Homily for Sunday, 5 March 2023– Second Sunday in Lent

Readings of the day: Genesis 12:1-4a; Psalm 33:4-5, 18-19, 20, 22; 2 Timothy 1:8b-10; Matthew 17:1-9

When we think about our identity—what reveals to the world around us who we are—where do we start? We might start with our names, the identity we were given when we were born. I was born Warren Roger. Roger recalls the French heritage on my mother’s side. It was my great-grandfather’s name, and I also have an uncle (my mom’s brother) whose name is Roger. Warren is Old Germanic, related to caring for animals. I do not think my parents—unless they have a special ability to see into the future that I do not know about—could have predicted how much I love animals when they named me at birth. But I think my name is fitting.

At baptism, we (if we are baptized as adults or older children) or our parents (if we are baptized as infants) give our name to the Church. We take on a new identity, a new name of baptized Christian. How many of us took another name, often a saint’s name, when we were confirmed? At confirmation, once again, our identity changes. We become a new being, sealed with the gift of the Holy Spirit.

Today in the Book of Genesis, we hear about Abram. God tells Abram to set out from his homeland, Ur (in what is now Iraq near the Persian Gulf), to an unknown, unnamed place. All God tells Abram is that the place to which he will relocate will be a place of blessing: “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.”

At this point, Abram is seventy-five years old. He would have to wait until he was eighty-five to have his first son, Ishmael, with Hagar. Abram was ninety-nine years old when God gave him a new name, Abraham. And, finally, when Abraham was one hundred years old, God followed through on his promise to give Abraham a son, Isaac, with his wife Sarah. The process of Abraham’s change of identity, from Abram to Abraham to the father in faith of many nations, takes time in the Book of Genesis. But already we hear the first movements of God giving Abram that new identity. Not only will the land where Abraham will settle be blessed, or Sarah and Abraham together be blessed with a child in their old age, but Abram will bless the land and its people where he settles. God has already given Abram a new name, a new identity, even before he leaves Ur: “You will be a blessing.”

The process for Jesus and for us, Jesus’ disciples, toward taking on a new identity before God is much shorter than it was for Abram. Jesus’ public ministry through the founding of the Church at Pentecost lasted maybe a few years; Abraham moved to a new home at seventy-five, waited over eighty years for a new name, and one hundred years for a child with Sarah.

Today from the Gospel of Matthew we hear the account of Jesus’ transfiguration. Of all the Gospels, Matthew is the most focused on questions of identity: Who is Jesus? Who were Jesus’ ancestors? Who are we, Jesus’ disciples, the Church? Matthew begins his Gospel with a spectacular genealogy of Jesus, a list of forty-two generations of names, before identifying “Jesus, who is called the Messiah,” as the son “of Joseph, the husband of Mary.”

In the order of Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus’ transfiguration happens right between two other important “identity” sections in Matthew. Just before Jesus’ transfiguration, Jesus takes his disciples to the far northern reaches of Israel at Caesarea Philippi. There, Jesus asks his disciples, “Who do you say that I am”? Among all the different identities the people were associating with Jesus—“Some say John the Baptist, others Elijah, still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets”—Jesus’ apostle Simon Peter is the only one to identify Jesus correctly: “You are the Messiah, the son of the living God.” And Simon receives a new identity in the process of correctly identifying Jesus as the Messiah: “You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church.”

Just after Jesus is transfigured, it seems that Jesus’ disciples are very confused, not only about Jesus’ identity and mission but their own. When they are barely down the mountain of the transfiguration, Jesus’ disciples question, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven”? Jesus places a child among them, saying that the only way to go to heaven, never mind be identified as “the greatest in the kingdom of heaven,” is to be as humble and dependent on God as the child is on those who care for it. And then Peter, who had almost aced the identity of Jesus as the Messiah before the transfiguration (I have a lot of empathy for Peter for his trouble grappling with the need for Jesus to suffer and die), stumbles on the question of forgiveness.

Peter asks Jesus, “Lord, if my brother sins against me, how many times must I forgive him”? By this point, Jesus has already turned this issue about how many times to forgive a sinner into a question about the identity of the whole faith community, the whole Church, all of us. Jesus has told the parable of the shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine sheep to seek the one lost sheep and bring it back to the fold. And then Jesus gives us our new identity and mission. It is the same identity and mission Jesus had given only to Peter at first, when Peter identified Jesus as the Messiah. Now that identity and mission belongs to all of us, sisters and brothers. Jesus repeats his identification and commissioning of Peter to all of his disciples: “Amen, I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven… For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”

In other words, we now all share in the identity and mission of Jesus himself: An identity and mission of forgiveness and mercy, not only “seven times” (in Peter’s figure of speech), “but seventy-seven times.” We now share without limit, infinitely, in Jesus’ identity and mission of forgiveness and mercy. At this moment we become “other Christs” who are anointed and sent out to “take away the sins of the world” and lead one another to God, to eternal life.

