Homily for Sunday, 25 December 2022– The Nativity of the Lord, Mass during the Day

Readings of the day: Isaiah 52:7-10; Psalm 98:1, 2-3, 3-4, 5-6; Hebrews 1:1-6; John 1:1-18

Sisters and brothers in Christ, Merry Christmas!

The word of God today, on this Christmas morning, is all about remembering beginnings so that we might discern what (or whom) God is revealing to us here and now.

This Christmas morning we hear the first words of John’s Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” I wonder if this is just because just because I am the consummate theology professor, my mind and spirit warped by sitting at my desk these last few days grading papers and exams, or if anybody else here finds it jarring to hear anything but the more typical Christmas story in our Gospel: The baby Jesus born to Mary into a manger in Bethlehem, because there was “no room for them in the inn,” and shepherds greeted by the song of an angel and told to go to the manger to greet the newborn Saviour of the world.

All of that happened. Other Gospels tell of those details of Jesus’ birth. But John has nothing about a baby, nothing about angels, nothing about Joseph. Mary is not named in John’s Gospel; she is “woman” at the wedding at Cana and “the mother of Jesus” at the foot of the cross. John’s Gospel has no shepherds and no manger scene. The first time John introduces us to Jesus is when he is an adult being baptized in the Jordan by John the Baptist.

Instead of the more familiar Christmas story, the kind we can put on greeting cards and show in a Nativity scene, John takes us back to the very beginning, not only of Jesus as a human being, but of the universe itself. The people who first heard John’s Gospel would have been attentive to its unmistakeable allusion to the first words of the entire Bible, in the Book of Genesis, about the first moments of the creation of the universe: “In the beginning.”

And what was there “in the beginning,” before God created anything of the universe, or anything in it? Well, there was nothing. Genesis says that “in the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep.”

That is it? “A formless void” and darkness over “the face of the deep”?! That sounds a little boring. But then God decides to create something. God breathes wind, God’s spirit, over the nothingness. And God creates light. Now we are talking, God; we have some excitement in the creation story!

John’s Gospel picks up on this creation of light motif just as well as Genesis does. John says in our Gospel today, “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it.” And then John introduces to us John the Baptist. John the Gospel writer is clear: John the Baptist is “not the light, but he came to testify to the light.” John’s function is to point to Jesus, “the true light.”

So John the Gospel writer identifies Jesus as the Word, “and the Word [as] God.” The Word of God, with God the Father and the Spirit, was present when our universe was called into being: “‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.” The Word, the Son of God, called forth the first light of creation. At the same time, he is the light identified by John the Baptist and John the author of our Gospel.

John connects these two events: The first movements of creation and God’s coming into our world in the person of Jesus Christ: Word from Word or, as we pray in our Creed, “God from God, light from light, true God from true God. Through him all things were made.” But John hearkens back to creation, back to the beginning, to set up the next movement of this magnificent prologue of his Gospel.

It would be one thing for John to remind us of the action of God in our favour—for our salvation—all the way back to the creation of the universe. But John does not stop there. Remember that the purpose of John’s invitation to us to remember back to “the beginning” is to help us to discern what, or whom, God is revealing here and now, in the present. The punch line in our Gospel reading this morning, the central point of John’s opening chapter (his prologue), is this: “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”

We are familiar enough with this statement from John that God, who existed before the universe was created, when nothing else existed, has put on our human flesh in the person of Jesus Christ “and dwelt among us.” Until this point in John’s Gospel, his first hearers would not have been too disturbed, either. In Jesus’ time and that of the Gospel writers, expectation of a Messiah, the world’s Saviour, was widespread. But, besides the small minority of people in the vast Roman Empire who had already come to believe in Jesus as the Messiah by John’s time, the people, Jews and Gentiles alike, did not expect (or readily accept) that God’s Messiah would enter the world quite in that way, in our human flesh.

For God to become human, to experience everything it means for us to be human—joys and sorrows, birth and death—was preposterous to most people in Jesus’ or John’s time. This is why John includes a bit of a reality check in our Gospel this morning: That “the world did not know,” did not recognize its creator and its Saviour in human form; “he came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him.”

But, to the minority of people of John’s world (and, frankly, our own today) who did accept Jesus as the Saviour, God the creator of the universe “in the beginning” was revealing his ongoing plan for our salvation in a new way. And this new way of continuing old revelation—God has always been with us—changes who we are in relationship to God, John says. We have been given “power to become children of God.” We are now the human flesh, the hands and feet, the loving, kind, and just heart of Jesus, the Word, in our world. God’s work of our salvation that started with those first moments of creation, “in the beginning,” is not finished yet. And it will not be finished until Jesus returns in glory at the end of time.

“We have seen [God’s] glory,” John affirms in our Gospel today. We have seen the Word of God, made flesh and dwelling among us. But even the prophets, hundreds of years before Jesus, were proclaiming a message very similar to John’s. Isaiah was active during the exile of the people of Israel in Babylon, over five hundred years before Jesus. He was preparing the Israelites to return to their homeland after Babylon had been overtaken by the Persians, who allowed Israel’s return home. The Israelites were weary. They were worried about having to rebuild their land from ruins. So Isaiah convinces them to return home by returning to the beginning of his message. A significant part of the Book of Isaiah, the middle sixteen chapters, from 40 to 55 of Isaiah, begins with a message of comfort: “Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem… that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has received from the LORD’s hand double for all her sins.”

Isaiah now concludes this section with a similar message. And, Isaiah says, “how beautiful on the mountains” of Israel “are the feet of the messenger who announces” this message of peace and comfort, of salvation and reconciliation with God. “Your God reigns,” Isaiah proclaims. The same God who reigned over the nothingness before creation and said, “Let there be light”; the same God who would take on our human flesh reigns and saves now and forever. Isaiah, like John, goes back to the beginning as if to say, “This is the same God, and our same relationship with God. Yet, in the context of old revelation, God is doing something new.”

We hear from the Letter to the Hebrews this morning essentially this same message: God has been with us through the prophets. God has created and ruled over “all things.” And now he has revealed himself as human, in the person of Jesus Christ. This is what we celebrate this morning, sisters and brothers: “We have seen [God’s] glory.” We can continue to proclaim with the Psalmist that “all the ends of the earth have seen the glory of God.” We have seen God take our human form in the person of Jesus Christ. We are reminded of God’s creating and saving power, all the way back to “the beginning,” to when the universe was nothing, “a formless void.” This is so that we can look forward to God completing the work of our salvation. We are invited to participate in God’s work of our salvation, to put human flesh on the presence of God in our world through works justice, kindness, and peace, until our Saviour, the Word, God made flesh, returns on the Last Day.

Homily for Saturday, 24 December 2022– The Nativity of the Lord, Mass at Night

Readings of the day: Isaiah 9:1-6; Psalm 96:1-2, 2-3, 11-12, 13; Titus 2:11-14; Luke 2:10-14

“The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.”

