Sunday, September 29, 2013

Complacency

26th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Cycle C
Complacency

The pope is a rock star these days, isn’t he? Everything he says is front page news and the subject of great discussion and debate. And one of his main themes from since his election is that we need to remember the poor. His teachings on the poor have brought needed attention to them, and that’s a good thing. Pope Francis is reminding us of what our basic mission has always been; loving our neighbor.

It’s easy to forget the poor. It’s easy to not notice the plight of anyone but our selves, isn’t it? Days like today and readings like these are important because they refocus us onto what is truly important. They remind us what it means to be disciples of Christ. They are not intended to make us feel guilty (but I assume the collection today will be a little larger than usual). Rather, they are like a map we look at in the middle of a journey that helps us stay on track.

That is what Pope Francis is doing; keeping us on track. As Saint Paul tells his protégé’, Timothy, today, “Compete well for the faith.” You can’t run a race unless you know the racecourse.

One of the key themes of Catholic social teaching is the preferential option for the poor. Not the preferential treatment of the poor, but the option for them. There’s a difference. What the Church teaches is that whenever we either individually or as a nation or society consider an action or actions, we think about how it will affect the least among us, and act to their benefit. In other words, if the choice is between making the lives of the poor better or worse, make it better. We should apply that litmus test to any situation that will affect other people’s lives in a meaningful way, from the coffee we buy to the legislation we pass.

The readings today are part of the basis for that teaching. Nowhere in these readings and nowhere in Catholic social teaching will you find a judgment on poverty and wealth in and of themselves. In none of these readings do we hear that wealth is evil and poverty is a virtue. Jesus isn’t saying that all the rich will go to hell and all the poor will go to heaven. This is not pitting the rich against the poor and vice versa in class warfare. This is all about the gift.

We are all given gifts from God in some measure or other. Some people are given much, some virtually no material goods at all. Some are given great talents while others just enough to get by. We can argue about the fairness of it all some other time. What’s important is not how much you are given; it is what you do with what you have.

We have no idea whether or not the rich man was a good man or if Lazarus was a bum. We don’t know why Lazarus was in his state or how the rich man got his wealth. Not important. All we know is that Abraham says that each was in the position they received from God.

The rich man never directly hurt Lazarus. He never oppressed him or stole from him. The rich man’s sin was that he never even noticed Lazarus!  The sin of the rich man was not that he was rich, it was that he was not a good steward of the gifts he had been given. He had grown complacent in his prosperity to the point where he assumed it would always be there. His complacency blinded him to the need of his fellow man right outside his door.

Recall what Jesus says in Matthew chapter 25, on how we will be judged. Those folks who wouldn’t be going to heaven didn’t even know they were doing anything wrong when they ignored the hungry, the thirsty, the naked and the poor. Didn’t matter.

Turn the story around. What if the rich man had come down with leprosy or some other horrible disease, and Lazarus knew about it but did nothing? Or even worse, didn’t care because he was so wrapped up in his own situation? Would their places in heaven be reversed?

There are plenty of good rich people and plenty of bums. But all of us are rich in some ways and poor in others. I love one of the Prayers of the Faithful options in the marriage rite that prays for “the hungry rich and the hungry poor”. We are all hungry, aren’t we? We are all at times the rich man and at times Lazarus. And most of us are spiritually poor, especially when we are materially rich.

Paul speaks to Timothy today about using the gifts he has been given. “But you, man of God, pursue righteousness, devotion, faith, love, patience, and gentleness.” Those are the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and we will all be judged on how we use those gifts.
Many of you have heard of Sam Skaggs. The Skaggs Catholic Center in Sandy is named after him because he donated virtually all the funds for its construction, which includes both Juan Diego High School and St. John the Baptist parish. The Skaggs family founded and owned the Safeway’s and Albertson’s grocery chains, among others, so he had a great deal of wealth. Sam died in March of this year, and during his funeral Monsignor Fitzgerald told us that over the years Sam donated over $100 million to the Diocese of Salt Lake City. Virtually every parish in the diocese has benefited from his generosity in some way or another.
Sam had a lot of money, but he didn’t serve that master. Instead, he served the Lord, and money was his tool. 
We hear a lot about giving back. People who have wealth or fame seem to have a need to give back to society or something. That may be a worthwhile thing to do, but what are they giving back to? And why think of it as giving back, as if there’s some sort of quid pro quo involved in success. No, it must be seen as gift giving. We receive the gift from God and then pass it on to others because that’s what a gift is.
We are truly blessed in our popes. Especially during the past century, they have been men unafraid to refocus not just Christianity but the entire world on the true message of the gospel. They have been true evangelists and missionaries. Our popes have found ways to rise above the noise and clutter of modern life to speak a simple message of peace and joy to the world. I think it’s great that Pope Francis is a rock star. People notice and listen to rock stars. But every rock star needs good amplifiers in order to be heard. That’s us.


