In today’s Gospel, Jesus asks for total loyalty from his disciples! But, total allegiance to what ends? As we celebrate the birth of our nation we naturally think of things like the “pledge of allegiance,” the oath we make to our nation to defend her and to stand by her…and we recall the many brave women and men, down through two and a half centuries, who have risked and given their lives so that we may enjoy the freedoms that we do, even as some of them come under assault, by members of the very government that are meant to protect those freedoms.

Jesus was clear that he expected his followers to “be all in,” to choose him over their mothers and fathers, over their sisters and brothers and even over their daughters and sons. This must have sounded absurd! Given the culture they lived in, they must have asked themselves, who could do this?

To choose Jesus over your family was to make a choice that would mean that you would lose your identity, because in their culture, your identity was rooted in your family, and you would lose the ones who would care for you in old age, or care for you in the event of illness; choosing Jesus over your family would mean your future would immediately become much more precarious!

What was Jesus asking of his followers? It seems, given the larger context of the Gospel, that Jesus was asking his disciples to put him at the center of their lives and from this center to then move outward to others. This message of Jesus, taken in the context of the fullness of his message to love God with our whole being and our neighbor as ourselves, gives us insight into what he is suggesting.

If indeed we are able to place Christ at the center of our lives, then I believe we will be less self-absorbed, less harsh towards others and more kind and accepting of others as they are, more generous and loving. Basically, more Christ-like.

By consciously and reflectively living more deeply Christ centered lives we become more and more rooted in our relationship with Christ and ultimately, then our relationships with our sisters and brothers can blossom and become fuller and deeper. Then we can have more authentic human encounters with “the other” loving them and accepting them as we find them…just as God does.

By placing Christ at the center of my life, I prioritize my life in such a way that the central realities the Gospel calls me to live out in my life become the priorities of my life. In this way, the Gospel values of justice, peace, care of the poor and the marginalized, the sick and the imprisoned, these realities are no longer simply “nice ideals to work for” but rather “Divine fundamental imperatives” around which I build my life, create family, and live out my relationship with God, others and the planet.

So, this week, let us ask ourselves…am I putting anything or anyone ahead of Christ and my relationship with God that I need to reconsider so as to live a more Christ centered life? How might I strengthen and deepen my relationship with God so as to more positively impact my relationship with loved ones and with all my sisters and brothers?
​
Blessings,
Fr Tim

​In this weekend’s Gospel Jesus warns us against fear and tells us to fear no one. Fear, and in particular “fear of the other” has been the cause of the destruction of entire peoples and cultures, the cause of one war after another, and still we have not learned just how disastrous for humanity fearmongering and the hatred of those who are different can be to our world.

Poets, philosophers, and mystics alike all have warned that fear ultimately leads to the deadening of the soul and disconnection from the human family. Several years ago, Pope Francis warned that wherever there is fear, there will always be someone who will manipulate it to their own good. "Because fear, besides being good business for merchants of weapons and death, weakens and destabilizes us, destroying our psychological and spiritual defenses, anesthetizing us to the suffering of others and, in the end, making us cruel." The completely unnecessary and illegal war with Iran is a perfect example.

We find ourselves in the midst of a fear-ridden country and world with some people shouting of a growing calamity because of the calls for racial justice and equality, because of increased immigration, and other societal changes that are happening with our changing demographics. And yet, Jesus who found himself in a not too dissimilar geopolitical situation (think the Roman occupation of his native country) called his followers not to fear but to have faith…not to give into fear!

We too are called to not allow ourselves to be ruled by fear and allow it to turn us into cruel people who think of ourselves first and only, and leave the less fortunate to fend for themselves and to exclude them from our democratic debate, and to seek to exclude them from our communities, our schools, our churches and our public spaces. Pope Francis taught that mercy is the “best antidote” to fear! And in the same speech, he called for us to partner that mercy with courage.

We need courage to do the right thing in the face of fear which causes communities to want to build walls to keep people out, instead of bridges which invite people to build community. And it is fear that makes people choose open conflict rather than to embrace and welcome the stranger as Jesus has commanded us to do.

