Morning Devotion for Friday, April 15, 2016

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Good morning, everyone. In my office, I have a little ceramic plaque, like a little plate, sitting on my windowsill. It was given to me by parishioners a few years ago. This plaque says, “Faith: As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”

This is a quote from Joshua 24:15, where the Israelites were given the choice to serve either the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, or the false gods of other nations. They were about to enter into the Promised Land, and this quote is from Joshua giving that choice and his decision to follow the Lord. The people of Israel responded, “Far be it for us that we should forsake the Lord to serve other gods.” Their choice was to follow the One True God over the false gods of other nations.

Israel wasn’t always faithful. They kept returning to these false gods, and had to be keep being called back to the One True God and being reminded of who the One True God is.

In our lives, we too are given the choice between the One True God, our Heavenly Father, and the false gods of the world. These aren’t the ancient gods that the Israelites were tempted by, such as the gods of the Middle East or Egypt or so on. Instead, the false gods we’re temped by are the false gods of worldly goods, human pride and self-centeredness. A false god is anything that becomes more important to us than serving God, and comes between us and God.

The fact is, our human temptation is to be worldly in spirit, focused on the things of the world. We tend to lose focus on what is truly important in our lives: our relationship with Our Lord Jesus Christ, and to serve others instead of ourselves. That desire to serve comes out of our relationship with Christ.

If we are worldly in spirit, we end up regulating our spiritual life to Sundays or certain situations, and not allowing our faith in Christ to influence every moment of our lives. To quote a phrase, we end up “Singing with the angels on Sunday, but living like the Devil the rest of the week”. Like the Israelites, we tend to wander away from the service of God, and follow the false gods of the world.

We need to hear the call of Our Lord to return to Him. Our Lord is waiting for us to return like the father in the parable of the prodigal son: The son who rejected his father and turned away from him. God is calling us when we fall into the trap of worldly things as this prodigal son did. He is waiting for us. We just need to turn back to Him.

(Post Reflection Music: Newsboys – The King is Coming)

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Morning Devotion for Thursday, April 14, 2016

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Good morning, everyone. We live in a world where so many voices claim to have the truth. There are religions that claim to have the truth. There are political commentators who claim to have the truth, especially at this time of elections they claim to be the “right answer” for everything. And so on.

All these voices that claim to have the truth, all they do is contract each other. Some of them even seem to go out of their way to argue with each other; look at politicians for example.

On top of all this, there is a whole different group of people who claim there is no truth outside of ourselves. It’s a moral relativism, where so long as I believe it’s the truth, it’s truth for me.

The problem with all these different competing truths is that we as Christians believe that there is a truth that we can find and follow. This truth is not some philosophy, nor some political platform; it’s not some thing. The Truth that we are called to follow is some body.

This Truth that we are called to follow is a person who became incarnated. This person is Our Lord Jesus Christ, who Himself tells us that He is “the Way, the Truth, and the Life”. We believe as Christians that God revealed the fullness of Truth through His Son. He revealed to us that there is a Truth, and that we are to follow it by following His Son.

People don’t want to hear that. They don’t want to hear that there is an objective truth, and that not every organization that claims to tell the truth is lying, but that there is someone who is the Truth. They don’t want to hear that because that means there are obligations they have to follow outside of themselves, that they cannot control what they think the truth is. However, there is a Truth that needs to lead and guide them.

This takes away from them the ability to justify how they live their lives. If there is a Truth outside of themselves, some of the things that they may be saying or doing are not true, good or right. Instead they want to follow relativism, the idea that there is no objective truth. The fact is that we live in a culture that says that.

Much of our culture is taking that which was revealed by Christ and saying it’s wrong. Instead, what he condemned is now being held as good, so long as it doesn’t hurt anyone and it’s mutually consented, and so on. Much of what was once viewed as a moral wrong is now seen as morally positive, or at least morally neutral. In fact, it seems the only morally wrong thing in the world today is either to be conservative or to judge someone else’s actions.

Of course, we know that there is a Truth, and that we are called to follow that Truth and to follow Him only.

