Reflecting on Habakkuk 1: 2-3; 2: 2-4

Do things ever really get better if we just wait, and trust God? That’s the promise of the reading from Habakkuk today.  In fact, the prophet wants us to have these words of comfort so much that he demands that the vision be written down on tablets in such large print that a courier can run with it and people can read it as he passes.

As I write this, the world is waiting to see if Syria actually turns over its arsenal of chemical weapons, some of which were used to kill a thousand people.  But of course Assad has already killed one hundred thousand people with the conventional weapons of shelling, gunfire, and torture.  Some of the victims of these atrocities cry out to the world, “We cry for help and you do not listen!  We cry out to you, ‘Violence!’, but you do not intervene.”   Others plead for the world to broker peace for them without firing another shot.

A few weeks ago the worldwide Church kept vigil for peace in Syria, and the fruits of that prayer were immediate.  John Kerry made a “gaffe from God”, and enemies began to speak to one another.

If the vision delays, wait for it. We wait, and never stop praying that Syria, the very cradle of Christianity, may once again be Ground Zero for the dramatic power of God. St. Paul was born there.  St. Matthew and St. Luke both wrote their gospels there.  Paul’s missionary journeys embarked from there.  We were first called “Christians” there.  Pray for peace in Syria.

The vision still has its time, and will not disappoint.

Is there someone you pray for all the time?

Reflecting on Luke 16: 19-31

We’re twenty-six weeks into Ordinary Time, and already I’m thinking about snow.  With the cool weather comes all the delicious smells and tastes and sights and sounds of fall.  It’s finally time for pumpkin bread and football games.  And that means that this liturgical year is beginning to wind down.

But before we start looking for the Advent candles, let’s reflect for a moment on the gospel―St. Luke’s gorgeous proclamation of good news for the poor ―that we’ve been hearing all year and will continue to hear for the next eight weeks.  Today’s story about the rich man (Dives) and the poor beggar Lazarus is a perfect example of Luke’s “business plan”.  His mission is that anyone who reads his gospel shall never again store up treasure for themselves while forgetting about those who have less.  He wants us all to be rich in what matters to God.  Eternity depends on it.

We’ve heard the great Lukan stories since last December.  The poor, unmarried virgin says be it done unto me according to your will, and the world is changed forever. Early in his public ministry Jesus’ very first words to a great crowd assembled on a plain are blessed are you who are poor, for the kingdom of God is yours.

The guy who builds bigger barns to store all his goods has his life demanded of him that very night.  The guest list for your big party should begin down at the homeless shelter and the school for the blind.  And Jesus, for whom there is no room at the inn for his birth, in death is buried in a tomb not his own.

Okay, Luke.  We’re listening.

Is there a Lazarus in your life?

Reflecting on Luke 16: 1-13

What a strange story.  The steward who cheats his employer makes friends by inviting other people to cheat him too, and then the employer praises him for being so crafty.  I want a boss like that.

Actually, I do have a boss like that.  Jesus Christ is the boss of me. He encourages me today to be endlessly cunning, wily, inventive, ingenious, and endlessly passionate about spending eternity with him.  Do whatever it takes to find me and draw near to me, and I will draw near to you.  Don’t die without my grace and love and presence.  Heaven will be a lot easier to enjoy if you start pursuing it right now.

So, how do we use all of our cunning to enter the kingdom of God?  Perhaps the first step is to notice those things that make us feel unsettled, unhappy, unloved, and undone.  None of that is kingdom material, so we have to find ways to detach from resentments, rage, the pain of disappointments, and the day-to-day coarsening of our hearts through exposure to parts of our present culture.

If we pay attention to what makes us truly happy that will surely bring us near to God, the creator of all joy.  Yesterday I found a lovely CD in my car that had been forgotten in the glove compartment for several years.  The minute I put it in the player the car was filled with beauty, and the grace that always accompanies it.  Note to self: listening to beautiful, prayerful music makes me happy.  That must be a God Thing.  Do that some more.

I think I’m getting the hang of this.

What ingenious ways can you find to bring more “God Things” into your life?

Reflecting on Luke 15:1-32

He came home, finally.  Yes, I saw him staggering towards the gate.  Even though I’ve spent all these months staring at the road, willing for him to appear in the distance,  I was too shocked to recognize him.  He’s lost so much weight he barely resembles the boy I love, the one I fed and cared for, the one I taught to ride a bike and jump off the high dive.  His mother didn’t drink coffee for nine months while she was pregnant with him so that he could have the best start in life.

