Receiving Mercy 

Today’s Gospel is very difficult to hear, if we listen carefully, because some men of God try to kill a woman. Some Pharisees, who would have been respected as we respect pastors and theologians, drag a woman caught in adultery to Jesus. Apparently they had followed a woman—probably a poor prostitute—and watched her hooking up with a customer. Not accusing the man, they jumped out to force this woman before Jesus; they used her to trap Jesus. They were using the law as a sledgehammer to bash this unfortunate sinful woman, and to bash sinless Lord Jesus. These two are thrown together, and unbelievably, they understand each other. Jesus wants to give the mercy she needs, and she gratefully receives the mercy he thirsts to give. The accusers, however, do not ask and so do not receive mercy. The woman, abased, humbly awaits Jesus’ decision, whereas the Pharisees grudgingly drop their stones, but keep their hatred, only now transferring it to Jesus. They have come for blood, and they will get it. Jesus will die in that woman’s place. In absolving her, Jesus makes her capable of receiving the real love she had never known from a man.
 
Sacramental Confession 

This drama plays out several times a day in our parish. Every time someone goes to confession, he or she kneels before the Lord humbling awaiting Christ’s sentence. And Our Lord does indeed judge the sinner, but only as worthy of mercy. He has come for our sins, and weeps that we will not give them to him (“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, if only you knew…”). The one thing Christ needs, however, is our presence in that confessional. God does uphold the law, for without right order we sink into demonic chaos. He does not condemn her, but he does tell her to sin no more. He doesn’t abrogate the law but makes us capable of keeping the law.
 
Go with Our Lady

So go to confession at least once before Easter. The woman in today’s gospel, after all, made her confession, albeit not under optimal circumstances. But the effect was the same—she received pardon and the grace to “avoid this sin.” Let’s not wait until someone accuses us, drags us under the public eye, before confessing our sins. The Church gives us the confessional to make it relatively painless. Ask Our Lady to go with you into the confessional, as crying children sometimes ask their mothers to go with them. You will not be condemned by Jesus, and you will escape the condemnation of men.

A Face like the Sun
​Our Lord climbs Mount Tabor to pray with Peter, James, and John, and while he is praying, is transfigured: the fourth Luminous Mystery of the Rosary. Two weeks ago I too climbed Mt. Tabor, with 45 others from our parish,  during our Holy Land pilgrimage. How wonderful to have been where Our Lord stood. We could see the fertile Valley of Jezreel, the limestone cliffs of Nazareth to the northwest, the Golan Heights to the east. What a grace to make that pilgrimage—you see the Scriptures as you hear them! So on Mount Tabor, Christ reveals his glory to Peter, James and John to strengthen their faith for the trauma of his Crucifixion. “This is my beloved Son,” a voice thunders from within the cloud. This is my Son, blazing with the radiance of the sun, with the glory of a billion stars. He will be humiliated on Good Friday, but he will be raised up, for the Creator of the Stars of Night cannot be conquered by darkness.
 
A Boy’s Telescope
When I was a kid I bought a telescope. With that treasure, I explored the heavens, gazing at galaxies and moons and planets, the rings of Saturn, the polar caps of Mars, the dusty lanes of stellar nebulae. As the apostles beheld Christ’s heavenly glory, let us also turn our telescopes to the heavens for a moment. On a clear night from a high mountain—Mt. Tam for instance—you can see hundreds of stars, a few planets, and the smoky edges of our own galaxy. That dull smudge is the Andromeda galaxy, 2.5 million light years distant (that’s 10,000 million trillion miles—the Lord owns a lot of real estate), which contains over a trillion stars. Both galaxies belong to the Local Group of about 50 galaxies, which belongs to a cluster, which clusters make up filament patterns of superclusters. My new favorite telescope, the Hubble, took a picture of the night sky the size of your thumb held at arm’s length and found 10,000 galaxies in that small dark spot. If every star (with its dozens of planets) were a grain of sand, the box to contain all the observable stars in the universe would have to be two miles high and two miles wide and stretch from New York to Atlanta. The universe is vast beyond our imagining, but God made man as the central jewel of creation: a creature to be loved for his own sake, and made capable of loving his Creator. But we are only capable of that love if we keep ourselves pure.
 
Your Sanctification
In the Epistle, St. Paul pleads with his beloved Christians at Thessalonica to imitate this immaculate whiteness of Christ.  He earnestly urges them, in the Lord Jesus, “to refrain from immorality and lust…. God has not called us to impurity but to holiness.” As a mother would speak with her daughter, or a father his son, he addresses the delicate and burning issue of purity. “Conduct yourselves in a way pleasing to God… this is the will of God—your sanctification.” Paul defines “sanctification,” in this passage, as sexual purity. Holiness is more than chastity, of course, but bodily impurity severely limits our capacity to love God. “Every other sin,” St. Paul will say, “is outside the body,” but the impure man compromises the very temple of the Holy Spirit, which is his own body.
 
