Today’s Thoughts: “The Kingdom of God is among you.” These are Jesus’ words in today’s Gospel (Luke 17:20-25). What do they mean?
On the one hand Jesus could be talking about himself. He is the Kingdom of God at that moment. The religious leaders are looking around for God and signs of God, yet God is in their midst. The Kingdom of God is among them, and they are missing it! Another way of looking at Jesus’ words is that Jesus does not say that the Kingdom of God is in us or above us or around us; Jesus says the Kingdom is among us. Perhaps Jesus is saying that none of us alone possesses the Kingdom of God. Each of us shares in the Kingdom, thus we need each other for the Kingdom to be fully appreciated. Considering these two ways of understanding Jesus’ words today, perhaps our challenge is to be aware of God’s Kingdom among us. We need to be on the lookout for the presence of Jesus, the presence of God in our life. And what will help us not miss the God’s Kingdom and the presence of Jesus among us? Well, one way to approach this challenge each day is by “refreshing our hearts in Christ,” as St. Paul tells us in our first reading today. (Phlm 7-20) Have a blessed, holy, wise, and wonderful Thursday everyone.
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Today’s Thoughts: Today we celebrate the feast of the dedication of the Lateran Basilica in Rome. It is the Pope’s local parish church as bishop of Rome. It is considered “the mother and head of all churches of the city of Rome and the whole world.” It has with stood barbarian attacks, earthquakes and fire. It is a physical sign of the presence of God not only in buildings but throughout the world.
In our first reading from the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel (Ezekiel 47:1-2, 8-9, 12), we hear about the Israelites struggles in exile. It is the experience of lifelessness, it is the experience of earth where nothing will grow. It is the experience of being without their own land, their own homes, their own Temple. The prophet Ezekiel has this vision of the new Temple. It is a spring welling up, flows East, transforming the desolate land of the Arabah region (like a new garden of Eden), and it enters the Dead Sea, purifying it. This spring of water brings life and healing. In our Gospel today (John 2:13-22), we encounter the famous story of Jesus overturning tables, making a whip out of cords and driving out all those who are making his Father’s house a marketplace. The moneychangers and sellers, who became rich at the cost of the poor, are driven out. In answer to the religious leaders request for a sign, Jesus says: “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up.” They do not understand him. His disciples, however, remember these words when Jesus rose from the dead on the third day. In our middle reading from St. Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians (1 Cor. 3:9c-11, 16-17), St. Paul preaches the good news of Jesus and baptized them in Christ so that each could become God’s “building,” with God’s Spirit dwelling in them. Perhaps as we reflect on our readings today on feast of the Lateran Basilica, we might take the time to remember that Christ dwells in each one of us, that he gives us the courage to overcome our weaknesses and become holy temples of God. We might find ourselves parched, struggling, and lifeless at times, but with God’s grace flowing like a stream through us, we are challenged to give life to the presence of God wherever we go and to whomever we meet. Have a blessed and holy Wednesday everyone. Today’s Thoughts: The reading from St. Paul’s Letter to Titus seems to be answering the following questions: What does a Christian look like? How does a Christian act? How does one recognize a follower of Christ?