We’d been searching for him, of course.  After he walked away from the rehab center we knew he’d go right back to the streets.    He found his dealer and went straight back to using.  He even admitted that he was the one who broke the window in the basement and stole the computer last winter.  The truth is, we were secretly relieved.  He remembered where he lived.

The kids are torn.  They were crying and hugging him and telling him how much they missed him.  But I know they’re really scared now.  It’s been a year of anxiety for all of us, wondering if he was dead in some crack house.  Now we all have to live with the tension of having him back.  He’s back in treatment and he really does seem like he’s beat it this time.

His older brother held back from hugging him.  There’s been a lot of betrayal there.  It’s going to take a lot of work to repair the damage.

Can you make the welcome home party on Saturday?

How do you reconcile today’s gospel with what we know about addiction?

Reflecting on Philemon 9, 10, 12-17

How are you at the art of gentle persuasion?  Do you need some help getting a child to eat her broccoli, or an elderly parent to give up his car keys?  Read Paul’s letter to Philemon, found towards the end of the New Testament.  In just 445 words, Paul gives a tutorial on how to gently but firmly get someone to do the right thing.

Philemon owned the home where the earliest Christians of Colossus (in modern-day Turkey) gathered.  He was certainly a faithful follower of Jesus, and yet he appears to have owned a slave, a young man named Onesimus. As far back as St. John Chrysostom (347-407), this letter has been used to either justify or vilify slavery because Paul is coaxing a slave-owner into taking back his slave as a free man.

Onesimus has left Philemon’s household and has become a companion to Paul during his imprisonment, probably in Ephesus in the mid-‘50s.  Onesimus has become a devout Christian, so beloved of Paul that he calls him “my own heart”.  Paul has a deep love for both slave-owner and slave because they have both been “co-workers” with him in proclaiming the gospel.

Paul’s authority over those early churches stands in the background of this warm letter.  He could command Philemon to take Onesimus back and not exact the accepted punishment for runaway slaves (cutting off a leg).  But he wants the authority of Christ to override his own.  He is persuading Philemon to do that hardest of all things: to allow Christ to change his behavior, even when his culture encourages him to do the opposite.

That’s the great challenge for us today.

Are you currently working on coaxing someone to change a behavior?

Reflecting on Psalm 68: 4-5, 6-7, 10-11

St. Marianne and the Sisters of St. Francis with their patients

Come with me for a moment.  I want to take you down the highest sea-cliff in the world.  We can either hike down, or take a mule-ride, or take a short and beautiful plane trip down into Kalaupapa Peninsula on the Hawaiian island of Molokai.

Ah.  You’ve heard of it, yes?  This is the dreadful place where the unfortunate Hawaiians who had contracted Hansen’s disease (leprosy) were exiled from the 1840s until the invention of a cure in the late 1960s.  And this, of course, is the only single site in the U.S. where two saints (Saint Damien and Saint Marianne) have resided.

I cannot sing the refrain of this weekend’s responsorial psalm without thinking of them and the loving care they brought to those who would never see their families again:

God, in your goodness, you have made a home for the poor.

Father Damien, a Belgian missionary priest, offered up his life to live and die with those who were exiled, to be the presence of God that the psalmist exalts today, to be the father of orphans and the defender of widows, and to give a home to the forsaken.

Mother Marianne Cope and other Franciscan sisters of her community from Syracuse, NY soon followed.  They established a safe home for the girls and women.  They built a school and a hospital, where they introduced the sanitary measures that ended the spread of the disease on Molokai.  And those sisters are still there, 125 years later, tending to the needs of the thirteen remaining patients who have chosen not to return to public life.

St. Damien and St. Marianne, mahalo. Thank you.

Have you found a way to make a home for the poor?

Reflecting on Isaiah 66: 18-31

When Isaiah promised that all the nations would stream to Jerusalem because of their encounter with the God of Israel, he envisioned a great pilgrimage of joyous new believers coming to the Holy City because that was where God dwelt.

I recently met a family who reminded me that where there is Love, there God dwells.  Several years ago the Stallings family from Frisco, Colorado discerned that they were being called to bring Christ’s love to the poorest of Uruguay.

Thus began The Fields of the Fatherless (see Proverbs 23:10 for the beautiful scripture text which inspired their work), a farm expressly for the delight and healing of children orphaned because of the increasingly fragile family ties in this most secular country in South America.

Funded through the good will of a small group of friends, the Stallings bought a beautiful working farm in a rural area in Uruguay.  Then they started inviting orphans―and there are many there because of restricted adoption rules, legalized prostitution, and a huge decline in couples marrying and staying together.