And, in between these two “identity vignettes” in Matthew’s Gospel—exchanges between Jesus and his disciples that are all about who Jesus is as the Messiah, who Peter and Jesus’ other disciples are, and who we are—Jesus goes up the mountain with Peter, James, and John to be transfigured. Jesus’ identity as the Messiah, so correctly identified by Peter, does not change in his transfiguration. Jesus’ identity is only revealed in a way to us that is almost overwhelming. Jesus’ transfiguration reveals him to us more fully than before as the fulfilment of the Law and the prophets (remember how Jesus identifies himself in this way earlier in Matthew’s Gospel, at the beginning of his Sermon on the Mount).

Yet the transfiguration not only reveals Jesus’ identity to us more fully than ever before. And the transfiguration reveals to us our own identity—who we are through, with, and in Christ—more fully than ever before, so fully that we cannot help in the moment but be overwhelmed.

When the voice from the cloud says of Jesus, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased,” this voice, the voice of God, also says this of us. Sisters and brothers, we are transfigured in this very moment. God looks down on us and says, “These are my beloved sons. These are my beloved daughters. This is my beloved Church.”

God reveals to us a new name, a new identity, a new mission. Abram becomes Abraham. Peter reveals Jesus as “the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” Jesus reveals us, identifies and commissions us, as the community that will bind and loose, that will seek the lost sheep in infinite forgiveness and mercy. From the cloud God reveals Jesus once again as “my beloved Son.” In the same moment God identifies, commissions, transfigures us as his beloved daughters and sons. In this Eucharistic celebration God sends the Holy Spirit upon us to solidify our identity and commissioning as “one body, one spirit in Christ.”

But from the moment of the transfiguration we still have one more major step so that God might reveal to us fully Jesus’ identity and mission, and ours. That last step we call, we experience as the Paschal Mystery: The events of the passion, death, resurrection, and ascension to heaven of Jesus Christ. This is why, after Jesus’ transfiguration in our Gospel today, Matthew says that the disciples are “overcome with fear.” Now, fear is not a feeling that we like to experience, I do not think. But our experience of suffering, our experience of death, an end to this earthly life, is necessary for us if who we are is anything like who Jesus is. By his passion and death, Jesus has transformed (we could say transfigured) the last event in our human experience that needs to be transformed and transfigured: Death itself.

In the time we have left this Lent, between now and Easter, we will continue to have God reveal our fullest identity to us. God does so one step, one event at a time, sharing with us in Christ our human sufferings but also joys: Between the mount of the transfiguration and the mount of Calvary, between Calvary and heaven, where Jesus has ascended and awaits us. There, in heaven, awaits our fullest vision of Jesus—the Messiah, the Son of the living God—and our fullest vision of who we are: Beloved daughters, beloved sons, beloved Church; beloved, redeemed, and saved disciples of the Son of the living God.

Homily for Wednesday, 22 February 2023– Ash Wednesday

Readings of the day: Joel 2:12-18; Psalm 51:3-4, 5-6ab, 12-13, 8-9, 14, 17; 2 Corinthians 5:20-6:2; Matthew 6:1-6, 16-18

Sisters and brothers, in a few moments we will bless and distribute ashes to remember that we are sinners before God, in need of God’s grace to live this time of Lent as a time of repentance: We turn from our sin and toward God’s mercy and love.

Yet, in Matthew’s Gospel from which we have just heard, Jesus warns against outward actions of faith or piety that draw attention to ourselves. Jesus says that, when we give alms, pray, or fast, not to do these things so that we may be seen by others, but “in secret,” so that our “Father who sees in secret may reward” us.

So, when we receive ashes and go forth from here with this sign on our foreheads, will we not be acting against everything Jesus has said in our Gospel reading today? Well, not quite: We are still acting within the spirit of what Jesus says, as long as our intention behind wearing ashes on our foreheads in public is right. In other words, the ashes we display today are not about us. They are all about God and God’s love for us.

These ashes with which we will sign ourselves today are not about doom, gloom, or how awful sinners we are. No, these ashes are our sign of joy to the world as we begin this time of Lent.