In a very real way we are called to “walk towards our fears” and not run from them. Walking towards our fears takes courage, but we must not forget that we do not walk that journey alone, we walk with Christ!

Our discipleship calls us to be courageous in these difficult and divisive times, and as Pope Francis told us, we are to “be a sign of mercy”, living signs of mercy to others, and Pope Leo has followed that up, calling us to be signs of hope! So let us be living signs of mercy and of hope to all those who are targeted or mistreated or threatened because of the color of their skin, their ethnicity, their gender or because of where they were born or who they love, or what their social status is or what their nationality. These realities cause fear in some people who are unable and unwilling to accept people who do not look like them, people who are “other than themselves.” They cannot accept that each and every human being is made in the image and likeness of God and is deeply and passionately loved by God just as they are!

And as disciples of Jesus Christ, we are called to stand up in opposition against those persons and movements that espouse social, political or religious ideologies and principles that deny or demean the God given human dignity of every woman, man and child on this planet.

Not until we have done this will we have truly lived the great commandment of Jesus: to love our neighbor as ourselves. We must ask ourselves, what personal biases am I being called to walk towards or to sit with and name? Let me pray to draw courage in facing my own biases with the Holy Spirit guiding me.

May each one of us be a sign of mercy and a sign of hope to those who are suffering, are discriminated against, are marginalized in any way, or ignored, or unloved.

May your lives be filled abundantly with the endless mercy and hope of God. Amen.

Blessings,
​Fr Tim

There is a sentence in today's Gospel that I want to sit with for a moment before I say anything else. Matthew tells us that when Jesus saw the crowds, he was “moved with compassion.” But the word Matthew uses in ancient Greek – splanchnizomai – meant something more visceral than moved with compassion…it meant more like, his gut wrenched. It meant he felt the suffering of those people in the very core of his body. It meant the pain of the harassed and helpless was not abstract to him. It landed in him physically. It hurt.

And after that gut-wrenching compassion comes action, prayer, the sending of laborers, the naming of the mission: to proclaim the kingdom, to cure the sick, to raise the dead, to cleanse those the world has declared unclean, to cast out the demons of fear and exploitation and indifference. And then, perhaps the most astonishing line in the whole passage, "Without cost you have received; without cost you are to give." This is not an optional instruction for the especially holy. It seems that this is Jesus’ description of discipleship itself.

Before we can be sent, we have to see. And seeing -- real seeing -- the seeing that wrenches the gut, requires that we look at who the crowds actually are.

They are the families sleeping in their cars a few miles from here, within sight of some of the most expensive ZIP codes in the country. They are the undocumented worker who got injured on a job site and is afraid to call 911. They are the asylum seeker who has fled violence, crossed thousands of miles, and now waits in uncertainty, told by a system that seems not to care, that her case will take years. They are the Black teenager followed in a store, the transgender young person rejected by family. The woman whose gifts are diminished at every turn, the elderly man who has outlived everyone he loved, the homeless woman riding the train all night too afraid to go to a shelter for fear of violence.

Jesus saw the crowds and he did not look away. He did not manage them at arm's length, process them through a system, sort them into groups of deserving and undeserving. He was moved. He was filled with compassion. He saw them as sheep without a shepherd, not as a problem to be solved, but as beloved children of God in need of someone to journey with them as they walked through their private valley of darkness.

So as disciples, sent, who do we see? Who do we allow our gut to wrench for? And this is a harder question: who do we look away from? Who has our society trained us to be blind to? I think that probably most all of us have at some time in our lives felt unseen, felt unwelcomed, unloved. And in converse to this reality, Paul in Romans then writes, "God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us." While we were still sinners. Not after we had cleaned up. Not after we had proven ourselves. While we were yet broken, love came.

That unconditional grace received without cost, it is the source and the energy of our mission.

When Jesus sends the twelve, he sends them light. No gold, no silver, no extra tunic, no staff for self-defense. There is something deeply countercultural, even counter-instinctual. We live in a world that tells us to secure ourselves first, to accumulate leverage, to build walls of protection before we go out. And here is Jesus saying: go as you are. Go with what you've been given. Trust.

