Good Friday 2023 - Morning Prayer - Weep for your sins

 

Following the Last Supper, Jesus and the disciples left the Upper Room, and processed to the Garden of Gethsemane up on the mount of olives. 

And there on the mountain he began to pray. He asked his disciples to stay awake with him and pray. But they kept falling asleep. Even Peter, James and John, his inner circle, who had witnessed his transfiguration on Mount Horeb, could not keep their eyes open.

And so, the Lord suffered, agony alone. St. Matthew tells us that his suffering was out of sorrow. Sorrow for who? Sorrow for Judas. Sorrow for Peter. Sorrow for his disciples’ indifference. Sorrow for the souls of those who would reject him ultimately, and spend eternity in hell. Suffering for those who call themselves Christians, yet persist in indifference to their vocation to holiness. Sorrow for priests who break their vows. Sorrow for married couples who break theirs. Sorrow for children whose hearts turn hateful toward their parents. And sorrow for parents who drive their children to such hatred. Sorrow for all the sins of the world. He took on himself not simply our sins, but the sorrow we should pay for them.

He sweat blood because we have failed to even shed sufficient tears for our sins.

Likely around 4am, the Lord was arrested and brought before Annas and Caiaphas and the Sanhedrin who brought false witnesses to testify against him. 

Around the time most of us were getting up this morning, between 6 and 8am, the Gospels are not clear Jesus was brought before the governor Pontius Pilate who found no reason to condemn Him, but sent him to the puppet-king Herod, who also failed to find a crime. 

Now with the crowd stirred up by the Sanhedrin, Pilate has Jesus scourged and then agrees to have him crucified, out of fear of a rebellion. Around 8am, Jesus begins to carry his cross through the streets of Jerusalem, and probably around the time you were starting your rosary, around 8:30am, Simon of Cyrene is tasked to help this stranger with the heavy burden.

Around 9am, the time we began our morning prayer, Jesus was nailed to the cross.

Following morning prayer we will depart in silence, but we will return to Church at the hour of the Lord’s final breath—“the ninth hour of the day”.

The Lord was sorrowful for us, and tells us that we ourselves should be sorrowful. He told the women of Jerusalem, “weep not for me, but weep for your sins and the sins of your children.”

Today, rightfully is a day of sorrow. We fittingly weep for our sins today. And we plead God’s mercy for ourselves, for all mankind, for priests and religious, for those who reject God, for those who seem to be stuck in cycles of sin, for those who have become lukewarm, for those who near death, especially those in danger of hell, that maybe, just maybe, if God wills it, a last opportunity for repentance may be given to them.

There is a tradition that of praying the Seven Penitential Psalms today: Psalm 6, 32, 38, 51, 102, 130, and 143. Today also begins The Divine Mercy Novena, which is prayed from Good Friday until Divine Mercy Saturday. 

We plead God’s mercy today through the passion and death of our Lord, to help us grieve our sins sufficiently, and to save souls by bringing them to repentance, for the glory of God and salvation of souls.

4th Week of Lent 2021 (EF) - Monday - Wisdom of Solomon and the Whip of Cords

 I remember exactly where I was when I first heard the story from today’s epistle of King Solomon and the two women. I was in second grade catechism class, sitting on the carpeted floor of my home parishes church basement. 

And I remember being so impressed with the clever way King Solomon determined who the true mother was, with his wisdom. I wondered just how many other wise solutions to problems he devised. I could imagine myself in Solomon’s place dispensing wise advice.

As a young boy, I think this story inspired a love of scripture as a source of wisdom—wisdom to live one’s life by, wisdom to help you know the difference between right and wrong—truth and deception.

Kind of a strange story to hear right in the middle of Lent, especially when coupled with the Gospel story of Our Lord fashioning a whip out of cords and driving the money changers out of the temple and predicting how he will be put to death.

And yet, in a sense, had the Jews of the Lord’s day exercised the wisdom of Solomon, they never would have sullied the temple with their corrupt business practices.

We are certainly meant to be impressed with the Wisdom of King Solomon and recognize the folly of the moneychangers, and yet, during Lent, I think we are also to meant to recognize the times where we have been like the deceitful harlot, those times where we have conducted our earthly business in competition with God, where we have sullied his temple. They would have known that the Temple was to be a house of prayer, not a den of thieves.

