God Wills Your Wholeness

St. Paul reminds us in today’s first reading, 1 Thes 4: 1-8, that God’s will for us is our “holiness.”  God wills our integrity, our transparency, our wholeness, our honesty, our purity, our simplicity; in short,  our sacred commitment to Truth, to Life, to  Christ--the way to the Father.  God wills that we again become childlike: innocent, awe-filled, loving and trusting, inclusive, transparent, faith-filled and hope-filled.  God desires that you and I refrain from immoral acts: acts of evil intent, malicious acts, hate-filled acts; that we refrain from deceitfulness and from all that is contrary to godliness, to loving and forgiving as God loves and forgives us.  God wills our good. 

What do you will for yourself and others?  Is your will worthy of being carried out in actuality, that is, are your actions and attitudes in sync with your innermost desires, those that come from your God-self, or are they aligned with the propensity to act contrary to God's will, to succumb to the weakness of sin that exist within each one of us?

Temptations: Feeling Trapped between Right and What is Not Right

Today we celebrate the feast of John the Baptist, the one who prepared the people for God the Son’s coming into this world to walk among us as a human being, teaching us the way to the Father, to God’s Kingdom here on earth and in eternity.  Herod was fascinated by John, loved to hear him preach but did not follow his counsel, living according to his own will, not God’s, as did Adam and Eve and their descendants to this very day.  John, being a righteous man, confronted Herod when he married his brother Philip’s wife, Herodias.  It was Herodias and his own daughter who trapped him into doing that which was truly against his conscience.

Herod, Herodias and their daughter’s lives were dominated by wealth, power and self-indulgence, a form of self-idolatry. We ourselves live in a world ruled by secularism, materialism and unlimited freedoms, a  narcissism and forms, also, of self-idolatry.  We become our own gods, so to speak.  Hence, as with Herod, temptations abound in our lives.

To whom am I going to listen today: my narcissistic self or my God-self, the voices of others egging me on to follow the Father of Lies or the voice of the Spirit inviting me to follow Jesus, the Way, the Truth and the Life which the world does not recognize?  The choices is ours!

God's Intimate Knowledge of Us

“You have searched me and you know me, Lord,” we pray in today’s responsorial psalm.  In the Gospel,  Mt. 23: 27-32, Jesus searches the hearts of the Pharisees and confronts them for their hypocrisy. Exteriorly, they look very holy with their elegant, officious robes, sacred phylacteries and tassels.  Interiorly, however, they are anything but holy.  “They tie up heavy burdens…and lay them on peoples’ shoulders but they will not lift a finger to move them.  All their works are performed to be seen,” Matthew tells us in verses  4-5 of this same chapter.  There is a Pharisee in all of us, that is, all of us are hypocritical from time to time and appear to be living impeccable lives. All of us, on occasion, do things for show. We also have the ability to be authentically holy, that is, to be persons who recognize and acknowledge our sinfulness; are merciful, compassionate, kind, just, forgiving and caring toward others, willing to lift their burdens, to share their grief, to help them find love and peace and joy for their sake alone. Yes, we truly care, are genuinely involved in making the world a better place because we are, in fact,  cooperating with grace to the fullest of our abilities.

 

 The Lord knows because He searches our hearts! And even when He finds “the Pharisee” there, God still loves us ,redirects us toward an authentic Christian life and forgives us our failings.

God's Infinite, Loving Knowledge of Us

Today’s responsorial psalm, Ps 139, reminds us that God searches us and knows us.  “…You understand my thoughts from afar,”  as He did, for example,  the thoughts of Peter, John and James; Mary of Magdala, his own Mother Mary, the woman who touched the hem of His garment and was healed, the woman he met at the well and told  that her present husband was not her husband.  Yes, God knows you and me intimately.  “Even before a word is on…[our] my tongue[s],” God knows it all. God knows when our thoughts are negative or positive, critical or accepting; yes, even venomous or generously kind and merciful like His own.  God loves us no matter how wayward or holy our thoughts might be.  God guides our thinking to the way God thinks.  God directs us to thoughts that generate positive energy, that deepen our hope and our faith and the hope and faith of others.