I marvel at this first line of our reading tonight from the prophet Isaiah every time I hear it. Isaiah proclaimed this message of “great light” in a very dark time for his people, the people of ancient Israel. The nation of Israel had been overrun by the Assyrians many years before Isaiah’s time. The corruption of Israel’s own leaders did not help. Long before Isaiah, Israel had split into two kingdoms, Israel in the north and Judah in the south, around Jerusalem. Assyria had conquered the north, and Sennacherib’s army, “like a wolf on the fold” in the poetic words of Lord Byron, had been stopped (barely) at the gates of Jerusalem, just before Isaiah’s time.

But things did not get any better for Israel and Judah from there. Israel was surrounded by much more powerful nations than it: Assyria, Babylon, Egypt. And each of those nations wanted Israel’s territory, its fertile land and its position on major trade routes. The kings of Israel and Judah tried to appease their mightier neighbours by agreeing to worship the other (pagan) nations’ gods and making military alliances with these nations against another. Israel had forgotten that a trusting relationship with its God, our God (we call this a covenant relationship), was the only way to ensure Israel’s survival as a nation. So, after Assyria, it was Babylon’s turn to conquer Israel and Judah. After Isaiah’s time, the people of Israel and Judah would endure about seventy years of exile in Babylon.

Amid all this darkness of impending national destruction and exile, Isaiah proclaims that “the people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.” Now there are a few possibilities for why Isaiah would proclaim a message like that. Maybe Isaiah was ignorant of the obvious reality, that Israel was doomed. Maybe, much like the people of Israel, Isaiah wanted to remain optimistic that Israel’s national disaster of conquest and exile was farther off than it really was. And maybe, against all odds, Israel’s God would miraculously and immediately save it from being overrun by its more powerful neighbours.

But Isaiah, like any true prophet, was no pollyannaish prophet. Nor was he ignorant of the disaster that awaited Israel and Judah in Babylon. After all, Israel, all but Jerusalem, was already occupied by the Assyrians by Isaiah’s time. And Israel’s God would not miraculously and immediately save Israel from being conquered by and exiled in Babylon. God saves, but not in that way. Isaiah, like the other prophets in our Bible, had no difficulty scolding Israel and its leaders for their corruption and idol worship that would surely bring Israel to doom, to exile. God saves, but there must be consequences for breaking the covenant relationship with God as the leaders of Israel and Judah and their people were doing in the time of the prophets.

So, what is this in Isaiah’s prophecy about people walking “in darkness” seeing “a great light”? Two weekends ago, I co-led an Advent retreat at the Providence Renewal Centre in Edmonton—a wonderful place to be on retreat, if any of us ever have this opportunity—with leaders of other Christian traditions, members of the Edmonton and District Council of Churches. One of the retreat speakers was Stephen London, the Anglican Bishop of Edmonton. Rev. London invited us to a practice he calls “slow spirituality.” It is “slow” in that it is a patient response to conflict or trouble in our world or our personal experience.

How often do we stop and realize that the usual human response to conflict or trouble is a fight-or-flight response, by hard-wired primitive instinct? Rev. London calls this the instinct, when faced with conflict, either toward aggressiveness (to confront and fight) or avoidance (to flee the conflict). It is amazing, when we think about it, how often we default either to aggressiveness or avoidance of conflict, to fighting or fleeing.

For me, I am perfectly fine, especially if I have my coffee first thing in the morning… That is, until I hear the news or read the newspaper! Here is my little (non-sacramental) confession: I hate all the senseless violence in our world, the nationalism, the instances of selfishness that scream: “My country first, my party first, my soapbox first, me first”! When I hear, from when I wake up in the morning, about Ukrainians trying to survive the winter, trying to survive the latest Russian bombing raids on their cities, their infrastructure, their civilian population; when I hear of demoralized Russian soldiers, not really wanting to be in Ukraine to fight their government’s unjust war, I become very angry. When I hear the latest plans to weaponize social media, attempts to promote the next convenient conspiracy theory under the guise of a little blue bird and “absolute free speech,” this, too, triggers my anger. And then I think, “What could I ever do about this silo mentality of our nations, our societies, and our media? It is seemingly each person for her or himself.” I suppose I try to live and preach the good, social justice and the common good as I see these. But, really, too frequently I (and I do not think I speak only for myself; not by far) retreat into a kind of despair, a kind of avoidance of conflict, of trouble, if I am honest with myself.

But this aggressiveness or avoidance response is not the way of a prophet. It was not Isaiah’s way. And it is not God’s way. So, what is the prophetic way forward? What is God’s way of responding to the troubles and conflicts (while also living the joys) of our world and our experiences? What is the way of patience, of “slow spirituality” of which Rev. Stephen London speaks? I think Isaiah gives us a clue to answer these questions in those first words of our first reading tonight: “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.”

“The people” Isaiah addressed included himself. Isaiah and the other Old Testament prophets not only preached great oracles and visions—doom or consolation—to Israel. They lived what they preached, died for what they preached, witnessed Israel’s destruction, exile, and rebuilding, went into exile in solidarity with Israel’s people for what they preached. Isaiah and Israel’s other prophets “walked in darkness” with their people. This was the only way that light (hope, joy) would come from the darkness, so that the people could see and live it together.

This is the way of the prophets. This is the way of patience, of “slow spirituality” as Rev. Stephen London puts it. This is the way of what Pope Francis often calls “pastoral accompaniment” of God’s people. This is the way, from when Vatican II published its Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes (“The Joys and the Hopes”)—back in 1965—that our Church identifies as solidarity with all the “followers of Christ” in our “joys and… hopes…griefs and… anxieties,” especially those of people “who are poor or in any way afflicted.”

This is God’s way. This has been the way of our Lord Jesus Christ, from the moment he entered our world through Mary’s womb, fully human in all things but sin, fully in solidarity with us in our human “joys and… hopes…griefs and… anxieties.” This was Jesus’ way from that very first Christmas, in a stable in Bethlehem long ago.

And who were the first masters of “slow spirituality,” of patience, of overcoming our basest instincts to fight or flee trouble, at the moment of Jesus’ birth? The first masters of this—the prophets’ way, God’s way—were Mary and Joseph. And then Luke’s Gospel says to us this night that there were humble shepherds, “keeping watch over their flocks by night,” who are visited by “an Angel of the Lord.” And, sure, when “the glory of the Lord” first shone around them, Luke says, the shepherds “were terrified.” Those were terrifying times. Israel, not much differently than in the time of the Old Testament prophets, was under brutal foreign occupation. Caesar Augustus ruled from Rome; Quirinius ruled from Syria. The rulers of the world into which our Lord Jesus was born were all Roman.