Sunday, September 15, 2013

The Searchers

24th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Cycle C

Arguably, John Wayne’s best movie ever, and the one he should have received the Oscar for, was The Searchers. He plays Ethan Edwards, a middle-aged Civil War veteran who spends five years looking for his abducted niece, accompanied by his nephew Marty. The girl, Debbie, had been kidnapped as a small child by the Comanches after they had massacred her family. The two men never give up; they doggedly slog through all sorts of inhospitable terrain in all types of weather, following up on every lead they find.

In the end, they finally find the girl in a Comanche camp. Ethan and Marty fear that after five years Debbie is more Comanche than white, and she actually runs away from them when they try to rescue her. She is afraid that they will kill her just as they had killed all the Comanches in the camp, and Marty really doesn’t know what Ethan will do to her. The most dramatic moment in the film is when Ethan catches up to her and grabs her and you don’t know what he’s going to do to her. He then wraps her in his arms and says, “Let’s go home”.

The Searchers is a modern day parable that focuses on two things: the value of the person lost and the dogged persistence of the searchers. It’s the same with today’s readings.

We can look at the two shorter parables in the gospel today and think that Jesus was just being ironic. Why would anyone go to such lengths to find something as worthless as a single sheep or a cheap coin, worth about a dime.  The Pharisees who Jesus was telling this story to also probably thought it ironic, because they were well off. Usually, Jesus told parables to the poor, the uneducated, and the simple. Those folks knew the value of a single sheep or a single dime. A single sheep was extremely important to the shepherd, not just because of all the time and effort he had to put in to raise it, but because it was his main source of income, and its progeny would insure his future. That poor woman lost ten percent of her savings, so of course she would tear apart the house looking for it. When you lose something so dear to you you become desperate to find it. And desperate people do desperate things.

Can you imagine losing something that would make you desperate to find it? We may not be able to relate to stories about sheep and dimes, but we just remembered the events that occurred on September 11, 2001 this past week. What about the men who rushed into those burning buildings searching for people trapped inside? They didn’t even know any of them personally, yet they went inside, at incredible risk to their own lives, to search for them. They saw those people as being so valuable that they were willing to die for them, and they ultimately did.

We are often reminded of the number of people who died in the towers, both rescuers and victims, yet we often forget that thousands of people were saved by those searchers in the hours prior to the towers falling. They kept going in again and again to lead people to safety. I think that is a parable we can all relate to today.

Human life has that type of value. Human souls have that type of value, too. Do you ever wonder why some people go to heroic lengths to try to convert people to their faith? Why are there 70,000 LDS missionaries going door-to-door every day all over the world? All for the hope of baptizing just a few. It takes a person with two strong convictions to be a successful missionary. A firm belief that what they have to offer is of the greatest value, and a firm belief that the people they are preaching to are worthy of receiving that gift.

True missionaries value both the message and the person receiving it. LDS missionaries believe with all their hearts that their way is the only way, that unless a person is baptized a Mormon he or she will not get to the highest heaven, and so they are desperate to baptize as many people as they can. It is their responsibility to carry that message out to the world. The most effective seeker is the desperate seeker.

The seekers in today’s gospel were desperate. The shepherd was desperate not to lose his future. The woman was desperate to recover ten percent of her savings. The father was desperate to recover his son.

Yet the lost are often desperate themselves, aren’t they? The prodigal son is desperate to eat. His life of dissipation quickly led to a life of desperation. And he was hungry, lonely, afraid, and full of regret. That is often the case with people who are lost. I try to imagine what it was like being trapped in the stairwells of the twin towers, or worse, on the floors above where the planes hit. The fact that so many of them leapt to their deaths rather than suffer what they were experiencing there is proof of the level of their desperation.

