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Easter Sunday 2011      

         Today is a day to smile. Yes it has been raining for almost two days straight and there is flooding and gas is almost 4.00 a gallon, but today is a day to smile. There is far too much frowning and scowling and nasty looks of impatience. On this Easter Sunday, we really have something to smile about.    

           Some people may think we are crazy and others a little strange, but the frowns of sorrow, fear and anger are things of the past for Christians. We smile because we know with faith that Jesus Christ is alive, and for that reason we can truly live and act as God’s children by the gift of the Baptism. 

            We lived in a world where there is injustice, disease, violence, evil and death. Those things slowly but surely eat away at us, weighing us down and making life much more of a chore than a joy. God the Father had seen that this is what we had made of our lives. We went from a garden to a garbage dump and so all we could do is distract ourselves from pain and suffering until this life is over. We chose ourselves over God; our will over God’s will and brought about the seeds of our own misery. 

          God has always had one desire for all his people: to give them the opportunity to receive again what they so foolishly gave up and welcome them back to him. He sent Jesus his Son, born of the Virgin Mary to proclaim the Kingdom of God and that faith, hope and love can overturn doubt, despair and selfishness if we allow God to work with us and in us and through us.             Just two days ago, we recalled that by his death on the cross, Jesus took upon himself everything that could have destroyed us and today we know that he has destroyed them. When we speak about Jesus, we do not just say that Jesus was there, but rather because of the Resurrection and the grace of the Holy Spirit we can smile and say that Jesus IS here. Right NOW.

     Jesus IS ALIVE and so the lie that God is out to get us or does not care about us is replaced by the Truth that God is offering us a new opportunity to come to him in faith.

     Jesus IS ALIVE and so the fear of professing and living our faith is replaced by the confidence that God has hidden nothing from us and invites us to carry our burdens with the certainty that we do not carry them alone.

     Jesus IS ALIVE and so the selfishness that the world tells us is good is replaced by the generous and selfless love of being for others.

      In Jesus’ death and resurrection, God reminds us that our true humanity and beauty lies in the reality of giving and receiving one another in love. The frowns that we wear and the regrets and resentments that we carry around with us are the result of thinking about ourselves as a people who believe their future is all about changing their past. 

      In fact, in the Resurrection and the Sacrament of Baptism that makes us true sharers in the resurrected life, we know in faith that God is calling us to look ahead. He is calling us to love more every day, pray more every day, serve more every day. In love, prayer, service and sacrifice we find the risen Jesus Christ. When we eat his Body and drink his Blood it is the glorified and risen Jesus that we receive. We receive life and hope and a love that will keep us strong when it appears that we are outnumbered and overwhelmed.

     The life of Christ conquers the life of chaos that many of us think we have to endure, when today, he says to us a simple word: “PEACE.”

    So, when you are out and about in your daily life, when you are overwhelmed and at your wits end, when you are on the verge of despair and think that life has gotten the upper hand, just remember this Easter Day, which is more than a day, but a whole lifetime. God is caring for you. You have God’s undivided attention. All you have to do know is love the Lord, love your neighbor and SMILE!

Easter Vigil 2011   

            What are we waiting for? Why have you come here tonight? The answer may seem obvious to many, but it is still important to know the reason. Some of you may be waiting to get baptized. Others of you may be waiting to be received into full communion with the Church. Some of you may be waiting for all of this to be over so you can go and eat or drink the things you gave up for Lent. While all of these are good answers, they are not why we have come here tonight.    

            All of the answers I have given point to another far more important answer. We are waiting for Jesus Christ to keep his promise of Resurrection. In the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, Jesus foretold three times that the Son of man would be handed over, put to death and then raised on the third day. Is it true? We believe in faith that it happened in time in the year 33AD, but in that case, we can only say Jesus WAS raised. It is a part of history that we remember.  

              But is that all that it is?  If it was, then we could only say Jesus “was.” But we say more than that, because we say Jesus “IS”. Jesus is not past, but present, and tonight he becomes present to you who have been preparing to receive the sacraments in a real, intense and personal way. 

          Catechumens and candidates, you join the thousands of men and women and children over the course of history that have come to this night to know if Jesus is real. Is his love real? Is his sacrifice real? Is Jesus really present in the world or not? 

