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Year: 2006

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Homilies

Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

I Myself will gather the remnant of My flock
from all the lands to which I have driven them
and bring them back to their meadow;
there they shall increase and multiply.

God promised the people of Israel that He would take care of them. He would care for them like a shepherd cares for his sheep.

At the appropriate moment in time God the Father sent His only Son, Jesus Christ to us as a man of flesh and blood —“ and as God.

God himself walked among us. He ate with us. He listened to us. He had great empathy for us. He used beautiful language, as the Father had used through His prophets of old. He was the shepherd for the lost sheep.

Today’s Gospel tells us that Jesus and His apostles were looking for a quiet place to go off and rest and pray, a place to reflect on what had happened on their missions to the cities, towns, and villages of Israel.

They couldn’t do it. No, the poor, the seekers, the sinners, the weak and the lame, the questioners, they all followed Him.

His heart was moved with pity for them,
for they were like sheep without a shepherd;
and He began to teach them many things.

We love this beautiful language, the gentle loving shepherd looking after his sheep. We love the soft and mellow Jesus, the Jesus of our imaginations, the Jesus we paint for our children in Sunday school.

Brothers and sisters,

We’ve somehow misplaced the shepherd Jesus —“ Jesus, the man who could save sheep with the crook of His staff. Jesus who could pull His sheep out of the jaws of the wolf, Jesus, the man, who was strong enough to guide and teach His sheep.

He began to teach them many things.

But did they learn, have we learned, from our shepherd?

The words of today’s psalm give us a powerful sense of confidence, if we believe they are true, if we trust God’s word.

Even though I walk in the dark valley
I fear no evil; for you are at my side
with your rod and your staff
that give me courage.

Do we take up that courage? Are we a people who fear no evil or pain? Do we see ourselves clothed in white garments washed in the blood of the lamb, protected by His rod and staff? Or are we faint at the thought of standing up to wrong?

This week’s press has been full of articles that call for Christian witness. They call on us to be strong in our faith, in the face of great evil.

Reflect on the alleged stem cell debate. The world calls us ignorant. The world says that we bring condemnation and death upon the sick.

Reflect on the Churches that support abortion and stem cell research on embryos. Kill the babies so we don’t have to suffer. We want our lives to be better, so get rid of the weak sheep; they’re only getting in our way. Their parts are more useful to us than they are.

Reflect on events in the Middle East. The war in Iraq, the war Israel has undertaken against Lebanon, and the stacks of civilian bodies piling up. Those civilians, many of whom are children, those civilian Christians, Muslims, and Druze who lived together in peace, are blood witnesses against our inaction, our buying in. We Christians are woefully silent.

Reflect on the Churches that buy-in to that war. The Evangelical Christians who think the war in the Middle East is the best thing to happen since Jesus. They think the wars there will hasten the coming of Jesus. Come-on, hurry up Lord, the bodies are piling up for you.

Reflect on recent events in so many so called Christian Churches. Those events call on us to be strong. They call on us to be strong witness to the faith that is being jettisoned by so many.

The numbers are stacking up against us. Our witness, true Catholic Christianity is a laughing stock and an object of derision in the world, even among alleged Christians.

Have we gotten that soft? Have we condemned ourselves to a life of ease by sins of laziness (remember the old term sloth) and greed?

Have we forgotten who we are, or are we afraid to witness against evil? Have we forgotten that Jesus taught us many things, the first and foremost being that we must love God and our neighbor, and that we must be willing to lay down our lives for each other?

Where are the true Churches? The Churches that hold true to historic Catholic Christianity. The Churches that still remember that the world is not all there is, the Churches that remember that we are to take up our crosses and join our sacrifices to the One, to Jesus Christ who sacrificed all for us.

In Christ Jesus you who once were far off
have become near by the blood of Christ.

We have been drawn near to God by Jesus’ blood. We have been washed in the blood of Christ. Now is the time to get on the road and complete the journey.

God has kept His promises to us. He cares for us, watches over us, and protects us. We need only believe. We need only be strong enough to take that first step toward the Kingdom. We need only remember the many things He taught us.

Take up the courage of Christ Jesus! Go today! Bear witness; bear the truth of Christ to the world.

Even though I walk in the dark valley
I fear no evil; for you are at my side
with your rod and your staff
that give me courage.

Amen.

[dels]homilies, sermons[/dels]

Current Events

Why Mr. Bush?

From the Independent: Why is there not a murmur of protest from Washington? by Kim Sengupta in Nicosia.

Outside the cavernous US government-run holding centre in Nicosia, Mohammed Shami shook his head. “I feel embarrassed to be an American. They have given Israel the green light to destroy Lebanon. What they are doing is wrong; it is immoral.”

Yes, indeed. President Bush acted very quickly to save the lives of the unborn the other day. If only he would act so quickly to save the lives of the born, the children of Lebanon.

