Gospel, Homily and Coffee

Life is ultimately good and joyful.   Our Faith, as catholics as Christians, is incredibly fulfilling.   There is so much that make sense, and provides meaning. Arriving at this though is not always easy.   It requires a degree of effort on our part (and I daresay, at times a LOT of effort) Yet, when the effort is made: as the shepherds, we go into our lives glorifying and praising God.  Glorifying and praising for the freedom and joy that we have found and experienced. What is that effort? It is in the phrase almost at the center of this gospel passage:  “And Mary kept all of these things, reflecting on them in her heart.” Mary “reflects” couple of times in Luke’s Gospel:  she ponders the angel’s greeting, and when Jesus runs away from them to be in the Temple, after the resolution of that family drama, the gospel says she treasured all these things in her heart. Socrates says, through Plato:  “An unexamined life is not wort...

(Last night I spoke of salvation, and our Salvation is that God has embraced our humanity.  That embrace changes us;  it allows the strong parts of ourselves to be used to love others; the weak parts allows us to grow and transformed so that we can be loved and love others.) This all requires humility. Humility is to accept my place, and our place, in the Universe. This may come as a shock to some, I know it gets me all the time; I am not the Master of the Universe, and nobody is.  I am but a servant, creature; all of us are but servants and creatures. I have been made.  You have been made.  We have been made by God. Yet we are made for something wonderful and spectacular.  God made us to be part of a great harmony,  a harmony within this universe and beyond it.   My humanity, my uniqueness, our humanity and uniqueness, all of it serves the great purpose;  God’s great plan. It is like a choir;  a single voice is be...

Salvation is the freedom and the capacity to live life fully. And as Jesus revealed, and thus we believe as Catholics, living life in the full is about loving others and letting ourselves be loved. Salvation is to love and let ourselves be loved.   God’s will is that we love and be loved by one another. For this, the Son of God was born and lived as Human, died and was resurrected. So that we humans would be freed for love Remember Love, as Jesus revealed is to willingly give of ourselves for the good of others and to let others give of themselves willingly for our good. This is the joy of Christianity. What we especially celebrate these days at Christmas is not simply that the Son of God was born as human, but think of it in this way:  That God embraced humanity!  The Incarnation is The Divine fully and wholly embracing our humanity. Jesus embraced all of our humanity; the good and the not so good. This is powerful stuff.  Because...

Don't Panic...the best advice from a spiritual director ever (and Douglas Adams would say, carry a towel). To panic is to give into the fear, it is to give into the Chaos! Genesis:  God breathed upon the waters of chaos, and brought harmony.  It took 7 days to create.  All within its own time and space. When an event happens, I must not give into the panic, but wait, discern, look for what will be brought forth, then participate and take action. Don't panic, and react before the story has even ended.

The Joy of Christmas---is it approaching, theoretically. Advent time, I think, is an opportunity through scripture and prayer, to reflect on the Joy of Christmas. Advent is to anticipate joy; to look within to how we need to change so as to experience the Joy. What part of our lives do we need the grace of God? This final week we have this wonderful Gospel about Joseph. Joseph, a man of dreams.  How he must have imagined his life:  getting married to Mary, having children and raising a family.  A beautiful dream. Then that got changed. God asked for a new dream from Joseph, and Joseph, the saint, accepted the new dream. He let his own go, his own vision of his life, his own plans to accept another. That is Trust and that is Humility!  Trust and humility leads to Joy. In a recent interview with Krista Tippett, famed Chorale Director Alice Parker remarked about how we humans, as individuals, tend to place ourselves at the center of the univ...

Such poignancy in our Gospel. Think back to last week’s gospel with John the Baptist.  He is announcing the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven.  He is in the desert making a difference; baptizing people, confronting the religious leaders and calling them on their attitude.  He is full of confidence! And today, this confident, strident figure sits in jail, a dark place.   Questions and doubts plague him. What is going through his mind?  “Was I mistaken?  Have I wasted my life?  Why is this happening to me? Where are you God?” And look at his reaction...He asks Jesus if he is the one?  He questions Jesus’ role. So what happened? I think a clue is in Jesus’ response in the final lines:  “John is a great man, but least in the Kingdom.”   John has failed to grasp the true meaning of the kingdom. I bet he tried to create the kingdom in his own image, and kingdom that he thought was best.   He tried control so...

The Gospel passage ends with the phrase, "The Angel departed from her." It dawned on me that "WOW".  See God had the answer from Mary, and trusted in her.  There was not need to micro-manage Mary and her pregnancy. This is our God.  God, the all powerful, almighty, creator of the heavens and the earth, is NOT a micro-manager.  God permits me, us, to do what we need or want; and to accept the consequences.

Everybody loves change, as long as everybody else changes and not me. And the irony or paradox or hypocrisy, is that the only person I can change is myself.  Which then leads to all kinds of frustration. John the Baptist tells us that we need to change. Repent, move in a different direction In our lives, so that we are prepared to accept and participate in the Kingdom of Heaven. Isaiah gives us beautiful vision of the Kingdom, that it is a mindset, a vision of Justice, peace, wisdom, a community. It is a wonderful ideal. Yet, why after 2000 years is it not a reality? I think there are many personal, and real reasons why we don’t make changes, and they are not usually evil. We tend to not see the need to change in ourselves, in others yes, but not in ourselves. We are scared to change.  We have a degree of comfort that comes with familiarity with our patterns, even if we recognize their harm. We do not know how to change. And I also do...