Whether we are young or old, female or male, we hear from St. Paul a description of the “ideal Christian.” We need to look past the cultural disconnect that it seems to present to us and see it as a challenge to all of us, female or male, old or young. The best news is the last sentence, which begins, “For the grace of God has appeared….” We might tend to get absorbed in the earlier descriptions of conduct, examining our own behavior, wondering if we fulfill requirements. “I’m pretty good at this; that’s one of my faults; I always struggle with that.” However, if this is what we focus on then we are missing the good news here. Behavior and attitudes, external changes, are all results of the transformation we have experience when we open our hearts and welcome God’s grace. They are the outcome of the internal changes we make because of our relationship with God. We seem to have gotten the message turned around. We focus on our behavior and berate ourselves for wrong actions, mis-steps and faults. We always seem to be trying to “fix” the outside, to re-shape ourselves to fit the ideal image, to make sure we “measure up”, rather than allowing God’s grace to continually permeate us, transforming us from the inside. The Gospel reading further develops the value of this grace. The good that we do, the ways we help and serve each other, all the ways we give of ourselves and our gifts – we do this not in expectation of some reward, but because this is now our nature. This is who we are, transformed in Christ! Again, somewhere along the way we turned this around to thinking we will like ourselves better, and feel better about ourselves, if we act in the ways that get us the rewards of recognition, praise, status, a raise, or whatever else we think motivates us. Our transformed life is the reward! It is not external to us, not a fleeting feeling or transient title or trophy. Today. let us love the Lord with our whole heart and God will do the rest. Have a holy and blessed Tuesday everyone! Today’s Thoughts: A few years back, I read a book by Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM, entitled Just This, and in it Rohr quotes the French philosopher and savant, Blaise Pascal, “People never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction.” This reflection by Pascal and Rohr seems to be a connecting point for our readings today.
In St. Paul Letter to Titus, Paul is placing his trust in Titus to find good people who can lead the Church in Crete and the surrounding area. Paul gives Titus some qualifications for the kind of people he should look for. Paul wants faith-filled people not ones who are led easily into self-righteousness and sin. Titus is to look for good people but not ones who will think of themselves as “holier than thou!” In Luke’s gospel Jesus continues to talk about sin, which is not a topic that most of us like to embrace with vigor. Perhaps it is because we have been influenced too much by societal norms which seem to reject the notion of sin in the modern world. As we reflect on the readings today, words of Pope Francis come to mind also when he is asked, “Who Is Jorge Mario Bergoglio?” and he responds, “I am a sinner.” Perhaps it is good to know that we are the same company as the Pope. Our Gospel not only dwells on the effects of sin but also the resolution to bring us back into the light of the Spirit. We hear a lesson on how to forgive others. If someone wrongs us seven times a day, we are called to forgive seven times. Yes, we are called to constantly forgive, God in his unquantifiable love forgives us if we truly have a repentant heart. The work of faith and forgiveness is never finished. It is an ongoing process until we meet God face to face. Have a blessed and holy Monday everyone. Today’s Thoughts: In our Gospel today, we encounter Jesus having to deal with religious leadership once again as they try to catch by presenting what seems to be an unsolvable problem. Today leaders involved are the Sadducees, a conservative section of Jewish leadership centered around the Temple, who will disappear once the Temple is destroyed in 70 CE. This group of Jewish fundamentalists, have a philosophy that there is no life after death, so, they come to Jesus, not to talk about marriage, but to push their agenda as opposed to Jesus’ teachings about the life and kingdom to come. They invoke the writing of Moses to justify their presentation to Jesus.
In his answer, Jesus reminds them that during the encounter that God initiated with Moses at the “Burning Bush” Moses called out, “Lord”, Who is God of the three foundational persons in the history of Israel, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. God is not the God of the dead, but of the living. The point of our reading today centers on life not death. The brothers and mother in our first reading today from the Second Book of Maccabees are focused on life. Not the life they are currently living, that is temporary. They are focused on the life to come for all eternity with God. Jesus is also focused on the life to come. He does not describe it in detail but in broad strokes and the main focus is life! We are on the journey and our faith needs to be ground in the God of the living! These final weeks of the liturgical year are always focused on what our journey of faith is all about. The mystery of eternity is in front of us. We can only try to describe it in human terms that always come up short and so we must believe. We must have faith and hope that rest in our God, who always has been and always will be the God of the Living! Have a blessed and holy Sunday everyone. Today’s Thoughts: “No servant can serve two masters.” (Luke 16:13) No we cannot divide our focus when it comes to living life, when it comes to our faith. And so, offer the following reflection so that we might focus on what really matters today…
Celebrate each moment as it comes to you…with faith, trust and gratitude. Because all that happens in our life has God’s mark on it. Each day offer a simple fiat…It can be as simple as taking a breath, or the beat of our heart, but let it say thanks God! Seek God each day, not in some far-off place, not in the trappings of history but in the world around us. God is always right here, in this place, in our hearts. God is right here, where we stand, where we walk, where we run, where we sit, where we lie down, in everything we do. God is right here, in our family, in our friends, even in strangers we meet. God is in our workplace, our homes, our yards, our living rooms, our family rooms, our bed rooms. Because these are all places, altars where we offer and receive love and thankfully God is there! Celebrate life; celebrate life with gratitude and thankfulness today and always! Have a holy and blessed Saturday everyone! Today’s Thoughts: The Gospel for today (Luke 16:1-8), always seems to be a confusing one. What exactly is Jesus saying? It seems that Jesus is praising the unfaithful steward just because he figures out a way to land on his feet after being fired. Perhaps the key word for Gospel today is “prudence” or maybe a better word might be “cleverness.”
