about one month ago...

“

It wasn’t the typical Bible text for an Easter sermon, but the
preacher knew what this congregation needed to hear.

Never forget, he said, what Jesus proclaimed in his first sermon:
“The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach
good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the
prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the
oppressed.”

This isn’t the sermon that many believers hear on Easter, but it’s
the one that prisoners need to hear, said Chuck Colson back in 1992,
facing a small chapel packed with men at a federal prison near Denver.

This was also the sermon the former Watergate conspirator kept
preaching to flocks behind bars during the decades between his own
stay in Alabama’s Maxwell Prison in 1974 and his death on April 21 at
the age of 80. Anyone who wants to understand what changed Colson from
President Richard Nixon’s trusted “hatchet man” into one of the age’s
best-known Christian apologists needs to understand this sermon.

You see, Colson told prisoners across America and around the world,
it was radical to proclaim “freedom for the prisoners” during the
Roman Empire. And today? Anyone who preaches this message “in one of
those nice churches downtown” will get the same icy response that
Jesus did.

“The rich and powerful people,” he said, with a dramatic pause, will
“run you out of town.”

Never forget, shouted the former Marine, that Jesus died as a
prisoner. Was there anyone in the room who had ever been
strip-searched, beaten and mocked? Did anyone know what it felt like
to have the legal authorities use muscle in an attempt to wrench a
guilty plea — to a lesser offence, of course — out of a desperate
prisoner?

“Has anything like that,” he asked, with a knowing smile, “every
happened to any of you?”

“Amen,” said the prisoners. Some laughed, while others stared at the
floor. Many waved clenched fists in the air to urge the preacher to
keep going.

Colson kept going. Was there anyone in the chapel who been betrayed
by a friend, perhaps even a friend turned around and provided evidence
to the state? Was there anyone present who had been convicted of vague
crimes?

In the end, of course, Jesus was executed — between two thieves.

But that wasn’t the end of the story, on that particular Easter
morning in Colorado, or in any of the other Easter services the former
White House powerbroker chose to spend behind bars after he founded
Prison Fellowship in 1976.

“If you want to know what Easter is about, then there’s no better
place to find out than in the tombs of our society — which is what
our prisons are,” he said. “On this, of all days, prison is the one
place that Jesus would be. Believe me.”

After Colson’s death, most of the obituaries — especially those
produced in elite East Coast newsrooms — focused on his Watergate
role and, perhaps, on his pivotal work creating a new and powerful
coalition of conservative Catholics and evangelical Protestants.
Working with a team of talented researchers and writers, Colson also
produced shelves of influential books and commentaries that addressed
almost every controversial issue in the American public life and
politics.

Sadly, this all-politics DC Beltway perspective may draw attention
away from Colson’s trailblazing work in prisons, which ultimately
created a network of more than 14,000 volunteers in more than 1,300
prisons nationwide and around the world. He also founded the Justice
Fellowship organization, which has worked for the reformation of
America’s sprawling, bloated, crowded and, all too often, destructive
prison system.

“That’s where Chuck developed his social conscience. It was in
prison, in all of those face-to-face encounters with those forgotten
souls, ” said Michael Cromartie, vice president of the Ethics and
Public Policy Center. He was also Colson’s first research assistant
and aide after the creation of Prison Fellowship.

“Chuck was never happier than when he took off his jacket and
loosened his tie in a dingy prison chapel somewhere, facing rows of
men in metal folding chairs who had big, thick Bibles in their hands.
… He embraced as many as he could. He tried to learn their names and
hear their stories. He tried to make a difference in there.”

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about one month ago...

Peace, Doubt and Mercy-

What must those six days have been like?

I often wonder that when I read today’s Gospel.  Here was St. Thomas the Apostle, the only guy not ruled by fear:  His brothers stayed in the upper room afraid, but not him, he was out and about.  Either way, He’s out and Jesus comes.  Jesus appears to the ten remaining disciples who were present and speaks to them.  Thomas comes home, perhaps with food, perhaps from talking to people about Jesus…who knows?  Either way, he returns to find that his friends have lost their minds.  They tell him that Jesus has risen from the dead.

Now, from that moment until Jesus appears again to them, six days passed.  No doubt that upper room got very small: arguments, recriminations, finger pointing, yelling, questioning…should Thomas have chosen to believe the ridiculous, he’d have to have wondered why Jesus didn’t appear while he was there.  

It must have been a nasty six days.

Whatever the case, somewhere in there, Thomas tells his brothers what it would take for him to believe: if he puts his finger in the nail marks and his hand in Jesus side, then he’ll believe.