It’s easy to imagine ourselves giving wise advice like Solomon, maybe even imagining ourselves imitating the Lord’s great righteous fury, fashioning our own whip out of cords to drive the thieves out of the Lord’s temple. And yet, It’s quite another thing, isn’t it to humbly admit how unlike Solomon we have been. How rather than Solomon, we’ve acted more like the deceitful harlot, willing to compromise the truth at the expense of another’s happiness to achieve our ends. It’s one thing to express righteous zeal at the thieves in the house of the Lord, it’s another to humbly admit that we’re the ones that have so often deserved to be on the receiving end of that whip of cords.

Mea culpa, Right?

May our Lenten observances continue to instill in us deep contrition for our sins, open us up to wisdom from on High, and that we might come to know the joy of the heavenly Jerusalem, for the glory of God and salvation of souls.

4th Sunday of Lent 2019 - The Return of the Prodigal Son

One of the most famous of the parables of Jesus, proclaimed on this 4th Sunday of Lent, is the renowned Gospel we call the Parable of the Prodigal Son. The word prodigal isn’t one we use every day. It comes from the latin “prodigus” which means wasteful, excessively extravagant, or greatly lavish. The prodigal son was certainly excessively lavish and wasteful, selfishly demanding his share of his father’s estate. He took it, he left his father and brother, and went with all that money, and what did he do? He was prodigal with it. He wasted it on drinking, gambling, prostitutes, and soon enough he had squandered it all and was reduced to eating pig food. Finally, he gets the idea that he could go crawling back to his father, and perhaps enter into lowly servitude in order to subsist. He would have to live with the consequences of his prodigality, his lavish waste.

And yet, could we not also call this the parable of the Prodigal Father? Wasn’t the father, in a sense, prodigal? Not Prodigal in wasting money on earthly pleasures, of course, but excessively lavish and extravagant…in mercy, in forgiving his son. For when his prodigal son attempted to return, the father would have had every right to turn the wretch away: “How dare you show up here. You made your bed, now sleep in it.” And yet the father was Prodigal, lavish, in his mercy. He says, “Son, your return here, to my embrace, to the shelter of my house is something to celebrate. Welcome home.”

The point of Jesus’ parable of course is that WE are the prodigal sons and daughters. We waste God’s many gifts, we squander His blessings; instead of using the time we’ve been given to pursue truth, goodness, and beauty, we pursue flattery, selfishness, and the boring ugliness of sin. We are prodigal in our relationship to God. Yet, thanks be to God, God is Prodigal in Mercy. When we kneel before the Father, and say, Father I have sinned against you, I’m no longer worthy to be called your son or daughter, what does God Our Father do? He wraps us in the mantle of His Mercy, He calls for celebration in heaven when a sinner repents. He lavishly showers immense blessing upon the contrite, he welcomes home the wayward and the squandering with open arms. If that’s not good news, if that doesn’t cause us immense joy, what will? How appropriate that we have this message of joyful reconciliation on this 4th Sunday of Lent, which is called Laetare Sunday, Joy Sunday. God’s mercy is the source of our joy.

As you probably know, we have a beautiful print of Rembrant’s painting of the Return of the Prodigal Son in the parking lot entrance way. This was one of Rembrant’s last paintings before his death, and he beautifully depicts the son, in clothes, tattered from his life of dissipation, his sandals deteriorated from his wayward path, kneeling penitentially at his father’s breast. His father calmly embraces his son, laying hands on his shoulders as if to absolve him of sin. The dark scene is illuminated by the father’s tenderness, a symbol of weary and sinful mankind taking refuge in the shelter of God's mercy.

Now here is the challenge though: we must not let the message of mercy become a generic. God’s mercy is not just something that Jesus wants us to think about. Rather, he wants us to experience it, concretely and personally.

We are to really, physically kneel down and utter those words, “Father, I have sinned against you. I no longer deserve to be called your son or daughter. I have squandered your blessings. And here are the precise ways I have sinned.” And this humble acknowledgement and accounting of sin is primarily done in the Sacrament of Confession, the Sacrament instituted by Jesus Himself for the forgiveness of sins committed after baptism.