(Post Reflection Music: Tree63 – You Only)

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=imgarsW9shM

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Morning Devotion for Wednesday, April 13, 2016

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Good morning, everyone. Most of us have had that bad breakup, like after a bad relationship blew up and ended. Maybe we had a bad period in a relationship which led to that bad breakup. We know what it’s like to have come up with some way to end it as gracefully as possible.

The song I picked for this morning is called “So Long Self”. It takes some of those cheesy breakup lines you might have heard, or even used, and plays with them. Instead of breaking up with someone else, it’s breaking up with ourselves for the love of God. It’s using these breakup lines to talk about giving up selfishness, the love for ourselves,  and turning that love over to God, then giving of ourselves to others.

What the song is doing is show us how we can follow those two great commandments I talked yesterday. The two great commandments come from Matthew 22:37-39: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is like it. You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

The true love of God leads to service. That’s why Our Lord connected these two great commandments: when we truly love God, we will truly desire to love our neighbor. This is probably one of the greatest challenges we have with the Gospel message. The message of the Gospel is that we are not to think of our needs or wants, but to place the needs of others and the love of God above our desires.

This flies in the face of human pride. Our human pride says that we want to be the greatest. We want to be the one who is better than anybody else in what ever it is we do. We want to be like the disciples in the Gospel of Mark, where they actually debated over who was the greatest, right after hearing from Our Lord that he would be sacrificed and die for our sins, and in response, the disciples debated who was the greatest. Our Lord answered, “If anyone would be the greatest, he must be the last of all and the servant of all.”

This is following the example of Our Lord Himself. As Mark also tells us, He came “not to be served, but to serve, and to give His life as a ransom for many.” This is opposite of what our human pride would say. Our pride would say that the greatest are those who are being served, not those who serve.

To overcome this human pride, we need to give of ourselves out of love of God and love of neighbor. And we need to be willing to say, as the song says, so long self!

(Post reflection music: MercyMe – So Long Self)

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Morning Devotion for Tuesday, April 12, 2016

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Good morning, everyone. In the Gospel passage which we heard on Sunday at Catholic Mass – I know other churches use similar series of readings – Simon Peter was asked by Our Lord 3 times, “Do you love me?” That would be difficult enough, to hear Our Lord 3 times after His death and resurrection ask him do you love me.

The first time Our Lord asks this question he does it a little bit different. He says, “Do you love me more than these?” This isn’t just more than the other apostles, he’s asking Peter if he loves Him more than anything else in the world. Is there anything more important to Peter than Our Lord, or is Our Lord the most important thing in His life.

That’s a difficult question to be asked, but it’s a question we should  be asking ourselves. We are called by Our Lord to God above all things. And yet, I think we often put other things as more important, we love other things, more than we love God. We then end up making excuses why we aren’t following Our Lord as we should.

We find time for many things in our lives, those things we enjoy or desire. Do we ever find time for God in prayer and worship? We are truly called to love God above all things, putting God first in our priorities, and to put everything else 2nd to Him. We are called to look at the example of the apostles and the great saints who have gone before us, and gave up their families, their jobs, their possessions to follow Our Lord. Some even gave their very lives to follow Him.

We are called to do that because Our Lord in his 2 great commandments said that we are to “love God with our whole heart, soul and being. Second to that is to love our neighbor as ourselves. If we are not following God with that true love, we are not following that first commandment.

I think we realize deep down that there is a risk when we love God above all things because we end up doing and saying things at are not popular, and there will be pushback. Look at the prophets in the Old Testament and the Apostles after Our Lord ascended into heaven. They did and said things that caused them great greif. People became upset with them.

If we love God above all things, we will do and say things that will cause others to become upset with us. There will be difficulty in dealing with others. There will be problems that arise. People will not be happy with what we do and what we say.

But God will reward us if we love Him above all things. He will begin to give us the Grace in this life, the true joy that we desire, the true joy that comes from following Him, and cannot not be received from anything else but God. We will also receive eternal joy in the next life, which nothing else on earth can promise.

Above all, we should desire to love God because God wishes to spend eternity with us.

