Sunday Homily - New Translation Check-up, Part II

Sunday Homily - New Translation Check-up, Part I

Sunday Homily - Speaking with Authority

Hello all, it's been a while again since I last posted, things have been busy, especially with the pastor away for some holidays, and the accompanying break-in and other sundry craziness.  So here are three homilies backlogged from a few weeks back.  I think for the time being, I will just be posting the audio, transcribing takes a bit more time than I have available.  Enjoy!

Sunday Homily - Mary, Mother of the Living

As promised, the text of the January 1st Homily:

Today we celebrate the motherhood of our Blessed Mother, the Blessed Virgin Mary.  The title of this feast, "Mary, Mother of God" is actually a theological doctrine, that goes all the way back to the year 431 at the Council of Ephesus, when our Blessed Mother was declared, "Mother of God".  It was really intended to say more about Jesus, the fact that Jesus was God, than it was to say something about Mary.  Nonetheless, being such an important feast of our Blessed Mother, I would like to focus my reflections on her this morning.  I don't know how many of you have had the opportunity to surf over to our diocesan website, admittedly it's not a very user-friendly website, but if you can navigate around, somewhere buried in there, is an explanation of our diocesan Coat of Arms, and our diocesan motto.  For those who don't know, our diocesan motto is Mater Viventium, "Mother of the Living" and this is another title given to our Blessed Mother, "Mother of the Living."  Certainly we know that she is the Mother of God, she is the Mother of Christ, she is Mother of the Church.  When our Lord gave her over to St. John as he hung on the Cross, she became the Mother of the Church, but that title is given to her as well, Mother of the Living.  It was given to her by St. Epiphanius (that's a $10 factoid there that you can impress your friends with, St. Epiphanius called Mary, "Mother of the Living").  That title was actually first used, in Genesis Chapter 3 to make reference to Eve, that Eve was the "Mother of the Living".  After all, she is the first woman, she is the mother of all humanity, but then Mary is also called the Mother of the Living, because she is often referred to as the "New Eve."  If we go back and take a look at that story in Genesis, we see that it was Eve who was the one who was first tempted by the serpant, it was Eve's disobedience that caused Adam to sin, to bring Original Sin into the world, to eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  So just as Eve first was disobedient and led Adam into sin, so first Mary was obedient to God's plan, before our Lord's obedience in his sacrifice of himself on the Cross.  Christ is often referred to as the New Adam, because he revereses Adam's sin, and Mary the New Eve, because she reverses the disobedience of the first Eve.  As we know, Mary was obedient to God throughout her entire life, at every moment of her life she did God's will, she never committed a single sin throughout her entire life.  Her obedience was most important though, at that moment when the Angel appeared to her, and the Angel of the Lord told her that she would become the Mother of God.  Nevertheless, she still had the free choice, she could have said "no".  She could have said, "I don't want to be a part of it, I don't understand, I'm afraid, I can't do this" but of course she was perfectly obedient in all things, and so she did say "Yes, let it be done to me according to your word."  Through that act of obedience to God's will, she became the Mother of Christ, and she became the New Eve, the Mother of all the Living.  Her role as mother, of course, doesn't end with that, her role as mother continues.  She loves each and every one of us with a mother's love, she loves the whole world, each and every person with a mother's love, not just the members of her Son's body, the members of the Church.  So we are invited, we are encouraged to turn to her in our times of need.  Mary's intercession is certainly very powerful.  I myself have to confess being a bit of a late comer to Marian devotion, there was not much Marian devotion practiced at home when I was growing up, but I have come to discover in my life, on a few occasions turning to our Blessed Mother, that her intercession is indeed very, very powerful, and very effective.  It might be a very simplistic way to say it, but, if we have Mary on our side, then we cannot fail; that what seems almost impossible, suddenly becomes almost easy if we have our Blessed Mother on our side.  She wants to help us, she wants to show us that mother's love, that she has for each and every one of us, she wants us to turn to her, so she can lead us to her Son.  So as we begin this new year, 2012, we commend our Parish, our families, our friends, our Diocese, and indeed the whole world to the prayers and the intercession of our Blessed Mother; Mary, Mother of the God, Mary, Mother of the Living, that she might continue to show us a mother's love, that she might continue to intercede for us, that we might know the grace and power, and forgiveness and mercy of her Son.  Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us!

A New Year, A New Blog Feature

As we begin this new calendar year, I decided to add a new feature to the blog.  My Sunday homilies will now be available in audio (but since Blogger only allows videos not audio files, I'll be converting them to simple videos and posting them to my YouTube channel, then connecting it here to the blog).  For those who still prefer the printed word, the text of the homily will still appear on the blog.  God bless, and a Happy New Year to all!

