Homily for Sunday, 15 October 2023– Twenty-eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

Readings of the day: Isaiah 25:6-10a; Psalm 23:1-3a, 3b-4, 5, 6; Philippians 4:12-14,19-20; Matthew 22:1-14

If you were able to attend a lavish banquet free of charge, invited by the host, would you say, “Sorry, I have better things to do than attend the banquet”? I would probably not say, “I have better things to do,” even if I did; “I have better things to do” would sound very rude to the host, even if this were true. And, if I had a reason not to attend the banquet, it would have to be a very good reason. I simply like food too much to miss a banquet that good, especially the food promised in the banquet we hear about today from the Book of Isaiah: “A feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear.” As our Fr. Jim says when he anticipates that a meal will be especially tasty: “Yum, yum, yum”!

But that is precisely what the guests invited to the king’s wedding banquet in Jesus’ parable do: They refuse the king’s invitation, not once but twice in today’s Gospel reading. The king sends his slaves out a second time after his original guests refuse to attend (or maybe even to RSVP) after the first invitation. And the king’s second attempt to invite the original guests is even less successful than the first. The original would-be guests make light of the king’s invitation. One goes “to his farm, another to his business, while the rest” seize, mistreat, and kill the king’s slaves.

If I were the king in Jesus’ parable, I would almost certainly say after the first unsuccessful attempt to invite guests let alone the second: “Well, those people are not worth the trouble of inviting. They are rude, they make fun of me, if they are not downright evil.” I would have gone straight to inviting people from “the main streets”—from the highways and byways—“the good and the bad” to the banquet. I would have saved a few of my servants from being mistreated and murdered in the process! But I am not the king in Jesus’ parable. The king in Jesus’ parable, God, is far more patient and richer, even more extravagant, in graciousness and mercy, in second chances and beyond, than I think any of us is. And there are many very patient, gracious, and merciful people in this chapel right now; I know this first-hand, so I do not intend this as a slight against any of us.

It is easy for us, I think, from today’s Gospel reading to find points to dispute the richness, the infinity of God’s (the king’s) patience, grace, mercy. After all, why would the king, if he is so infinitely patient, gracious, and merciful, ever become so enraged that he would send his troops after the invitees who refused two attempts to invite them to the wedding feast and mistreated and killed the king’s slaves, destroy them, and burn their city for good measure? I have difficulty imagining God readily punishing even the worst sinners. I prefer to think that we have the freedom to refuse God’s grace, mercy, patience, love, salvation as definitively as God offers these gifts to us; as definitively and purposely as God invites us to the wedding banquet. We are free to bring eternal punishment upon ourselves. Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar once said that this is why he had to believe that hell exists: We are free to accept or to refuse God’s invitation to the heavenly banquet, once, twice, forever. But von Balthasar (and I agree with him) hoped very few people if anybody had refused God’s invitation so definitively.

Still, why would God (the king in Jesus’ parable) destroy the invitees to the wedding banquet, even if they had killed his slaves? And our Gospel parable becomes even more troublesome if we consider the end of it: Of all the guests from the streets who show up at the wedding feast—we might think, understandably, that the important thing is that they show up at all; they are already better than the earlier guests who refused the king’s invitation twice—one is not wearing the wedding robe provided him by the king. So the king throws him out “into the outer darkness, where there [is] weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Again, why would the king throw this poor guest, who had already gotten into the banquet hall and possibly ordered his complimentary drink at the bar, out of the hall?

I think that, at this point, we need to accept to some extent that Jesus’ parable of the wedding banquet is a story. It is a condensed account of how many times would-be guests could dishonour the king at a royal wedding banquet before being punished. There are cultural elements at play in Jesus’ parable, too: Guests at royal weddings in Jesus’ time, even if one were a lowly person who managed to be invited to the feast by default, would be provided a robe by the king. To refuse to wear this robe was a supreme insult to the banquet host. And Jesus was not beyond using a little exaggeration to make a point.