Like He asked Simon Peter, Jesus asks us “Do you love me more than these?” Of course, our answer should be as Simon Peter said, “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.

(Post reflection music: Newsboys – Shine)

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Morning Devotion for Monday, April 11, 2016

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(The local radio station gives some time to the county Ministerial Association every Monday through Friday morning for a short devotion. The ministers in the area take a week at a time to give these devotions. The short reflection by the minister is followed up with music of his choice. This week is my turn, so I’m sharing these devotions to more than just the Phillips County, MT, area.)

Good morning, everyone. It’s great to be with you again for these morning devotions.

What do you think is our greatest challenge for us as Christians? What is the greatest challenge we need to face as we follow Our Lord? Well, I would argue that our greatest challenge comes from the Book of James 1:22, “Be doers of the word, and not hearers only.”

I say that’s a challenge because it’s very easy for us to be a hearer of the Word. It’s passive, it’s apathetic, we don’t need to do anything; in fact, being hearers of the word doesn’t demand anything from us. It doesn’t require us to change; it may even make us think we’re in the right because we hear things in the Word of God that seem to agree with our particular world view.

What’s hard for us to do is to be a hearer of the Word, to actively live out God’s commandments, because it requires much of us. It requires us to change. It requires us to have a constant reevaluation of our lives.

This isn’t any thing new. This is a constant struggle throughout humanity. Look at the Israelites in the Old Covenant. The Scriptures tell us that the Israelites were given God’s Words in “statutes and decrees” that were taught by Moses. They were very clearly given the Word of God, as we see in the early books of the Scriptures. But they would regularly fall away from God’s commandments, and would end up following these false gods of human tradition. They needed judges and prophets to call them back.

Sadly, this situation didn’t change after Our Lord came. When we look at the situation throughout the history of the Church, we see that Christians regularly fall away from God’s Word given by Christ to His Church. We see this in divisions within the Church, people fighting within the Church, but we also see it with the various denominations we have today that have split the Church.

Even worse than that, are the many Christians who are unconcerned with the active practice of the Faith. Yes, they’ll say they’re Christians: they’ll believe in Our Lord, but they give no public nor private practice of their Faith. They’re not praying, and they’re not committing to public worship.

If we are to truly be a doer of the word, following the Scriptures, it means allowing the Word of God to influence our lives. Just being a hearer only means allowing sin to fester within us; to allow ourselves to not be changed by Our Lord and allow that sin to remain in our hearts and defile us. If we are to be a doer of the Word, it cleans all that out. I quoted James 1:22, but also look at the verse right before it, James 1:21: “Put away all filth and evil excess and humbly welcome the word that has been planted within you, and is able to save your soul.” By being a doer of the Word, it purifies our hearts to follow God’s commandments, and leads us to the salvation which God has promised us for His glory.

So, the time is now to stop being only hearers of the Word, but to be doers for God’s glory.

(Post Reflection Music: Matt Maher – For Your Glory)

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Homily Podcast

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Just a quick note for those who aren’t familiar with my website, I’ve been posting audio recordings of my Sunday and Holy Day homilies for a couple years now. You can either listen to those homilies via my website on the “Home” tab, or subscribe to the podcast in iTunes, Stitcher or by copying the RSS link into other podcast software (including Google Play Music when they finally release the capability).

No, the sky isn’t falling

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It seems like every time Pope Francis so much as sneezes, Internet commentators start sounding like Chicken Little: “The Church is falling! The Church is falling!” Now, I haven’t read any of Amoris Laetitia, and I don’t know when I’ll get around to reading it, so I don’t know if it’s good, bad, or just plain ugly.

What I do know, however, comes from the words of Rabbi Gamaliel in yesterday’s Gospel:

For if this endeavor or this activity is of human origin, it will destroy itself. But if it comes from God, you will not be able to destroy them; you may even find yourselves fighting against God.