Sunday Homily - The Most Holy Trinty, God's Life and Us (and a Farewell Message)

As I am due to leave my parish in the next week, my homily this Sunday includes a bit of a farewell message; it's a farewell to the parish, not to the blog, just to clarify.

Well, we are come to my final discourse this weekend.  I will still be with you for another week and a half, but next Sunday our soon-to-be-ordained-deacon John Redmond will be offering us his first homily as an ordained clergyman, and so this will be the last Sunday homily of mine which you will be able to enjoy, or have to endure as the case my be.

The Most Holy Trinity, it is one of those mysteries of our faith which seems to cause so much consternation to anyone who takes the time to reflect on it.  In fact there's a joke told at the seminary, that after you have taken the course in Trinitarian theology, you will leave with:  five notions, four real relations, three person, two processions, one essence, and ZERO comprehension.  This feast day, the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity, or as we often call it, Trinity Sunday often causes a great deal of consternation for preachers.  After all, how can one possible take something as abstract and theological as the Trinity, and make it applicable to our lives, how can you do the subject justice in the short space of a homily?  There's a story told of one of the priests of our diocese, this was many years ago now, and this priest was just newly arrived from Poland.  He was a young curate in a parish, still learning English, and one Sunday morning the pastor suddenly took ill.  So this young curate, with his tenuous grasp of the English language, and no time to prepare, was forced to give the homily, and it was Trinity Sunday.  He got up into the pulpit, and this is the homily he gave, "Trinity is great mystery.  If I speak about it, will be even greater mystery."  Thus ended the homily.

Understanding the Trinity, how it works really isn't important for us to understand this feast though.  In fact, for us human beings it is impossible to ever fully understand how the Trinity works anyway.  There is an account told from the life of St. Augustine, he was walking along the seashore, contemplating the mystery of the Trinity, in the midst of writing his work on the Trinity.  As he walked along he saw a young boy digging a hole, then running to fetch water from the ocean and pour it into the hole.  St. Augustine stopped and inquired what the boy was doing, the boy told him that he was attempting to put the ocean into the hole.  The saint replied that it would be impossible to put the ocean into a small hole, at which point the boy revealed himself to be an angel, who told Augustine, that just as it is impossible to fit the ocean into a hole, so it is impossible for the mystery of the Trinity to be contained in the human mind.  So it really is impossible for us to fully understand this great mystery, but as I already said, to understand this feast it's not important.

The Trinity ultimately is the life of God, the inner life of God, the life of God that we are called to share in, to participate in; that is what's important for us, this sharing in God's life, in this life we call it Grace, in the next life we call it Heaven.  This inner life of God is a relationship of love; theologians will tell us that the Holy Spirit is the love that exists between the Father and the Son, a love so perfect and so great, that He is Himself a person.  This is key for us, and for how we relate to our God.  If we look to many of the ancient religions, to the pagan religions we often find that the people created a whole pantheon of gods for themselves, because if you think about it, the idea of a single, solitary god is a rather scary thought.  A lonely god, who created us for the sake of having some companionship; how could we, limited, weak human beings that we are, how could we ever adequately return the affections of an all-powerful god?  But our God is not alone, our God is a community of persons, a relationship of love.  God does not need anything from us, God is perfectly content and perfectly complete in Himself, but like any relationship of true love, that love went beyond God, to us, God created us out of love.

So often though, as our first reading makes clear, we reject that love, that life that God offers to us, because we are a "stiff-necked" people as Moses says, a stubborn people.  We turn away from God in our sinfulness, we look at all that we have received from God, and we forget who it comes from.  But our God, in his love for us continues to give us opportunities to come back, to share in His life.  He even sent his Son into the world to offer Himself as a sacrifice to save us from our sins, to break down the barrier between us and God, that we might once again have that opportunity to share in his life.  Again though, so often we forget that everything we have comes from God, all of our possessions, our relationships, our gifts and talents, even the good works we do are by the grace of God.  We look at our possessions and we want more, we look at our talents, our good works, and we puff up our pride, we forget that they are all gifts from God, freely given out of love.  As many theologians would tell us, the only thing that we human being can do or achieve without God, is sin.  That is why we come here each and every week, to this Holy Eucharist, because this is the perfect way to offer our thanks to God for his love and his gifts.  By sharing in the sacrifice of the Son, we renew our relationship, and our resolve to persevere in the life of grace, so that by constantly living in that life of grace in the here and now, we might share forever in the life of the Holy Trinity, in the kingdom of heaven.