But a baby, born into a manger—a food trough for animals—would rule over all these big names whose rule stopped at might and terror. Jesus was not to rule this world with might and terror, earthly power to match earthly power. No, Jesus’ rule begins as “a child wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger.” Jesus’ rule would involve dying at the hands of the big-name bringers of brutality and occupation and their enablers among Jesus’ own people, on a cross. Jesus’ rule, his light, hope, joy, and salvation, would involve walking in our human flesh, in our darkness, in solidarity with us.

This is the prophets’ way. This is God’s way. This is the way of Christmas, sisters and brothers. This is a way that has brought us everlasting “good news of great joy for all the people.” This is the only news—imagine reading this first thing in the morning—that can overcome and disempower the worst of our darkness, trouble, and conflict, if we dare not fight or flee but encounter the God of our salvation in this moment, in the trouble and conflict, but also then in the joy of this night.

For God has brought us “great joy”: To us “is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is the Christ, the Lord.”

Homily for Sunday, 27 November 2022– First Sunday of Advent, Year A

Readings of the day: Isaiah 2:1-5; Psalm 122:1-2, 3-4, 4-5, 6-7, 8-9; Romans 13:11-14; Matthew 24:27-44

What words of hope we have heard today!

The prophet Isaiah says, about “Judah and Jerusalem, ‘In days to come the mountain of the LORD’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains…raised above the hills; all the nations shall stream toward it.” Israel, faithful once again to its God—our God—would know no more injustice, no more war… swords beaten “into ploughshares and… spears into pruning hooks.”

This is quite the grand prophecy of a glorious future for Israel, for “Judah and Jerusalem.” This is especially true if we consider the sorry state Israel and its leadership were in during the time of Isaiah. The prophetic ministry of Isaiah overlaps with the reigns of two especially bad kings in Jerusalem, Jotham and Ahaz, and then the reign of Hezekiah, who tried to reform both religious practice (no more worship of idols; Israel would worship only the one God) and social practice (against corruption and disregard for the poor). But the damage was already done. Israel was on track to be sacked by the stronger nations around it, and its people exiled to Babylon.

Just before the prophecy we hear today from Isaiah, the prophet warns Israel of the consequences of its sin—idolatry and social injustice—in stark terms. Yet, even in that first chapter of Isaiah, there is hope for Israel. Isaiah gives Israel the opportunity to “set things right… Though your sins may be like scarlet, they may become white as snow.”

And then the prophecy we hear today, from Chapter 2 of Isaiah, is decidedly hopeful. Especially considering the depth of Israel’s sin, it is remarkable that Isaiah prophecies that sin, the invasion and destruction of Israel, Jerusalem and its temple, the succession of bad kings, the Babylonian Exile would not be the end of Israel as a nation. Israel would not only recover from all this, but Jerusalem would “be established as the highest mountain and raised above the hills.” The temple of Jerusalem would be rebuilt, even more magnificent than before. There would be peace, right worship of the one God of Israel, and special care for the poor and disadvantaged, the widow, the orphan, the foreigner.

In contrast to Isaiah 2—and similar to Isaiah 1—Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew today strikes a much starker, foreboding tone. Jesus speaks to his disciples—and to us—about the end of time, his return, “the coming of the Son of Man” to judge the world. Jesus compares the events of the end of time with those of Noah’s time, when God sent a flood to wipe out the entire human race except for Noah and his family, so great was human wickedness on the earth.

A frequent theme in our Gospel reading today is the unknown. Jesus says about the people of Noah’s time that “they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away.” Likewise, Jesus says of his return at the end of time: “You do not know on what day your Lord is coming.”

I am not sure that to say to somebody—to us—that we cannot know, cannot prepare for a future event is all that reassuring. Imagine if your instructor in a course here at the university, instead of presenting clearly when each assignment was due and when exams were, said in the syllabus, “You do not [and cannot] know on what day your exam will be held. Too bad.” I am sure that would do wonders for students’ already-heightened anxiety. Thankfully we, your instructors, do not do this! There is reason to be hopeful, both about our studies and about the end of time!

But then imagine the anxiety of Jesus’ disciples when he said to them that they could “not know on what day” he would return, what day would be the end of time. Thankfully, Jesus gives us a way in which we can be prepared for his return, even if we cannot know its precise day. He says to his disciples, “Keep awake, therefore,” and, “You must also be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.”

How do we maintain hope, especially in this Advent time of hopeful waiting for our Lord’s return, and not allow anxiety to get the better of us? Jesus says, very simply, “Keep awake… be ready.” Isaiah’s message is similar to Jesus’ message, many hundreds of years before Jesus. How were the people of Isaiah’s time to “keep awake” and “be ready”? Isaiah says that they were to do so by acting with justice, especially toward the poor, the disadvantaged. The people to whom Isaiah prophesied were to “keep awake” and “be ready” by worshiping only the one God of Israel, our God, and not the gods of other nations. They were to “keep awake” and “be ready” by not making military and political alliances with one great nation surrounding Israel in an effort to avoid invasion by another.

“Keep awake… be ready”: In his letter to the Romans that we hear today, St. Paul is as insistent as Jesus is in our Gospel about the nearness of Jesus’ return in glory: “Now is the moment for you to wake from sleep… The night is far gone; the day is near.” St. Paul uses powerful imagery of putting “on the armour of light” and living “honourably as in the day.”

Sisters and brothers, for us not to be overtaken by anxiety at these words and images of St. Paul, of Jesus, of Isaiah, but to understand and live this message as hopeful, we must “keep awake” and “be ready.” The word of God today and through this time of Advent invites us today to hope in the return of our Lord at the end of time in a way that spurs us into action. Hope is not and cannot be a passive virtue. Hope must lead us to act concretely for justice, for peace in our world beginning in our own hearts, our households, our workplaces, our places of leisure, our Church. As we pray in our Psalm today, hope must lead us to seek the good of “the house of the Lord our God.” Sisters and brothers, we are a living “house of the Lord our God.” Let us pray with growing urgency for one another, then, “‘Peace be within you.’ For the sake of the house of the Lord our God, I will seek your good.”

To seek one another’s good is to seek the salvation of one another by the end of time, but it is also to ensure that essential needs of our brothers and sisters are met now. If we are the living, active, hopeful “house of the Lord our God,” then the poorest and least advantaged of our world, of the people we ourselves encounter day to day, must be the cornerstone of the house of God that we are.

At Mass we pray, in the prayer Jesus taught us, “Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” This is the ultimate Advent prayer of hope. But it presupposes action on our part to build the reign of justice, peace, salvation that God wills for us, “on earth as it is in heaven.” We offer one another a sign of peace. As we do that, at every Mass, could we not pray quietly the words of the Psalmist for the person we are greeting with peace: For your sake, “for the sake of the house of the Lord our God, I will seek your good”?