To say that the ashes we will receive are a sign of joy does not deny that we are sinners, or that there is great sin and evil in our world. On the contrary: Our ashes proclaim to our world, loud and clear, that sin is real and that we are, individually and socially, afflicted by sin.

At the same time, the ashes we show the world proclaim God’s love and mercy toward us. Think of the prayer we hear when we receive ashes on our foreheads: “Repent and believe in the Gospel.” Repentance, turning from sin so we can turn toward God, is only possible because God so loves us—“God so loved the world”—that he intervened in this world, giving us his Son, human like us in all things but sin, to give us the chance to be saved. God sent his Son, Jesus Christ, so that our repentance would have a point: We turn from sin to turn toward God, to recommit to living as God has lived among us in the person of Jesus. Without God’s initiative toward our salvation in this way, we would have no reason to repent: We would turn from our sin, but toward whom, if not God?

Repentance makes sense, and our salvation is possible, only because God loves us and wants us to be with him in eternal life. Yet it is not enough for God that God wants each of us to be saved. No, God wants us to proclaim this message to the whole world. God sends us forth, today with blessed ashes as a sign of God’s love, God’s mercy toward us, to be, as St. Paul says in his Second Letter to the Corinthians, “ambassadors for Christ.”

“Now is the day of salvation,” St. Paul proclaims. We proclaim this same message with ashes as St. Paul once proclaimed in words.

Undoubtedly, we might feel (and perhaps we should feel) a hint of unworthiness to be ambassadors, messengers, prophets of God’s salvation in Christ in the way God has sent us into the world to be. The older form of the prayer when we received ashes on Ash Wednesday was from the Book of Genesis, after Adam and Eve eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil: “Remember that you are dust, and unto dust you shall return.”

If we are honest with ourselves, I think it will be easy for us to remember how weak and sinful we are, our world is, the human condition is, fallen from the original state in which God created and blessed us. And we will be a bit broken-hearted about our sin.

The prophet Joel says to us today, “Rend your hearts and not your clothing.” We turn to God, our hearts broken by our sin. And God turns us back out into our wanting world, saying: O redeemed sinners, whom I have brought back to myself by the blood of the cross, now go out into the world wearing ashes. These ashes are not about you, God might say to us. This season of repentance we call Lent is not about us, sisters and brothers, or about our sin. Lent and our ashes are about God sending us back out into the world to be ambassadors of God’s love, grace, and mercy, for “now is the acceptable time; see, now is the day of salvation.”

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 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, 28 February 2021– Second Sunday in Lent, Year B

Readings of the day: Genesis 22:1-2, 9a, 10-13, 15-18; Psalm 116:10, 15, 16-17, 18-19; Romans 8:31b-34; Mark 9:2-10

This homily was given at St. Joseph's College, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada.

How many of us are giving up something or have ever given up something for Lent? Might this be a strange question to ask, especially in our present situation? After all, we are still in the midst of this COVID-19 pandemic that keeps us and many people from being able to worship in person and receive communion. We have given up a lot, and not only in terms of worship and the sacraments, over almost a year since the first COVID-19 restrictions and lockdowns began.

Yet, when we speak of giving up something, especially during Lent, do we not usually refer to giving up what may be comfortable or good for us, but that we do not really need? I, for one, have never been very good at giving something up for Lent. I usually try to think of a very small comfort to give up; even better if this is something I am able to give up beyond Lent. One year, when I was a novice, in the beginner stages of religious community life in preparation to take first vows, I decided to give up not coffee altogether—if I were to give up coffee altogether, I think I would be lethargic or miserable, or both, in the morning—but simply to give up the sizable amount of sugar I used to put into my morning coffee. That Easter Sunday, I put sugar in my coffee as I had until Lent that year, and it made my coffee far too sweet. I have never gone back to putting sugar in my coffee since then. Great, then, I thought, I would need to think of something else to give up for Lent after that!

Those of us who have given up something for Lent or are doing so this year: What kinds of things to we give up? Are they food and drink-related comforts: Junk food, alcoholic beverages, chocolate, or coffee (or simply the sugar in our coffee, maybe)…? Have any of us given up social media, like Facebook or Twitter, as I know some of my friends do during Lent? How about taking this time of Lent to master our habits: Quitting smoking, minding our language, and so on? How many of us have heard or seen Pope Francis’ list of things from which to fast and on which to feast during Lent? Pope Francis’ list is a few years old, and has been made into a convenient image on social media: Fast from or give up hurting words, anger, pessimism, worries, complaints, bitterness, selfishness, and grudges, says Pope Francis, so that we may “feast on” kind words, gratitude, patience, hope, trust in God, simplicity, prayer, compassion, and reconciliation. Finally, Pope Francis says, “Fast from words and be silent so we can listen.” Hmm… There’s another thing—wordiness—from which I know I could fast in order to listen and appreciate silence better!

