The Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time – A

Zephaniah 2:3; 3:12-13

1 Corinthians 1:26-31

Matthew 5:1-12a

 

 

Dear Jesus,

 

I see that we are standing on the threshold of Lent.  This coming Wednesday is Ash Wednesday.  Lent is early this year because Easter Sunday is the earliest it can be.  For some, it might be difficult to think of Lent so soon on the heels of our Christmas-Epiphany celebration.  Some may still be taking down and putting away that season’s decorations.  Beyond those who see the opportunity to shed a few pounds and get back into now too snug pants and dresses, not that many may get all that excited about the coming season for fasting, praying, and almsgiving.  Here we go again, they will say, if they bother at all, we have to engage in self-denial.

I have to be honest with you.  I may not be all that excited about the six-weeks’ regimen, but I’ll be the first to admit that I need it.  I want to focus on our relationship, my call to walk with you on the way.  It’s easy to get distracted and to let the lure of contrary values beguile.  It’s true that the hardest person to say No to is one’s self.  In an age of rampant materialism, an age that is all about power, position, youth, beauty and wealth, it’s hard to admit to you how attractive all of those things are.  I can’t fantasize about being young or attractive.  Those days are gone forever.  But there sure is a tug when it comes to power, position and wealth.  When that man looked out at me from the television screen and whispered with a leering smile: Imagine what it would be like if this ($90,000) car were yours, I thought, yeah, imagine. 

It’s by happy coincidence, I know, that this Sunday’s Gospel is your telling of the Beatitudes.  How did we ever get so used to hearing them?  We are so used to them, even being able to recite them from memory, that they don’t shock, much less bring us up short.  When this gospel is proclaimed Sunday, I’ll bet there won’t be a few who will drift off after the first Blessed and think: I have heard these before.  I wonder who’s going to win the Super Bowl.

The opening of the gospel is curious.  Matthew says that you saw the crowds – all those people milling about, curious about you, perhaps even seeking something, but undecided about you.  Then you went up the mountain like Moses, the great lawgiver who encountered God on the mountain top and came down from there bearing the Decalogue.  You then sit, taking the position of the authoritative teacher.  Only then do your disciples come to you, leaving the crowds behind, your disciples – those who have made the decision to walk with you.  These are the ones you teach.  In other words, the Sermon on the Mount isn’t for everyone, certainly not for the faint hearted, or even those on the fence, so to speak.  You are teaching disciples how extraordinarily new your Way is and how defiant it is of established ways and commonly accepted values, necessitating a whole new way of perceiving reality.

I must sit at your feet the docile student and let your words wash over me and hear them without defenses in place.  I have to pay attention to what causes me to wince even as I resist the temptation to be smug as I think of those who need to hear your teaching.  I have to allow myself to consider that the Beatitude I would most like to dismiss or ignore is probably the one I stand most in need of taking to heart.

Am I poor in spirit?  Well, I know I’m not wealthy, at least by the standards of most people in this country.  But how much of my focus is on things?  How entitled do I feel to the wealth that is mine, even seeing my good fortune as a sign of God’s favor, masking the fact that I am desensitized to a longing for God that opens the door to God’s reign in my life which is the kingdom of heaven.  I do thank God that I am not as poor as most of the people in the world.  That’s a good sign, isn’t it?

Is mourning a happy state?  Blessed (happy) are they who mourn, you say.  That can only be if the mourner is convinced that the separation from the one mourned is temporary.  There must be a confidence that the hoped for reunion that is the heart of mourning will be realized.  But it isn’t only people who are mourned.  So are the losses of position, reputation, and relationship.  In all of these, it is restoration that is the desired comfort.  Does the blessed state of the mourner come from the confident assurance that God will heal, restore, and reunite?  You mourned your friend Lazarus.  You mourned as the rich young man turned away from your invitation to go, sell what he had, give to the poor and return to follow you.  You mourned because he preferred wealth.  You mourned over Jerusalem.  How often I would have gathered you to me as the hen gathers her chicks, but you would not.  You are the model for this beatitude in your final moment on the cross.  When all looked on and saw destruction and failure, you breathed forth your spirit into the hands of the Father who could raise you up.

Blessed are the meek, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the merciful, the clean of heart, the peacemakers, and those who are persecuted for righteousness.  And I say, blessed are you.  It occurs to me now that you are the personification of all of those states you term blessed.  You, the meek one, lay down your life for your friends.  Take my yoke upon your shoulders, you said, for I am meek and humble of heart.  Many tax collectors and those known to be sinners came to join you and your disciples at dinner.  For this you were denounced and condemned.  In everything, it is your trust in God that is the example.  Your constant desire is to do the will of the One who sent you. 

If I let the words of the Beatitudes wash over me and allow myself to be vulnerable in the hearing, I have to conclude that to achieve the blessed state you outline, I must desire to imitate you in all things and to have union with you as my greatest longing.  But if I do this, won’t my attitude toward every other person and every thing be affected?  I’ll have to speak out against injustice and denounce war and warmongers.  I will have to align myself with the poor, the outcasts, the sinners and dare to associate with them, even have dinner with them.  What will people say then?  What if I am denounced?  What if I am rejected?  Where will my strength be then?