This is how we “keep [actively] awake.” This is how we nourish the hope that dawns anew in us in this time of Advent. Our worship connects with our seeking one another’s good, one another’s salvation ultimately. Isaiah speaks of this essential connection between right worship and right practice of justice, peace, loving kindness. St. Paul speaks in contrasts: Putting “on the armour of light” instead of darkness, acting as people “of the day” and not of night, passive and anxious.

It is no accident, elsewhere in St. Paul’s writings, that hope is the middle virtue, the hinge point, of the three so-called “theological virtues,” faith, hope, and love. Active hope arises from our faith and it naturally leads us to love God, our neighbour, and ourselves. “The greatest of these is love,” yes, but hope is the virtue of keeping awake so that we may love.

My sisters and brothers, as we begin this time of Advent, I pray, “Peace be with you… Peace be within you.” May we act with justice, act and live with kindness. May we be a people of hope: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” May we be a people that seeks one another’s good, a people who keeps awake and is actively ready for the return of the Lord, our salvation and our peace.

Homily for Sunday, 30 October 2022– Thirty-First Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C

Readings of the day: Wisdom 11:2-12:2; Psalm 45:1-2, 8-9, 10-11, 13, 14; 2 Thessalonians 1:11-2:2; Luke 19:1-10

It is humbling, really, and even more so than ever with our science and technology for observing our universe, to look out into the heavens and realize how small we are. Here we are, on a nondescript planet that orbits an average star, the sun, in a galaxy (the Milky Way) that is dwarfed by many more spectacular galaxies, in a universe with an estimated diameter of 93 billion light years.

Yet, when Pope Benedict XVI was installed as Bishop of Rome in April 2005, in his homily at the Mass as he received the archbishop’s pallium, the garment of lamb’s wool around an archbishop’s neck with three crosses in front and three in the back that symbolizes his unity with Jesus, the Lamb of God, and the fisherman’s ring that marks the pope out as a successor of Peter, he said this: “Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary. There is nothing more beautiful than to be surprised by the Gospel, by the encounter with Christ.”

The week before Pope Benedict gave this homily, he addressed the cardinals who were about to choose him, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, as the successor to Pope John Paul II. Cardinal Ratzinger warned of “a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one’s own ego and desires.”

Let me say that I think we are invited to hold both these statements as true, as jarring as they are when we hear them together, from the same person, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger-Pope Benedict XVI. We cannot deny the pervasiveness of sin, individual and in the structures of our societies, politics, economies of the world.

A few days ago I tuned into a panel discussion on CBC’s The National about the possible causes of the current global economic crisis. The panelists acknowledged Russia’s war against Ukraine as a factor in the world’s economic problems. But then one of the panelists used a word I do not recall hearing before then, “Greedflation”: Price inflation driven at least in part by the greed of elites and large corporations for profits, which ends up (as economic problems tend to do) disproportionately affecting the (already) poorest and most socially disadvantaged.

Our world has struggled to respond to Russia’s unjust attack on Ukraine, its slaughter of innocent Ukrainian civilians and damage to Ukraine’s cities and essential infrastructure, and government and even religious officials’ attempts to justify the war. Much of public discourse, aided by the worst of social media, has been reduced to ideological polarization, peddling of conspiracy theories, and a kind of anti-intellectualism or general anti-authoritarianism.

Sin in our world is easy to find with very little effort. The “dictatorship of relativism” is a constant danger; the ethics of moral decisions becoming judged ultimately relative to “what is most beneficial for me,” with less to no regard for a common or universal good, any definitive direction or meaning of human life, which we Christians might call heaven. As St. Augustine of Hippo once prayed, “O God, our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”

But sin, or this “dictatorship of relativism,” is not the original state of the human person, from the moment of creation or the moment each of us came to exist. Our original state, and indeed the original state of our entire 93-billion-light-year-wide universe, is one of having been blessed, loved, intended, willed by our God. Many theologians, including yours truly, have in recent years shied away from terms like “original sin,” because sin is not original or essential to our human nature. Our having been thought, willed, loved, deemed necessary, and blessed by God are original to our human nature as God has created us. Sin is a corruption of this original blessed, willed, loved state of the human person and creation.

There is no truth, to my knowledge, that is proclaimed more consistently in our Scriptures than this: “God blessed them… God saw everything that he had made and, indeed, it was very good,” the Book of Genesis proclaims at the end of its first creation account. And we hear this same proclamation, this same truth across our readings today. The Book of Wisdom was among the last Old Testament books to be written. It was written in a time when, if one wanted to find sin, corruption, relativism, decadence in Israel, one would find it easily. One foreign nation after another (the Greeks and then the Romans, during the time in which Wisdom was written) had ruled Israel, sometimes with brutality. And Israel’s home-grown elites were often no better: The regime of King Herod and his successors hoarded the wealth of the nation and became corrupt and brutal. There were the Pharisees and their scribes, and the temple priests. There were zealots who sought to respond to violence and corruption with more violence and more corruption.

Yet, amid all this social corruption and decadence, the Book of Wisdom says this of God: “Lord, you love all things that exist… How would anything have endured if you had not willed it? … You spare all things, O Lord, you who love the living.” Wisdom does not deny sin in the world by proclaiming this foundational truth of God’s love of all creation; on the contrary. The author of Wisdom knows all too well the corruption of sin in our world, but proclaims that God corrects “little by little those who trespass… so that they may be freed from wickedness.”

The author of Wisdom proclaims how little we really are in this great universe God has created: “The whole world before you, O Lord, is like a speck that tips the scales.” Still, sisters and brothers, Wisdom proclaims to us today nothing other than the mercy and love of God by which we and our whole universe was created and continues to exist. As Dr. Denis Lamoureux here at St. Joseph’s College would say, this is the foundational truth of creation, which God “ordains and sustains”: “Lord, you love all things that exist.” We are “like a speck,” but one that “tips the scales”: “Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary” beyond measure in God’s eyes.

This love, this blessing to us, our existence and sustenance and that of all creation leaves us with one response worthy of us before the merciful love by which we are “ordained and sustained,” by which, as the beginning of our Eucharistic Prayer proclaims, “we live and move and have our being.” Our Psalm speaks of our due response to this merciful, creative, and sustaining love of God: “All your works shall give thanks to you, O Lord, and your faithful shall bless you. They shall speak of the glory of your kingdom, and tell of your power.”

The second letter to the Thessalonians is a prayer for each of us, that the creative and sustaining love of God may work in our world through each of us: May “the name of our Lord Jesus Christ…be glorified in you, and you in him.”

But perhaps few Bible passages speak as well to God’s merciful, creative and sustaining love for us, for all God has created, than our Gospel story today of the tax collector Zacchaeus’ encounter with Jesus. Zacchaeus, even without his sinful past as a factor, is literally and figuratively “short in stature.” He is, as the Book of Wisdom says, “like a speck,” but a speck that will tip the scales, somebody dearly beloved in the eyes of God.