The children come for escape from the tensions and loneliness of orphanage living, and oh, how they find it there.  They swim in the big swimming pool.  They ride the horses and pet the baby goats.  They get one million hugs from Cathy and Gary and their two wonderful teenagers Abi and Josh (who adapted and learned the language even faster than their parents).

I love to travel to Israel to touch the places where Christ lived.  But my spirit soars when I hear stories of joyful believers who are taking Him to the loneliest corners of the human heart.

Where do you see Jesus alive today?

Reflecting on Jeremiah 38: 4-6, 8-10

Marc Chagall, Jeremiah in the Pit, 1957

I used to listen to the radio all day, every day, when I was a teenager.  It was so easy then. The dial never moved, and we could listen to the great music of the sixties late into the night.  Thanks to all the great advances in technology I haven’t been able to figure out how to get a station on my car radio in decades.  I keep pushing buttons, but all I get is that infuriating static.

The prophets, on the other hand, have figured out the radio frequencies so brilliantly that they can actually find God’s voice on the dial, and they know just where to place themselves so that the signal is loud and clear.  Jeremiah, way back in the sixth century B.C., was getting God’s voice in stereo, and the message was unmistakeable:  tell the king of Jerusalem to surrender to the Babylonians, for it is God’s will.

What an inconvenient truth this was. They hated him for it, and beat him, threw him in prison, and tossed him down into a muddy cistern to die of starvation at the peak of the famine brought about by the Babylonian siege of the city that he had prophesied for so long.  He’d been right, of course.  Those who speak for God always are.

We all want to be on the right side of history.  We’d love to be the one about whom people say, “If only we had listened.”  Or maybe we’re the ones who need to listen.  I have a feeling that the words of the prophets are starting to come in loud and clear.  Turn your radio on.

Have you ever suffered persecution for telling the truth?

Reflecting on Luke 12: 32-48

There is so much that is hidden in nature.  Take bees, for instance.  All through the luscious summer months they secretly pollinate our gardens and fields.  I hardly ever notice them, but without their quiet work the world would end.

Even more grace-giving for me than the ingenuity of nature are those moments of astonishment when the hidden works of love and charity of the people around me are exposed.  I had one of those jaw-dropping moments last week.

My friend Rita teaches theology and scripture at Mullen High School in Denver.  I’ve known her for fifteen years.  It was not until yesterday that I realized that three nights of every week she shops and then cooks a hot meal for eighty elderly people downtown who are without permanent housing.  She and her husband John then haul all the food from their house, sometimes stopping at Qdoba for their generous donation of rice.  Finally, they carry all the food in, set it up with the volunteers—those hidden angels all around us who do the work of the kingdom consistently, year after year, without anyone knowing–and warmly greet and serve each grateful guest.

Rita, I asked, where does the money come from for all the groceries it takes to feed these eighty people three times a week? Oh, she said, it comes from my paycheck from Mullen.

And she has quietly done this for fifteen years.

I have a feeling Rita will be in charge of all her Master’s property someday.  Oh, wait.  Since those who are poor are at the center of God’s heart, she already is.

In what hidden ways are you bringing light and grace to the world?

Reflecting on Luke 12: 13-21

So, the summer project—which is the same project I’ve had for the twenty-five years we’ve lived in our house—is to finally organize the thousands of pictures and letters I’ve saved through the years.  After an agonizing month I finally transferred all my stuff from the garage, to the porch, and now, yes, to the living room.

We can’t eat at the table because it’s covered with my grade-school report cards.  Ugh.  Why on earth have they traveled with me all these years?  And why, I wonder, is the picture of the family of the unnamed hired help at my grandfather’s dairy sitting where the dinner plate should be?

Sentimentality, said Kafka, is giving something more attention than God gives it. I cringe when I imagine the nameless mother in that ancient picture somehow walking into our living room today and seeing the picture of her family one hundred years ago and saying, “Are you kidding me?  THIS picture is more important to you than your present life?  Even I didn’t keep that picture, and I actually know who those people are.”

What if this very night my life were demanded of me?  I know without a doubt that stuff would be shoveled into the recycle bin in a heartbeat.  The table would be cleared, and set with my beautiful china (which brings me such joy in my real life), and all my family and friends would gather around it.  We would sing, and laugh, and pray, and eat!  And I would die in peace, finally rid of the stuff that was keeping from being rich in the ways that matter to God.

What “treasures” do you store that are keeping you from real happiness?