So, six days later, Jesus comes again.  He starts off by saying “Peace be with you” as he has three times before.  He then speaks to Thomas and doesn’t chastise or reprove him; instead, he meets his criteria…sort of a “This is what you need?  Oh, then do it.”  

Thomas probes the nail marks.  He physically places his hand inside Jesus body and the proclaims him as God.  If I’m not mistaken, Thomas is the first person to recognize Jesus as “God”.

As you may know, Thomas was faithful, even to the point of death.  When you go home today, look at a map.  See the distance between Israel and southern India.  Thomas walked it and brought people there to Jesus.  He preached and taught until he was tortured to death with spears.  He held that faith so well…

Back to that upper room now.  Jesus says “Peace be with you” three times.  The Greek word Jesus uses for “Peace” refers not to an inner contentment, but a communal relationship.  He’s addressing the fights that have occurred among the disciples and the fights that will come.  He’s declaring “Peace” after what must have been six days of war. His very resurrection is such a colossal event that it changes all the rules: it unifies them in a way not many other things could.  Wherever they go from that day forward, they are bound by the wonder and beauty of having seen Jesus risen from the dead. Their fights with each other are over, they are commissioned to go into the world in unity and forgive sins in His name, bringing people to God through their testimony.

This unity speaks to us today:  we are here because of that moment.  Look around you for a moment if you will.  Look at who is here.  What would bring us all together at 730 in the morning other than our firm, heartfelt conviction that He is Risen and that He calls to us?  What a wonderful and amazing thing this is…right here, right now, I praise God for you and your presence here.  

We ARE one in this belief, and this oneness in our belief in Jesus resurrection is the first step to a greater unity that we are called to. Look at today’s first reading: 

“Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common. With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all.”

We learn that the Christians loved each other so much that people were drawn to this fledgling and seemingly insignificant Church.  See what happens when people who love Jesus live in unity?  Others come.  Too often, our answer in American Catholicism is to create programs that may or may not be useless.  We work at developing strategies to getting “our numbers up”.  None of these will ever be near as effective as us loving each other and sacrificing for each other to such an extent as to cause others to look at us and say “Wow!  Look at how they love one another!”. 

We believe something unbelievable: God took our sins and guilt upon Himself and died, killing those things with Him.  He rose from that death and calls us to enter into a deep personal relationship with Him, lived out in this Catholic Community of believers.  Within this community, we must be patient and loving with the process of conversion that each one must enter into. 

Fear can never be a part of this process of conversion.  We don’t need to be afraid of our doubts or of other people’s doubts.  Be confident enough in what we believe to hold it up to our intellect with humility and love.  If someone comes to you with their doubts, don’t be angry with them, gently walk with them until they see the beauty and wonder of what Christ teaches.   If you struggle with doubts, share them with a knowledgeable, patient and loving person within this community.  Ask them to bring you to truth.

Here is our chance to understand that God’s mercy is not just about what we’ve done wrong, but in how right God wants us to be in mind, soul and body.  We can be confident in what Jesus teaches us: confident enough that we are patient with those who struggle: especially ourselves.  Mercy requires that we understand that conversion is a process, a process that begins with our struggles and ends with our crying out to Jesus in wonder and awe “My Lord and My God!”

What better thing can we say than that?

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about one month ago...

Imagine, if you will a soldier in a foreign land.  He’s been trained and given all the tools he needs to be a good and effective soldier.  It’s nighttime, so he sleeps. And as he sleeps, he dreams.  He dreams of a reality where he is a teacher…a molder of young minds.  He dreams of his classroom and his students, he dreams of his life and what it would be like.  Like some of our dreams, his is vivid and connected and, in the dream state, the contradictions and strange occurrences appear normal and right…unquestioned in that delirious landscape.

Then, the alarm goes off and jars him awake…he fires out of his bunker and looks about.

In that moment, is he a solider?  Of course he is.

While he dreamt, was he a soldier?  Of course he was.

And yet, in that dream state, he could’ve sworn he was a teacher.

And so it is with us.  Whenever we gather in God’s presence, we are to hear an alarm that will pull us from our dream state and into reality.  Tonight, the alarm chimes particularly loud…a wake up call from Our Father as he attempts to shake us from our sleep and remind us that we are not primarily engineers, teachers, farmers…that we are not first and foremost those and the many other things we believe. We are first and foremost His Children…the Objects of His affection.  As objects of His affection, that means that we are able to receive the gift of the Eucharist.  It also means that we are at war against evil and evil against us.  Let’s look at how those two truths are related.

This truth is spoken so clearly through the Eucharist that we call it “The Blessed Sacrament”.

Here are some of the things our Catechism says about the Eucharist:  It is the source and the summit of our faith, is the sign and cause of our unity with God and each other…it’s the culmination of God’s saving action, it’s the worship we offer…its our connection to the liturgy in heaven and our anticipation of eternal life…all these things and more.