While He was at Prayer…
The world in which we live smears its filth on us at every turn, from television, movies and social media. You can hardly do a simple google search without getting contaminated by someone’s impurity. How can we maintain the purity in which God created us? How can we keep our place among the radiance of his sun and stars? We all know that only God can keep us pure, that we are powerless in the grip of our own lusts to either sexual impurity or base uncharity. It is for us to pray, from the heart, every day, to dispose ourselves. Notice that the glory of Our Lord’s immaculate purity was revealed while he was in prayer. That’s why, at Star of the Sea, we are putting all our time, money, and energy into Perpetual Adoration of the Eucharist. We must make our parish another Mount Tabor, a hilltop from which the radiance of Christ’s light beams over the City. Every parish must be so, and I believe the surest way is to develop a culture of Eucharistic prayer in every parish. May Our Lady, the Immaculata, Star of the Sea, shine her brilliant purity upon us, leading us to the glory of Christ himself.

They say it is darkest just before dawn. I remember a camping trip with some high school buddies on the Appalachian Trail. A hot-blooded youth, I didn’t bring a sleeping bag and thought I’d be just fine under the stars in my flannel shirt and jeans. All night long I could hear the gentle snores of my friends while I shivered under those cold stars. How long would the night last? Finally, when I thought I couldn’t stand it anymore, when it was darkest and coldest, a light began to break in the east. Hope began seeping back into my frozen heart. I would survive after all.

Coming down this morning from our early morning prayers, I glanced at the morning paper as the others went over for Mass. The paper was dark and fearful, oppressed with drama and discord, and I wondered if I should read that paper any longer.

As I had an hour free, I rode out to my favorite bench at Golden Gate Park to get some light and air. The sun had just cleared the eastern horizon and the redoubtable Chinese were doing their morning exercises in the park. I prayed the Office of Readings for the Solemnity of the Annunciation as birdsong filled the air and tiny creatures poked about in the blooming azaleas on my little hilltop. An elderly Chinese couple came puffing up the stairs past my bench, each calling out a joyful “hallo” as they skated back down the hill, all smiles.

It was the Solemnity of the Annunciation. An angel announced the dawn of God’s love to a maiden of Nazareth. She was the first to hear that the darkness was coming to an end. In the 2000 years since that announcement, the world had gone through periods of darkness and light. It seems to be undergoing a period of darkness just now, but light and joy are just as far as a hilltop in the park, or a quiet spot in the church, or a heartfelt moment with another person. “May we,” as the prayer for the Solemnity articulates, “who confess our Redeemer to be God and man,
merit to become partakers even in his divine nature.”

We are fortunate to have many wise Asian women in our parish. They remind us of what we already know, and recover what we seem to have lost.

There are days, and there will be days, when I can’t see how “it” will work. My own frailties, and the overwhelming firepower of the world, knock the wind out of me. I related this state of affairs to a wise and dear Vietnamese friend the other day. You must understand how much the last few generations in Vietnam have suffered, which has endowed their faith with a rare purity and beauty. “Father,” she said, “God is with you. He is with all of us. You have to believe this.” I have to believe that everything God allows will bring about something beautiful. Every single catastrophe is a grace-filled moment of sanctification. “God cannot love you unless he humbles you,” she said. “Only humility can feel God’s touch.”

And so I thought about the humility that comes only through fasting, the kind that strips one to the bone. If I summon the courage, I fast on Friday until after nighttime Stations. And it is when I am empty, hardly strong enough to stand, that I feel God’s touch. To know Him who was stripped, I need to be stripped. Praying the Stations after a satisfying meal is a waste of time. And the most perfect fasting is to take what God gives, and give what he takes, with a big smile. Why the smile? Because I know that in giving what I would never have given, I am finally letting him love me, feeling his love. So, dear children, do not fear the cross. Love the cross, and learn to know God through surrender to it.

