of love that calls husbands and wives to be humble with one another, to correct out of love and to accept correction with humility – in their hearts. Likewise, Fathers and Mothers evangelize their children by how they show their love to them – providing for them, guiding them as they are raised. As children we are called to imitate the love that our parents show us in how they love one another and how they love us.

What is our witness to the Gospel?
God desires a relationship of love with us, and so he has given us two families in which to learn how to enter into relationship with him – our families of blood; the domestic church, and our family of faith in the Catholic Church. In both families we have a duty to do, to watch out for one another’s safety. In the Gospel today Christ shows us the way to do this. Christ has placed a two-fold challenge before us this week – To recognize God’s hand when we are called to account this week and not harden our hearts; and to respond to Him with courage when he wants us to use us to sound the alarm. The question is - do we have the courage?

Got Love?

18th Sunday Ordinary Time – Cycle A

Got Love?

Is 55:1-3 Psalm Ps 145:8-9, 15-16, 17-18 Rom 8:35, 37-39 Mt 14:13-21

This past week, my wife went and saw the new X-Files movie, and came back and commented to me that it had a very negative portrayal of the Church.

Hollywood gives the Church a bad rap
This movie (the X-Files) gives a typical Hollywood portrayal of the Catholic Church. Without giving away the plot it features two men, one is a former Catholic priest and convicted pedophile who has super-natural visions, the other is a Catholic Priest who opposes a boy from receiving a non-descript stem-cell treatment that the Church considers abhorrent. The movie embroils these characters into conflict with the Church and concludes that the teachings of the church are wrong, and ought to be ignored.

Does this really reflect our family?
In a certain way, I think that this movie is an attempt by the producers and distributors to portray the Church and her teachings as irrelevant to modern day issues, backwards, messed up and mean. It leads us to ask the question - is this an accurate portrayal of the Catholic Church? Is this how our community, our family really is?

Do we answer by making our own movie?
How are we as Christians to answer these serious accusations in the world today? We could on one hand, collect up all of our monies, and go and hire an great director and pay them to make a movie about the Catholic Church that portrayed her in a positive light – but would that be an effective use of our resources? All in favor of a second collection to raise money to make a movie to counter this accusation please raise your hands.

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If not then how?
Don’t panic! I think that Jesus wouldn’t raise his hand either. Christ doesn’t want us sitting on our backsides in the pews, He calls us to answer these accusations by being witnesses to the Gospel. But where does the rubber meet the road? How do we do this?

The readings today give us some hints on how we as Christians, disciples of Jesus are to respond to this movie, and all other accusations against the Church. Let’s go through them one at a time.

All who are thirsty come to the water
Isaiah the Prophet invites all who are thirsty to come to the water. Are we thirsty? What are we thirsty for? We are thirsty for the same thing that everyone else in the world is thirsty for – we are thirsty for love;

• not the kind of love we might have for ice cream or pizza;
• not the kind of love that we experience from our brothers and sisters;
• not the kind of love that we experience for our parents or our children;
• not the kind of love that we have for our husbands or wives.

We thirst for a love that is greater than all of these loves – we are thirst for the Love of God. We thirst to know how special we are in His eyes.

All who have no money…

Isaiah goes on to invite those “who have no money to come receive grain and eat. Come without paying, and without cost”. If we were to literally engage with this passage of scripture we might dismiss it by saying that we have food in the pantry at home, or some money in the bank. What then is the money that Isaiah is referring to? The money that Isaiah is speaking of is the money of love – our ability to show love. He describes us as having no money, because we learn to love in response to our experience of being loved. Isaiah is describing our ability to love when compared to God’s ability of love. God has an infinite ability to love, we are very limited, and so we are poor in comparison to God. It is God who invites us into a relationship of love, to receive His love – to receive from Him freely.

Love illumines our heart – it reveals in us selfishness
Every encounter with the love of God illuminates our hearts. It is in the brightness of God’s love that we are confronted with the question – “Why spend your money for what is not bread; your wages for what fails to satisfy?” Where is my love directed? Where do I spend my time? My treasures? My talents? How does my expenditure of time relate to the love that I seek?

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Sneaking out of town - imagine Jesus’ day in the Gospel

Have you ever wondered why it took Jesus all day to cure the sick. When I read this Gospel, I imagined that he got up early in the morning, grabbed the disciples and snuck out of town, only to find that when they landed the boat the crowds had followed him. On landing with his disciples, he had pity on the crowds and so he spent his day healing them. This gives us a glimpse of what God’s Love is like. Jesus could have healed them all instantly, but rather he spent the day healing them, by entering into relationship with them, showing them what the Love of God is like – it is relational. God’s love is relational, and when we experience it we are healed!

We are the disciples

Whenever we read scripture about the disciples, we need to pay special attention to them, because we too are disciples of Jesus, and we are called to imitate their actions in our own lives. The disciples come to Jesus and ask him to take care of a problem – feeding the crowd. They even have a suggestion on how God ought to solve this problem that they have (send them away). How many times have we taken our problems to God with a suggested solution?

Christ calls us to action by placing our gifts at His service

Jesus answers them in much the same way that He answers us – He challenges them to action. He says “There is no need for them to go away; give them some food yourselves.” To which they respond that they don’t have enough – five loaves and two fishes. This is where the Gospel and the reading from Isaiah fit together beautifully. We come to God because we are poor in our ability to Love, but if we allow Him, he will take our meager gifts and multiply them a thousand fold. What would the world be like if we placed all our relationships before Christ like the disciples did in today’s Gospel? How much love would we witness to our wives and husbands, our children and parents, our brothers and sisters, our neighbors and friends and enemies?

Christianity is Fire – Christians are Arsonists
A 19th century philosopher once described Christianity as fire, and true Christians as arsonists.

The Fire of Christianity is Love. Love is the key to being united with God. When we allow the love of Christ to dwell in our hearts then our temptation to sin falls away, we live as St. Paul says – without anything separating us from the Love of Christ.

We are called to be like the disciples in the Gospel and place our meager gifts before God, so that He can take them and magnify their effect.

Love is our capacity to hold heat? How hot or cold are our hearts?
John Chrysostum describes our love as the capacity of our hearts to hold heat. Do we allow the love that we experience here with the Eucharist to remain in our hearts throughout this week? Are we hot or cold? Does our heart retain the heat of Christ’s love in a way that is living and effective, that changes how we live our lives? Are we being arsonists?

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How does our family answer the accusations of Hollywood? - By sharing the fire of Christ’s love!

When we allow this fire of Christ’s love to penetrate our hearts we become a witness of the Gospel to our families, friends, neighbors and coworkers what true Christianity is about. When we do this in simple, practical ways by offering to mow the neighbors lawn, visiting the sick, those who are homebound or in prison, by holding the door for another, by taking care of the poor, the weak and the suffering. When we do one of these actions we spread the fire of God’s love into the world. This arson of Love is the anti-dote to the accusations made in the movie theater about the nature of Christianity and the Church. What fire is Christ calling you to spread this week?