The point of Jesus’ parable today is, I think, this: God or the king is indeed infinitely patient, gracious, merciful with us. As Hans Urs von Balthasar says, the freedom is ours to refuse (even definitively, finally) or to place limits or obstacles before God’s invitation to the wedding feast of heaven. The freedom is ours to refuse to do God’s will by being kind, just, patient with one another in this life on earth. And our actions—either accepting or refusing God’s invitation to the feast—have consequences. Our Gospel says, “many are called, but few are chosen.” Sisters and brothers, we have all been called by our baptism to the king’s wedding feast, the feast to celebrate the mystical marriage of the king’s Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, and his bride, the Church. But the freedom is ours to RSVP or not, to show up or not, to wear the wedding robe the king gives us or not. God will not stop us if we do not wish to attend or wear the robe, although he might try a few times (at least twice, according to the parable) to send servants—our fellow sisters and brothers in faith—to invite us to the feast if we do not accept the invitation right away.

I do not wish to discourage us. But please let me suggest that the ways in which we can refuse God’s invitation to the wedding feast can be much subtler than refusing to show up at the banquet, much less committing murder, as the first invitees do in our Gospel reading today. It is possible for us to be admitted to the banquet hall even if, like the poor guest at the end of today’s Gospel, we are not wearing the king’s issue wedding robe.

One way I think we find ourselves admitted to the wedding feast, or at least this sacrament of it, without (figuratively) wearing our robe is if and when we overestimate the gravity of our own sin or, we may think of it this way, when we underestimate the infinity of God’s mercy. There is a whole concept of what (or who) the Church is, a whole ideology of the seriousness of human sin and modern societies’ failure to account for it, at play here. So I will not dwell too much on this right now. But I only want to say how much it saddens me profoundly when somebody denies her or himself communion at Mass unless they are (and this is up to the person’s conscience, which I cannot judge) truly in a state of very serious or mortal sin.

Our Gospel reading today says that, after the first guests refused the king’s invitation outright, the king sent servants to call in “the good and the bad” from the streets to fill the banquet hall. If any of us is, according to your conscience, among the “bad,” please remember this: You are here, attending this Eucharistic sacrament of the king’s, God’s, heavenly wedding banquet. Wear your robe! If the sin on your conscience is less serious, the Penitential Rite at the beginning of Mass solves that problem. Less serious sins are absolved, forgiven during the Mass itself. Do we not acknowledge, just before receiving communion, “Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof.”

The Lord says to us, “Good, then. I will invite you under my roof, to my sacrament, my Eucharistic feast.” Please never turn down the Lord’s invitation to this celebration under God’s roof! Please wear the robe marked “redeemed sinner” that God has given each of us at our baptism! And if you have committed a truly serious or mortal sin, the sacrament of reconciliation will solve that problem. Please resolve to go to confession as soon as possible. As a priest, I personally have never and will never turn somebody down who asks me for the sacrament of reconciliation! We will wash your wedding robe, with a few generous squirts of stain remover, dry clean it (figuratively) if we need to and, Voilà, it will be as good as on the day of our baptism!

God’s mercy, God’s generosity, God’s loving kindness, God’s salvation are infinite. It is up to us to RSVP, to attend, to wear the robe when we receive God’s invitation to the wedding feast, in heaven and sacramentally here on earth, in this Eucharistic celebration. Take up, sisters and brothers, God’s invitation to eat and drink without reservation of God’s “rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear.” Or as Fr. Jim would say to that offer of eternal salvation, “Yum, yum, yum”!

Homily for Sunday, 10 September 2023– Twenty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

Readings of the day: Ezekiel 33:7-9; Psalm 95: 1-2, 6-7, 8-9; Romans 13:8-10; Matthew 18:15-20

When I served in Colombia as a postulant with the Basilians, we observed community spiritual practices that go way back in the Church and in religious orders, but which I found especially difficult: Culp and monitions. Culp is when you meet with a fellow member of the community (a postulant, seminarian, or priest) and tell him and ask his forgiveness for an offense you have committed, usually some wrong against the good of the community in the religious house. Monitions is when somebody in the local community confronts another about an offense he has committed.

It is not that I found culp easy: I could certainly think, without much difficulty, of a few ways in which I have tried and am still trying to live religious life better, be a better brother to the Basilians with whom I live; simply be a better human being. But, compared to culp, I sincerely disliked the practice in monitions of having to think of something of which to accuse one of my brother Basilians in the house. What if the offense of which I accused another made me look like a great hypocrite? Surely I am guilty of many things greater than the little offense of which I am accusing my brother, right? And I am not, by nature, confrontational.