              Tonight you find out just how real he is. You will be baptized into his death and freed from sin. You will be overshadowed by the outpouring of the Holy Spirit when the living Jesus Christ takes possession of your heart and soul and body in a new and mysterious way. You will then receive his Body and drink his Blood and begin in a new way to serve the Lord by loving him with your whole heart and soul and your neighbor as yourself. 

               The Risen Lord through the power of the Holy Spirit will be your companion in good times and bad, in times of joy and sorrow. You are no longer alone. The sin of Adam that has made us alone, empty and without hope is replaced by the powerful life-giving grace of the Risen Lord who makes us a new creation. You will now join with us as we work out our salvation in the joyful expectation that Jesus Christ will come again in glory and welcome us into the fullness of the Father’s Kingdom in heaven.     

           The debt we owed to God has been paid not in dollars and cents, but in Jesus’ self-sacrificing love on the wood of the cross. Along with us, your lives are now filled with new possibilities to make a return to the Lord for all he has done for you. Every new day God grants you is a reason for gratitude. Every breath you take is a reminder of the risen Lord breathing his Holy Spirit into you. Every action you undertake is now an opportunity for you to give a true accounting before others that Jesus Christ is your Master, your guide, your God and he offers you freedom. 

               This freedom is from death, which no longer has any power over us. This freedom is for love, for generosity, for sacrifice to make a gift of yourself and be a witness to others that Jesus not only was, but Jesus still is. He is still loving us. He is still healing and forgiving us. He is still leading us to heaven. He is still feeding us with his body and blood. He is still breathing new life into us every day.

                This is the reason we are here and this is why we are waiting. We want to share with you the life of Christ that burns as brightly in us as it does on the Easter candle we have blessed tonight. It is what the Apostles discovered from the women who returned from the tomb. It is what we discovered when we first accepted the faith, and it is what you will discover in just a few minutes. Jesus has been raised from the dead. He is here, and he will never leave us.

Good Friday 2011   

       On this awful and awe-filled day Christ takes on three foes: Truth is opposed by lies. Suffering is opposed by cowardice. Love is opposed by selfishness.  By his words and actions, Jesus commands us to reflect on real life, and our ability or inability to embrace it. In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus says if “you will be my disciple, you must deny yourself, take up your cross daily and follow me.”

           My first response is: “but Lord, there has to be another way. You way ought to be something easier, something fun, something convenient. I want to follow you, but you are asking me for too much.” Many times we are like the rich young man, we want to follow the Lord, but we are so concerned with hanging on to the things this world says is important, we refuse the gift of hanging on the cross.  

              Which is safer, the world or the cross? What do you think? The world has pleasures, the world has beauty, the world has goodness. The values of the world also teach us that the world is in my control, people can be in my control, I can determine and create my own world according to my whims and desires.  No one is worth my life, I am important above all else. I must serve myself.       

         Jesus saw the world as beautiful and good, but is also saw it as dangerous. We can take ourselves too seriously and forget that it is God who is ultimately in charge, not me. Not my will, but THY WILL be done. This was the battle at Gethsemane. Jesus knows the Truth because as God He is the Truth. Only Jesus can cure the terrible and terminal disease that that the human race has brought upon itself. 

               Truth is sometimes a lonely thing. People are so inmeshed in their own realities and delusions of grandeur that when faced with the choice of the truth or a lie, they will delay or deflect the truth if they have the chance. To choose the Truth is to recognize that some things may be sacrificed- my comfort, my popularity, my wants. I need everything in me to hold onto the Truth, because there is nothing else worth holding. 

          Views in this world change as quickly as the wind, or Ohio weather. Jesus teaches us that we must give up everything else to follow him, to go against the flow, to say that my faith is not just an idea, but a deep commitment to Someone far greater than myself, who guides me and leads me into places I have not planned to go, but where I truly need to be. To live this faith takes great courage, knowing that I might be ridiculed, shunned even isolated because of what is right.         

       Why do we choose to suffer? We seem to gain so very little and at the same time appear to lose so much?  There is only one reason to suffer, and that is love. To love and be loved is the greatest gift one can give and receive, but it is also our heaviest burden. It is what makes us truly human. The bond of love gives us both great joy but also great sorrow.  

