20 February 2021 - knowing our need

Today's Readings

(Audio)

Jesus saw a tax collector named Levi sitting at the customs post.

He said to him, “Follow me.”

And leaving everything behind, he got up and followed him.

We see today the calling of Matthew, also known as Levi. He had been until that moment a tax collector, a group known for oppression and malicious speech, a group not known to bestow their bread on the hungry or to satisfy the afflicted. Even an otherwise decent individual who was driven to such a position out of desperation would not easily remain unstained by it. 

Matthew was able to recognize that he was sick and in need of a physician. He was tired of a life that defined by falsehood, that was so dominated by the importance of money. Unlike the Pharisees, Matthew had no illusions of righteousness on from the law. The Pharisees thought themselves righteous, that their works meant that were not sinful or sick or in need of healing. But they did not recognize that "by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight" (see Romans 3:20).

“Those who are healthy do not need a physician, but the sick do.

I have not come to call the righteous to repentance but sinners.”

Matthew was able to recognize two things that enabled his profound response to Jesus. He recognized that he was sick, that is, his soul was languishing, not realizing the potential for which God intended made him. And he recognized in Jesus one who could heal him. In fact, he recognized in the very invitation to follow Jesus that he was being invited to come and be healed. What he was being offered was to leave the old life of sickness behind and embrace the new direction which Jesus represented, filled with hope and possibility. 

He will renew your strength,

    and you shall be like a watered garden,

    like a spring whose water never fails.

The ancient ruins shall be rebuilt for your sake,

    and the foundations from ages past you shall raise up;

“Repairer of the breach,” they shall call you,

    “Restorer of ruined homesteads.”

There is hope for all people who are able to recognize their need for the Divine Physician. The Pharisees offer us a cautionary tale, showing how our pride causes us to entertain illusions of self-righteousness and self-sufficiency that prevent us from recognizing our need for Jesus and turning to him. Let us instead see how our own efforts, like those of Matthew, left us still empty, still wounded, still in need of grace, so that we can welcome the invitation to receive that grace whenever it is offered.

When we receive Jesus from the raw and vulnerable place from which Matthew did we will too will want to invite others to share in the feast we have discovered.

Then Levi gave a great banquet for him in his house,

and a large crowd of tax collectors

and others were at table with them.

Jesus does not exclude anyone from his call. Pharisees and tax collectors are both welcome, and all stand in the same need of grace. Jesus shows favor to the strangers, the outcasts, the seemingly irreparably broken people of the world, in order to show that there are no limits to his mercy. We ourselves are often more like the Pharisees who don't recognize that we still, in every moment, stand in need of mercy. Witnessing profound conversions in the lives of others is meant to remind us that we are meant for more as well. Our own conversion must be ongoing. Our own healing is not yet complete.

Have mercy on me, O Lord,

    for to you I call all the day.

Gladden the soul of your servant,

    for to you, O Lord, I lift up my soul.

Chris Tomlin - I Will Follow

19 February 2021 - break every chain

Today's Readings

(Audio)

They seek me day after day,

    and desire to know my ways,

Like a nation that has done what is just

    and not abandoned the law of their God;

The world definitely does this. It is happy to go along being entertained and numbed until something happens so severe that it cannot solve it with its own resources. In the past when that happened the world would turn to God and seek after him. Disasters drove people back into the churches. It was said that there were no atheists in foxholes. The trouble is that God would not allow himself to be used only as a last resort when all else failed. Turning to him in distress did not necessarily alleviate the distress. It definitely mattered to the hearts that chose to do it. But the world observed a God who did not respond as things did not seem to improve. Finally we came to a point where the world was too jaded to even turn to God in times of trial, as it seemed to not suffice in the past. If God refused to be present on the world's terms, as a last resort when our own efforts fell short, when entertainment could no longer distract us, when pleasure could no longer numb us, well, the world wouldn't bother with him at all. The saddest aspect of this is that we never experienced what it would be like to be a nation that was just and had not abandoned the law of God. Had we been walking with him the whole time we might have discovered that providence and protection really could make a difference.