Lent: dust to dust

Forty Days: Jesus spent 40 days in the desert, and we spend 40 days in Lent. We began this holy season of cleansing, sacrifice, and joy five days ago by getting our ashes. On Ash Wednesdays in New York City, where I attended seminary, we would spend all day at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, marking ashes on people’s foreheads. Everyone came: the cabbies and the power brokers, office workers in smart business suits and tennis shoes, news anchors and opera stars from Times Square, street cleaners and Wall Street financiers, homeless folk and the Park Avenue elite. All stood shoulder to shoulder in line, patiently waiting to get a smudge of ashes under the great gothic arches of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. All alike confess the universal truth: I am not perfect, I will die someday, and I need God’s help. Now is the time to turn back to God.  I gave a dollar to a homeless man yesterday at a red light on Park Presidio. Homeless people often see life with wonderfully simple clarity. He asked me if I was a reverend. I said, yes, sort of, that I was a Catholic priest. “I’m a Baptist,” he called out, “and I believe in God, because he is my savior.” I looked into his dancing blue eyes as the light turned green. “But don’t get me wrong,” he chuckled as I pulled away. “I backslide from time to time!” There is no one in this church that does not backslide, and God is here to push us back up the slide.

Temptations

In today’s Gospel, our blessed Savior enters the wilderness of our sin and its consequences, a zone of death, to fight for us. It is a wilderness full of beasts and angels, the best and the worst of our human race. Jesus goes into the desert to rescue the beasts and transform them into angels. He is tempted by Satan, as we are tempted, in three ways: First, by pleasure. You are hungry, Satan points out, for this or that satisfaction. You can have that satisfaction just by asking for it; your Father in heaven would not deny you this simple pleasure. With Jesus, we reply: God’s word, and God’s will, is my bread, and my only pleasure. I will discipline my body so my soul can be filled. Keep your Lenten fast—the spiritual riches you will receive are worth the price. The Second Temptation is to having it my way. Throw yourself down—you have a right to do what you want, and someone will catch you. I saw a skateboarder the other day flying down the hill on Geary right through traffic—no brakes, completely unprotected—almost like a death wish. It was a sheer assertion of his will to do what he wants with his life. And we say in reply: my life is not my own, but I am a steward of the gift God has given me. Give alms, for in giving your life to God and others rather than throwing it away on your own will, you entrust it to God, who will keep it safe for you. And finally the third temptation, to power. By bending a knee to Satan, Jesus could have unlimited worldly power. By bending a knee to this culture, we could gain mastery over a dimension of it. But God calls us not to conform, but to reform, to go against the tide rather than assimilate to this world. The world, anyway, is passing away. SO in Lent we pray more and more deeply. We pray to God, not to Satan, and we dedicate ourselves to disciplined prayer.

Parish Mission

Our Parish Mission next week will focus on Our Lady, Ark of the Covenant, and Jesus, the divine presence in that Ark. He is always within her. The closer we draw to Mary, the closer we draw to Jesus inside of her. There is no authentic devotion or life in Christ that ignores or disowns his Mother Mary.

Msgr. Arthur Calkins, a Vatican expert on Our Blessed Mother, will preach Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday nights at 7pm. We will expose the Blessed Sacrament after his talk, and conclude with benediction. A priest will be in the confessional during adoration. There is wonderful grace in simply coming to a mission, because it is God’s will that we do this during Lent. I hope you can come. Let us pray to Our Lady now in the words of Mother Teresa:

 

Yesterday we all received a black mark on our foreheads. When I was a kid (only one of two Catholics in my class), I wore that sign of the cross traced in black ashes with pride—too much pride, I’m sure. In the early years of our Church’s history, the sign of the cross was misunderstood, even a sign of shame. Sometimes today, too, the Sign of the Cross is misunderstood by some.

Imagine a Catholic who attends a morning Ash Wednesday Mass, then dashes off to work at a high-powered office in the financial district or a chic clothing store on Union Square. This sign of our faith will be misunderstood by some, and even as we witness to our belief in Jesus we must do so with patient charity, as some will not want to see our faith publicly displayed. Let us wear that sign nevertheless and hope that many will come to a better understanding of our faith.

In years past the newspapers would always send a reporter and cameraman to my parish for a story on Ash Wednesday and the Christian practice of Lent. After all, the majority of people in this country practice the Christian faith, so Lent is certainly a newsworthy item. But in recent years, Ash Wednesday has become less of a story. I kind of miss those nice reporters and the festive atmosphere they brought with their colorful stories about Lenten practices. Imagine my delight when CBS, NBC, ABC, the Chronicle, and even the Examiner showed up last Wednesday. They expected to do a somewhat negative story on our parish, but every child, every adult they interviewed proclaimed the faith by the Sign of the Cross in ashes on their forehead! I had a lovely time talking to reporters again, and we all got our news story on Lent. God knows what He is doing! 

With this Mass, we have entered into Holy Week. No time compares with these eight days that have forever changed human history, and continue to change it.