If I am to be your disciple, isn’t there any other way?

Sincerely,

Didymus  

 

The Third Sunday in Ordinary Time – A

Isaiah 8:23-9:3

1 Corinthians 1:10-13, 17

Matthew 4:12-23

 

Dear Jesus,

 

Something is happening in the Church that causes me great distress.  There is nothing that I can do about it, but I thought I would write and put my sorrow before you.  Sometimes, you get back to me with a response.  That would be most welcome now.  Other times, silence ensues and I must pray over my concern and learn to live with it knowing that ultimately you will heal what is perceived to be a wound; you will unite what seems to be intractable division.

 

How many years have I been walking with you and gathering with you at The Table?  You know I was never the same after that first encounter, that nothing that antedated our meeting had the same value or importance.  You know that my journey with you has been fraught with questions that always seek greater understanding.  That is the way with faith, isn’t it?  I noticed in this Sunday’s reading from 1 Corinthians that Paul chastises his audience for the divisions that they seem to be fostering in the Corinthian community.  Some are boasting because they belong to different teachers – Paul, Apollos, Peter and Christ.  Each sect seeks to lord it over the others as being inferior to itself.  And Paul cries out: Is Christ divided?  He is scandalized by their attitude.

 

Nowhere is that unity of the whole church more clearly proclaimed than in the celebration of the Eucharist.  But things are changing.  Now there are two rites, one Ordinary and one Extraordinary, but two nonetheless.  The Ordinary is the Celebration of the Liturgy according to the Missal of Paul VI promulgated in 1970.  The Extraordinary comes from the official document Summorum Pontificum of Pope Benedict XVI that authorizes wider us of the Latin Mass composed before Vatican II and contained in the 1962 Roman Missal of John XXII.

Am I mistaken, or are there now two rather startlingly different ecclesiologies in evidence in the two rites.  I am old enough to remember when the 1962 Rite was the only rite.  Said in Latin, the priest had his back to the people – were they called the Assembly in those days? – and the people on their knees followed along in their missals, which offered translation, or they read their own devotions or prayed the rosary depending on what moved them.  Bells rang to call the people to attention for the words of institution.  Then, after the exposition of the Bread and Wine above the priest’s head, they could go back to their devotions.  When Communion time came, it was not unheard of that the priest was the only one to receive the Bread.  He was the only one to drink from the Cup.  The later in the morning the mass time, the fewer the number of communicants.  The emphasis seemed to be on the transubstantiation of the bread and wine into your body and blood that the people were there to adore.  The priest was the sole celebrator of the mass with the people in attendance as silent adorers.  The Scriptures were limited to two readings, one from St. Paul and one from one of the gospels.  The Hebrew Scriptures were in short shrift.  There were not three cycles of readings for mass.   Much of the Scriptures was never proclaimed in the course of the Sundays of the year.

 

There is nostalgia among some for that essentially Tridentine Liturgy.  Nostalgia for the Latin.  Nostalgia the silence and reverence perceived in the assembly’s posture of adoration.  Even some priests find joy in celebrating this rite with fewer distractions because the assembly is behind them and they have less of a compulsion to perform.  Alas, how can there be nostalgia form something that one has never before experienced?

 

Am I mistaken in thinking that the Second Vatican Council called for the full, active, and conscious participation of the assembly?  Am I incorrect in thinking that the assembly is called to exercise the priesthood of the Baptized as co-celebrants of the Liturgy?  In no way is the assembly to be passive adorers, much less spectators.

 

We stand about the Table of the Bread in testimony to your resurrection and, as the Baptized, to our participation in the resurrection.  We stand in recognition of your presence in the transformed assembly and in the transformed bread.  We engage in dialogue with the priest-celebrant and are of one mind and heart with him in the offering of the Eucharistic Prayer.  There is no place for private devotions here.  (In fact, I wonder if an argument could be made that if one were to engage in private devotions throughout the mass s/he would not have been missed mass.)  We stand in unison in the Communion Procession acknowledging our common union with you augmented through our reception of the Bread and our drinking from the Cup.  It is after all a following of your instruction quoted in the words of institution.

 

Am I making sense?  Am I wrong when I think there is a different ecclesiology being exercised here?  Am I just being stubborn when I think that I cannot go back to the other way?  I loved the chants of the old days.  I loved the ritual of my youth.  It was difficult and even awkward to adapt to the new.  But once the theology of the call to renewal was grasped and the transforming effects on the assembly were perceived, there was no going back for me.  The priest now empowered the assembly and did not just preside over them.

 

I didn’t exactly shake the dust from my feet as I left, but I left the parish church near where I live knowing I could never return there, that I had to find a parish that celebrated according to the mind of Vatican Council II.  What sent me over the edge?  The pastor announced that he was discontinuing granting access to the Cup to the assembly.  Among his reasons, none of which seemed substantial to me, was his concern that with so many Ministers of the Cup the people might lose track of the importance of the priest.  Clearly it is his perception that too much power has been given to the people and that it is time for the ordained priest to take that back and return the people in their proper place.