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.

- GK Chesterton

Is it only the world that does this, that seeks God in desperation and then gives up on him entirely? Or does this describe us as well? Do we keep up some regularity of external practice, but only truly open our hearts and seek in periods of distress and need? Perhaps we point to the regular external practice as proof that we are entitled to the healing, breakthrough, or answered prayer we seek. Likely we don't even consider how differently things may have gone had we been seeking God all along.

The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them,

and then they will fast.

Jesus promised to be with us always, unto the end of the age (see Matthew 28:20). The bridegroom, then, is taken away from us only by our lack of response to his grace. We are called to rend our hearts precisely because they have become insulated against his presence. This rending of hearts necessarily entails the rending of social injustice as well.

This, rather, is the fasting that I wish:

    releasing those bound unjustly,

    untying the thongs of the yoke;

Setting free the oppressed,

    breaking every yoke;

Sharing your bread with the hungry,

    sheltering the oppressed and the homeless;

Clothing the naked when you see them,

    and not turning your back on your own.

We must rend the bonds holding others captive, because in them we find Jesus truly present. This rending is a double movement that breaks the obstacles within us to God and breaks the obstacles before others to both the corporeal and spiritual goods to which they are entitled. By doing so, their full dignity as made in the image of God, as those with whom Jesus himself so closely identified, can be made manifest. 

When our hearts are hardened we are unable to find God anywhere. Our prayers in crisis, especially to the degree that their are presumptuous, may turn out to be too little too late, and this precisely because God desires a closer walk with us. And so let us rend every obstacle to God's presence, the hardening and insulation that keeps us from seeking him first, that keeps us from caring about the plight of the people who surround us.

Then your light shall break forth like the dawn,

    and your wound shall quickly be healed;

Your vindication shall go before you,

    and the glory of the LORD shall be your rear guard.

Then you shall call, and the LORD will answer,

    you shall cry for help, and he will say: Here I am!

Tasha Cobbs - Break Every Chain

18 February 2021 - life indeed

Today's Readings

(Audio)

I have set before you life and death,

the blessing and the curse.

Choose life, then,

that you and your descendants may live

This choice that Lord offered in Deuteronomy may seem opposed to the call made by Jesus in today's Gospel.

If anyone wishes to come after me, he must deny himself

and take up his cross daily and follow me.

For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it

But the reason we are given both of these readings today is that they are expressing the same call.

but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.

The invitation Moses gave to the people was not to seek just any life, or life on their own terms. 

If, however, you turn away your hearts and will not listen,

but are led astray and adore and serve other gods,

I tell you now that you will certainly perish;

you will not have a long life

on the land that you are crossing the Jordan to enter and occupy.

Moses invited the people to choose life that was life indeed in which they and their descendents could live, "by loving the LORD, your God, heeding his voice, and holding fast to him."

The trouble was the depths of the sway and influence that idols maintained over the people. Even after leaving Egypt their hearts were still pulled from the straightforward path of God by the idols of the nations that surrounded them. And it is the same for us. Even after we have been liberated from sin by baptism we are often still entranced and enchanted by the various idols of the world around us, the ways in which that world promises happiness on our terms, apart from God and his ways.

What profit is there for one to gain the whole world

yet lose or forfeit himself?

The happiness that the world promises can't deliver in the long run. Even in the moment it is never something that fully satisfies our hearts. There is always the sense of something more that is missing even when we have the best that the world can offer.

For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it,

but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.

Because our problem has always been putting ourselves first and God in a distant second or third we continue to experience slavery to sin and dissatisfaction with our lives. And because that is our problem there is no way to be delivered from it that won't be a little bit like dying. It is precisely the call to choose life on God's terms and no longer on our own that really is true life, true joy, and lasting happiness. But to the part of us that is old and unrenewed it feels like death, because to that part of us it will be death. Let us trust God that old self of ours that protests and complains never gave us happiness anyway. Not really. And let us believe the one who made us, who knows what is our greatest good, about where true life can be found.

