Homily for April 27 2008 Sixth Sunday of Easter

I'll do a little review for those who were here last week and those who were not. Last week in my homily I raised the question, "How do we know God? and How do we know Jesus?" The answers that came out were: We know him in our life together; we know him through the rituals that we celebrate; through the sacraments; through the Scriptures that we share. And that we really can come to know him in those ways. Well, after Mass, somebody came up to me with a very important addition. So this is part two.
A young man came up and said, "Well, we know him in our life together, because we are doing his work, and it's in doing his work that we know him."
Well, that's a very important addition, because it pointed out we could have ritual, but if we're not doing his work, we won't know him in that ritual. We could have our life together, but if we are not doing his work, we won't know him in our life together. Somehow that clicked with the Gospel today. Jesus says, "If you love me, you will keep my commandments."
I have to confess, I've always been a little squeamish about this Gospel, because it sounds like saying, "If you love me, you'll do what I say," and that always kind of made me feel uncomfortable. So I want to invite you to broaden your frame. What he's really saying is, "If you love me, you will be where I was in the world. If you love me, you'll be about doing the things that I was about doing in the world, and you will come to know me and experience my continuing presence when you're doing those things."
As an analogy, those of us who have had loved ones who have died and gone before you, don't we experience their ongoing presence to us most of all when we're doing the things that they liked, and when we're enjoying the things that we enjoyed together, and when we're doing the things that were important to them? So it's when we're doing those things that were important to Jesus that we come to know his presence.
I want to connect a lot of things today. You know, often it seems to me when I come to church on Sunday that there's a lot going on, and I want to try to connect it in some way. Well, yesterday and Friday night we had a wonderful parish planning retreat. I want to share that with you. I want to also talk about doing the anointing of the sick after Mass, and talk about the reading. The one word that comes to me is "connection."
A couple weeks ago in our deacon formation, it was all about the Trinity. What a doctrine! But at the end of the session, the instructor had three of our candidates stand up and lock arms facing outward in the circle, with their arms locked together, and had them turn round and round and round. And he said the Greek word that theologians used to describe the life of God  I hope you're impressed that I know this word  the Greek word was perichoresis.
Do you know what it means? Dance. So the life of God was described as a dance, this flow of energy between three persons. So he had these three people in our midst dancing around.
Then he asked us to stand around them and look at the person that we most related to, and then as they moved, try to move with that person. Well, you can imagine, we're all bumping into each other, and we're all getting in each other's way, and it's very, very messy. And he concluded by saying, "Welcome to the church!" Does it make sense to you?
Well, anyway, as we had our planning day yesterday, four things surfaced as very important to the people there. And by the way, those of us who were there yesterday, would raise your hand? So you see how many of us were there, and they want to really share with you what we experienced.
The word "connection" stands out among all four. First of all, people were expressing a desire for connection with each other beyond the confines of these walls and beyond the confines of this hour that we spend together.
By the way, I think that was mostly the younger people expressing that. Those of us who are old, we already have our connections, and we already have our separate teams, but the younger people are hungry for those opportunities to connect.
The other thing that surfaced was connection in the sense of communication among ourselves, and communication with everything out there, and everything going out. Again, the flow like the dance, the flow of information, and of energy and of life.
Another thing was, of course, our connection with God and our worship. I thought it was very odd, yesterday At one point, we broke up into groups and were writing on newspapers: We Believe, We Serve, and We Do. And under "We Serve," there were all sorts of things that people listed. And finally, about the second round, somebody very quietly and gently said, "Shouldn't we have God on that list?" Maybe we were all assuming that God is on that list. So there was God.
And then the third thing was connection with the neighborhood and the world around us.
Those are the four things that people said we really want to concentrate our energy and our work on, those four things. Those of us who were there, did I cover it pretty well? Anything anybody want to add?
Yes, more social. One of the big things was more social, community things, and that's very important, because, well, the relationships that we share, building those relationships. And we build them in many ways, and certainly having fun together is one of them.
By the way, we did have fun together yesterday and Friday night, and we ate, and there's just something about connecting. And anyway, we'll be reporting more of that to you, and  yes?
Mary Pat was saying one of the things we talked about yesterday, too, was the creed under "What We Believe." I was going to say this later, but we haven't been saying the creed normally at Mass. And when we have a visiting priest who comes and says it, we get lost. And last week I had to tell you what page it was on. And I'll address that just briefly.
You know, I have a real commitment to being inclusive in our language and in our way of speaking. I think it's very important that in our use of language we be sensitive. Well, so many of the prayers of the Church are not very sensitive to that, so the creed sometimes hits people in the face with an overly masculine and patriarchal image of God, and for that reason I did what a lot of clergy do with conflict. I avoided it, by just not saying the creed.