I think this is healthy; I do not think I (or we) should go out of our way to reveal and confront the wrongs of others. If they are serious enough—like, real sins—they tend to reveal themselves quickly and widely in our social settings. And, contrary to the claim I hear occasionally that, because of increased secularization or other factors, our societies have “lost a sense of sin,” I think (maybe this is influenced by my experience of religious community life) that our societies, as secularized as they are, have increased in their sense of the social effects of evil, what we call sin, over its effects on the individual. This increase in awareness of “social sin” and its effects has been especially rapid in the last few generations, our lifetimes. I would like to know our thoughts on this.

But, I think, few of us enjoy confronting another person or a group, even if they are behaving in a truly wrong or sinful way. Nobody wants to be revealed as a great hypocrite for exposing the sins of others that may pale in comparison to the gravity of our own wrongs. Yet this is precisely the ministry God gives to the prophet in today’s reading from the Book of Ezekiel.

God has set Ezekiel as “a watchman for the house of Israel.” If Ezekiel refuses not only to confront a fellow Israelite who has sinned, but “to warn the wicked to turn from their ways,” he will meet the same end that they will. Ezekiel, like those who act wickedly, “will die in their iniquity.”

God asks quite the unenviable task of Ezekiel. Like most if not all the Old Testament prophets, I imagine that Ezekiel simply wanted to live a good life and go about his business without troubling anybody. Last week we heard from Jeremiah, another prophet who has a different vision for his life before God calls him to be a prophet to Israel. And when God calls Jeremiah to be a prophet, Jeremiah immediately wants to back out, but feels compelled—“enticed” is the word Jeremiah uses—to continue in the ministry to which God has called him, even though this has made him “a laughingstock” to his fellow Israelites.

So this is a common theme in the prophetic writings of the Old Testament: God insists on calling the prophets to a thankless ministry; the prophets’ reluctance to accept God’s call does not exempt them from it. In our Gospels, Jesus and his disciples are heirs to this same tradition of ancient Israel, the Jewish people. Jesus and his disciples, now we, are heirs to the same prophetic ministry as people like Ezekiel or Jeremiah exercised. So, what is this prophetic ministry? What does it look like for us to exercise it?

Inheriting the tradition and the ministry of the Old Testament prophets, of Jesus and his first disciples does not mean minding our own business, or even going about living our best lives as individuals when clearly evil exists and people do wrong in our world. Even if we are unsure if another’s actions are wrong or sinful enough to merit our intervention or confrontation—this was my problem with monitions—Jesus’ teaching and God’s call to Ezekiel say to us that it is not enough that we should simply mind our own business.

The greatest good not only of individuals but of the whole community—the “common good”—must be first and foremost when somebody has done wrong in a way that might have compromised the good of the community. Remember the beginning of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, before the Beatitudes in the same Gospel of Matthew from which we hear today. Jesus’ first teaching in Matthew in fulfillment of “the Law and the prophets” is: “When somebody wrongs you, first go and be reconciled with your brother or sister, and then offer your gift at the altar.”

That first teaching of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, “First be reconciled,” conditions Jesus’ teaching in today’s Gospel reading about what to do when a brother or sister, a sharer in our faith, a member of our Church wrongs us. “First be reconciled,” or, as Jesus says today, “Go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone.”

And, by “go and point out the fault,” Jesus is not saying that we should point out another’s fault, even a serious one, in a nasty or vindictive way. In this first step of how to act when another person wrongs us, I hear almost a presumption on Jesus’ or Matthew’s part that, most of the time, this step will suffice to bring the person who has committed the wrong to remorse and penance. How many times has this happened to us: We are about to say to somebody, in the most forgiving and empathetic tone we can muster (please pray for the graces of forgiveness and empathy in these situations!), “What you did or said really hurt me”? And, before we are even able to say something like that, the person says, “I’m sorry. I did or said something very hurtful and wrong.” This has happened to me many times. And it is most humbling when a person to whom I am closest—a friend, maybe even a family member or a brother Basilian—asks (in fact, anticipates) my forgiveness in this way. Just as often, this happens when I go into an encounter of reconciliation with such a person thinking I was in the wrong; that I said or did something to irritate that person and provoke a harsh response.