When someone is lost they feel worthless and afraid. They wonder if anyone is out there looking for them. They feel so very alone. They don’t know how to get back home and they don’t know how or if they will be accepted back if they do return. Like little Debbie in The Searchers, sometimes they run away from their rescuers because they’re afraid of what they’ll do.

Sin is like that, too. I think that when we first turn away from God, we do regret it and feel bad about it. That’s our consciences talking to us. But then, if we do not repent and return, it becomes easier and easier for us to silence that small inner voice, until we stop regretting altogether. That’s when it’s really dangerous. We cannot repent unless we first regret our actions.

If we have no regrets then we don’t think we’ve ever made mistakes and so those mistakes stay with us. Repentance means letting go of our sins. We often feel worthless when we fail, when we don’t live up to what we know to be true and good. What if we didn’t have a mechanism to repent? What if we didn’t have someone to forgive us?

A young man I know went through a stage when he was a teenager when he claimed to be a Wiccan. He was a warlock. And he was very serious about it. He read up on it and studied it. What he actually was was a naturalist. He saw the presence of the Creator in all of nature. It was a live and let live philosophy, with no real challenge to live beyond yourself.

It was no use trying to argue with him or even discuss the particulars of his beliefs versus mine, but one day I just asked him, “What do you do when you need to be forgiven?” His live and let live philosophy had no mechanism for repentance and forgiveness, because a tree cannot forgive. You cannot go to nature for help when you are in dire straits. There is no reconciliation with a faceless, impersonal “universe” that you’re just a small insignificant part of. A tree will not go searching for you. Well, unless you’re a hobbit.

Oftentimes the lost cannot return on their own. Many people never come to the realization that the prodigal son can come home. They feel so completely worthless and unwanted that they don’t think they deserve to come home. Or worse yet, they don’t realize that they’re lost at all. They have become so numbed by their sins and their rationalizations that they have ceased to feel regret.

That’s where we come in. I often wonder, why wasn’t the older brother out looking for the prodigal son? He was sitting at home with his father, doing what he was told, when what he should have been doing was desperately searching for his brother. Even his father would go out to the road to look for him, but the “good Christian” stayed in his comfortable place and did nothing. He never saw the value in his brother, only the sinfulness. I think he would be judged more harshly for his inaction than his brother would be for his sins.

And how much easier would it be to find that lost sheep if all the shepherds got together to help search? How much faster would that woman have found her dime if all her friends had come over to look with her? How many people would have been saved in the twin towers if only a single fireman had responded? We can easily sit here and think that we have it all figured out and have all the answers. We can be comfortable in our prayer and devotions, when all the while there are sheep out there to rescue. Or we suffer in silence over the son or daughter who has fallen astray, and never ask for help from our fellow searchers.

We’re all desperate in a way. We desperately need a savior and we desperately need to save. That’s why we’re all in this together. We all have value and we all have something extremely valuable to offer. But we must act together. That’s why we are Church.


Heck, even John Wayne rustled up a posse’. 

Sunday, September 1, 2013

It's Hard to Be Humble

22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time
Cycle C
Sir 3:17-18,20, 28-29
Heb 12:18-19,22-24a
Lk 14:1,7-14

“Ever since you became a deacon, you’ve been a pompous jerk! I’ve had it with you and I’ve had it with St. Mary’s!” Actually, the language used was a bit saltier, but you get the idea. And that was the nicest thing he said.

Wow, I was stunned. All I could do was sit there and stare at the phone after he hung up on me. This was from one of my oldest and closest friends, and I was completely blindsided. Months and months of anger had just come rushing out. I became indignant. “I’m the jerk? I’m the jerk? All I’ve ever been is a good friend to you. Where do you get off talking to me like that? You’ve blown everything out of proportion. It’s you who’s out of line.” Then, after I’d cooled down a bit, I was magnanimous and understanding. “He’s been having a hard time lately. He’s probably having a bad day. I’ll give him a bit of time and then he’ll call back and apologize.” Then, as the conversation played itself over and over again in my mind, I figured, “You know, he may be right.” A lot of times I do act arrogantly. A lot of times I do think that being a deacon is special, that I know everything, and I’m sure that attitude comes out. And that is not what being a deacon is all about. It’s not what being a friend is all about. It’s not what being a Christian is all about. Finally, I was struck by shame and guilt, and saw things through his eyes. And I was sorry; very, very sorry.