It is there in the Sacrament of Confession, we hear the words we long to hear, the words of our father saying, “welcome home, all is forgiven, you are still my son, you are still my daughter.”

Our Lord has given us the Sacrament of Confession to be that precise, concrete, personal moment of reconciliation, where we admit our prodigality before God, and we rejoice in God’s prodigality, who lavishes his mercy and forgiveness upon the repentant.  And there is no better time to return to the Sacrament of Confession than the season of Lent, as we prepare for Holy Week and Easter.

To be honest, there has been a great falling away from the celebration of this Sacrament over the past few decades. We are soberly aware of some distressing statistics. In a recent CARA study, only 12 percent of Catholics go to Confession at least once a year. 42% said, they never go. It’s not good. We are in danger of becoming Prodigal—wasteful—of one of the most beautiful, powerful, and life-changing ways that God wishes to encounter his people. “No thanks God, I’m fine, I don’t need your mercy.” How dangerous.

There are various excuses one hears for not going to confession: “the priest yelled at me when I was little, some priest or nun told me that Vatican II did away with the need for frequent confession,” this is not true. “I forgot how to go to confession, I forgot my act of contrition, it’s been too long, I wouldn’t know where to begin” or the worst of all “I don’t have any sins to confess”, which likely means you have failed to thoroughly examine your conscience…there are a lot of excuses, but none of them amount to anything, compared to the mercy God wishes to give you in that sacrament. If we really understood how much the Father wishes to meet us in the Confessional, we would run to the confessional. If you are avoiding confession out of laziness, embarrassment, fear, anger, confusion, or you disagree with the very institution of Confession, it’s time for a change. God, the Father, is waiting for you; for some of you, he’s been waiting a long time, but he is ready, to embrace you as the Father embraced the son in the Gospel today.

In the Lenten Scripture readings and orations today the Church challenges us to consider the joy of being reconciled to God. The Opening prayer spoke of hastening with promptness and eagerness to encounter God. And the prayer before communion speaks of the joy that comes from receiving the remedy for sin. Let’s allow God to answer these prayers in our life.

If you haven’t already, please make a Lenten confession, that you may know the peace and joy of the embrace of our merciful Father. To quote Paul in our second reading: “We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.”

And let us all pray for those who are lost, those who have left the Father’s house of the Church, that the lost may be found, that those dead in sin may through repentance and grace receive new life. There are inactive members of this parish and members of our family who, let’s be honest, are lost. And our prayers and our penances are so important in winning for them the grace of repentance. St. Paul, saw himself as an ambassador for Christ, an ambassador for the reconciliation that comes through Christ. Let us too be ambassadors for reconciliation and mercy.

May we be generous with God, continuing our Lenten penances with great gratitude and joy over the gift of God’s mercy, that his grace and mercy may abound in our parish and in our families for the glory of God and salvation of souls.

6th Sunday in OT 2019 - Sermon on the Plain

In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus gives his most famous sermon on top of a mountain. For Matthew depicts Jesus like Moses who atop Mt. Sinai received the Law of the Old Covenant from God. Jesus—the New Moses gives the teachings of the new law—the law of the new covenant that he came to form between God and Man. In Matthew’s Gospel, atop what is now called the Mount of Beatitudes, Jesus taught about holiness and eternal life, about salt and light, about anger, adultery, and divorce, and the love of enemies, prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, about judging others and casting pearls before swine, and the imperative of building your life on the solid foundations of his teachings.

In Luke, Jesus gives his first major sermon, not from the top of a mountain. In fact, St. Luke tells us that Jesus came down from the mountain, and taught his disciples and this large group of people on a stretch of level ground. This passage of Luke’s Gospel is known as Jesus’ Sermon on the Plain, and is delivered immediately after spending a night in prayer and naming the 12 apostles.

Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount and Luke’s Sermon on the Plain contain much of the same content, in fact, Luke’s version is a bit more down-to-earth, clearer and direct.
“Blessed are you who are poor, for the kingdom of God is yours.
Blessed are you who are now hungry, for you will be satisfied.
Blessed are you who are now weeping, for you will laugh.
Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude and insult you, and denounce your name as evil on account of the Son of Man."