Forgiveness, communal and individual, must rule these encounters, Jesus says, for any wrong not to weigh down and destroy the community of faith. Maybe we tend (I am not sure about any of us, but I speak for myself) to think of Jesus’ promise at the end of today’s Gospel reading in the context of the Eucharist, the Mass, or other communal prayer: “For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”

It is perfectly right for us to interpret Jesus’ promise in this way: Jesus is with us in this celebration, where there are “two or three,” or however many “gathered in [his] name.” But even with respect to the Eucharist, what is the first thing we do after the opening sign of the cross as a community, “gathered in [Jesus’] name”? As a community present together, we ask one another’s forgiveness. We pray a Penitential Act! Sisters and brothers, we are enacting the steps of today’s Gospel, our prophetic ministry after the likes of Ezekiel, every time we gather for Mass! That is quite remarkable, if you ask me.

And if encountering a brother or sister who has wronged us (or if we have wronged somebody) one-on-one in a spirit of reconciliation and forgiveness does not work, Jesus says, then bring witnesses: “Take one or two others along with you.” Those “one or two others” can be a check or balance if we are unsure whether the wrong of another really merits further action, if it has really hurt the good of the community. If it is a wrong worth pursuing further action and the enlisting of witnesses to forgiveness does not work, only then is it permissible to treat the person who has done wrong “as a Gentile and a tax collector,” Jesus says. And, even when it is necessary (on rare occasions this will happen!) to cast somebody out of the community—I think of the formal Church penalty of excommunication—the goal of such a penalty, of such exclusion must always be to remedy the break, the hurt caused by the sin. Even in this most extraordinary step, the goal must not be a vindictive, final exclusion, lacking hope for reconciliation.

When we seek first to forgive, Jesus is there among us. When we “first [are] reconciled,” alone with another who has wronged us or one whom we have wronged, and then with “one or two others” and then with the whole Church as witnesses, Jesus is there among us. When forgiveness and penance reign, we build a truly prophetic community of faith in which nobody is forever excluded “as a Gentile or a tax collector.” This last step becomes unnecessary when we are truly accountable not only for our own moral conduct or that of our brothers and sisters, but for how readily we forgive and are reconciled with one another. That, Jesus says, is at the heart of our identity as a Christian community of faith, the Church.

Homily for Sunday, 8 September 2019

Readings of the day: Wisdom 9:13-18b; Psalm 90:3-4, 5-6, 12-13, 14, 17; Philemon 9-10, 12-17; Luke 14:25-33

23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time

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

Full disclosure: Yesterday was my brother Eric’s and (officially) new sister-in-law Chelsea’s wedding at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church in Sherwood Park, a great celebration of love, family, friendship and, dare I say, Christian discipleship. What exactly, then, does Jesus mean when he says, “Whoever comes to me and does not hate their father and mother, spouse and children, brothers and sisters… and even their life itself cannot be my disciple”? How many of us here now, maybe with your family or friends, are here because you in fact really hate your father or mother, husband, wife, or children, brothers or sisters, or even your own life? And petty squabbles and, kids, sibling rivalries do not count. Jesus says we really need to hate each other to be his disciples, right?

Well, not quite. At least I hope that, having just celebrated my brother Eric’s and sister-in-law Chelsea’s wedding, I am now not supposed to hate them and the rest of my family if I want to be Jesus’ disciple! I think we may understand what Jesus says in today’s Gospel a little better with a brief lesson in Greek, because Jesus’ original meaning when he asks us to hate “father and mother, spouse and children, brothers and sisters… and even [our] life” in order to be his disciple gets lost in translation to English. When Jesus asks us to hate “father and mother, spouse and children, brothers and sisters… and even [our] life” in order to be his disciple, the word we hear as “hate” is from the Greek misei. In English, words like “miser” or “miserly,” for somebody who is not very generous with his or her money, derive from this Greek word.

So, does this mean that Jesus’ ultimate disciple would be somebody like Ebenezer Scrooge? Well, again, not quite. Misei in Greek means, more precisely, “to treat as nothing”; “as of minimal to no importance.” This may still be troublesome for those of us who love our families and like to spend a lot of time with them, as I do. One great blessing I have when I have taught here at St. Joseph’s College is to live, for a few months of the year, in the same city as most of my immediate family and many of my closest friends. I would have difficulty being Jesus’ disciple if this meant treating my family as if they were not important. This is simply not my reality; my experience.