Do we begin to understand, through all this, that there are many things we could fast from or give up during Lent? But what if we simply acknowledged that God is already way ahead of us in terms of giving something up? And the something, or better yet somebody, God has given up is not only a worldly comfort or something good that God did not really need. No, God gave up—for us!—his only Son so that we might have eternal life. God gave up, for us, something not only comforting yet unnecessary, but God gave up what is essential to himself. And this whole season of Lent focuses us toward our celebration of Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday; our celebration in a few weeks from now of God having given up his only Son for our salvation.

God’s sacrifice of self for us; God’s having given up his Son so that we might have eternal life, which we celebrate not only through Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday, but every time we assemble for Mass, is foretold in Jesus’ transfiguration. Mark, whose account of Jesus’ transfiguration we hear today, clearly connects this event to the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

Is there not an almost overwhelming amount of detail in the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ transfiguration? There are many points on which we could focus in this transfiguration event: Jesus, for instance, does not take with him all his disciples or even the Twelve apostles, but only (presumably) his most trusted three apostles, Peter, James, and John, to witness the transfiguration. Moses and Elijah, usually interpreted as the presence of the Law and the prophets of Jewish tradition, speak with Jesus. We have what many Biblical scholars have commented as a full making known of the one God in three distinct persons of the Trinity: Jesus, present in human form, also the divine Son of God; the Father, especially represented by the voice from heaven, “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!”; and the Holy Spirit, most often connected with the cloud that overshadows the transfiguration scene.

We have Mark’s peculiar emphasis (more than Matthew or Luke, who also each feature an account of Jesus’ transfiguration) on Jesus’ order to Peter, James, and John, “to tell no one about what they had seen, until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead.” Mark, though, is pithier than the other Gospels about the fear Peter, James, and John felt during the transfiguration and Jesus’ foretelling of his own suffering, death, and resurrection. Yet all the accounts of Jesus’ transfiguration in our Biblical Gospels share the all-but-speechless Peter’s exclamation, “It is good for us to be here.” Peter then suggests, in all Gospel accounts of Jesus’ transfiguration, that they build three tents. This could be a hearkening back to the Ark of the Covenant tradition of the earliest tribes of Israel in the Old Testament. These ancient people of Israel were mobile, and carried the Ark of the Covenant, the tabernacle in which God was said to dwell among his people on earth, within a series of tents.

But allow me to suggest that the main focus of Mark’s Gospel especially, amid all Mark’s spectacular detail of the transfiguration, is on the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus. When we think of the transfiguration, Mark wants us to connect with Jesus’ sacrifice, his willing giving up of self to death on a cross, so that we might have eternal life. Jesus, through Mark, wants us to contemplate prayerfully the events of his transfiguration in light of his resurrection from the dead. We have the gift of hindsight: Jesus’ resurrection from the dead is a completed past event. From Peter’s, James’, and John’s standpoint in time, Jesus’ resurrection was still yet to take place, so the apostles could do no better than to be (understandably) perplexed and afraid.

But even with our gift of hindsight, is not only the transfiguration but the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus it foretells not so extraordinarily rare that, in a way, it should not only have struck fear in Peter, James, and John, but in us? The transfiguration points ahead to Jesus’ giving up of self on a cross for our salvation. There is only one other figure in the Bible (and the only one who is not God)—Abraham—who is willing to give up his only son, in this case Isaac, simply because God calls him to do so.

Like Mark’s Gospel account of Jesus transfiguration, Genesis’ account of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac is so detailed as to be troubling; as to raise more questions in us than it answers: Why would God test Abraham? Is God really that mean that he would play Abraham like that, expecting him to sacrifice Isaac only to stop him at the last moment? Here, although I think we are right to focus always on God in any Biblical event, I think Genesis invites us to focus on Abraham’s response to God; on his complete willingness to do as God asks of him, even to sacrifice his only, long-promised son, Isaac. Abraham’s willingness to give up his only son is presented as a prefiguring of God’s own complete willingness to give his only Son, Jesus Christ, up to death so that we might have eternal life.