It’s hard to be humble. It’s not how most of us were raised, and it’s not how we are taught to act by society. The meek shall inherit the earth. Right. Tell that to the shy kid on the playground who everyone picks on. Or tell that to the woman who just got passed over for promotion because a coworker was more aggressive. We’re taught to be self-sufficient, self-reliant, proud of our accomplishments. Some people just seem to have it, though. We can’t pin it down exactly, but we know it when we see it, just as we recognize arrogance and pride when we see it. We often pass it off as shyness or insecurity, and sometimes it is, but true humility is a sign of great strength.

Humility is not what you do, it’s what you are. It’s not a character trait that you can cultivate, it’s the attitude you have based upon how you view yourself in relation to other people. Humility is all about relationships. How we view ourselves in relation with others. Including God. Who’s in charge? Who’s the master and who’s the servant?

In a competitive society it’s especially hard to be humble. And we’re taught from an early age to “love ourselves”. There’s even a song about that. And most times we don’t act on it consciously. We don’t ever want to be seen as arrogant, and we can work hard at being humble, but if our attitude towards other people is one of superiority, if we don’t see ourselves as being servants of others rather than masters, that will come out in how we treat other people. It’s all about how we see ourselves and other people. And everyone can sense it, for good or for evil.

Every now and then we get a smackdown, right between the eyes, usually from those closest to us. Most of the time we don’t even realize that we’re hurting others by the little things we say, or by our indifference to other people’s situations, but they remember every slight and dig, real or imagined. And sometimes it all blows up in your face and you lose a friend. When that happens you have a choice to make: you can get all worked up yourself and blame it all on the other person, or you can calmly take stock of your life and humbly try to see if maybe they have a point. Those smackdowns can have great value if they shock us into seeing ourselves as we truly are and lead us to do something to change our attitudes.

The greatest act of humility is repentance. You cannot be the master and ask someone for forgiveness. You cannot be arrogantly sorry. In order to ask for forgiveness you must subjugate yourself and your ego to the other. You have to dig deep within yourself and be truly honest in your assessment of your behavior. That’s what it means to be sincere. And once you see how you have hurt the other, you have to swallow your pride and ask for forgiveness, knowing full well that you may be rejected.

When we ask for forgiveness we are completely vulnerable. We are literally putting our heart in the other person’s hand, hoping that it won’t be stomped on, hoping we won’t be rejected. And sometimes we are. And even though we might think, “Well, God has forgiven me”, it still hurts, sometimes for years, sometimes for a lifetime.

Jesus told Peter that we must forgive our brother seventy times seven. What we must also do is repent seventy times seven. Just as we are called to forgive, we are also called to ask for forgiveness. I tell young parents that the most important thing they can do for their children is to forgive them. From the very beginning, forgive them. If only once do they come to you and say they’re sorry and you hesitate, or you offer some condition, or say, “I forgive you…but”, you have lost their trust. They need to trust that no matter what they do, you will accept them back. They must trust if they are to repent. They must trust in your forgiveness if they are to ever have hope. If they can’t trust in your forgiveness, how can they trust in their future spouse’s or even God’s? We all want to trust that we will be forgiven. Why wouldn’t you want people to trust in your forgiveness?

We act with humility when we forgive, just as it takes an act of humility to ask for forgiveness. Have you ever thought about how Jesus practiced humility? How could the all powerful God himself be humble? He did it by forgiving. He called everyone to repentance and then when they came to him he forgave them. Unconditionally. People trusted Jesus because he forgave. And he did more than that, he gave them proof that God forgives also. And he told us to do the same.

And so, for all the times I have acted arrogantly towards you, I am sorry.

For all the times I have acted flippantly and indifferently towards you and your situation, I am sorry.

For all the times I have used inappropriate language and jokes around you, I am sorry.

For all the times I have spoken without thinking, I am sorry.

For all the times I have not taken you seriously, I am sorry.

For all the times I have not truly listened to you, I am sorry.

For all the times I have failed to see your point of view, I am sorry.

For all the times I have thrown my authority around, I am sorry.

For all the times I have gotten on my soapbox and been holier-than-thou, I am sorry.

For all the times I have not returned your phone calls right away, I am sorry.

For all the times I’ve avoided you, I am sorry.

For all the times I have not been truthful with you, I am sorry.

For all the times I have not loved you as I should, I am sorry.


Ok, now it’s your turn.