I have set before you life and death,

the blessing and the curse.

Choose life

Christy Nockels - A Mighty Fortress

17 February 2021 - fast company

Today's Readings

(Audio)

“Spare, O LORD, your people,

    and make not your heritage a reproach,

    with the nations ruling over them!

Why should they say among the peoples,

    ‘Where is their God?’”

When we do not keep God first in our lives we do not allow him to be as present to us as he desires. We place ourselves outside his providential protection and open ourselves to all sorts of problems from which he could have protected us or for which he could have given us sufficient strength to face. 

Even now, says the LORD,

    return to me with your whole heart,

    with fasting, and weeping, and mourning;

Rend your hearts, not your garments,

    and return to the LORD, your God.

We are called to return the LORD, not simply to certain practices and actions are the external aspects of our yearly Lenten observance. None of the externals matter if they don't penetrate sufficiently to give God room in our hearts, to offer him a new foothold for his Kingdom within us. 

The degree to which we have placed second things first is the degree to which forcing ourselves to loosen our grip on them will necessitate fasting, and weeping, and mourning. We had supposed that something other than God might satisfy us. We may experience the death of that illusion as something which involves weeping and mourning. Even more, we will recognize that all of the time we were under that spell we were neglecting God's own offer of love. We can and should let ourselves fully experience these emotions as they arise but we needn't cling to them. They are meant to be at most a temporary aspect of the transformation that repentance brings. If we deny them we may still be in denial about the things that matter most and about our past infidelity to those things. But if we try to keep experiencing them, as though they were the substance in which our Lent should consist, we will be stagnating and preventing God from opening to us the new horizons which he desires to show us.

For our sake he made him to be sin who did not know sin, 

so that we might become the righteousness of God in him.

We are meant to let what Jesus did for us take full effect in us, rather than insisting that we don't really need to receive any more of it, or to say that we did it once and now we're fine. Our Lent must not be about what our efforts if it is to be a profitable season for us. It must be a doubling down on the centrality of the presence of God in our lives and an insistence that the grace given us by Christ must be the starting place and goal that gives our lives direction. In a season marked by so many external practices this may seem counterintuitive. Yet it is precisely a more complete reliance on grace alone that all of the practices and experiences of Lent are meant to embody. The degree to which they do not do so they become distractions.

We may have done poorly in the past when we tried to place Jesus first on the throne in our lives. We may have anxiety or fear that we will not do a good job in the future. But God wants Lent to be about the here and now with him, not the past or the future. He wants to be sufficiently present to us in the moment that our ruminations about past and future lose their ability to limit us.

In an acceptable time I heard you,

    and on the day of salvation I helped you.

One reason that it is hard to be present to God is that many of us have grown accustomed to seeking our rewards in the world. When we do good we typically look to the world for our validation. And the world inevitably disappoints us, offering us rewards for things which are bad or indifferent, and ignoring us when we act as our best selves. Lent is a time to practice seeking our validation from God alone, and not from others, nor even from the apparent results of our efforts. We may not see the fruit for a season, but it should be enough that God smiles on us as we plant the seed.

But when you pray, go to your inner room,

close the door, and pray to your Father in secret.

And your Father who sees in secret will repay you.

When we seek our validation from God alone we will experience in a new way the freedom that is the gift of his Spirit. When we experience his gift of righteousness as the approval we seek, rather than that which we must earn according to the paradigm of the world, we gain a peace that the world can't take away.

Matt Maher - 40 Days

16 February 2021 - bread and water

Today's Readings

(Audio)

Jesus enjoined them, “Watch out,

guard against the leaven of the Pharisees

and the leaven of Herod.” 