              Today Christ gives us back our true humanity by dying out of love for the human race that we might not ever delude ourselves again. The cross is the key that opens the heart of God to the world. From that pierced heart flows the REAL TRUTH. God’s infinite love, his boundless mercy, and consoling peace are opened to us again.

                We see that in this perilous and ever changing world that the cross is surely the safest place to be. It is painful, but pain is a part of real life. It can help us long for the goodness and joy that God has in store for those who bear it lovingly. The cross is heavy, but not as heavy as all the expectations that the world falsely makes on us to become our own gods and goddesses. The cross is humbling, but not humiliating. The world seeks to humiliate us by leaving us in pieces on the street and in broken homes and violent relationships, building us up only to later strike us down.  

             Jesus teaches us that the only safe place to be in this world is on the cross. God is there with us to show us the Truth of his sacrifice, to suffer bravely with us when everyone else would abandon us, and love us when everyone else is too self absorbed to care.  

              As we venerate this instrument of death which today becomes the truest sign of love and our means of salvation, let us hold tight to it, because we too are in a battle for truth, for courage and for love. Everything is riding on it. He tells us: don’t give up, don’t give in. Take up that cross and take up real life.

Holy Thursday 2011     

     It seems that the one constant in the world is change. We know that all things in this world pass, and that this world is not our final destination, but a stop along the way. We are always looking for ways to improve things and make things better, faster and easier. We even have a word for that today- “Upgrade.”       

          Every couple of years we may get a new phone because it is faster and has better gadgets. We may try to get an upgrade when we travel from coach to first class, or even a better hotel room. Unfortunately, some people think that they can upgrade relationships. Some may try to upgrade to “better” friends or better spouses. Many are always in search of something better, smarter, prettier, but they are never satisfied. They are simply waiting for a new model.    

               If anyone ought to have seriously been considering an upgrade, it should have been God. This human model 1.0 is far from perfect. Human beings can be selfish, greedy, needy, ungrateful and even evil. But in the midst of this, John tells us that Jesus loves them to the end as they are. He loves Judas who betrayed him. He loves Peter who is constantly second-guessing him. He loves those apostles who fled when he was arrested. He loves those who nailed him to the cross.  

              This night which begins the Sacred Triduum is all about the love of God for his people. He does not just speak about love though. John puts the love of God into action in the action of Jesus’ washing the disciples’ feet. God’s love not only desires our happiness, but God also wishes to give us all that he can so that we can receive that love in true freedom of heart. Loving is the most exalted and humbling thing we can do. We can choose another and allow ourselves to be chosen. We can give to another and at the same time be vulnerable enough to receive what another person has to give us.    

            God shows the greatness and power of his love through the lowliness and humility of his action. God has created us in love and through the action of his Son chosen us to become his children. He has done this by humbling himself to take on our humanity and emptying himself, stripping himself of all pretense to cover himself with our sins.  

                 In the presence of his disciples, Jesus Christ takes humble gifts of bread and wine and exalts them through his Words and the Holy Spirit to become his Body and Blood. That action that we recall is what we truly celebrate every time we gather for this Holy Sacrifice.                It is not the desire of God to upgrade the human race, but rather sanctify it. He teaches us tonight how to be human beings and he gives us the grace now to carry it out. He teaches us tonight the true meaning of love. To love, one must strip themselves of all ego and pretense and present themselves as they are, sinners in need of the mercy of God, a lost race in the need of direction, people who feel unloved, yet seek the fullness of love. We do not need to upgrade to something new. In fact, we need to return to something very ancient- God so loved the world and he has given us his only Son, that we might be saved from death and experience life. 

              In this gift of the Holy Eucharist, Jesus gives us his Body broken on the cross, yet glorified in the resurrection to put us back together when life pulls us apart. He pours out his blood to make us clean and fill us with gifts of healing, peace, courage, and the ability to let his love become our love. 

            In a world that speaks of love as taking and possessing, Jesus teaches us in this Sacred  action of the Eucharist  that the core of being who we are created to be consists of giving and receiving, of loving and sacrificing, of thanking and serving God and one another. Let us thank the Lord for this gift of the Holy Eucharist and the priesthood. Let us allow the Lord to wash us so that we can be made holy. Let us spend some time with him tonight and know that he is not going to upgrade this gift, but rather fulfill it by doing he has promised to do for us, give us real life.