Just before I conclude, I do want to offer just a few short words of farewell.  There will still be opportunities for individual good-byes, but since this is my last opportunity to address all of you, I have just a few words of thanks.  First and foremost I must give thanks to God for all of the blessings I have received over these last two years, I thank God for all of the highs, the lows, and everything in between.  I wish to express my thanks to all of you as well, for your kindness, for your friendship, and for your prayers.  I will certainly continue to pray for all of you as I continue on to my new assignment in Hamilton.  Finally, I can think of no better parting words than those which St. Paul offers to us today, "Finally, brothers and sisters, put things in order, listen to my appeal, agree with one another, live in peace; and the God of love and peace will be with you. Greet one another with a holy kiss.  The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you."

Sunday Homily - The Spirit of Unity

The following is the text for my homily given this past Sunday at a Mass in the Extraordinary Form in St. Anne's, Kitchener:

Today we celebrate the glorious Feast of Pentecost, a day when we give our focus to the Holy Spirit, or the Holy Ghost, whichever you prefer to call Him.  So often it seems that the Holy Spirit is the forgotten member of the Holy Trinity.  It's on occasions such as this one that I'm always a little envious of our brethren in the East.  The Eastern Rites of the Catholic Church, and those in the Orthodox traditions generally have a much better developed theology of, and appreciation for the Holy Spirit, than those of us in the West.  We seem to put all of our focus onto Christ, and certainly it is fitting, since we are his followers, but the Holy Spirit accomplishes so much, but we only seem to remember him on Pentecost and at Confirmation time.

We can certainly take much time, say a great deal about the Holy Spirit, so I will have to confine my reflections today to just one area, and today I would like to reflect on the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of Unity.  The cause of division after all is sin, and it is through the work of the Holy Spirit that we can achieve unity again, and I would like to look at three different areas, moving from the general, to the more specific.

In the reading from the book of Acts, we hear of the Apostles, who had been gathered in the upper room for nine days, in prayer, fearful of the Jewish authorities, suddenly going out to preach the message of Christ after receiving the Holy Spirit, and doing so in many different tongues, many different languages.  This hearkens back to the passage in the book of Genesis about the tower of Babel.  The many languages of humanity all brought about through human sin; sin causes division.  When travelling through the world, in order to communicate with our fellows, we need to find some way to overcome the language barrier, someway to translate.  Communication is difficult enough let alone trying to spread the faith of Christ and the Gospel message.  Through the power of the Spirit though, unity is restored, and indeed as the passage continues we hear that 3000 people were baptized that very day and became members of the Church.

It is often said that the greatest scandal in the Christian Church is the divisions within it.  So many thousands of different Christian denominations, how can we possibly proclaim the one truth of Christ when we are divided amongst ourselves.  For the past several decades, the Ecumenical movement has sought to bring about unity among Christians, but we often hear the old refrain, Ecumenism is not about making everyone Catholic again.  Well, I think our Holy Father, Pope Benedict would respectfully disagree.  After all we see the recent creation of the Anglican ordinariates to allow members of the Anglican Church to return to the Catholic Church while retaining some of the distinctiveness of their own liturgical traditions.  Quite recently too we saw a symbolic, but certainly a significant gesture, as our Holy Father was presented with a new Papal Tiara, by a group of Catholics and Orthodox Christians.  It is being called the Tiara of Christian Unity.  Catholics and Orthodox coming together to present the Holy Father with what is ultimately a sign of his authority as Successor of St. Peter.  We pray that the Holy Spirit continue to guide the work of Christian Unity and the efforts of the Holy Father to achieve it.

Turning a little more specific now, we can look at divisions even in our own personal relationships.  Once again, it must be said that divisions which come between us as persons have their origin in sin.  We can look at one specific example that is very prevalent in our own culture, that of divorce.  The statistics tell us that roughly 50% of marriages end in divorce, but that's the general number.  When we look at couples who share a faith, and practice that faith actively in their lives the number drops significantly.  Now, it's not possible to generalize in a homily about all of the specifics of human relationships, but the numbers point to something important, and that could very well be the work of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Unity, helping to overcome certain things that would otherwise lead to divorce.

Getting even more specific now, we can look within ourselves.  One of the consequences of Original Sin was a division within each one of us, as St. Paul reminds us, our Spirits thirst for the things of God, while our bodies and minds so often incline us to sin.  However, through the power of the Holy Spirit, through the grace we receive from him, through prayer, through the Sacraments of Baptism and Confirmation we are given the strength to fight against this division in ourselves.  Through the grace of the Holy Spirit we can turn our bodies and minds to the things of God.  Make no mistake, the division will continue to be there, at least until our souls are reunited with our glorified bodies in the resurrection, but the grace of the Holy Spirit can help us overcome our divisions, our inclinations to sin, and draw us to God.

So we pray that the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Unity may come among us, to help us to overcome sin and the divisions it creates; that He may give us true unity, in our world, in our Church, in our homes, and in ourselves.

