April 15, 2012

Second Sunday of Easter
Fr. Jim Deiters

I remember from many years ago my first visit to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit to see a parishioner’s baby that had been born prematurely and was in critical condition. Within minutes of being in the NICU one immediately realizes how fragile life is as room after room has a baby that is fighting to live. In talking to NICU nurses over the years I have come to learn so much about the development of a baby in the womb and how one of the last organs to develop and is most important for birth are the lungs. Once a baby is out of the womb, it needs those tiny lungs to take its first breath. We so take our breathing and lungs for granted…unless one has Cystic Fibrosis or other lung problems that limit our breathing. Then we realize how precious each breath is that we take and our very existence depends on it.

It makes sense then that the scriptures tells us God chooses to express his love and care for us in the form of breath. The scripture writers describe that creation began with God breathing upon the chaos to form the planets and all living creatures. Genesis tells us that God breathed into the nostrils of the woman and man he formed from the clay of the earth. It is God’s breath, in the form of the Holy Spirit that enters Mary’s womb for the Incarnation of Jesus. And now our Easter Gospel tells us that the Resurrected Jesus breathed on the disciples when he gave them the Holy Spirit and the power to forgive sins.

I think this image of God ‘breathing’ his spirit into us is another great way to think about Christ’s Resurrection and sharing in Jesus new life. Since our very existence depends on what we put into our lungs, the Easter season invites us to think about what ‘kind of air’ we have been breathing…and how often we need to be taking deep breaths of God’s Holy Spirit to help us with the challenges of life. If we have been around the ‘air’ of gossip, negativity, or greed…it begins to affect our very life!

Many of the great prayer traditions involve taking deep breaths to allow God’s breath to fill us…as we exhale all that is unholy and needs forgiven by God. It is no coincidence that Jesus combines his gift of breathing the Holy Spirit upon the disciples and giving them the power to forgive sins. That very image of the Spirit’s breath can help us when we are having a difficult time forgiving someone. On our own, forgiving someone is very difficult. But when we pray and invite God’s Spirit to come upon us and within us, we are given a new power to forgive what we ourselves could not do.

This same breath of God is what Jesus calls his Peace. Each time he appears the disciples the first words from his mouth are “Peace be with you.” Jesus’ gift of peace helps us let go of worries, anger and shame. God’s breath of peace is what we most need when we are bound up in fear. Jesus could see that fear was one of the main blocks to his disciples living passionately about what he taught us and thus he walks into that upper room filled with fearful disciples and gives them his Peace…and the breath of his Holy Spirit.

We learn of the effects of his ‘breath of Peace’ in the Acts of the Apostles reading which describes the community later on as living in deep care for one another. Christ’s breath of the Holy Spirit is exactly what helped the early disciples to do miraculous healings, face persecutions, and even have a willingness to die for their faith!

We have to remember that these disciples were just ordinary husbands, wives, and single persons who started out in fear and came to be our great heroes of the Church. They now look upon us from heaven and are praying that we open our hearts and minds to the same breath of the Holy Spirit that comes to us in the Eucharist. At every Mass we are in our own ‘upper room’ with our own fears, doubts, grief, and upsets.

On this feast of Divine Mercy, the Risen Christ comes to each of us in the Eucharist and breathes upon us his gift of the Holy Spirit to ‘revive’ and ‘resurrect’ us from thinking too small about what God wants to do with our lives. From the very first breath we took outside of our mother’s womb, God blessed us with life. Through baptism, the air we breathe now is the very life of the Holy Spirit. This week, let us practice the prayer of breathing in God’s Spirit… filling us with the Risen Christ’s peace, joy, and hope!

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April 8, 2012

Easter Sunday
Fr. Jim Deiters

It was quite interesting last week to see the craze over the lottery that reached a record high. It was humorous and wonderful to hear people do some dreaming as to how their life could be different. One of the radio programs I heard had the interviewer randomly asking people on the street what they would do with the $640 million. One simple guy replied, “Well, the only thing I really need is a new truck!” As crazy as the odds are at winning, one thing the lottery does is get people to do some dreaming. One of the greatest gifts God gave each of us is our imagination…and yet we rarely take time to imagine and dream about our deepest desires and wants.

Often times when a married person asks me what they can do to strengthen their marriage, I ask them, “What do you dream for your marriage to be like? And do you know what your spouse’s top three dreams are for their life?” I often get a blank look. In Matthew Kelly’s books he often challenges the reader to dream big for their life. When challenged to write out our dreams and hopes it helps us name what we really want out of life. Dreaming also clarifies what is most important to us. Marriages could be much stronger if they shared dreams with each other. And parents would do well to help their children to be more creative in their dreams for how they want to make the world a better place.