But over the months I've heard from people a real desire to say the creed, because it is our creed, and it is what we believe, even though the language is very awkward for many. I just want to acknowledge that, and we will say that.
Mary Pat was saying can we sing it? We'd have to learn it, and I'll throw that to John for future reference. Okay?
But anyway, be with us in prayer as we continue to talk about those things and how we might make them real in our life. But I think those of you who were not there, does that seem on target to you, with your sense of things that we need to really look at? And we will be looking at those things.
And then lastly, to connect, the anointing of the sick. And I hope I don't put him on the spot, but John, you were chairing the little group that broke up to talk about community, right? And at the bottom of your chart  by the way, one thing they all did was draw pictures of their vision of the church, and they were very good pictures. One of the funny things on the chart I want to share, too: This is Holy Cross. You can come late, but don't leave early.
So anyway, John, you remember at the bottom you had this thing about Holy Cross being a crossroad, and the word healing was in there, too, wasn't it?
Did you get that? A crossroads where people come to serve and be served, to heal and be healed, and to see each other not as "other" but as "us." So you see, healing was one of the things Jesus did that was very important to him, and it's very integral to the life of the church. And of course we have a wonderful gift of the anointing with oil in the sacrament of the sick.
By the way, in the earliest days of the church, people took that oil home, like you take holy water home, and they used it freely to anoint their sick people, and to anoint themselves, and to pray.
And, as with many things that at one time belonged to the people and were freely shared, over very long and complicated history, which had a lot to do with sin and who could forgive sin, it ended up that this anointing got reserved to the priest. And there is a certain way in which that can be, the anointing, that is the formal prayer of the church. But remember too, there was a time when you could take that oil home like it was holy water and freely use it.

Homily for April 20, 2008 Fifth Sunday of Easter

We use the Gospel I just recited at many funerals, I think the reason is obvious. It helps people frame the loss that they're experiencing in the picture of a bigger hope that Jesus has gone to prepare a place for us and will come take us with him.
I want to use it in a different way today, and I've thought a lot in the last week about how to use it. On my way down the aisle, I threw out everything I had been thinking of all week, because it was too much intellectual stuff. And I thought back to one memory and one question I want to leave you with to ponder. I'll suggest what the answer is, but first I want you to feel the question.
Years ago a young man came to me. I was sitting in my office surrounded by books, and he said, "Father, I want to know Jesus. Can you help me know Jesus?"
I said, "Oh, yeah." And I went over and I grabbed a book, and I handed it to him.
And he said, "No, I don't want to know about Jesus. I want to know Jesus. Can you help me?"
You know, at that moment that was a scary question. I mean, first of all, who am I to say I can help you know Jesus? And second there's the question, how do we know Jesus? I'm going to do what I do frequently, throw this open to you. Maybe you can help me. How do you know Jesus?
Through others. Good.
How else do we know Jesus? Through the Bible, and through what people write.
How else? In your own faith and your own spirituality.
You talk and you listen.
In the sacraments, especially in the Eucharist.
A sense inside of you.
One of the spiritual writers I love says some things about prayer, and he says if you pray, pray, do the best you can, be still and listen. If you don't pray, do the best you can, be still and listen. If you can't pray, do the best you can, be still and listen. And if prayer happens, pay attention to who it is that's praying. Sometimes it will seem like you, and sometimes it will seem like somebody else in you praying.
Can you relate to that?
So faith can be like a virus.
I was reading something recently about churches, and it said every church has an angel or a spirit, and you don't have to read about it, you kind of download it when you come in. And so, maybe we could say we download faith when we come through the doors.
Most of us got it from our parents.
I want to suggest an answer I gave after fumbling around a lot, and I don't know if I really gave this to him or if it's the answer I wish I would have given to him years later. I want to suggest that in the context of the church, the answer to the question, "How can I know Jesus?" is come, spend time with us, hang out with us. Listen to the Scriptures we read, pray with us, and celebrate the Eucharist with us. And if you do, you will know Jesus, because Jesus is alive and lives in our midst.
What do you think of that answer? Is it scary? Well, I can speak as your pastor, it scares the bejeebers out of me to say it. The minute I try to say it, I think of all the things that are wrong with me. I think of all the things that are wrong with our church, all the improvements that need to be made. I think of all the things wrong with the bigger church, and I say, "Can I really say that?"