Palm Sunday is the only Mass with two colors, and two Gospels. The liturgy begins with jubilant green palm branches as Christ triumphantly enters His City; it ends in red as he is executed five days later, with his blood soaking the ground beneath the cross. He took the city like no commander or emperor has ever taken a city. He took it without shedding the enemy’s blood, seated on an ass, the foal of a colt, in perfect humility. The city would demand blood, but it would be only his own. No one took it from him; He freely gave it to save the city, as he does at each Mass.

Christ begins the great labor of redemption this day, and will accomplish it in seven days. As God accomplished the great labor of creating the world in “seven days,” so will He accomplish the great work of recreating it in seven days. He fixed his eyes on the will of God to accomplish this work: “I have set my face like flint, knowing that I shall not be put to shame.” Christ sets himself to the task, and we must do the same.

God has appointed to each of us some great task, a “city” that we each must take as Christ took Jerusalem. It will be our vocation to enter this city and make it our own: a marriage, a career, some great sacrifice for another, some titanic suffering we must undergo. The time comes for every man to “set his face like flint,” heedless of either praise or mockery, in order to accomplish the work God has set before him.

In this Holy Week, we accompany Jesus Christ in defeat and triumph, in order to prepare for our own. To win, we must first lose, but our initial loss will not defeat us if we keep our eyes fixed on Christ. “Let us go,” as Philip said in last Sunday’s Gospel, “to die with him.”

The towering Sunday readings of Lent

We have reached the Fifth Sunday of Lent, with the towering story of Lazarus, having seen the Readings wax longer and richer as we move towards Easter. We will hear the longest Gospel of the year next Sunday (the entire Passion narrative), and finally, a week after that, nine lengthy readings cover the whole sweep of salvation history at the Easter Vigil. All of these readings, however, conclude with a very short Gospel on Easter Sunday: “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here. He has been raised up.” Astute homilists preach shorter sermons as the readings grow longer, and I pray that I am growing more astute with age.

Haunted by death

The raising of Lazarus is a drama second only to the Passion itself. It is story haunted by death’s spectral and putrid visage that, however, does not end in death. Jesus actually plays a cat and mouse game with death—giving it some brief play, but then yanking it back. Not only does he say, in the end, “death, where is thy sting,” but he says “thou, death, wilt serve me.” And death, indeed, serves the glory of God in the sickness, death, and resurrection of Lazarus.

Where were you?

A few brief points from this long tale. First, messengers tell Jesus that Lazarus (“the one you love”) is dying. We commonly say that death and taxes are life’s only absolutes—tax day is next week, by the way—but Jesus says that death is not absolute. He describes Lazarus’ death as “sleeping.” “Lazarus is dead … but I am going to awaken him.” Love can undo death. This great truth is somehow told in many fairy tales, as in the prince’s kiss awakening the dead princess from her “sleep.” By his death, Christ has become the true prince of this world, able to awaken all who are dead by his divine kiss.

Jesus gets to Bethany “four days late,” at least in the mind of the dead man’s sisters. Both reproach him in exactly the same words: “If you had been here, my brother would not have died.” These sisters are deeply upset, or at least confused, about Jesus. Where were you when we needed you? You said that you had come that they might have life; that he who eats your bread will never die; that he who drinks your water would have a spring of life-giving water within him. What about all these promises now? My brother, the one you love, is dead. All of these reproaches Jesus receives calmly, and simply says, I AM the resurrection and the life. Shall I prove it to you?

Jesus wept

And then Jesus himself weeps in the face of death. Have you ever seen a grown man cry? I saw a dear friend cry recently at his mother’s funeral Mass. Manly tears makes you love him faces death’s might manfully. Jesus’ soul is deeply troubled, he trembles and shakes with repulsion at the stench of death. Christ will raise this man, but it will cost him. With loud cry, like that from the Cross, “eloi eloi lema sabachtani,” Jesus calls the dead man out. “Untie him, and let him go.” By my death, I have come to untie you from the bondage of death. You will all die, but you will rise stronger, more beautiful, and sinless.

Belief in Life

Death has never been absolute. There is only one absolute, and that absolute is a person, a person who is love. All things, St. Paul writes, especially suffering and death, work for the good for those who love God. We must imitate Christ, who shakes and weeps at the stench of his friend’s death, and yet believes in Someone stronger than death. This story begins with the question of belief (“I am glad I was not there that you may believe”), it centers on belief (“Martha, do you believe this?”), and it ends in belief (“those who saw this sign began to believe in him”). Suffering does not hurt us. Death does not hurt us. Only unbelief hurts us. Suffering and death must strengthen your faith, that you may not fear, but rather believe in the Resurrection and the Life, Jesus Christ our Lord.