So what does Zacchaeus do? He climbs a sycamore tree when he realizes Jesus is about to pass by him in Jericho. All who see this (we can admit) ridiculous scene of the rich little tax collector, probably with his tunic caught high in a sycamore tree, begin “to grumble…: [Jesus] has gone to be the guest of one who is a sinner.”

Yet these grumblers miss the point. Jesus has offered to be a guest at Zacchaeus’ house: “Zacchaeus, hurry down, for I must stay at your house today.” Indeed, Jesus has made this offer to all of us, an offer of pure mercy and love: “I will come and dwell in this house today, the house of the earth, the universe, and everything I have created in it. And by coming and dwelling in your house in human flesh, sisters and brothers, I will redeem it and wipe away your sin forever. I will come ‘to seek out and to save the lost.’”

If there is ever an act that shows God’s love for us and all he has created, every speck, this is it! Yes, there is sin in our world, acts of human ego-seeking, violence and injustice, greed and war. But this, nowhere else, is the house God in his Son Jesus has come to dwell and redeem. “Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary.” And Jesus asks us to hurry to this celebration, because Jesus “must stay at [our] house today.”

Homily for Thursday, 28 July 2022– Ferial

Readings of the day: Jeremiah 18:1-6; Psalm 146:1b-2, 3-4, 5-6ab; Matthew 13:47-53

We hear two distinct messages from Matthew’s Gospel today. First, Jesus offers us one of his many similes of the kingdom of heaven that are very typical of the Gospel of Matthew: “The kingdom of heaven is like”… Second, Jesus extols the ideal scribe (maybe the ideal faith leader?) as “the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is old and what is new.”

Today, Jesus likens the kingdom of heaven to a net, thrown in the sea, in which many “fish of every kind” are caught. Once the net is ashore, the fish are sorted into good and bad; the bad are thrown out. The comparison to heaven—in fact, to the final judgment at the end of time—is simple: Angels will, at the end of time, “separate the evil from the righteous”; the righteous will enter heaven, while the evil will be cast into a place (or state) of eternal punishment, “the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

Matthew will take up this image of strict separation of the good from the bad in the end times toward the end of his Gospel, just before the Passion of Jesus, when Jesus gives an extended discourse of the sheep and the goats. In that discourse, in Matthew 25, we hear more about what kinds of actions or inaction will result in us finding ourselves either among the sheep, those who will enter the kingdom of heaven, or the goats, those who will be excluded from heaven and punished eternally.

In Matthew 25, whether we inherit the kingdom of heaven hinges mainly on our attention to social justice, to care for our sisters and brothers most in need: The hungry, the thirsty, the homeless, the imprisoned, and so on. This is a good reminder to us in our quite individualistic cultures in well-off countries (mostly) in the global north that our Gospel understands what we might experience at the end of time—our Church once spoke more often about death, judgment, heaven and hell, the “last things”—less in terms of reward or punishment for individual righteousness or evil (although we are still, individually, morally accountable to God and one another) and more in terms of a social or common good.

Among the biblical Gospels, Matthew is maybe the most sensitive to the corporate, social, common, communal good. We are not saved or condemned eternally alone, but together, depending on our society’s attention to the common good of one another, care for all of creation.

I have had this thought many times as Pope Francis continues what he has called his penitential pilgrimage to Canada, to further reconciliation with our Indigenous peoples against whom our Church participated in horrific, intergenerationally traumatizing abuses; cultural assimilation and colonialism, especially through the residential school system. From his first public address of this pilgrimage, just south of here in Maskwacis, a former residential school site, Pope Francis has begged forgiveness for the wrongs of Catholics and other Christians in the name of our faith and in collaboration with Canada’s governments against our Indigenous people.

There have been calls for Pope Francis to acknowledge not only the wrongs of many Christian individuals against our Indigenous people, but the evils perpetrated against them as corporate, institutionalized, social sin of the Catholic Church. We may be inclined to dismiss these calls as unnecessary, the special interest of “the media” often looking for a counter-narrative (in this case to the acknowledgement of the pope’s sincerity). But, considering today’s Gospel, I suggest that these calls include a valid and important reminder for us: Just as we are not saved or condemned alone, reconciliation and forgiveness are not individual pursuits but those of the whole Church. Matthew the Gospel writer had a keen sense of this whole-Church, whole-community dimension of sin and grace, judgment, accountability, forgiveness and reconciliation.

To forget this is to forget the value of Jesus’ second point in today’s Gospel reading. To forget this is to continue to devalue the treasures, new and old, that Indigenous cultures can offer that enrich our Church, that remind us of our social, communal, familial roots that ultimately draw us back to God, the common Creator of us all. It is easy for many (even, maybe especially, in the leadership of the Church) to fall back on blaming “media” contrarianism for speaking messages we do not want to hear. It is easy to fall back on forms of clericalism, slavishness to existing power structures—all forms of perpetuation of colonialist, nationalist, individualist attitudes that continue to create victims, have-nots, and to commodify human lives.

Instead, today’s Gospel invites us to reflect and act on the communal, social dimensions of sin and evil, but also grace and reconciliation. Our Gospel invites us to be like the ideal scribe, who brings out of our treasure the best of who we are, in a gift exchange with other peoples and cultures who also bring us their treasures, their memories, their recognition of God’s gifts—lands, ancestors, communities—both old and new.

Homily for Sunday, 26 June 2022– Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C

Readings of the day: 1 Kings 19:16b, 19-21; Psalm 16:1-2, 5, 7-8, 9-10, 11; 1 Galatians 5:1, 13-18; Luke 9:51-62

Who would follow somebody so demanding as Jesus; who would dare be the disciple of somebody who asks for our focus to be exclusively on following him? This is the question one of my favourite columnists reflecting on the word of God on Sundays lately, Sr. Mary McGlone of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, outside of St. Louis, asks in her reflection this week for the National Catholic Reporter.

She asks the question this way: “Who in their right mind would take up with an unarmed, violence-avoiding preacher headed to the big city to face jealous, powerful foes who would stop at nothing to get rid of him”? Sr. McGlone proposes two images of people of our own time who boldly, resolutely, visibly chose non-violence in response to violence, war, evil. The first image Sr. McGlone proposes is the “tank man” of the Tiananmen Square protests of June 5, 1989, who stood unarmed before a line of tanks leaving Tiananmen Square in Beijing the day after the Chinese government had violently cleared the square of protesters. The second image she reflects on is of Ukrainians during the still-ongoing war there handing cell phones to Russian soldiers so they can call their mothers.

Who in their right mind would go, unarmed, to look death in the face: Before a line of tanks; before the guns of the invading enemy? But this is precisely how Jesus asks us to follow him. And these acts of non-violence have disarmed and will disarm, at least momentarily, a world still beset by violence and threats to the dignity of human life across its span, from conception to death.