Jesus warned them about the leaven of the Pharisees for a similar reason that Paul warned the Corinthians about boasting. Paul warned that "a little leaven leavens the whole lump" and went on to say, "Cleanse out the old leaven that you may be a new lump, as you really are unleavened" (see First Corinthians 5:6). There was something about the pride the that motivated the Pharisees and the pride that motivated the Corinthian boasting that had the potential be a disproportionately corruptive influence. This means that it was not just the Pharisees that were at risk from prideful teaching, nor the boasters in Corinth at risk from their boasting. These things had the potential to damage the whole community, to create, divisions, jealousy, and rivalries.

They concluded among themselves that

it was because they had no bread.

Jesus wanted his disciples to be able to interpret the spiritual meanings of his teachings. But they were still too fixated on material things, on circumstances, and the apparently pressing problems of the moment. We get like this too. We make a mistake like forgetting to bring bread and suddenly we think everything Jesus says to us is related to that mistake. Our horizons constrict around our ego as our imperfection becomes our central concern. We forgot the bread. How could Jesus want to talk about anything else? But this attitude is precisely pride. This inability to look beyond ourselves is very much the beginnings of the same corruptive leaven as the Pharisees and Herod.

Jesus multiplied the loaves to show that our material concerns and needs could be subordinated to following him. If we seek first the Kingdom he will provide for what we need. The risk is that we look on the miracles of the feeding of the five thousand and the four thousand as though those miracles had no end beyond the mere provisioning of food. The risk of the leaven mindset that only sees solutions to short-term problems is to miss the way in which those solutions were signs of something more and greater.

when I broke the five loaves for the five thousand,

how many wicker baskets full of fragments you picked up?”

They answered him, “Twelve.”

“When I broke the seven loaves for the four thousand,

how many full baskets of fragments did you pick up?”

They answered him, “Seven.”

There were twelve baskets for the twelve tribes of Israel and seven baskets for the seven nations of the Gentiles. Jesus intended that they would become one body by feeding on the one loaf of his own body. But he needed to help his disciples to elevate their vision from a mode which was merely material to include a vision that was more expansive and could also recognize the spiritual.

Sometimes the best way to grow in the clean, the unleavened, and the spiritual, is to spend some time apart from influences that corrupt us and cloud our vision.

Then the LORD said to Noah:

“Go into the ark, you and all your household,

for you alone in this age have I found to be truly just.

We can enter more fully into the ark of the Church and let the flood waters of the grace of our baptism more fully put our old sinful self to death. We can more and more live and act from the grace of our new birth. We have been born again as new creations in Christ but it is up to us to choose to live from that reality. 

As soon as the seven days were over,

the waters of the flood came upon the earth.

We need to be able to trust in the Lord, to be concerned about his word sufficiently more than we are concerned about the word of the world, so that we can enter the ark when he calls and to leave the details in his hands. Our minds tend to rebel from this, as though the outside world will collapse without us. But again, this is pride and leaven. When we're within the ark God can still bring renewal to the outside world. For our part, he wants us to be ready and equipped to plant the seeds of a new and better life on that outside world when we finally emerge.

The voice of the LORD is over the waters,

    the LORD, over vast waters.

Ascribe to the Lord

15 February 2021 - partial obedience

Today's Readings

(Audio)

In the course of time Cain brought an offering to the LORD

from the fruit of the soil,

while Abel, for his part,

brought one of the best firstlings of his flock.

What do we bring to the Lord as an offering? Is it the best of what we have or only the leftovers? We know that the Lord doesn't need sacrifices or offerings. The cattle of a thousand hills are already his (see Psalm 50:10).

“Not for your sacrifices do I rebuke you,

    for your burnt offerings are before me always.”

Was Cain rebuked for his offering? Only insofar as that offering was an action that did not express care and careful discernment toward God, precisely the care that Abel's offering did represent. Cain, it seemed, did not care enough for God to him the best of what he had. The thing itself was immaterial, indifferent. But whatever it was, God wanted the best, not because he needed it, but because he deserved it. He knew that his creatures could only find happiness if they put him first.