What, then, do Abraham’s willingness to give up Isaac to death, and the transfiguration, which foretells God’s giving his Son Jesus up to death for our salvation, mean for us in terms of how we live here and now? For me, how well we answer this question for ourselves amounts to how we answer a few questions related to this first one: If we make some kind of Lenten sacrifice, say giving up something for Lent, does what we have given up make us more mindful of God’s sacrifice of his only Son for us on the cross; the only sacrifice capable of gaining us eternal life? Do our sacrifices make us more mindful of God always with and for us, as St. Paul asks today in his letter to the Romans: “If God is for us, who is against us”? Do we sacrifice willingly, as God does and has for us, and without boasting or appearing gloomy, or sacrificing something because we feel we have to do so? Does our sacrifice change us; transfigure us to be more like our selfless; self-sacrificing God? If we can answer “yes” to these questions, I think we are on the right track, this Lent and in our lives of faith overall.

Homily for Tuesday, 16 February 2021– Ferial

Readings of the day: Genesis 6:5-8, 7:1-5, 10; Psalm 29:1a, 2, 3ac-4, 3b, 9c-10; Mark 8:14-21

How easy is it for us to become distracted by small external details, especially when hearing or reading Scripture, such that we have difficulty grasping “the heart of the matter,” so to speak, of a Biblical text? Or how good are we at resisting these kinds of distractions by external details?

I confess that I am vulnerable to distraction by external details (mea culpa!). Readings like those we hear today are a challenge to me, for this reason. I can empathize with Jesus’ disciples, whom Mark often presents as bumbling and distracted, including in the Gospel reading we hear today. Jesus rebukes his disciples harshly: “Are your hearts hardened… Do you not yet understand”? I admit that my first reaction to Jesus’ rebuke here in Mark’s Gospel is that I am not sure I would have understood Jesus’ point about “the yeast of the Pharisees and… of Herod,” and why he is so harsh with his disciples, simply from the scant context Mark gives us, any more than his disciples did. What did Jesus’ disciples do that was so wrong?

In the Book of Genesis, we again encounter a harsh God, who goes so far as to be “sorry that he made human beings on the earth.” All I can think when I hear that is, “Ouch! Would God ever be sorry that he made us”? But this, too, risks too much focus on surface details: Would God be “sorry” or regretful of his own actions, like creation? Would a loving God really ever will to destroy all living things on earth, no matter how wicked we had become? Would God ever change his mind, from seeing that his creation was “very good” to, in the space of ten generations from Adam to Noah, wanting to destroy it?

The flood narrative in Genesis, like Jesus’ irritable encounter with his disciples in Mark’s Gospel, invites us to reflect more deeply than on these surface details, however attractive or troubling they may be. In both Mark and Genesis, the hearts of God and of God’s people are not in the same place; God and the people, be they Jesus’ disciples or the people of Noah’s generation, with the exception of Noah and his household, clearly do not have the same will; the same priorities. Genesis describes “every inclination of” the hearts of the people as “evil.” Mark describes Jesus’ disciples’ hearts as “hardened.”

How exactly the people’s hearts are inclined toward evil or “hardened” is perhaps forever a mystery; a detail. But we know that it is still possible, in the midst of hearts that are “hardened” or inclined toward evil, to set our hearts to pleasing God; to doing the will of God. Noah did it, as Genesis says: He “found favour in the sight of the LORD.” And, if we read today’s Gospel in the context of all of Mark, we see that, no matter how bumbling and distracted Jesus’ disciples almost always seem to be in Mark, Jesus never gives up on them. In fact, he willingly gives himself up to death for them, and us.

I find this especially consoling, as an (often) distractible disciple of Jesus: That I, and we, know something of the deepest, most heartfelt and ultimate will of God. Our God wills from the heart to save us, and has sent his Son for this purpose. And, somehow, our task is only to discern and cooperate with this ultimate will for us from the heart of our God.

Homily for Sunday, 27 December 2020– Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph

Readings of the day: Genesis 15:1-6, 21:1-3; Psalm 105:1-2, 3-4, 5-6; Hebrews 11:8, 11-12, 17-19; Luke 2:22-40

This homily was given at St. Joseph's College, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada.

If we were to take a little survey, what would we say is the most important part of the Mass? Would most of us say that the most important element of the Mass is the words of institution or consecration pronounced by the priest over the bread and wine, such that they become the body and blood of Jesus Christ: “Take this, all of you, and eat of it, for this is my body… Take this, all of you, and drink from it, for this is the chalice of my blood”? We could not go wrong by presuming that these words of institution are the most important part of the Mass, right? After all, they are Jesus’ own words from the Last Supper before he died for us. And the Church considers these words the sacramental form of the Eucharist, the essential words for the validity of this entire celebration.