Yet we hear from Luke’s Gospel today how the discipleship Jesus asks of us was difficult for his first disciples. Today’s Gospel begins as “the days [draw] near for [Jesus] to be taken up,” when he sets “his face to go to Jerusalem.” Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem, where he will die, rise, and ascend to heaven, is the single longest continuous section of Luke. It takes up more than one-third of Luke’s Gospel.

The words Luke uses in this short introduction to today’s Gospel reading are rich in subtle but important details. The word in Luke’s Greek we hear translated as to be “taken up” is an unmistakeable reference to the cross of Jesus. This same Greek word can also mean ascension to heaven. So the connection of this one word to Elijah, of whom we hear today in our reading from 1 Kings calling Elisha to succeed him, is a little less intentional on Luke’s part than its connection to the crucifixion and death of Jesus, but it is still fairly obvious. Before he is taken up to heaven on a chariot of fire (in 2 Kings), Elijah chooses Elisha to succeed him (in 1 Kings). And before Jesus is “taken up” on a cross outside Jerusalem, he likewise chooses disciples who will succeed him.

But do Jesus’ disciples understand what Jesus will ask of them as he sets “his face to go to Jerusalem”? They are decidedly not prepared for what Jesus will ask of them as disciples. From this point our Gospel reading today can be broken into two main parts. The first part focuses on people who are already Jesus’ disciples, in particular James and John. The second part of today’s Gospel focuses on people who want to, or whom Jesus calls, to be his future disciples.

By this point in Luke’s Gospel, James and John have been following Jesus as his disciples for some time. But they are about to experience something new, a bit of a dark turn in their story; their relationship with Jesus. Jesus sets “his face to go to Jerusalem,” where he will be “taken up” to die a horrific death. Surely James, John, and Jesus’ other disciples knew the risk Jesus was taking by so decisively setting out for Jerusalem. As Sr. Mary McGlone says, Jesus, the “unarmed, violence-avoiding preacher,” was “headed to the big city to face jealous, powerful foes who would stop at nothing to get rid of him.”

Worse yet, Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem from Galilee had to pass through Samaria. And we know that the Samaritans, especially in Luke’s Gospel, are synonymous with “most hated enemies,” especially if one were a Jew in Jesus’ times. Going back to Old Testament times, the Samaritans had intermarried with the pagan Assyrians who invaded Israel. So devout Jews hated their half-pagan, half-Jewish neighbours of Samaria. And, to add insult to injury, as Jesus and his disciples pass through this enemy territory, they are (not surprisingly) denied hospitality by the Samaritans. James and John ask Jesus if he wants them “to command fire to come down from heaven and consume” the Samaritans. Jesus immediately rebukes his somewhat overzealous disciples. Jesus’ way, our way to salvation, will be the way of non-violence. It will be, paradoxically in his disciples’ eyes, the way of submitting to inhospitality, to violence, and ultimately to death on a cross outside Jerusalem. It will be a way that I would not be surprised if James, John, and Jesus’ other disciples to this point thought was completely senseless; if, in his disciples’ eyes, Jesus was out of his mind.

Yet the story continues after Jesus and his disciples pass through Samaria. Somebody on the road, a would-be disciple, calls out to Jesus, “I will follow you wherever you go.” At face value, this offer by a would-be disciple to follow Jesus wherever he goes seems like one he could not refuse, right? But Jesus’ reply to this first prospective disciple seems strange at first hearing: Jesus does not accept this disciple, but does not really refuse him, either. Jesus only reminds him of the single-minded focus following him demands. That focus cannot be on worldly comforts or even necessities. Discipleship of Jesus is total dependence on God for our needs, until death, with the hope of eternal life.

“Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head”: This little, bizarre proverb reminds me of when I first became a Basilian; when I took first vows, and then final vows; when I was ordained. At each point in my Basilian journey, I have said to Jesus through my brother Basilians (sometimes in writing, as our Rule and Church law demand), “I will follow you wherever you go.” And, if I may say so, this is easier said than done. It is easier said than done when, sealed by the Spirit at confirmation, we say “Amen”; we choose for ourselves to be disciples of Jesus. Although I was too young to remember my own baptism, I am sure it was a case of eager discipleship, but easier-said-than-done in reality, when my parents and godparents—our parents and godparents—replied to the question from the priest or deacon, “Do you clearly understand what you are undertaking”: “Yes.” It is easier said than done when we promise, those of us who are married in the Church, “to be faithful… in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health.” It is easier said than done when we say, “Amen,” when we receive communion.

“I will follow you wherever you go,” we say to Jesus at each of these points in our lives. Fairly often, I hear, even from family, relatives, and close friends: “You have given up so much to be a priest: Being married, raising a family, and so on.” And I usually respond, “Maybe, but I have gained so much more than I have given up.” And, besides this, I am far, in my own estimation, from depending totally on God even for necessities, let alone comforts. This again reminds me of Fr. Joe Trovato, whom I mentioned in my homily a week ago. Our parish at the time, St. Kateri in Rochester, would have delicious and filling fish and chips meals prepared by the Boy Scouts on Fridays during Lent. At table, Fr. Joe would invariably look at me, with his hint of a smile, and say gently, “You know, we are not suffering”! We really are not sacrificing anything, for Lent or otherwise.

“Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head,” Jesus says to the first prospective disciple on his way to Jerusalem. And he is not done yet. Jesus meets two other would-be disciples in our Gospel today. But instead of them asking to follow him, Jesus takes the initiative with the other two: “Follow me.” Each time, though, these two would-be disciples have other priorities: “Lord, first let me go and bury my father… Let me first say farewell to those at my home.”

These two disciples’ priorities are legitimate, we must admit. To bury one’s dead relatives was the supreme act of honour to another person. To greet one’s family when entering or leaving home was close behind burying the dead as a supreme act of honour and mercy in Jewish culture of Jesus’ time. These are still considered corporal works of mercy in our Church today. And it was what we hear in our reading today that Elijah allowed Elisha to do before he accepted to follow Elijah and succeed him. So it is strange to us that Jesus would refuse these would-be disciples’ requests to bury their dead or to bid farewell “to those at [their] home.”

What, then, does our Gospel today say about discipleship, following Jesus? Discipleship of Jesus, sisters and brothers, does not tolerate violence in word or action. Discipleship of Jesus includes everybody; excludes nobody, even (and maybe especially) our enemies, from God’s grace. Discipleship of Jesus demands single-minded focus: Dependence on God for our needs in this life, if we are to set our faces in the direction Jesus travels; toward Jerusalem, toward the cross, with the hope of eternal life.