 

So I travel a distance to Liturgy now.  The parish is poorer than the one closer at hand.  The disabled and the aged are much more in evidence here.  Some of the disabled even engage in liturgical ministry as greeters, ushers, lectors and Eucharistic Ministers.  The choir isn’t as polished sounding as the one in the more posh surroundings.  But joy abounds and a spirit of rejoicing because you have called us to be transformed by the Eucharist that we celebrate in order that we might be sent to be the continuation of the Bread broken and the Cup shared until all have eaten and drunk and know that they are the beloved in the kingdom of the one who sent you to live among us.  It is curious how poverty enhances that proclamation.

 

I hear Paul asking again: Is Christ divided?  I am afraid that is my perception now.  It makes me sad but all the more resolved not to go back but to enter into the reformed liturgy and continue to be challenged to do this in your memory.

 

Sincerely,

 

Didymus   

The Second Sunday in Ordinary Time – A

Isaiah 49:3, 5-6

1 Corinthians 1:1-3

John 1:29-34

  

Dear Jesus,

No one can ever know what is in another person’s heart.  We can only imagine how we would feel were we standing in that other person’s shoes.  Only you know the secrets of the human heart.  Still, I find myself wondering and imagining.  What was it like for John the Baptist to come to the end of his career?  How easy was it for him to hand it all over and exit stage left?

The more I ponder the more important I think it is to look into my own heart and, remembering, filter the other’s experience through my own.  I couldn’t have done this as a youngster, not even at the beginning of my career.  All was possibility then.  The sense of vocation was so strong.  I had the truth.  In those heady days, it was easy to delude myself into thinking that I would make a difference, that the world would be a better place for my having trod the face of it.  I did not think much about aging or even about having to pass on the baton much less consider departing from the scene.  I lived in the now of the forever young.

Did John the Baptist know from the start of his career that his role would be to prepare the way for another?  When the crowds came and listened with rapt attention to his call to repentance, was he always thinking that he must be ready when the other would come to step aside, hand over the reins, so to speak?  As he continued and his reputation spread, as he heard people speculate that he might be the Messiah, was he quick to dash such thoughts and remind himself that he lived for the yet unknown you?  It seemed so clear to others that he, John, was becoming a light to the nations that (God’s) salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.  It was said that even the king came out in disguise to listen to him.

How much time did you and John spend together?  The Evangelists do not agree.  Only Luke makes the two of you cousins.  In John’s gospel, the Baptist says he did not know you but the reason why he came baptizing with water was that you might be made known to Israel.  Was it easy for John to turn it all over to you?  Didn’t he have certain expectations and amongst them that you would conform to his image of Messiah and the judgment and scourging the Messiah would bring?  John’s gospel makes it seem as easy as it was inevitable.  Having seen the Spirit descend upon and remain with you, he could then with calm assurance declare that you would be the one to baptize with the Holy Spirit.  And, having understood that, he can testify that you are the Son of God.  It flows so naturally with no evident struggle.  Did John have no doubts until his days in prison?  Did he wonder only then if it had all been a mistake?  Did he wonder only then what his life would ultimately mean?

I wonder if the greatest mistake we make is in thinking that we understand.  Is it true that the clearer the vision is the farther we are from the reality?  There is a temptation to try to do all we can to keep things the way they are.  The familiar is far safer than the unknown.  There is a comfort in saying that we have always done it this way.  My life was spent in the service of this dream and I want to pass that dream, unaltered, to others.  We really do not want to walk by faith rather than by sight.  I have had to struggle with that so many times.  Faith is not required to believe in what you see.  There is no faith in heaven.  God is seen and known in the beatific vision.  If I walk in faith, I have to remind myself that the Mystery is ever unfolding and developing in a process that will not be exhausted until the end of time and maybe not even then.  After all, it will take the rest of eternity to get to know God.  And then we will have only begun to know.

This is not to deny the worth of the Baptist’s witness.  It just was not an end in itself.  This is not to deny the worth of any person’s ministry.  It just was not the expression of the fullness of the mystery.  I should have been able to remember this as I went along.  All I would have had to do was remember the experience of church I had as a child and contrast it with the experience of church I had as an adult.  Both were beautiful.  Both shared the truth.  One experience prepared the way for the other.  The mistake would be to think that either one was as it should be forever.  Ever ancient; ever new, the poet said.  That is what I must remember.

When John the Baptist saw you coming toward him at the beginning of your public ministry, was he able to deal with that unfolding reality.  Or would his struggle heighten as he heard how different your ministry was from his?  Who told you to flee the wrath that is to come?  That’s the message with which he harangued the Sadducees and the Pharisees.  How could he cope when, from his prison cell he heard you denounced for welcoming sinners and eating with them?  Could he have accepted a Messiah who washed others’ feet?

Sincerely,

Didymus