Then again, our Eastern Rite Catholic and Orthodox brothers and sisters, I think, tend to become nervous when we speak of the most important part of Eucharistic liturgy. They tend, more than we Roman Catholics do, to emphasize the unity of the entire celebration. I think the unity of the Eucharistic celebration is good to keep in mind. Then again, I remember when now-Cardinal Thomas Collins of Toronto was Archbishop of Edmonton, used to call to mind the importance of still another part of the Mass, the dismissal: “Go, the Mass is ended.”

If we know our Mass especially well, we know that the Latin of this last line spoken by the priest (or deacon, if one is present) at Mass is Ite, missa est. This literally translates into English as, “Go, it (meaning the assembly) is dismissed.” Our word for the whole celebration, Mass, comes from the Latin missa here. Archbishop Collins would often paraphrase this dismissal rather humorously in his preaching, as in something like, “Get out of here; we have work to do.”

Now, I do not want us to get up and leave this celebration just yet; we have the entire Liturgy of the Eucharist still to go. But why, then, this emphasis on the very end of Mass; on the dismissal: “Go, the Mass is ended”; “Go in peace”?... Our readings today focus on dismissals; on people being sent forth from beautiful events, beautiful graced encounters with God, to accomplish some important and holy work, or simply to prepare, as the righteous Simeon did in our Gospel today, for the end of his life and beginning of eternal life in heaven.

Simeon’s prayer in Luke’s Gospel after receiving the infant Jesus in his arms and the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph in his presence in the Temple of Jerusalem is one of the three great prayers or canticles (songs) of the Liturgy of the Hours, also called the Divine Office. These canticles are all drawn from Luke’s account of the infancies of John the Baptist and Jesus. The Liturgy of the Hours is an ancient tradition that began in monasteries, by which monks would mark the passage of each day by praying at particular times of day or “hours” in community. Religious orders, including mine, diocesan clergy, and even many laypeople continue this tradition today.

At Morning Prayer, or Lauds, we pray the prayer of Zechariah, John the Baptist’s father, when John is born. This prayer begins with, “Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel,” so is known as the Benedictus (“Blessed be”). At Evening Prayer, or Vespers, we pray the hymn of Mary from her visit with Elizabeth, the Magnificat, named for this prayer’s first word in Latin, Magnificat: “My soul magnifies the Lord”… And the last “hour” of the Liturgy of the Hours each day is Compline, or Night Prayer. During Compline we pray those words of Simeon from today’s Gospel: “Master, now you are dismissing your servant in peace, according to your word; for my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples; a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and for glory to your people Israel.” Because the Latin of this prayer begins with Nunc dimittis (“Now you dismiss”), this prayer is often called the Nunc dimittis.

This prayer is about a dismissal, an Ite, missa est moment. But Simeon is not the only person in our readings today to be “dismissed”; to be asked at some point to set out somewhere. At the beginning of today’s Gospel reading, we hear that Mary and Joseph are “dismissed”—they set out at God’s command and that of their Jewish faith—to Jerusalem, to dedicate their newborn Son, Jesus, “to the Lord.” This dismissal, if we will, is the focus of our celebration today of the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. This holiest of families is the model for our families, our households, to become holy families; holy households ourselves.

Our holiness as individuals; as families; as households depends on our faithfulness to God when we recognize that God is calling us to set out: “Get out of here; we have work to do,” as Cardinal Collins would say. From the beginning, Mary, Joseph and Jesus are faithful to God in the big and small “dismissals”: To go from Nazareth to Bethlehem to register for a Roman census and to give birth to the Son of God in a humble stable or cave; to go to Jerusalem to dedicate the Child Jesus to the Lord according to the Law of Moses. And, if we listen attentively to our Gospel today, at the end of it, we hear of another “dismissal” moment related to the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph: “When Mary and Joseph had finished everything required by the law of the Lord, they returned to Galilee, to their own town of Nazareth. The child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom, and the favour of God was upon him.”

During their time in the Temple of Jerusalem, Mary, Joseph, and Jesus experience other “dismissal” moments: Simeon follows his Nunc dimittis prayer with a prophecy to Mary, a disconcerting one about how Jesus will ultimately be dismissed from this world, as “a sign that will be opposed.” And Simeon adds, to Mary, “A sword will pierce your own soul, too.” This, sisters and brothers, is a foreshadowing of the Cross, the Holy Family’s ultimate act of fidelity to God’s mission for them and for our whole world. The Cross is God’s ultimate Ite, missa est or Nunc dimittis moment. Jesus would have to suffer a horrific death, be “dismissed” in such a way from this world, but in a way he chose faithfully and freely, in order to save us.