Homily for Sunday, 19 June 2022– The Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ (Corpus Christi)

Readings of the day: Genesis 14:18-20; Psalm 110:1, 2, 3, 4; 1 Corinthians 11:23-26; Luke 9:11b-17

The Body and Blood of Christ, the Eucharist, the Mass: This reality we celebrate now has many names and many dimensions. And the readings we hear proclaimed from the word of God today, and the prayers of today’s Mass, each highlight particular dimensions of this celebration more than others.

The beauty, variety, and complexity of Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ, Corpus Christi, reminds me of the many different celebrations of this day I have experienced. Maybe some of us have participated in outdoor processions through the streets with the Blessed Sacrament. I have experienced this less here than in Colombia, where Corpus Christi processions are often quite elaborate.

Of course, Corpus Christi reminds me of first communions at which I have presided as a priest—the first one being the first communion of my godparents’ grandson, during my very first Mass as a priest. But I am especially remembering lately my many conversations at table with a brother Basilian priest I lived with in Rochester, New York, when I was just ordained, whom I especially loved and who was especially beloved of the whole Basilian community and people with whom he ministered. Fr. Joseph Trovato went to be with our Lord a couple of years ago. Quite often, though, when conversations with Fr. Joe would turn toward the Mass, the Eucharist, he would say, with his characteristic gentle voice, that the dimension of the Eucharist he found most difficult to live was that of sacrifice.

I was always somewhat surprised to hear Fr. Joe say this. When I think of priesthood (and not only the ordained priesthood but our common priesthood as baptized Christians), I think of one of my favourite prayers, St. Ignatius of Loyola’s Suscipe: “Take, Lord (Suscipe, Domine), all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and my entire will; all that I have and possess. You have given all to me. To you, O Lord, I return it. All is yours; dispose of it wholly according to your will. Give me your love and your grace, for this is enough for me.”

Another thing that would surprise me about Fr. Joe, when I would bring up Ignatius’ Suscipe, is how he would look me directly in the eye and, with all the sternness he could muster (which was not much), say to me, “I do not like that prayer.” When I would ask him why, he would say, “Because I find it such a difficult prayer to live out.” I think that, if Fr. Joe found Ignatius’ Suscipe difficult to live out, the rest of us are in big trouble! Instead of the Suscipe, Fr. Joe’s favourite prayer or saying was from St. Francis de Sales: “There is nothing so strong as gentleness, and nothing so gentle as real strength.”

There have been few people, let alone few priests, who have lived the sacrifice demanded of Ignatius’ Suscipe—the total surrender to God of liberty, memory, understanding, our “entire will” to our Lord who has “given all to” us—as well as Fr. Joe Trovato. He certainly lived the radical (and, dare I say, more than humble, but self-sacrificial) gentleness to which St. Francis de Sales’ saying invites us.

The self-sacrificial gentleness of Ignatius’ Suscipe, of St. Francis de Sales, or of Fr. Joe Trovato is a Eucharistic self-sacrificial gentleness. It is a gentleness and a self-sacrifice to which the Lord in his grace invites us. There are many moments in our Mass, every time we celebrate it, when we remember Jesus’ sacrifice of his entire being, his having “given all to” us, for our salvation.

Maybe the most important moment during our Eucharistic celebration when we remember Jesus’ self-sacrifice for us is when we pray the same words Jesus did at the Last Supper, on the night before he gave himself up to death for us: “Take this, all of you, and eat of it, for this is my body, which will be given up for you… Take this, all of you, and drink from it, for this is the chalice of my blood.”

The earliest disciples of Jesus remembered Jesus’ sacrifice, his giving of his body and blood for us, at the Last Supper and on the cross, in Jesus’ own words. “This is my Body that is for you… This cup is the new covenant in my Blood. Do this… in remembrance of me.” St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, which we hear today, is an early witness to this way in which Jesus’ first disciples remembered his sacrifice for us and its meaning for our salvation.

The Eucharistic dimension of sacrifice is closely connected to its dimension of memorial: Of memory not of artifacts in museums, but memory that projects Jesus’ giving of self to us into our history, so that it becomes always and everywhere present. And it becomes a self-sacrifice we can and are called to imitate: “Do this in memory of me… You have given all to me. To you, O Lord, I return it.”

But how, through remembrance of Jesus, our greatest act of self-sacrifice, or otherwise, could we ever return such a sublime gift as Jesus has given to us: His Body and Blood; his life, on the cross? At Mass, in our Eucharistic prayers, we use a lot of language of sacrifice and of returning to God some element of God’s sacrifice of himself in Jesus for us. During our table conversations, Fr. Joe often liked to point out this language of sacrifice in our Eucharistic prayers that, like Ignatius’ Suscipe (so he would say) he had difficulty living out, much less understanding. Sometimes our Eucharistic language of sacrifice can be bold. We pray, for instance: “May this sacrifice of our reconciliation… advance the peace and salvation of all the world.” We still await with Christian hope, sisters and brothers, the fulfillment of this “peace and salvation” for which we pray every time we celebrate our Eucharist.

Sometimes our language of sacrifice in our Eucharistic prayers can be difficult to understand: “Look, we pray, upon the oblation of your Church.” What is an oblation? It is another word for sacrifice; for offering back to God what God has given us in this very celebration: The sacramental yet very real presence of the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ. And so, we pray, “We offer you in thanksgiving this holy and living sacrifice… May [Christ] make of us an eternal offering to you, so that we may obtain an inheritance with your elect.”

But can we ever offer God back what he has offered us; what God continues to offer us through our Eucharist: His very self, for our salvation? Can we ever match the sacrifice of self that Jesus offered for us on the cross? Without God’s grace, the short answer to these questions would be no. I have no doubt that Fr. Joe Trovato was on to something when he would say he had difficulty living out the meaning of the Lord’s sacrifice for us; the meaning of St. Ignatius’ Suscipe: “You have given all to me. To you, O Lord, I return it.”

I will go a step beyond Fr. Joe here: Without God’s grace, to remember and to live in imitation of Jesus’ sacrifice for us is impossible. Yet, should we ever despair of God’s grace, we need only to remember the abundance of that grace of which Jesus’ greatest miracles were a sign. We hear from Luke’s Gospel today how Jesus multiplied the “five loaves and two fish,” so that there was enough to feed “about five thousand men,” and women and children in addition to them, with food still left over.

In this way, God will multiply even our smallest efforts at imitating God’s self-gift to us in our lives. God will multiply even our smallest efforts at kindness; at the kind of hospitality and blessing Melchizedek, the priest-king, shows Abram, and Abram returns to Melchizedek, in our reading from Genesis today.

God’s abundant grace will multiply our “I find this difficult to live out” into more than enough to nourish the world. In God’s grace, all the dimensions of this great celebration of the Body and Blood of Christ come together: Sacrifice, memorial, hospitality. God’s grace enables us to celebrate here now, and then to bring God’s real, nourishing presence to our world by all we say and do. God’s grace “is enough for us,” so that all we have received, we now return; we now give to a world hungering and thirsting for peace and salvation.