Sunday Homily - A Rose by any Other Name, Except Pink

The following is the text of my homily for this past Sunday, (the image is not of the chasuble I wore, but it makes the point):

"By now you would have probably noticed that I'm wearing a new vestment, one that you would not have seen before.  I acquired it over the summer, but I'm willing to venture a guess, that most of you here have never seen a priest wearing a vestment of this colour before.  Certainly we're aware of the candle for this Sunday in the Advent wreath, but rarely do we see a priest wearing a vestment in this colour.  That's likely because, following the liturgical reform of the Second Vatican Council, this particular liturgical colour, which we only use two days a year (the third Sunday of Advent, and the fourth Sunday of Lent) became optional, and sadly, so often when things become optional, they tend to become obsolete.  If we take the principle, though, that in her liturgy, the Church never does anything without a reason and explanation behind it, we have to ask the question, why does the Church give us a liturgical colour that we only use on these two occasions, what is the significance behind it?  To answer that question, we need to first make a very fine, but very important distinction.

So often, when we see the third candle in the wreath, and on those rare occasions when we see the priest wearing vestments of this colour, we describe it with the word 'pink', but the Church says that the colour we may use today is not pink, but 'rose'.  So what's the difference?  Well I don't want to turn this into a lesson on colour theory, but how do you get the colour 'pink', you combine the colour 'red' with the colour 'white'.  How do you get the colour 'rose', you combine the colour 'violet' with the colour 'white', and there is the key distinction.  Two weeks ago we examined what the colour 'violet' means, that it is a colour associated with 'penance'.  What does the colour 'white' symbolize, to answer that, all we need to do is look to those occasions in our liturgical calendar when the colour is used, Christmas, Easter, the feast days of saints; the colour 'white' symbolizes 'joy'.  So in this rose colour, we have that combination of penance and joy.

You might be asking yourselves right now how can we combine these two seemingly opposite things, penance and joy.  However, so many of the important beliefs and truths of our faith are a combination of things which seem to be opposites, even contradictions.  All we need to do is look at the person of Jesus Christ himself, is he God, or is he a human being, well he's both.  How is that possible, that is the mystery of the Incarnation, but he is fully God, and fully a human being.  Is God one, or is God three, again he's both.  He's one God in three divine persons, how is that possible, that is the great mystery of the Holy Trinity.  What about the Holy Eucharist, is it a symbol, or is it the real presence of Christ?  Again, it is both, it is the real presence of Christ, body, blood, soul, and divinity, it is the sacrifice of the Cross made present to us on the altar, but all we see is bread and wine, a symbol pointing to the greater reality.  So how can we have this combination of penance and joy, two seemingly opposite and contradictory things, very easily, we just call it Hope!

If we think about it, Hope, by its very definition is something that is unfulfilled, something that we are waiting for, something that we are longing for, and we human beings really don't like to wait.  Particularly now in our fast paced, instant gratification culture, it so often seems that if we have to wait for something, it's almost not worth getting.  That can be a penance in itself, but if it is a spiritual reality that we are waiting for then we must prepare ourselves as well, and that preparation takes the form of prayer and penance.  As we wait though, we do not do so in fear and trepidation, we wait with joy, because what we await is the glorious return of our Lord, a day when, as our gospel tells us, 'the blind will see, the lame will walk, the deaf will hear, and the dead will be raised'.  Even more than that, we wait with joy, because our Lord has already come, and by his sacrifice on the Cross, he has already freed us from the power of sin and death.

We are called to be a people of Hope, which means that we need to have both of these elements.  If we eliminate the penance, the waiting, the longing, the preparation, then all we are doing is living for the moment.  It may seem good for a while, but ultimately we know that it will prove to be unfulfilling.  If we eliminate the joy, then all we have left is despair, we wait, but we do so with fear and trepidation, we don't look forward to a glorious reality.  Not only are we called to be people who live in hope, but we are called to proclaim that hope to a world so often filled with despair, sadness, and fear.  As the prophet Isaiah says in our first reading, 'Say to those who are of a fearful heart, "Be strong, do not fear! Here is your God."'  We are called to proclaim the hope we have to all those around us, the hope we have in Christ Jesus, and the glorious day of his return.

So why does the Church give us this colour, this rose colour, in the mid-point of this Advent season.  In the midst of this time of penance and preparation, as we wait for the coming Christmas celebrations, and as we wait for our Lord's glorious return, it is a reminder that we do so in a spirit of Hope.  What we await is a glorious day, when all things will be made new.  We look forward in joy, knowing that Christ has already freed us from the power of sin and death.  We proclaim that hope to all those we meet, in this world marked by fear and despair.  Above all, we proclaim our need to prepare ourselves worthily and well, to celebrate the glorious day of our Lord's return, so that we may be truly ready to greet him when he comes."