Good News Amidst the Bad News

Senseless Violence: 2017 Las Vegas Shooting

Senseless violence, that is what controlled the news cycle this week. A gunman in Las Vegas kills 58 people and wounds 489 others, and even after a week of intensive inquiry no one can explain why he did it. Senseless violence, a violence that continues in our country through shootings and terrorist attacks year after year. There is also senseless violence in today’s gospel parable. So it only makes sense to ask what the parable might say to our own violent landscape.

Just War: Eve of 2003 Iraq War

Clearly, the situation in the world today is complex.  However, we are as a country are now standing on the brink of war. This is why we as Christian believers must raise our voice and ask serious questions.  Such questioning is not simply our moral responsibility but also a part of our democratic process.  We need to ask, is military intervention the only option?  Is it the best option? And if it were to be used, could it be justified?  These are the questions that we must bring to our prayer.  These  are questions we must discuss with one another.  These are questions we should help raise in the minds of other Americans.

The warning of today’s parable must be taken seriously.  We live in a world where violence begets violence.  We live in a world where the destruction of human life can all too easily escalate.  We owe it to ourselves to make sure that if our country uses military force, that use of violence will not create evils that are greater than the evil we seek to eliminate.  As Christians and as Americans we must not only assure ourselves that military action is a just action; we must also try to be very sure that if we go to war, such violence is truly a last resort.

Caring for the Vineyard

It must be time for grapes to be harvested, because we’ve heard about vineyards the last three Sundays. Two weeks ago we had the parable of the laborers in the vineyard, last week the parable of the two sons who were asked to work in the vineyard and today the parable of the wicked tenants of the vineyard.

Today’s parable flows from the first reading for this Sunday, from the first section of Isaiah. In the first reading a vineyard is cared for, but it does not produce fruit, so it is destroyed. In the gospel for today, it is not the vineyard that is bad, but its tenants that are bad. They kill the servants and even the son of the owner. They will be destroyed so that someone else may care for the vineyard properly.

The vineyard in this parable is the Kingdom of God. It is the Church in the broadest application of the term Church. The vineyard is cared for by wicked tenants who are concerned only with their own gain. They are willing to cheat, steal and even kill to bolster their own lives. They use the vineyard for themselves instead of caring for it.

Sinner Please Don't Let This Harvest Pass - A Homily for the 27th Sunday of the Year - Community in Mission

There is an urgency and clarity about today’s Gospel that is often lacking in modern Christians, including the clergy. In this Gospel, the message is urgent, provocative, and clear: there is a day of judgment coming for every one of us and we simply must be ready. The message is a sobering one for a … Continue reading "Sinner Please Don’t Let This Harvest Pass – A Homily for the 27th Sunday of the Year"

Community in Mission

Let’s take a closer look at the Gospel and apply it to the vineyard of our lives:

1. The Sowing
2. The Seeking
3. The Sinning
4. The Sentencing

You are not special

Twenty Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time Year A I really get annoyed when I am made to wait. Sometimes, I rush over to the hospital aft...

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I really get annoyed when I am made to wait. Sometimes, I rush over to the hospital after receiving an urgent call to anoint someone, hoping to meet the relative or person who had called me to bring me into the ward, only to realise that the person had not even arrived. And so as I wait, I begin to fume, I begin to formulate some sarcastic thing to say to the person when he finally arrives. Recently, when I shared this with a priest friend of mine as we were exchanging notes on pastoral experiences, he told me something that I would never forget. “Michael, you are not special. The reason why you get upset is because you think you’re special, but you’re not. Other people wait for us. Everyone waits. So, why should we be any different?”

Clergy E-Notes

“…if the family is the sanctuary of life, the place where life is conceived and cared for, it is a horrendous contradiction when it becomes a place where life is rejected and destroyed. So great is the value of a human life, and so inalienable the right to life of an innocent child growing in the mother’s womb, that no alleged right to one’s own body can justify a decision to terminate that life, which is an end in itself and which can never be considered the “property” of another human being.”

— Pope Francis

The hole in your heart is the opening which Jesus enters your life

Is there some dark recess in your soul that still harbors things that you’re not yet ready to bring to the Lord for healing — possibly because you don’t yet feel ready to face these things yourself? Admit it to yourself?

Every one of us has some area of personal brokenness deep down that is a source of self-questioning anxiety that weighs on us, and which we can pretend isn’t there, but it is. My brothers and sisters, believe it or not, that wound is a gift.