But to be Jesus’ disciple, I think Jesus is saying to us today, is a question of priorities. Even if (as I hope we all do) we love our mothers and fathers, our wives, our husbands, our children, and know the beauty and dignity of our own lives, Jesus is asking us to put God first. Jesus is inviting us to put our relationship with God above all the other great relationships we may have with people closest to us and however much we may love our own lives. Compared with our relationship with God, Jesus invites us to consider even the greatest of our relationships with other people and with ourselves (and certainly our own ego) as of minimal to no importance. This is especially because all our relationships with other people—our families and close friends—and our ability to recognize and love the dignity of our own lives all find their source in God.

If we understand Jesus’ saying that, to be his disciple, we must “hate… father and mother, spouse and children, brothers and sisters… and even [our] life” in this way, this may also help us to place what Jesus says to us in the context of our other readings today, from Wisdom, the Psalms, and Philemon.

The Book of Wisdom, not surprisingly, invites us to prioritize and seek after wisdom. Now, the Book of Wisdom is a strange book of the Bible. It, like several books that make up the so-called “wisdom literature” of the Old Testament—Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Sirach, some of the Psalms, and Wisdom—barely mention God and at times include statements that are theologically problematic if they are not interpreted carefully. We hear even today, for example, that “a perishable body weighs down the soul, and this earthly tent burdens the thoughtful mind.” Texts like this would be used by people on the fringes of the early Church called Gnostics (from another Greek word, gnosis, that means “knowledge”), who taught that the human body is like a prison dwelling from which the soul had to free itself to go to heaven. This teaching, and the Gnostics’ view that there is knowledge, gnosis, that is essential for our salvation that is outside the Bible or the teaching of the Church handed on from Jesus’ Apostles, were eventually condemned by the Church as heresy. But the Biblical wisdom literature is also peculiar in that it mentions God sparingly and, at face value, tends to prioritize human faculties like wisdom over anything divine.

At least today’s reading from Wisdom acknowledges a divine source (who remains unnamed, but still) of wisdom. The Book of Wisdom asks, “Who has learned your counsel, unless you have given wisdom and sent your holy spirit from on high”? So, if Wisdom prioritizes or glorifies wisdom above all, we could say that it does so because to prioritize or glorify wisdom is to point us to the source of all wisdom, the ultimate source of “all that is good,” whom we call God.

Like the Book of Wisdom and Luke’s Gospel, St. Paul’s letter to Philemon also calls us to discern priorities. Philemon is the shortest and one of the latest of St. Paul’s letters that are included in our Bible. St. Paul writes from prison to a wealthy Christian of the time, Philemon, who was possibly a bishop or other leader of the Church and who owned slaves, but whose slave Onesimus had run away from him. In the meantime, Onesimus had become a Christian (possibly baptized by Paul) and was being accompanied and taught by St. Paul in the Christian faith. If the Old Testament Book of Wisdom prioritizes the human faculty of wisdom, Philemon gives pride of place to virtues like forgiveness and reconciliation. Like wisdom, forgiveness and reconciliation point us to our utmost priority, God. Who here has forgiven or reconciled with another person, or been forgiven, not least in the sacrament of reconciliation, and so knows of what I speak?

Philemon, whom St. Paul addresses with this brief yet moving letter, was in no way obligated to receive Onesimus back as his slave, much less as “a beloved brother” in Christ as St. Paul asks of him. St. Paul knows this; he knows Philemon’s legal rights toward Onesimus, yet he asks Philemon to receive Onesimus back anyway, using affectionate terms for Onesimus like “my child” and describing his relationship with Onesimus like that of a father to a son.

St. Paul’s letter to Philemon, Jesus in Luke’s Gospel, our Psalm today, and the Book of Wisdom all point us to our ultimate priority, who is God. But each reading we hear today points us to God in a different way. In the letter to Philemon, the way to God is through practice of the virtues of forgiveness and reconciliation, especially when we are not required to forgive somebody; to receive that person back as “a beloved brother” or sister. Forgiveness and reconciliation without conditions is how God acts toward us when we stray from God and hurt one another by our sin. Unlike Onesimus, though, we do not begin as slaves; we begin as beloved people, created in God’s own image and likeness.