One way to think about Jesus’ Resurrection is that it is God’s biggest ‘dream’ for the world now revealed! From the beginning, God had a dream for his favorite creature, human beings, to live eternally with him in the Garden of Eden. But when humans turned selfish, God had to declare that there was no room for selfishness in such a holy place…and death became a reality of our human condition. But God was not satisfied with this outcome and had to sort of ‘re-dream’ how to reverse the curse of death that we humans brought on to ourselves. Thus we have what unbelievers call a pretty crazy idea that we Christians believe – that God came to earth as a human person named Jesus, lived a fully human life, even died, and then rose from the dead. If you really think about it and tried to explain to a non-Christian what it is we believe, we must admit it seems pretty incredible! This is exactly the ‘questioning phase’ that naturally happens during the high school and college years – trying to grasp something that is not proven with science or math.

But this is exactly why FAITH is so unique! Faith is a GIFT given by the Holy Spirit to help a person believe in what is not seen or able to be proven with empirical data.

In order to really celebrate Easter and what it all means…a person has to have the gift of faith! Otherwise this is just a day for dressing up, hunting eggs, and eating chocolate. We are here because we say we really BELIEVE that this Gospel story is TRUE! In the tomb, the burial cloths were still there…but Jesus body was raised from the dead! There simply is no logic or science to explain this…only faith!

In Jesus’ Rising from the dead, God’s dream is restored by reversing the curse of death for all of us. Our bodies will still decay at some point, but Jesus’ Resurrection opens the possibility of every person to also rise to eternal life with God in heaven.

Now, one may say, “sure I believe there is a heaven for us to go to when we die, but how does that help my life NOW? The answer to this is what we will hear in the upcoming Scripture stories for the next seven Sundays of the Easter season. The early disciples wrote out all kinds of incredible things that happened to their lives once they came to believe in Jesus’ Resurrection! While our long-term goal of heaven may seem far off, to live in the spirit of Jesus’ Resurrection means experiencing its fruits already in the here and now!

God’s dream is for us to know the new life of the Resurrection at each moment. With eyes of FAITH, we must watch closely for signs of new life all around us every day! We must believe that God can raise up and resurrect those parts of our life that seem ‘stuck’ or maybe even ‘dead.’ While some things that are not meant to be will die away, it takes true FAITH to believe that God can bring back to life something we thought was hopeless.

And this is the key line in the Gospel for Easter. It says the disciple “saw the empty tomb…and believed.” While some of us may be the kind of disciple who wants more tangible proof, we come to this Eucharist and ask God to open our eyes and hearts to become more aware of the Real Presence of Jesus…right here in the Eucharist…and in so many other ways Christ is visible in the very world around us!

Let us bring to the Altar today anything in our life and our relationships that needs God to ‘raise up’ with the Risen Christ. Let us pray for the Spirit to help us during these fifty days of Easter to do some ‘dreaming’ with God…about what kind of resurrected life He has in mind for us.

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April 5, 2012

Holy Thursday
Fr. Jim Deiters

Last year during our parish pilgrimage to the Holy Land, in the middle of many spiritually moving experiences, one place that was a true highlight for me was being in the church at the site of Peter’s denial. If you remember the story, it took place near the palace of Caiaphas where Jesus was on trial after his arrest. Our group first got to pray at the original steps that led up to the palace, steps that Jesus himself would have walked up after he was rope bound at his arrest in the garden. While little of the palace remains, the site has a large church built over it to mark the place not only of Peter’s denying Christ, but this is where Jesus would have spent his last night before his Crucifixion. The church is called “Saint Peter in Gallicantu,” which means “Peter and the Cock Crowed.”

When you walk into the church, it immediately gives you an eerie feeling as it is dimly lit and has huge mosaic images of Peter denying Christ, the cock crowing, and Peter weeping. But the most upsetting part is when we were led down a narrow winding staircase to a tiny dark cell that would have been in the basement of Caiaphas’ palace as a wet sewer sort of a place…and would have been the place where Jesus spent his last night on earth alone. I had never before thought about where Jesus stayed on Thursday night after his arrest. We spent a few moments of silent prayer there…trying to imagine Jesus’ feelings of abandonment.

Here we are some 2000 years later…celebrating with great fanfare this most holy night, which while filled with great memories of what happened at the Last Supper, still evokes a sense of sadness of what happened to Christ later that night and the next day. As one might think about what Jesus prayed while he was in that dark cell, I imagine Jesus praying that his disciples would remember what he said to them at the Supper: “Do this in memory of me,” and “as I have done for you, you should also do.”

On his final night with them, he chose to give his disciples the Eucharist and the mandate to follow his example of serving others. The washing of the feet symbolizes for us more than just the need to care for one another; but when he says “I give you a model to follow,” he is also talking about how he will lay down his life the next day in complete selflessness.