That painful place is a gift because that hole in your heart is the opening through which Jesus can enter your life and dwell in your heart in a more profound way than ever before. Not where we are strong, but rather where we are weak. Because that’s where we’re the most vulnerable.

How to Stop Worrying and Start Living

Bottom line: St. Paul tells us how to stop worrying and start living.

oday St. Paul tells us, “Have no anxiety at all.” (Phil 4:6) We perhaps smile at those words. When someone says not to worry, it can sound like Pollyanna – a person so blindly optimistic that they imagine bad things can never happen. Well, that is hardly the case with Paul. He faced trials few of us could conceive. A partial list includes an escape involving being lowered over the side of building in a basket, public whippings, shipwrecks, snake bites, imprisonment and bodily ailments – particularly, afflictions of the eye. Yet in this letter, written toward the end of his life, he says, “Have no anxiety at all.”

Guarding the Deposit of Faith and Producing Fruit for the Kingdom

In the parable Jesus taught in our Gospel today (Matt 21:33-43), the landowner gave his vineyard on deposit, so to speak, to the tenants when he went on a journey. As vintage time approached, he sent his servants to the tenants to collect his produce. But the tenants mistreated and killed his servants and finally in exasperation the landowner sent his son thinking they would respect his son. But they also killed his son. Jesus teaches this parable in Matthew after arriving in Jerusalem before his Passion. We know, and the Pharisees listening to Jesus knew, that Jesus was referring to the prophets of the Old Testament who had been rejected and killed, and Jesus is now predicting his own death. He knows it is the inevitable outcome of his ministry. The crunch line comes at the very end when Jesus says, “Therefore, I say to you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that will produce its fruit.” (Matt 21:43) We could see this as a reference to the Church in the first century becoming less and less Jewish and more and more Gentile. The deposit which had been given to the Chosen People would be taken from them because they did not keep it in trust as requested.

Standing Before the Truth

For our reflections today we would do well to look at our own lives – and this applies especially to those of us in positions of authority in the Church. We are being challenged to ask ourselves: Are we committed to stand before the truth, in whatever way it affects our life? In the Responsorial Psalm we prayed that God would let his face shine upon us. Only then will we be saved, but we cannot fool God, for God sees things as they really are. God knows the truth.

As disciples of Jesus we have had the privilege of looking upon the face of Jesus. Everything about him tells us of God’s desire to forgive and of God’s promise of grace. Jesus is the vine of today’s readings. If we listen to him and bind our hearts to him, he will give us the sap of his Spirit who will reveal to us where we are failing. Jesus is the Way, the Truth and the Life (John 14:6). The Spirit of Jesus will give us the courage to stand before the truth that alone can set us free (John 8:32), and encourage us to ‘do the truth in love’(Ephesians 4:15).

The Vineyard Church

We delude ourselves dangerously if we think our major task in reading scripture is to examine the historical period in which it was written. Admittedly, such study is a valuable tool for critical distance from and understanding of revelation’s context.

But if the word of God lives for us, it must be spoken now. It must be received now. Paul’s charge to the Philippians is that they live what they have learned and accepted. Living the word, more than the study of it, yields “God’s own peace beyond all understanding.”

Violence and the Sacred

I have shared with you before that one of my favorite books in seminary is entitled “Violence and the Sacred” by Rene Girard. Girard is an anthropological philosopher who chronicled the theme of violence in every religion and culture throughout history. In ancient societies, there was a common theme throughout the globe of performing a sacrifice as a way to keeping peace.

How it worked is if you had a rivalry between people or groups of people, the violence would be redirected towards a third party who becomes the scapegoat, like we see in Leviticus where the term scapegoat comes from, the coliseum in ancient Rome to distract the masses, or most nefariously with Nazi Germany. The scapegoat can unify the rivaling factions for a time but it doesn’t last.

Girard had an interesting and compelling system on how these rivalries develop, which we don’t have time today to sufficiently address, suffice to say whether the violence is present between tribes, between cultures, within communities, between political parties, between families, family members, or even the violence that is directed inward towards the self, this is what Girard has to say about the human condition, he says, “Only violence can put an end to violence, and that is why violence is self- propagating.” Let’s hear that again, “Only violence can put an end to violence, and that is why violence is self-propagating.” I believe the perpetual violence ingrained in the human heart is why Jesus wept as he surveyed Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives. I also believe this is why Jesus became incarnate for us and for the sake of our salvation.