Well, the answer of faith is yes, you can. That's what it means to be church. Peter said at the end of the second reading, "You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people." Jesus said in the Gospel, "If you have seen me, you've seen the Father." Can we say that? If you've seen us, you've seen Jesus? If you know us, you know Jesus? That's a real challenge, but that's what we're called to be by the way we celebrate, by the way that we live and by the way that we share our own knowledge.
I can read books and they can help me know things about Jesus, but they won't help me know Jesus. I can read the Bible and read a lot of things about Jesus, and if I read it prayerfully, especially in the midst of the community, Jesus is there speaking to us.
I hope I don't lose you with this switch, but I read a commentary on this Gospel, and I just felt like I want to say this and I hope it fits. When Jesus says, "No one comes to the Father but through me," today I think we're afraid to really assert that we and the Church are the way to know God and to know Jesus, because it sounds a little arrogant, doesn't it? Do you know what I mean? You might say, "What about Muslims, and what about Buddhists? What about all those other people?" And especially if you hear those words as being said by the largest religion in the world and a very powerful institution, they sound arrogant. But I want to invite you to hear them in the context in which John spoke them, a very small minority who had come to know God in a unique way through Jesus and who were paying dearly for it, because they were being kicked out of the synagogue, their spiritual home, and they were suffering severe persecution. But they were filled with confidence and trust in what they had come to know.
I thought of that, and I thought, yes, our church is big. It's the Roman Catholic Church throughout the world, the largest church in Christianity. It used to be the largest religion in the world, but I hear that Islam has overtaken us. But you know, for me the church is right here. I do my best as your pastor to keep us on the same page with that other church, that big one, and I know sometimes some of us have some tension about that, but it's part of the mystery of particularity. I experience the living Jesus here, Sunday after Sunday, with you, and around this altar, and that feeds everything else. So the answer to me, for me, to how did I come to know Jesus is, through being with you. And I hope we can all say and feel that as we pray.

Homily for April 6, 2008 Third Sunday of Easter

Somebody was telling me the other day about one of our priests who is retired. He was saying Mass at a parish and there was a long Gospel with a familiar story, and he read the first two lines and he said, "Oh, you all know the rest of the story. Sit down."
Well, I felt like doing that with today's Gospel, because how many of you, immediately as I started, you know the rest of the story? It's very familiar. So what more can we say about it?
Well, I was reading a commentary the other day that quoted the writer Frederick Buechner about Emmaus. What is this village called Emmaus? And he said Emmaus is the place we go when we want to escape. It's the place we go when we want to just throw up our hands and say the heck with all of it. It could be a TV show; it could be a drink; it could be a novel that you want to read; it could be any place where we want to go. How many of you can recognize an Emmaus in your life?
Well, often on our way there, something strange will happen to us. If we're open to it, we might find that we are entertaining a sacred visitor unaware. The whole of Scripture and mythology is full of people who welcome strangers and find that they have been entertaining angels unaware. What happens so often is you go back to the old stories that you've heard over and over again, and you begin to interpret what is happening in the light of those stories.
So that's what Jesus did today. He went back with them to Moses and the prophets, and he interpreted what had happened in light of those stories. And he sat down with them and he did the signature action of Jesus. What is Jesus' signature action? He took bread, blessed it, broke it, and gave to them. That occurs again and again in the Gospel. And suddenly they recognized him.
Well, you know, as I reflect on this story, happily that happens for me over and over and over again in my life. Oh, by the way, another little point I want to point out: What happens when they recognize him? Poof, he's gone. Do you know, I spend a lot of time talking to people about their experience of God for almost all of them that's what the experience of God is like. There's a brief moment of recognition, and poof, he disappears. Can you relate to it?
You know, our experience of God is not something constant and steady and with us all the time. It comes and it goes, but we remember it. Well, that's my life. I find myself on the way to Emmaus; I just don't want to deal with it anymore. And something happens, and I return to the stories that I grew up with, and I begin to reinterpret what happened in light of those stories. I return to the place that I keep coming back to, over and over and over again, right up there [pointing to altar.] And somehow I reinterpret what has happened to me.
That's not true for everybody. There are a lot of people who are still looking for those stories that they can go back to over and over again, and who are still looking for those experiences, but for many of us that's true. We have the familiar and the comfortable rituals and stories that we keep come back to, and they're a treasure house, a gold mine that we can mine over and over and over again and come to understand what is happening in our life today.
That's my prayer for all of us, on the personal level, but also on the level of our society. In my letter in the bulletin this week I raise the question, as you all know, this is an election year. How can we pray together during an election year? How can you voice a prayer that everybody can say, amen to, and yet that isn't so vague and general and insipid that it's just good things for good people? It's a real challenge. How do we apply our faith to the issues around us? I think it's so important that we learn to talk about things in terms of the stories and the traditions of our faith. I want to do that in two specific ways today.