In the ‘washing of feet’ ritual in which we are about to partake, it is not about just being a good ‘helper’ to others. Even unbelievers can be good at helping people. To ‘follow Jesus’ example’ goes beyond doing good for others…as he models a much greater level of service… in which one is called to really lay down one’s life in complete selflessness…at ALL times!

It was only later that the disciples began to realize the connection between Jesus saying “Do this in memory of me” at the Eucharist… and his example of living selflessly and saying “I have given you a model to follow.” I believe that while he was in that dark cell praying not only for God’s help, he was already asking the Holy Spirit to come into the disciple’s hearts and remember his words and his actions of Offering the Eucharist and laying down their lives for others.

Jesus gave us the Holy Eucharist precisely as our nourishment to be fed with His Spirit…so that we CAN lay down our lives for others. Tomorrow night during the Passion we will sing that harrowing phrase ‘There is no greater love than this: to lay down your life for your friends.” As Christians, Jesus teaches us that our ‘friends’ include every person God created. Each of us, with our unique vocation, talents, and charisms, has to figure out what it means to lay down our life for others.

As we each ‘give our life away’ like Christ, we know it will be not be easy…as everything around us tempts us to live for our self. We come back to the Eucharist time and again to be fed with the True Body and Blood of Christ…to literally become like Jesus when we leave here. By partaking of this Bread of Life we are given the courage and strength to fulfill what Jesus prayed for, “to follow his example.” As we enter into the Passion of Good Friday…and the 50 days of Easter, let us keep alive those phrases that Jesus prayed over and over, “Do this in memory of me” and “As I have done so must you do.”

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April 1, 2012

Palm Sunday
Fr. Jim Deiters

As I was preparing my homily this week on this Passion story from Mark’s Gospel, different from John’s version of the Passion we will hear on Good Friday, the thought that kept coming to mind was how violent the whole event was. In the very challenging preparations of how to preach on a story of such violence and death, I took the newspaper each day this week and started noticing in the reports similar kinds of hatred, betrayal, and violence. At times we ourselves take part in violence …each time we resort to words or actions that are disrespectful, pre-judging, gossipy, or just plain hateful...sometimes used on our own loved ones. It is tragic how we can easily we can get caught up in the cycle of violence that seems to plague our human species. Jesus’crucifixion is a sad summary of the tragedy behind the violence we humans do to one another.

While most of God’s creation around us displays beauty, growth and harmony, we humans just cannot seem to figure out how to be unified and co-operate in God’s plan of salvation. Sometimes we forget how destructive our own words can be….thinking that we are better than others or misusing our power. In our fears and insecurities we cling to power, greed, and violence to try and live in an illusion that we are some kind of god in charge.

Mark’s Gospel tells us that Jesus was crucified with "two revolutionaries.” The Romans, instigated by the Sanhedrin, believed that Jesus was just another ‘revolutionary’ needing to be put to death. Notice the darkness of it all: Jesus’ arrest was at nighttime; a trial with false testimony; a crowd shouting "Crucify him, crucify him!"---- meaning ‘we want murder!’ All this collusion and conspiracysent Jesus to his violent cross and death. The story reveals how easily people get sucked into participating in senseless violence!

Throughout the tragedy of the trial, the lies, the weapons, the beatings and the crucifixion, it is very important to notice that Jesus himself refused to resort to the use of violence. The gospel writer highlights the stark difference between those who use violence for false power …and Jesus who always takes a stance of complete non-violence to show us a whole other kind of power – one of love!

Mark’s whole Gospel emphasizes Jesus’ life as one of non-violence. Even while being murdered on the Cross, Jesus remains a symbol of peace and forgiveness… even while he is stretched upon an instrument of violent torture. The cross is an icon of our faith since it sums up what we believe – LOVE conquers violence! The rest of the story we will hear on Easter and the weeks that follow proves that love, not killing people, wins! Love wins!

While the cross is worn by some as a sign of faith or simply as jewelry, we must remember that it was an instrument for execution. Jesus faced the death penalty and an execution! If you think about it, to believe in executing people teaches our children that murder is acceptable? But violence is violence; murder is murder---even if it is government sanctioned. We see the tragedy of capital punishment right here in the story of Jesus’ death!

Even as Jesus was being tortured on the Cross he was praying for his enemies and praying a psalm about trusting in God’s help. It all sounds crazy to believe – that Jesus could remain completely non-violent in such a time of unjust punishment!

As today we begin what is called “Passion Week,” we prepare for the highest holy days of the year – the Triduum liturgies of Holy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter. Holy Mother Church calls all of her children to come to these most significant celebrations to watch, listen, and participate in a summary of everything Jesus taught us – love, service, and forgiveness. From Thursday through Sunday we will hear Scriptures, participate in rituals of foot washing, kissing the Cross, baptizing new members, being anointed with the Spirit, and partaking in the Eucharist, - all ways that we share in Christ’s life of rejecting violence and living in love!

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