Current Events

The reality of Lebanon

The best analysis I have ever read on the tragedy that is Lebanon, a tragedy that is yesterday, today, and perhaps forever. It is so sad and it pains me deeply. Read: A farewell to Beirut by Robert Fisk in Beirut.

Beirutis are tough people and are not easily moved. But at the end of last week, many of them were overcome by a photograph in their daily papers of a small girl, discarded like a broken flower in a field near the border village of Ter Harfa, her feet curled up, her hand resting on her torn blue pyjamas, her eyes —” beneath long, soft hair —” closed, turned away from the camera.

She had been another “terrorist” target of Israel and several people, myself among them, saw a frightening similarity between this picture and the photograph of a Polish girl lying dead in a field beside her weeping sister in 1939.

Will someone, anyone, speak-up to stop it? I’ll be calling my elected representatives, if only to give voice to the voiceless.

Everything Else

Why bloggers blog

The Pew Internet and American Life Project has just published Bloggers: A portrait of the internet’s new storytellers (PDF document).

In the study they note the breakdown of the reasons bloggers blog. They are as follows:

The Pew Internet Project blogger survey finds that the American blogosphere is dominated by those who use their blogs as personal journals. Most bloggers do not think of what they do as journalism.

Most bloggers say they cover a lot of different topics, but when asked to choose one main topic, 37% of bloggers cite —my life and experiences— as a primary topic of their blog. Politics and government ran a very distant second with 11% of bloggers citing those issues of public life as the main subject of their blog.

Entertainment-related topics were the next most popular blog-type, with 7% of bloggers, followed by sports (6%), general news and current events (5%), business (5%), technology (4%), religion, spirituality or faith (2%), a specific hobby or a health problem or illness (each comprising 1% of bloggers). Other topics mentioned include opinions, volunteering, education, photography, causes and passions, and organizations.

Cool, I’m part of the 2%. While 2% seems small as a percentage, in real numbers it represents 2% of 12 million bloggers or 240,000 bloggers blogging on religion and spirituality.

Everything Else

I don’t feel very emotional about this…


Which Hellenistic School of Philosophy Would You Belong To?



You are a Stoic.

Stoicism is a school of philosophy commonly associated with such Greek philosophers as Zeno of Citium, Cleanthes, or Chrysippus and with such later Romans as Cicero, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, and Epictetus. Organized at Athens in 310 BC by Zeno of Citium and Chrysippus, the Stoics provided a unified account of the world that comprised formal logic, materialistic physics, and naturalistic ethics. Later Roman Stoics emphasized more exclusively the development of recommendations for living in harmony with a natural world over which one has no direct control. Their group would meet upon the porch of the market at Athens, the stoa poecile. The name stoicism derives from the Greek stoa, meaning porch.The Stoic philosophy developed from that of the Cynics whose founder, Antisthenes, had been a disciple of Socrates.

The Stoics emphasized ethics as the main field of knowledge, but they also developed theories of logic and natural science to support their ethical doctrines.

Holding a somewhat materialistic conception of nature they followed Heraclitus in believing the primary substance to be fire. They also embraced his concept of Logos which they identified with the energy, law, reason, and providence found throughout nature.

They held Logos to be the animating or ‘active principle’ of all reality. The Logos was conceived as a rational divine power that orders and directs the universe; it was identified with God, nature, and fate. Human reason and the human soul were both considered part of the divine Logos, and therefore immortal.

The foundation of Stoic ethics is the principle, proclaimed earlier by the Cynics, that good lies in the state of the soul itself, in wisdom and restraint. Stoic ethics stressed the rule “Follow where Reason leads”; one must therefore strive to be free of the passionslove, hate, fear, pain, and pleasure.

Living according to nature or reason, they held, is living in conformity with the divine order of the universe. The four cardinal virtues of the Stoic philosophy are wisdom, courage, justice, and temperance, a classification derived from the teachings of Plato.

A distinctive feature of Stoicism is its cosmopolitanism. All people are manifestations of the one universal spirit and should, according to the Stoics, live in brotherly love and readily help one another. They held that external differences such as rank and wealth are of no importance in social relationships. Thus, before the rise of Christianity, Stoics recognized and advocated the brotherhood of humanity and the natural equality of all human beings. Stoicism became the most influential school of the Greco-Roman world and produced a number of remarkable writers and personalities.

Take this quiz!

Poland - Polish - Polonia

The Universal Hope Offered by Poland

Bill Saunders, Senior Fellow and Director of the Family Research Council’s Center for Human Life & Bioethics writes on The Universal Hope Offered by Poland. He states in conclusion:

Unlike Disneyland, Poland is not a fairy-land. It is a real country, with real problems, and I will return to them in my next column. But Poland is preeminently a country whose “particularity” gives hope to a “universality,” a universality that recognizes true human rights in service of the truly common good.

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