Today we celebrate the feast of St. Monica. For thirty years she prayed for Augustine, her wayward son, a child living an immoral life, a child who had turned away from Christ.  God knew her agonizing thoughts, saw her weep over her son’s disobedience to God’s Commandments to love God above all (the first three commandments) and to love his neighbor as himself (the other seven commandments).  Through her, Jesus interceded for Augustine.  Her waiting upon the Lord was richly blessed, as her son converted, abandoned a life of sin and consecrated his live to the Lord as His priestly servant.

To what is God calling you and me? In what ways are we in need of conversion in our thoughts and in our actions? And for whom are we praying?

Impulsive or Reflective Living: The Consequences

Today’s first reading, Judges 11: 29-39a, was very disturbing to me when I first read it. Jephthah vows to the Lord that, if He delivers the Ammonites into his power, he will sacrifice to the Lord whoever comes out of the door of his house to meet him on his return. His only child, a daughter, so excited over her father’s military victory, comes out playing the tambourines and dancing. In anger, I ask: How can anyone make such an impulsive, rash decision in the name of God! As I prayed over the Scriptures, the thought came to me that rash, impulsive decisions are carried out every day in the name of God, of religion, even when falsely perceived as right and just, as obligatory. Such actions are common even to this day. Human lives are sacrificed daily and persons are harmed by any one of us acting impulsively, rashly, as we glory in ourselves and our accomplishments, as did Jephthah. These actions may be as “small” as entertaining gossip, raising ourselves above others by “having fun,” “fitting in,” at the expense of another. Though not as tragic as was Jephthah’s vow, such behaviors still affect us and others in negative ways. And so all of us come before the Lord in humble repentance, asking for mercy and forgiveness and the courage to live reflectively instead of impulsively.

God's Generosity concerning the Kingdom of Heaven

In today’s Gospel, Mt 20: 1-16, Jesus states that “the Kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out at dawn to hire laborers for his vineyard.” Those hired later in the day, even those hired at 5 p.m., received the same wage as those hired at dawn. What a message of hope for all of us! Those who accept Jesus’ invitation to work in His vineyard, whether accepting that invitation as children, adolescents, young adults, middle age adults, those of advanced years or on their death beds will be treated equally. Recall the thief on the cross who acknowledged Jesus and said to Him: “Remember me in your Kingdom” and Jesus’ response was “This very day you will be with me in Paradise.” We may want to protest: “No fair. I lived a good life for 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90 years and a thief just before he breathes his last get the same treatment I do!” God’s mercy, God’s generosity, God’s love is infinite. It has no bounds! It is inclusive. No one is turned away who repents! Salvation is free to those who believe in the Lord and rely on God’s mercy! May I be that generous!

Being God's Champion

In today’s first reading, Judges 6: 11-24a, an angel of the Lord appears to Gideon and says to him: “The Lord is with you, O champion.” Gideon’s response, in today’s parlance, sounds something like this: “O yeah! Then why are we facing such horrible possibilities as being slaughtered by our warring neighbors?” Gideon was in the process of beating out wheat in the wine press to save it from the Midianites, certainly not a pleasant job given that they were soon to be delivered into the enemy’s hands. Gideon complains: “If the Lord is with us, why is all this happening to us? Where are the wondrous deeds that our ancestors tell us God performed for us in Egypt?” The angel of the Lord says to Gideon: “Go with the strength you have and save Israel from the power of Midian!” Gideon objects: “Me? My family is a nobody in Manasseh; and, in my family, I’m totally insignificant. You’re really talking to the wrong person, Lord!” Sound familiar? You and I could dance the same dance in which Gideon engages. We could come up with similar complaints—our world, too, is in a mess, about to be overpowered by enemies within and outside of the U.S. As the fires and the floods rage in fury; when terminal or chronic illness strikes our families, we, too, might wonder where God is. Like Gideon, we could manufacture the same arguments when God calls us forth to take responsibility to make something happen to change the course of our lives when we are at our end’s wit. The choice is ours: we can engage in arguments and do nothing or, in faith, to take up the challenge to make a difference, to radiate possibilities in a seemingly impossible situation. I pray for the courage to do the latter! What about you?