Jesus says the steward is prudent, that he is shrewd, pragmatic and has foresight. However, as I said above, we might also say that the steward is clever, meaning he is shrewd, ingenious, crafty, and skillful. Prudence and cleverness share some of the same meanings and in some instances, could be used to say the same thing. As prayed with our readings last night I had these thoughts about the prudent and clever steward and what Jesus might be getting at in the Gospel… In our world there are many prudent and clever people. Often as a world, a culture, a society we put our cleverness to work in many ways. We invent machines and systems that can protect us and destroy our enemies. We have invented the internet, cellphones and computers that help us communicate better, work fast and be more productive. We invent sophisticated systems to warn us of impending disasters like hurricanes, tsunamis and other nature made events. We invent systems to spy on one another, to hack computers and disrupt communications. We invent instruments of war some of which that can destroy the world. We are very clever people. Yet up to this point in history we have not been able to figure out how to feed everyone, how to cloth everyone or how to give everyone shelter. Perhaps this gets at the point that Jesus’ is making with his parable. The people of the world are very clever but sometimes people of faith are not. We put our prudence, our cleverness, our shrewdness, our foresightedness, our skillfulness to work for ourselves, but as people of faith, it might be time to put it to work for others. We can learn from the cleverness of the world but only if our cleverness leads us to bringing God to the world. I think Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ said it best when he wrote, “Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, [humankind] will have discovered fire.” Let us be clever people of faith and discover for the world God’s love once again. Have a blessed and holy Friday everyone! Today’s Thoughts: Perhaps these three quotes help us understand our two parables this morning from Luke’s Gospel. Parables that speak to us of the mercy of God…
“The thing the church needs most today is the ability to heal wounds and to warm the hearts of the faithful; it needs nearness, proximity. I see the church as a field hospital after battle. It is useless to ask a seriously injured person if he has high cholesterol and about the level of his blood sugars! You have to heal his wounds. Then we can talk about everything else. Heal the wounds, heal the wounds. ... And you have to start from the ground up.” (Pope Francis) “A church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints.” (Abigail Van Buren) “I prefer a Church which is bruised, hurting, and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a Church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security.” (Pope Francis) “God never tires of forgiving us; we are the ones who tire of seeking his mercy.” (Pope Francis) God never stops searching for us no matter how much we have struggled in our life. Our readings today speak to us of hope, mercy and God’s great love for us. This is something the scribes and Pharisees never seem to understand. It seems like at times even today religious leaders do not understand. The question is do we? Have a blessed and holy Thursday everyone. Today’s Thoughts: I have always liked our first reading today from the Book of Wisdom (Wisdom 3:1-9) especially the line, “But they are at peace.” This reading is often used at funerals, moments when people are remembering a loved one, a friend, someone who has been important in their life, who has passed on. In the midst of grief, it can often be helpful to think of the person finally being at peace even if because of their passing we are not.