This is not a romanticization of poverty. Jesus knew poverty and he healed it wherever he found it. This is something different -- a call to radical dependence on God and on the communities we go to serve, rather than on accumulated privilege and power. It is the posture of the peacemaker.

In our tradition, we talk about nonviolence not merely as a tactic but as a way of seeing, a way of being in the world! A conviction that every human being carries the image of God and that no cause, however just, justifies the destruction of that image. That stance towards the world, going without sword or shield, trusting in the power of truth and love, in the power of the Holy Spirit is exactly what Jesus embodies in Matthew's Gospel, and what he asks of the laborers he sends. 

We who are gathered here know what it means to work for justice in a world that sometimes pushes back hard. We know what it is to advocate for the immigrant family facing deportation, to show up at a school board meeting for inclusive policies, to speak out when the silence of the comfortable becomes complicity in harm. That work is exhausting. And it is holy. And it begins, always, in that gut-wrenching compassion that Jesus modeled, seeing the harassed and those in need of help and refusing to look away.

In a few minutes, we will come to this table. We will receive without cost the bread of life. We will receive what we did not earn, have not merited, and could not purchase. We will receive grace. And that will be sufficient for the work of the day.

And then the proclamation, “the Mass is ended” and we will be sent: Go, this is our mission. We are the laborers. The harvest is abundant. Those who are worn down, harassed and in need of help are waiting, not as objects of charity, but as the face of Christ, as the ones in whom God has placed the sacred image that our calling, as disciples, is meant to serve.

Blessings,
Fr Tim

The Body and Blood of Christ is not only something we “get” when we go to Mass…it is what we become!

As Roman Catholics, we believe in the “real presence” of Christ in the Eucharist and while we will never fully understand how this is, we gather each Sunday, around the “table of the Lord” to be nourished…and to be changed…changed ever more fully into the Body of Christ.

Through our receiving the Body of Christ…Christ lives in us and we in Christ and thus we become the Body of Christ. This “indwelling” of Christ in us both as individuals and as community has enormous implications for our lives both individually and communally.

We become “the Body of Christ” present in the world and are called to be the visible compassion and love of Christ reaching out to the immigrant, the refugee, to those discriminated against and treated unjustly because of the color of their skin, their gender or where they came from. We are called “to be for” all those who suffer and who are in need, in any way. As Christ was “for the world” so too we are to be “for the world”.

Our daily actions, our work, our relationships, all of them must reflect the Divine indwelling. As disciples, our lives are to be a living witness to the words, actions, life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

And by no means do I miss the point that this is a tall order, called “the great commission.” It is the very core of what true discipleship of Jesus Christ is: to live and to love as Jesus lived and loved! It is an enormous challenge, but we do not do it on our own, we do it as a community and we do it in and through the power of the Holy Spirit dwelling within us, through the Divine indwelling that Christ, promised that would be ours. We are alive in Christ!

We are called to live our lives in such a way that we become visible, tangible signs of God’s amazing and passionate love for all people, to stand up to the systemic racism that pervades our society, that has been woven through the fabric of our country over 400 years.

I believe that to refuse to sit in the discomfort of confronting the reality of racism in our country and our own white privilege is to deny the primary message of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and God’s deep and passionate love for ALL people, just as they are, just as he created them…as the beloved of God!

When we embrace that all who are “other” from “me,” that they are the “BELOVED” of God, then there is no place in our hearts or in our lives for racism, bigotry or “otherness”.

So, let us ask ourselves: how does my life reflect my being part of the Body of Christ? When I leave Mass after having received Eucharist, what do I take with me out into the world?

What is the Eucharist calling me to “pick up” or “lay down” in my life that might allow me to more deeply engage in working to bring an end to racism and bigotry and all forms of marginalization and exclusion of people, in our social and political policies, in all areas of our society, so that we might better work together to build up the Reign of God in the here and now? So that ultimately each child, woman and man will be seen, respected, valued and cared for, as the child of God. Let us all embrace the Divine presence that dwells within each one of us, and let God transform our lives, and the world through us.

​Blessings,
Fr Tim