Recently I met a young man, a recent graduate of Notre Dame who, instead of taking that expensive, fancy education and turning it right away to how to make a lot of money, is wanting to turn it to how do you do something significant in our society? And he chose to spend the next year, or few years, of his life working to educate people about the death penalty.
So I had occasion to visit with him and I thought that ought to be encouraged, so I invited him to come and say a few words to us today, so that if you are inclined to want to learn more, you could see who he is and maybe meet with him in the back of church.
And then also Nicholas Davidson, who graduated from our grade school here, is being deployed to Iraq and wanted to ask our blessing and our prayer before he goes. So after Will speaks I want to do that, too, as we go into our prayers of the faithful.
So first I want to bring Will up.
WILL:
Thank you, Father, for that wonderful introduction, and thank all of you for having me here this morning.
My name is Will McAuliffe, and my organization is called the Indiana Coalition Acting to Suspend Executions, or InCASE. You can just remember that; that's a lot easier.
The reason why I founded this organization, in many ways, is to answer a question that Father posed in today's bulletin, which is: Is it possible to talk with each other in a way that is honest and safe and promotes understanding? And the issue I'm working on is the death penalty.
And I think there is a way to talk to each other. I think that it may not have been represented yet. People don't necessarily have the vocabulary, so to speak, to talk about this in a way that doesn't boil down to right or wrong. There's a lot more to this issue, and it has to do with what are our standards in our search for justice in our society. What does that mean? What does justice mean to us, and how do we go about getting it?
And to do this we have to ask ourselves some very, very difficult questions. Are we okay with the fact that if a victim happens to be white rather than black, here in Indiana, the defendant is three times more likely to be sentenced to death? Are we okay with that? How does that happen and what does that mean in today's society? And what do we think about the fact that just last week the 128th individual was exonerated from a death row nationwide?
In our search for justice, certainly we've made great strides and a great deal of progress in terms of quality of representation and how we define justice and what we do to those who damage our society. But we've had two individuals right here in Indiana who have been exonerated from death row. At one point one of them came within three days of his execution. And another one came within two weeks of his execution. As you can see, this doesn't really have anything to do necessarily with just right or just wrong, or black or white. It has to do with how do we go about what is best for us and for our society.
So first we have to acknowledge that there are issues. That's the first step, and then we have to learn about them. And that's the work that I am trying to do, trying to educate people and raise awareness that there are these issues out there. And to be honest, we're a long way from is this right or wrong in the purest sense. There are a lot of small issues that everybody can agree on fixing first before we have to take on that big monolith of the death penalty and do we get rid of it today or tomorrow.
So I'd like to kind of close with a quote from a bulletin put out in 2005 by the U.S. conference of Catholic Bishops which renews their over 20-year call for the end of the death penalty in the United States: As leaders of the community of faith and as participants in our democracy, we are committed to contribute to a growing civil dialogue and reassessment of the use of this ultimate punishment.
And I think that that's something we can all take up. We can all take up a conversation about this. And as I said, what I'm striving to do is help people have a conversation that doesn't end up breaking down into an emotional argument or simply a matter of right or wrong.
And as Father said, I'll be in the back if any of you have any questions, or you can go on the website, which is Indianacase.org. But like I said, I'd love to hear any of your reactions, whatever they may be, in the back, and answer any questions you have. And again, thank you so much for having me to your wonderful parish this morning.
Thank you, Father.

FR. LARRY:
Thank you.
As Will was talking, I remembered, gosh, thirty-some years ago when I was running for the legislature, one night one of the old pros took me aside and said -- these were his exact words, and I've never for gotten them -- he said, "Listen, you're saying too much. You're telling them what you think about the issues. Don't do that. Just smile and shake a lot of hands and make them like you, and they won't know what you do when you get in there."
Well, cynical, but good advice if you want to get elected. Ever since then, what I have felt is that there are so few places in our society where you can safely come together and really engage in honest and open discussion about things that really do matter, and the church ought to be at the top of the list of those places.
Well, then, to move on to the second thing, whatever our opinions about the war in Iraq, we know that we have young people being sent there who should be constantly in our prayers. And so, Nick, I'd like to invite you up.
[Prayer over young man being deployed to Iraq]
O God, watch over Nick as he goes into harms way. Protect him from bodily harm. Protect him from harm to his soul and his spirit from the violence and hatred that will surround him. Bring him safely home to his family. Safe in Body, Mind and Spirit. We ask this:
[sign of blessing]
In the Name of the Father, and the Son and the Holy Spirit
AMEN!