Just four beatitudes compared to Matthew’s eight. And on the surface…this is a pretty strange teaching. Blessed are your when you are poor? Well, no one wants to poor. Everyone tries to get out of poverty. Blessed are you who are hungry? In Jesus’ day, to go hungry was a sign that you were cursed by God. Know one likes to be hungry. Blessed are you who weep? This is getting more masochistic as it goes on. Poor, hungry, now sad? We seek to escape sadness, depression, and grief. And the last one is even more dramatic. You are blessed when you are hated, persecuted, condemned as evil for being a follower of Jesus. Well…where do I sign up?

How do we begin to understand these odd teachings? Jesus certainly shakes-up the expectations of his audience. Christians are to view and treat the world differently. We aren’t to trust in the same things the worldly-minded trust in, we aren’t to hunger or crave or seek the same things as the worldly-minded because we recognize that nothing in the world can satisfy our deepest hunger for God. We get in trouble when we attach that deepest spiritual hunger to the things and ways of the world; we end up frustrated, exhausted, spiritually depleted, and even lost in sin.

This odd teaching requires we go a bit deeper though. Jesus uses this phrase “blessed are you” in each of these sayings. The Greek word for “blessed” is “Makarios”, the same as in Matthew’s Gospel. “Makarios” is often translated as blessed, happy, fortunate, or divinely joyful. The Greeks used to call the island of Cyprus “makaria” the Island of Joy. The Greeks felt Cyprus was like a high-end resort: so fertile, beautiful, pleasant, safe, peaceful, and rich in minerals and natural resources, that its inhabitants were completely self-sufficient. They had no need to travel or trade in order to live in perfect physical comfort. Maybe, Luke had this in mind in writing “Makarios”, that following Jesus’ teaching, you receive what is sufficient for making your way to the heavenly paradise.

Blessed, fortunate, divinely joyful, in possession of what is necessary for eternal life, are you when you are poor, that is, when you are not attached to or controlled by material things, but rather, when God is your greatest possession, when you do not allow the material things of the world to keep you from knowing, loving, and serving God.

So much of our sadness comes from allowing the things of the world to control us and distract us from what is most important in life. The world tells us that joy and happiness are obtained by amassing houses, cars, mobile devices, clothes and shoes, grander and more luxurious vacations. The devil loves to convince us to work harder and harder for these things, which may bring some temporary gratification, but in the end leaves us exhausted. The devil loves using worldly allurement to draw us away from that which truly gives us life--prayer, service, devotion, worship, and communion—that is genuine encounter with God, and genuine authentic human contact. So how blessed are you when you are poor, detached, dispassionate about the worldly and rich in the things of God.

Okay. Blessed, fortunate, divinely joyful are you when you are hungry. Hunger is linked to the sensual. So, how fortunate when you are not addicted to sensual pleasure. Food and drink and sex are good, and the ability to enjoy them in their proper context is good. Catholics are not puritanical. God pronounced these created things good. But good, in their proper context, moderated by reason. Pleasure is good, but not God. What sinful man tends to do, is to make them into gods. We attach our infinite desire for God to these created things and bend our wills to obtain them inordinately. But because these things do not satisfy our deepest desire for God, it’s no surprise that addictions emerge around these things: food addiction, drug and alcohol addiction, sex and pornography addiction—Addictions which cause great damage to the psyche, to families, and to souls.

But blessed are you when hunger, when you are detached from these sensual pleasures, when you don’t let the pursuit of physical pleasure control your life. Jesus came to set us free from slavery to the sensual.

Thirdly, Blessed, fortunate are you who now weep. The weeping of the righteous in scripture is often linked to the acknowledgement of sin. Isaiah cried out and wept: Woe is me, I am doomed! For I am a man of unclean lips” Isaiah wept because he was unable to come into the presence of God because of his sins. And so, blessed are you when your recognize your sinfulness and weep for your sins and seek conversion.