The Feast of All Souls is a day of remembrance. It gives us an opportunity to pause and remember the important people in our lives who have passed on. People who have left us physically, people whom we now hope are at peace now with God. It is a day when we remember them in a formal way at Eucharist and informally through stories and moments of prayer thankful for their presence in our lives. I have always felt that the Feast of All Souls is really the second half of the Feast of All Saints. Yesterday we celebrated the people formally named saints by the Church because of their faith filled lives, people who during their lives stepped out of the ordinary into the extraordinary and became examples, inspirations and role models within the Universal Church. Today we remember, we celebrate, all those ordinary people who perhaps did not step into the extraordinary except in our lives, people who gave us life, who taught us, nurtured us, protected us, and guided us. We remember, we celebrate, today people who were with us from the beginning or who stepped into our lives for a brief moment that made a difference. These are people who are not honored by the Church as saints in a formal way but whom we perhaps honor in our own special way, as saints with a little “s” because we are thankful for their presence, inspiration and love. We remember, and we pray today for all who journeyed through this life with the sure and certain hope that God has found them worthy because he is the Good Shepherd with an overflowing cup that has brought them to peace! Have a blessed and holy Wednesday everyone! Today’s Thoughts: I have a few disjoined thoughts for you today…
“To become saints, only one thing is necessary: to accept the grace which the Father gives us in Jesus Christ.” (Pope Francis) Today, we remember, we honor, and we say thank you to all the women and men whom the Church calls saints, but also whom we call saints. People who have touched our lives down through the centuries. People who shared their faith and perhaps more importantly lived their faith so that we might encounter the presence of God, so that we might grow into the people God created us to be, so that we might believe. They were mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, sisters-in-law, brothers-in-law, nieces, nephews, friends, teachers, grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, neighbors, strangers, companions on the journey, ordinary people who lived extraordinary lives of faith. Pope Francis talks about the saints in our lives this way; “I see the holiness in the patience of the people of God: a woman who is raising children, a man who works to bring home the bread, the sick, the elderly priests who have so many wounds but have a smile on their faces because they served the Lord, the sisters who work hard and live a hidden sanctity. This is for me the common sanctity. I often associate sanctity with patience: not only patience as hypomoné [See note], taking charge of the events and circumstances of life, but also as a constancy in going forward, day by day. This is the sanctity of the militant church also mentioned by St. Ignatius. This was the sanctity of my parents: my dad, my mom, my grandmother Rosa who loved me so much. In my breviary I have the last will of my grandmother Rosa, and I read it often. For me it is like a prayer. She is a saint who has suffered so much, also spiritually, and yet always went forward with courage.” Note: (Hypomoné is a New Testament Greek word meaning – the capacity to endure under difficult circumstances; bearing everyday tasks, contradictions, tribulations.) Pope Francis also says that – “We need saints without cassocks, without veils - we need saints with jeans and tennis shoes. We need saints that go to the movies that listen to music that hang out with their friends.... We need saints that drink Coca-Cola, that eat hot dogs, that surf the internet and that listen to their iPods. We need saints that love the Eucharist, that are not afraid or embarrassed to eat a pizza or drink a beer with their friends. We need saints who love the movies, dance, sports, and theatre. We need saints that are open, sociable, normal, happy companions. We need saints who are in this world and who know how to enjoy the best in this world without being callous or mundane. We need saints.” One last thought from Pope Francis on this All Saints Day. Today’s Gospel is the passage of the Beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew’s Gospel. During his homily a few years ago at an All Saints Mass in Sweden Pope Francis proposed six new beatitudes for the modern era: "Blessed are those who remain faithful while enduring evils inflicted on them by others, and forgive them from their heart; "Blessed are those who look into the eyes of the abandoned and marginalized, and show them their closeness; "Blessed are those who see God in every person, and strive to make others also discover him; "Blessed are those who protect and care for our common home; "Blessed are those who renounce their own comfort in order to help others; "Blessed are those who pray and work for full communion between Christians." So, to all those who lived these beatitudes and touched us with sanctity and helped us to be the people we are today…we say thank you! Have a blessed and holy Tuesday everyone! |
Fr. Paul R. Fagan, C.P. "Preacher on the Run"Just a few thoughts to help you on your journey through life...let me know from time to time what you think... Archives
April 2024
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