The shortest and most potent way I can summarize the Eucharist is to say this: God’s love and hunger for us are expressed in His willingness give Himself to us in the form of bread and wine.  We receive him into our bodies and take him in…he becomes our breath, our blood, our bones, our heart, our minds, our very flesh.  He becomes one with us.

The beauty and wonder of that is so clear that, we could stop there, but we don’t, because there’s even more.  The way that God offers Himself to us: in this small piece of bread…easily broken, easily desecrated or, worst of all, easily ignored.

I want to share with you an excerpt from Dr. Peter Kreefts book “Ecumenical Jihad”.  The part I want to share is from a discussion Dr. Kreeft had with a Muslim named Isa about the Eucharist.  The interpreter is named John.  It begins with Isa asking:

I:          “Your Church teaches that he is really present there, yes? That what’s there is the man who was God?”

K:         “Yes. The formula is ‘Body and blood, soul and divinity.’”

I:          “And you believe that?”

K:         “Yes.”

Isa made as if to say something, but stifled it. John assured him he would not be offended.

Finally, reluctantly, Isa said, “I don’t understand.”

K:         “I understand how you feel. It sounds very shocking.”

I:          “No, you don’t understand. That’s not what I mean. You will take it as an insult, but I don’t mean it to be.”

K:         “I promise I won’t take it as an insult. But I really want to know what’s on your mind.”

I:          “Well then… I don’t think you really do believe that. I don’t mean to say you’re dishonest, but… “

K:         “I think I know what you mean. You can’t empathize with anyone who believes something so shocking. You don’t see how you could ever get down on your knees before that altar.”

I:          “No, I don’t see how I could ever get up. If I believed that thing that looks like a little round piece of bread was really Allah Himself, I think I would just faint. I would fall at His feet like a dead man.”

John looked carefully at my reaction as he reported Isa’s words. My eyes opened, and Isa smiled. “What did you say to him?” I asked.

J:          “Nothing. Then, after a while, just ‘Yes.’”

John is a wise man.

A wise man indeed.  Look at the host…the tiny little vessel that God uses to offer Himself to us: its not coincidental or mere convenience that God chose this common and little means of conveying Himself to us: its reflective of how He works to conquer evil and how we are to use the gift of this Most Blessed Sacrament to do the same.

Right here, right now, in this sacred place, God is trying to shake us from our sleep. He’s trying to show us how Blessed we are to receive Him…He’s trying to show us some measure of what the Eucharist is.  He’s showing us how to fight evil through imitating Him.  

The Eucharist is the hint before the story…it prepares us for what is to come in the story of His life and what we celebrate over these next few days.

Tonight, the Eucharist starts us on our walk with Jesus through utter and total desolation…we watch as the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords begins by offering His disciples His very flesh to eat and blood to drink.  We look on in horror as he, the Master of All commits to the utterly slavish task of washing feet.  We are with Him and shocked when his friends abandon Him at His time of need.  We weep with Mary as she sees Him completely rejected and abandoned, even by those whom He helped and healed.  We shy away as he is tortured with a whip.  We trod silently behind as he hefts the burden of wood and places it on his shoulders.  We ponder incomprehensibly the love that compels him to cry out “Father, forgive them, they don’t know what they are doing”, thus making excuses for us even while we are putting him to death. We stare in awe as the innocent and pure God man cries out “It’s all my fault!” and collects all the sins and guilt of the human race upon himself and dies.

It shouldn’t have worked…the evil one had to know what was coming, but he couldn’t stop himself.  Evil must destroy and, as our experience has proved, it eventually destroys everything it touches.  And so, Jesus, humility in human flesh, took the evil upon Himself, wrapped it all within and upon Himself and died, taking it with Him.

This is the Eucharist and it is the rule of our Christian life, not the exception.  God calls us to receive Him so we can be Him.  He doesn’t say “Take and Understand”, he says “Take and Eat” and so we do.

We don’t understand the evil inflicted on us.  We don’t understand why we continue to inflict evil.  We can’t wrap our brains around what causes people to do the evil they do and our hearts accuse us that we confound others with our evil.

We may not understand how or why evil happens in or around us, but we do understand now how to fight that evil:

We must receive and adore Him in the Eucharist and then we must become Him.

We must become small.

We must become humble.

We must be selfless.

We must sacrifice.

The Eucharist is a gift that demands we wake from our sleep and see Who He Is and what He offers us and how precious and beautiful that gift is.  Our thanks…our acknowledgment that we have awakened is in our receiving this mystery with Awe and Joy, while committing ourselves to imitating it. 

We receive, we rejoice, we become.

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