Our Psalm, like the Book of Wisdom, prioritize wisdom among ways of seeking God first. To know the shortness of our earthly days is, in a way paradoxically, to know the “favour” and “steadfast love” of the LORD for us; to know God as the source of our life, both our finite life on earth and our eternal life with God in heaven for which this life is our preparation.

In this earthly life, family and close friends can help us to prepare for eternal life by acting as examples of God’s love toward us, and our acting as examples of God’s love toward them. It will be unlikely for us, but it does happen still in our world today that people, Christians, are asked to choose in a moment between love for family, friends, and this life, and God. It is for these moments especially that Jesus says, “Whoever does not carry their cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.”

Whether in the rare event we will be called to give our life for the Lord, or whether we seek wisdom, or love of family and friends, or forgiveness and reconciliation—all of which are good things—may we allow our seeking after these things to point us toward God. All earthly realities are secondary: Wisdom, human love and relationships, even giving our lives for our faith. God is and must be first. God is the source of “all that is good”; all that God gives us in this life for our salvation.

Homily for Monday, 26 August 2019

Readings of the day: 1 Thessalonians 1:1-5, 8b-10; Psalm 149:1b-2, 3-4, 5-6a, 9b; Matthew 23:13-22

Monday of the 21st week in Ordinary Time

This homily was given at St. James Church, Vernon, BC, Canada.

Do we not hear quite a contrast between our readings today from 1 Thessalonians and our Psalm, on one hand, and our Gospel from Matthew on the other hand? Do we not find comfort in St. Paul’s first words of his first letter to the Thessalonians: “We always give thanks to God for all of you and mention you in our prayers”?

And is our Psalm not similarly comforting: “For the LORD takes pleasure in his people; he adorns the humble with victory”? Our Psalm is the 149th of 150 of the Psalms in our Bible. The last three Psalms in the Biblical Book of Psalms, numbers 148, 149, and 150, make up a set known as the “Hillel” Psalms. If we think of a Hebrew word that sounds similar to “Hillel,” maybe we would think of “Hallelujah,” which literally means “Praise be to God.” And so our Psalm today begins, “Sing to the LORD a new song, his praise in the assembly of the faithful.”

This sounds a lot like what we do well already. Certainly, those of us who gather for Mass at 8:00 am daily here at St. James do so with a sense of joy. But it takes a particular amount of commitment anyway to gather here every day (for many of us), rain, snow, or shine, for Mass, to offer our praise to God “in the assembly of the faithful.”

So I think St. Paul’s words to the Thessalonians or the words of the Psalmist could very well be addressed to us. But then what should we make of the Gospel reading we hear today. Jesus’ seeming harshness in our Gospel today is startling: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you lock people out of the kingdom of heaven”!

I suppose we could focus our attention on the more consoling, gracious words of 1 Thessalonians or our Psalm, or interpret Jesus in our Gospel as directing his harshest criticism at the religious leaders of his time. Jesus’ excoriation of the Pharisees and scribes in Matthew is certainly challenging for me to hear as an ordained minister of the Church: Am I serving the Church with purity of heart? For the times when I or any leader in our Church, ordained or non-ordained, allows ego to take priority over leading us, the baptized faithful, to salvation, I ask for our forgiveness. I ask for our prayers for our leaders, in the Church and in public office in our civil society, that by God’s grace we will serve the betterment of the Church and our civil society.

But I do not think that we should simply put aside Jesus’ words in Matthew’s Gospel today as if they were directed at only religious leaders, or all leaders, in Jesus’ time or ours. Please let me say again: I have great confidence that our devotion to our faith and often-daily Eucharist is strong; it is eminently praiseworthy. So I think the words of praise to the faith communities of the Psalmist’s and St. Paul’s time apply to us here at St. James and in so many places all over the world.

Yet what is our ultimate motivation for all our devotions; our prayers; our gathering for Mass nearly every day, many of us? Do we speak and act for justice; toward bringing every one of the baptized faithful closer to God and God’s saving grace? Do we seek to reconcile divisions in our world, within our Church; within our own relationships, and do we pray for this reconciliation? If so, we rightly and with purity of heart may “sing to the LORD a new song,” a song of “praise in the assembly of the faithful” that God will hear and that will help to bring us to salvation.