Homily for Sunday, 5 June 2022– Pentecost

Readings of the day: Acts 2:1-11; Psalm 104:1, 24, 29-30, 31, 34; 1 Corinthians 12:3b-7, 12-13; John 20:19-23

John’s Gospel is peculiar in many ways, not least of which is John’s account of Pentecost, Jesus breathing the Holy Spirit on his disciples, which we hear today.

Remember that, one week ago, for our celebration of Jesus’ ascension to heaven, we heard Luke’s version of these events. In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus asks his disciples to remain in Jerusalem until he ascends to heaven, and then he sends the Holy Spirit upon them: “Stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high.”

In John’s Gospel, Jesus’ appearances after his resurrection and his gift of the Holy Spirit to his disciples happen all at once. We hear today how, on the very day Jesus rises from the dead, he stands among his disciples in a house where they had gathered, behind locked doors “for fear of the” Jewish leaders who had handed Jesus over to the Romans to die. Jesus appears in his disciples’ space, despite the locked doors, and greets them, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” And Jesus sends his disciples, as John makes a point of saying, with the gift of the Holy Spirit that he had promised them during his ministry and at the Last Supper: “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”

So, which is it? Did Pentecost—Jesus’ sending of the Holy Spirit upon his disciples; the birth of the Church—happen after or before Jesus’ ascension? Or did Pentecost happen more than once?

The renowned Sulpician Bible scholar Fr. Raymond Brown caused no small controversy at the time when he wrote that Christians should consider that Pentecost has happened not only once; not twice, before and after Jesus’ ascension to heaven, but many times. And the Holy Spirit still descends upon and inspires our Church to action, to mission today. We have all experienced Pentecost-like moments, sisters and brothers, many times in our own lives. I am not only speaking of our celebration of Pentecost once a year, fifty days after Easter, but much more often than that. And, most of the time, we are not even aware when we are experiencing an encounter with the Holy Spirit; a Pentecost-like moment.

The first Pentecost-like moment in each of our lives as Christians is at baptism. Now, at baptism if, as most of us are, we have been baptized as infants, we will not have been aware that we have just encountered the Holy Spirit. But our parents and godparents will have been aware of this Pentecost-like moment. They will have spoken for us at our baptism, when they respond, “It is,” to the question of the priest or deacon just before the baptism: “Is it your will that [this child] should be baptized in the faith of the Church, which we have all professed with you”? At the anointing with chrism after baptism, the Rite of Baptism clearly speaks of the effects of this sacrament: “The God of power and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ has freed you from sin, given you a new birth by water and the Holy Spirit, and welcomed you into his holy people.” The moment of our baptism is our first encounter with the Holy Spirit as members of “God’s holy people,” the Church. It is our first Pentecost-like moment.

In baptism we (or our parents and godparents for us) make our first profession of faith, one St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians says today is only possible by the grace of the Holy Spirit: “No one can say, ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by the Holy Spirit.” And St. Paul connects the moment of our baptism back to those first Pentecost moments Jesus’ apostles experienced, in the locked room when Jesus breathed the Holy Spirit upon them; in Acts when tongues “as of fire” descended upon them. St. Paul says, “For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body… and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.”

In confirmation we are again anointed with the chrism oil we received at baptism: “Be sealed with the gift of the Holy Spirit.” If, for most of us, our parents and godparents witnessed for us and assented to the work of the Holy Spirit in us from the moment of our baptism, in confirmation we have the chance to assent; to agree to, witness and consciously receive the Holy Spirit for ourselves. For us, as St. Paul says in 1 Corinthians, the singular “gift of the Holy Spirit” becomes a remarkable diversity of gifts that spur us on to proclaim the Good News of Jesus Christ by all we say and do. In confirmation, this vast array of gifts of the Holy Spirit is summed up in a formula of seven: “The spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of right judgment and courage, the spirit of knowledge and reverence… the spirit of wonder and awe in [God’s] presence.”

We may sum up the gifts of the Holy Spirit in this kind of list of seven but, as St. Paul knew and we know, the Holy Spirit’s gifts to us are unlimited by any of our human categories or language. Still, all these gifts of the Holy Spirit, without number, is meant to serve one purpose in us; in the Church. St. Paul says, “To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.” And our ultimate good, sisters and brothers—the good God desires for all of us together—is eternal life.

Each of our Church’s sacramental rituals include a moment when we call upon the Holy Spirit and his gifts without number to direct us toward this “common good” and ultimately toward eternal life with God. I will not analyze each time in our sacramental rites when we call upon the Holy Spirit. This would take me far too much time, and I would be keeping us from (eventually) leaving here to proclaim the Gospel to the world with the gifts the Spirit has given us. And I do not wish to do this.

But I want to draw our attention simply to the Mass, since we are in the midst of it now. Most of us, if we are paying attention, know the first major moment at which we call upon the Holy Spirit during the Eucharistic Prayer at Mass: The priest extends his hands over the bread and wine and prays that the Holy Spirit transform this bread and wine into “the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Yet I often wonder if even the most faithful, attentive Catholics at Mass realize that there is a second moment during the Eucharistic Prayer when we call upon the Holy Spirit. There is no change in the position of the priest’s hands, or much of anything, to indicate when this happens, except that the priest prays that the Holy Spirit might descend not upon the bread and wine a second time, but upon us. We pray that the Holy Spirit might transform us to “become one body, one spirit in Christ.”

“Just as the body is one and has many members,” St. Paul says, “all the members of the body, though many, are one body.” We pray, every time we celebrate our Eucharist, that the Holy Spirit might transform us to make this unity in multiplicity of gifts and members of the Church a reality.

I find it astounding, every time I hear our reading today from Acts, that “every nation under heaven,” people speaking and hearing the Gospel in their own languages, were “all drawn together in one place.” All witnessed together, in unity yet phenomenal diversity, that first Pentecost when the Holy Spirit descended like wind and in tongues of fire on Jesus’ first apostles.

They—Jesus’ first apostles; the vast multitude of people, each speaking and hearing the Gospel in their own language—are a lot like us: Gathered together in one place before God; gathered to receive gifts of the Holy Spirit without number but all oriented toward “the common good” and toward our eternal life with God. That, if anything, is amazing. Only the Holy Spirit of God can do this. Only the Holy Spirit can gather us together “in one place” to hear the Gospel; gather us together to be transformed, more and more, into “one body, one spirit in Christ”; gather us together where we may receive the strength and inspiration to proclaim the Good News and communicate the Spirit of God to our world.

This is our Pentecost: Not only a one or two-time communication of the Spirit to Jesus’ first apostles, but a Pentecost moment projected into our history and our memory as a people of God. We celebrate here and now an ongoing Pentecost; our encounter now and forever with the Holy Spirit that draws us all “together in one place”; that orients us toward the common good and that will bring us to eternal life.