Of course, Luke the Gospel writer fairly deliberately connects this event of the Dedication of Jesus in the Temple, with its “dismissal” moments, to the great “dismissal” moments that mark our entire history as a People of God, all the way back to the first moments of creation. Today, the Book of Genesis centers on Abraham and Sarah, whom God invited to “be dismissed”: To set out boldly and faithfully toward a new way of life, which would eventually bring them descendants numbering as the stars of heaven, beginning with Isaac. The Letter to the Hebrews today picks up on the dismissal-setting out of Abraham and Sarah theme. Hebrews says of Abraham and Sarah: They “set out, not knowing where [they were] going.”

When have we been called to set out, sisters and brothers, to be dismissed, into the unknown or even fearful, either as individuals or as families? I think this year of 2020 has given us a lot of practice with “dismissal” moments. It has been a difficult year, to say the least, with COVID-19, loss of health, loss of lives, loss of work for many of us, loss of the ability to gather to worship and receive communion in person… Yet still we gather to pray together here. Many of us gather as whole families, in front of a computer screen, to participate in Mass by Zoom, Sunday after Sunday, together as this St. Joseph’s College community.

Still this is a graced opportunity, an Ite, missa est moment to show our faithfulness as individuals; a College community; households; families. And this will continue after the formal Ite, missa est of this celebration. We will “go in peace” from here, because we have “work to do”: The intentional works of loving kindness, big and small, that make us, our households, and our families holy. We have already had much practice, and shown ourselves faithful to such work. May we be “dismissed” and so be blessed, to continue to act after the example of the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, every moment of our lives.

Homily for Sunday, 28 July 2019

Readings of the day: Genesis 18:20-32; Psalm 138:1-2, 2-3, 6-7, 7-8; Colossians 2:12-14; Luke 11:1-13

17th Sunday in Ordinary Time

This homily was given at St. Alphonsus Parish and St. Joseph's College, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada.

“How is your prayer life? How do you most like to pray”?

These are questions I frequently ask people of faith in the course of my ministry as a priest. These are questions I frequently ask myself. When I ask these questions, often I observe that people to whom I ask these questions wonder what precisely I am asking: Do I mean to ask the time of day at which people prefer to pray, or whether people tend to prefer “formula” prayers like the Our Father, Hail Mary, Glory Be, the rosary, prayers at mealtime, or devotional prayers to particular saints, or simply free verse? Do I mean to leave my intent of these kinds of questions open to interpretation? (Usually I do, in fact, like to leave these questions a bit open-ended).

Is prayer not somewhat of a delicate subject for many of us? Many experts on prayer (if there are such people) suggest that there is no single right or wrong way to pray. Those of us familiar with the Baltimore Catechism of the 1940s may remember its definition of prayer as “a lifting of the mind and heart to God.” More recent prayer “experts” like the late Jesuit Fr. Thomas Green, whose book Opening to God and its sequel Weeds among the Wheat I highly recommend for anybody interested in deepening your prayer experience, reflect on difficulties with definitions of prayer like that of the Baltimore Catechism. The definition of prayer in the Baltimore Catechism, “a lifting of the mind and heart to God,” is well and good, but can lead us, Fr. Green says, to place undue emphasis on our own efforts at prayer over God’s effort to reveal God’s self to us in our prayer. And so prayer is difficult if impossible to define, except maybe as an act of attentive listening to God without trying to limit God; an act of Opening to God that is easier said than done.

In this context of attentive listening to God, Opening to God, I would like to connect this difficulty, if impossibility, in defining prayer to what we hear today from Luke’s Gospel. Luke begins by placing Jesus and his disciples at prayer “in a certain place”; a nondescript, undefined place. In this place, which the usually-detailed Luke does not even name, Jesus’ disciples ask him: “Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.”

But how did John teach his disciples to pray? The trouble for us is that, at least in the Bible, there is no account of how John the Baptist taught his disciples to pray. We know from elsewhere in the Gospels that John had disciples, people following him, and that John’s and Jesus’ disciples were not mutually exclusive groups; some of John’s disciples were probably also Jesus’ disciples, and Jesus’ disciples also John’s disciples. We know from the Gospels that John preached a message of justice and repentance in anticipation of the Messiah, Jesus, but the Gospels never explicitly speak of John the Baptist teaching his disciples to pray.

“Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples”: When Jesus’ disciples ask him this, Jesus gives them, and ultimately us, the Lord’s Prayer or the Our Father. Now, neither Jesus nor the Gospel writers seem to be too fussy about the exact formula of this prayer, the Our Father. Who here noticed that the wording of the Our Father we have heard in today’s Gospel reading is not exactly the formulation of this prayer we are used to praying, whether privately or together, say, at Mass? The form of the Our Father we are more used to is from Matthew’s, not Luke’s, Gospel. We might presume that these differences between forms of the Our Father in Matthew and Luke are due to one form being older than the other (Luke’s version of the Our Father is shorter, so it is probably older than Matthew’s). We might presume that these differences are due to differences in the needs of the early Christian communities Matthew and Luke were trying to reach with their messages: Luke, for instance, focuses more on the social needs and challenges of his community, whereas Matthew focuses more on the spiritual good and cohesion of his community.

This is all fine, but how does this meet our needs; the spiritual and social needs of our community of faith here? If Jesus were standing among us here, and we were to ask him to “teach us to pray,” what prayer would he teach us? Would Jesus prayer be a particular formula, to be prayed at particular times of day, or for a specific amount of time every day, or would Jesus ask us simply to pray from our hearts; to lift our hearts and minds to God as the Baltimore Catechism says, however we see fit, at least when we pray in private?

I think we hear a clue to the answer to these questions from the rest of our Gospel reading as well as our first reading, from Genesis, and our Psalm today. As soon as Jesus teaches his disciples the Our Father, he goes on to tell a strange parable in today’s Gospel. The friend in Jesus’ parable, who is asked for “three loaves of bread” at midnight—Luke does not say why anybody would ask a friend for “three loaves of bread” at midnight—Jesus says will eventually give the person who asks for the bread what he asks for, not so much “because he is his friend” but “because of his persistence.” And if any of our human friends might be convinced by our persistence to give us what we need, even when meeting our needs is inconvenient for our friend, Jesus asks us to imagine “how much more… the heavenly Father [will] give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him”!

I interpret from this that there is never really an inconvenient time to pray to God for what we need. Jesus does not give us a correct formula with which to pray, but only asks us to pray persistently: “Ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you.”

If we go back to the Book of Genesis, to our first reading today, we find a model of persistence in Abraham. In fact, please allow me to introduce to us, as a model for our prayer, Abraham the Pest! Abraham the Pest probably knew as well as anybody the wickedness of Sodom and Gomorrah, so it could not have been much of a surprise to Abraham when the LORD revealed to him his plan to destroy these cities. Yet Abraham knew, as the LORD had to have known, that there were at least a few righteous people among the wicked of Sodom and Gomorrah. Abraham’s own nephew, Lot, and Lot’s family were among these righteous. So Abraham the Pest begins to bargain with God: “Suppose there are fifty righteous within the city… Suppose five of the fifty righteous are lacking? Will you destroy the whole city for lack of five”? “Suppose forty [righteous] are found there”… Thirty… Twenty… Ten… Okay, just my nephew and his family, please, unless Lot’s wife looks back at the burning city, then I will accept that you turn her into a pillar of salt”  (but that is another story).

How might God have responded to Abraham’s persistent bargaining to save anybody righteous among the wicked inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah? I try to imagine God’s tone of voice with Abraham as The Pest bargains with God: “Alright, Abraham, I suppose I have given you my blessing to be the pest you are. Note to self: Create limits on persistence of future humans when they pray. No, wait, it is too late; I have already created the ‘pest gene’ in all Abraham’s descendants, who are to number as the stars. What was I thinking? Alright, Abe, you win, you big pest! I will save the righteous people of Sodom and Gomorrah, even if there are only a few of them”!

Our Psalm today gives us a guide for when our persistence in prayer, our being a pest like Abraham to God, pays off: Give thanks to God for when God answers our prayer. “I give you thanks, O Lord… On the day I called, you answered me,” we pray with the Psalmist. Give thanks to God when God does not give us exactly what we asked for, but gives us something even better, or when God helps us to endure suffering, because in Christ God took the suffering and evil of our world on himself on the cross to redeem it, so says the Letter to the Colossians to us today.

What does all this say about how we should pray? I think, first of all, we are invited to pray with the likes of Abraham the Pest, our Father in Persistent Faith; of Thomas Green the Contemplative; of John the Baptist; of Jesus our Saviour. Pray for our needs and for the needs of one another, especially the least well off. Listen attentively without imposing limits on God. And, when our prayer, the “lifting of [our] mind and heart to God,” is answered, give thanks that “on the day” we call, God answers us.