The fact is, the Church survived Gamaliel and the Sanhedrin, the Roman Empire, Germanic Invasions, and many other empires and rulers that thought they could take Her down. She survived heresy, division, the (sad) schism with the Orthodox, the Protestant Reformation, Secular Humanist movements in Europe, Soviet-style Communism, and many more movements and philosophies. There have been bad popes, worse bishops, terrible priests (some may think I could among this number), and apathetic laity; and the Church still survives today. Some of Her strongholds have gotten weak (Europe, North America), and some of the lands washed by martyrs’ blood have become Her strongest bastions. The Church has survived, and will survive until Christ Himself returns.

To those who fear that Pope Francis will destroy the Church, I say, “Have hope! The Church will survive him.” There may be confusion right now. Certain movements within the Church may be celebrating and promoting their misunderstanding of what Pope Francis has taught and said, but it won’t last. Even during the most corrupt and decedent popes, great saints have arisen to call the Faithful back to Christ’s teaching and to evangelize the world.

The call for us as Catholic Christians is not to seek cover, crying “The Church is falling! The Church is falling!” It’s not for us to criticize every little word and action of Pope Francis. Our call is to be the great saints in our time by first living lives of virtue and hope, then proclaiming the Good News of Christ. Yes, the great saints in the past would occasionally “call out” popes, bishops, priests, and so on, but they recognized that their primary mission was to live according to the teachings of Jesus and proclaim those teachings to the world. That is our mission as well. If we wish to reform the Church, we must reform our lives first of all.

What Does An Evangelizing Parish Look Like?

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The title of this post is one I’ve been struggling with for some time: What does an evangelizing parish look like? In my opinion, this is a vital question that every person in the Catholic Church, whether clergy, religious or lay, needs to be asking. This question is not asked over concern for the future of the Catholic Church, but for the future salvation of those in our communities and neighborhoods.

Much has been made over the past 20-30 years about parishes establishing “mission statements”, but very few that I’ve seen explicitly mention evangelization. Yet, that is a primary mission which Our Lord gave to the Apostles: “Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.” (Matthew 28:19-20) It’s my contention that we do not evangelize as Catholics because have not made evangelization a primary mission of our parishes.

This post is the first in what should be a lengthy series of intermittent posts discussing various things a “model” evangelizing parish does. My hope is to get a vision that I and other pastors can use to reform our priestly ministry and guide our parishes in becoming evangelizing forces within our communities.

Lectio Divina

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For most of the school year, I’ve been leading Religious Education for our middle school (6th-8th grades) kids. We went through Mark Hart’s T3 Bible Timeline (which is admittedly a bit mature for this age group, but they still seemed to learn from it), finishing it last week. In the last lesson, Mark briefly touched on Lectio Divina, and there was a section in the student workbook on how to do Lectio.

Last night, I led the kids in the steps of Lectio, trying to explain how to do it, and they seemed to pick it up. They were even quiet! It was a good reminder for me about this beautiful and powerful prayer form, which I had learned at Mount Angel Seminary thanks to the Benedictine monks there.

For those not familiar, Lectio Divina is a 4-step immersion into hearing God speak to us through the Scriptures:

  1. Lectio – Reading: Slowly reading the Scripture passage, not skimming or rushing, but speaking the words out loud and intentionally listening to them.
  2. Meditatio – Meditation: Choosing a word or phrase that stands out in the reading, and chewing on it in your mind and heart.
  3. Oratio – Prayer: Speaking with God about the passages that stood out and your meditation on those passages
  4. Contemplatio – Contemplation: Entering deeply into God’s love and simply being in His presence

Lectio Divina is fairly simple to get the pattern, but difficult to master. Contemplatio is really something that develops over the course of a lifetime, and is a grace given by God Himself to those who seek Him. This doesn’t mean that the other 3 steps can’t bring His grace, however. Much fruit can be gained through the process of Lectio, Meditatio, and Oratio, especially for those called to the ministries of teaching and preaching.

I highly recommend all Christians explore and use Lectio Divina as a way to better understand the Scriptures and what God is saying to us each individually through them. It is an ancient, venerable form of prayer that is just as necessary today, if not more so due to the lack of silence, as it was over a thousand years ago. Much richness can be mined from the Scriptures, and deeper relationships with God the Father and His Son, the Word of God, can develop through the working of the Holy Spirit.