What does the world weep over? Certainly not over offending God! One can’t help but think of the recent legalization of abortion up to and including the birth of the child in several states for any reason. As a kid, in popular culture there was at least some acknowledging that abortion was not ideal. The slogan was “make abortion safe, legal, and rare”. In 2019 we hear slogans like “shout your abortion” or “abortion on demand without apology”. People not weeping but reveling in the fact that innocent life is murdered. The world weeps not for the destruction of its moral compass. 

Rather, Christians blessed are you when you weep over sin. We do well to make spiritual reparation through prayer and fasting for sins that cry out to heaven and for the conversion of those who revel over and celebrate sin.

And those who weep over sin, the Lord says, will one day laugh; those who acknowledge and repent of sin in this life will rejoice in the world to come.

And finally, blessed are you when you are persecuted for Christ. “Rejoice and leap for joy on that day!” The world wants to silence the Christian Gospel, wants us to compromise the moral teachings of Jesus, to water down the content of the faith, to change what has been received from Christ and the apostles. And we will face resistance when we trust in Jesus.

But Jesus promises blessedness, eternal life, and joy to those who persevere in the truth, who are willing to undergo suffering to courageously defend, patiently explain, clearly articulate, and unambiguously live the Christian faith in the face of error and confusion and persecution. We proclaim the Gospel of Life in the midst of a culture of death, but we do so joyfully, knowing that our efforts are made for the glory of God and salvation of souls.

2nd Week of OT 2018 - Friday - Insincere Repentance and Deepest Conversion

Yesterday, King Saul, jealous of the adulation of his people for young David, seemed to heed his son, Johnathan’s wisdom, that nothing is to gained by his hatred for David. Saul swears to God that David shall not be killed. So, it might have come as a surprise, that we read this morning, a few chapters later, that Saul and three thousand of his men are hunting down David.

We read how David had the perfect chance to kill his pursuer, literally catching Saul with his pants down, but when David spares Saul’s life, and gives an impassioned speech, again showing himself to be a friend of the king, Saul weeps and acknowledges David’s goodness.

Two chapters later in first Samuel, Saul forgets his contrition, and begins to hunt David again, and David again spares Saul’s life, yet even after that, we’ll find David fleeing Saul’s murderous plots.

Many mourn for their sins, but do not truly repent of them. Many will weep when they get caught in a misdeed and have to face the consequences of their actions, but they aren’t sorry for the action, they are sorry they got caught. I hear it in the confessional often, a child confesses getting in trouble for fighting with their sibling. They aren’t confessing the fighting, they are confessing getting caught.

Saul, was for a time ashamed of his envy and hatred of David, yet he did not rid himself of the deep bitterness in his heart, and so his hatred and treachery returned.

Insincere repentance might cause our sins to sleep for a bit, but likely they will return with greater force.

The Old Testament will chronicle, not just Saul, but Israel, exhibiting over and over again, half-hearted, insincere repentance, a failure to turn to the Lord completely.

Since, we are imbued with the Spirit of Christ, who himself completely surrenders to the will of the Father,  we, the Lord’s brothers and sisters, are able to practice the profound conversion. But we must desire, pray for and work for the deep personal conversion the Lord wants for us. We will always regret not handing over to God our selfishness and insecurities, but we will never regret allowing him to convert, change, and transform. us. For in complete surrender, we find perfect joy, for his glory and the salvation of souls.

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That all members of the Church may live out their baptismal call with greater conviction and faithfulness, and turn to the Lord in their sins with sincere contrition.
That those in civic authority may submit their minds and hearts to the rule of Christ, the Prince of Peace and Hope of the nations.
That the March for Life in Washington D.C. this Friday will help to transform our culture and inspire many to adhere to the Gospel of Life.
For all the needs of the sick and the suffering, the homebound, those in nursing homes and hospitals, the underemployed and unemployed, immigrants and refugees, victims of natural disaster, war, and terrorism, for all those who grieve the loss of a loved one, and those who will die today, for their comfort, and the consolation of their families.
For all who have died, and for all the poor souls in purgatory, and for X. for whom this Mass is offered.
Incline your merciful ear to our prayers, we ask, O Lord, and listen in kindness to the supplications of those who call on you. Through Christ our Lord