Cain greatly resented this and was crestfallen.

When we try to offer God something less than he asks of us we too will find ourselves frustrated. This is true even before we look around us and see others actually giving themselves completely and, in doing so finding satisfaction. An automatic result of giving God our leftovers, our partial obedience, is that we ourselves will be unsatisfied. 

The LORD looked with favor on Abel and his offering,

but on Cain and his offering he did not.

Cain greatly resented this and was crestfallen.

When we are not walking in obedience we are at high risk of becoming jealous of those who are. We don't see clearly why they seem to have found fulfillment and favor and we have not. We can't see the difference just by looking at our respective offerings. We are blinded to the good intentions that made the offerings of others acceptable. We forget the reason why our own offerings were not accepted, believing instead that it must be because God arbitrarily preferred others to ourselves. We become jealous. And jealousy is always dangerous.

Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him.

God gives us many opportunities to own up to sin at each step before it progresses further. Yet he will even allow us to be separated from the community if it might help us to come to understand the severity of the problem. Nevertheless, he has something more in mind than strict justice. Abel's blood cried out for justice. But the blood of Jesus cried out for better things than that of Abel (see Hebrews 12:24). Like Abel, Jesus offered the best of what he had to the Father. Indeed he offered his very self. Like Abel, those who were jealous of him put him to death. But the blood which poured out from the Sacred Heart cried out for mercy for sinners. Cain in his punishment was a sort of figure of all sinners, a wander without the true rest until the mercy of Christ would finally be revealed.

The Pharisees came forward and began to argue with Jesus,

seeking from him a sign from heaven to test him.

If we come to Jesus with demands rather than offerings, or if our offering are merely bargaining chips, we will leave frustrated and crestfallen. The reason Jesus did not give a sign is that he himself was sign enough for those with eyes to see. As we give our hearts (and the best of our hearts) to God may we see in Jesus the sign of favor which receives them. He himself, his whole life, is the sign of mercy that pleads for us to the Father.

Kutless - We Fall Down

14 February 2021 - you've got the touch

Today's Readings

(Audio)

“If you wish, you can make me clean.”

It can become difficult to believe that the Lord does want to make us clean and whole. The longer we live with our weaknesses and ailments, be they physical or moral, the more we are forced to consider that the reason why we are still afflicted might be because the Lord does not in fact will it that we be made clean. 

There is something in us that isn't content to remain unclean. We know that we were made for more. We sense that our leprosy has isolated us, kept us "outside the camp", and in some way cries out "Unclean, unclean!" to any who know us too well. It keeps our interactions with others at the borders of our personalities, preventing us from experiencing true intimacy, lest we risk that others would truly know us, and in knowing us, become contaminated. Worse still, our perceived condition as unclean keeps us from entering fully into the worship of the people of God. There too we participate only from the boundaries, never confident enough to come into the intimate presence of God.

The longer we live in our perceived condition as unclean the harder it is to imagine anything changing. Yet if we see Jesus with the same eyes of faith that the leper saw him we can be buoyed with new hope.

“If you wish, you can make me clean.”

Moved with pity, he stretched out his hand, 

touched him, and said to him, 

“I do will it. Be made clean.”

In any other circumstance we would be right to try to shield others from our affliction lest we contaminate them. The law itself could do no more than pronounce judgment upon us. It had no remedy to offer. But in Jesus the flow of contamination is reversed. Rather than the unclean contaminating him, we see that anyone he touched was made clean. This was because he himself was utterly holy, beyond the power of our sins and afflictions to contaminate. And it was because he himself chose to allow this holiness to go out from him to others as gift, as grace. 

We might have expected the touch of God to be a consuming fire that destroyed the unclean. But instead we find that it destroyed only that darkness which made them unclean and set them on fire with divine love. Why this difference between those who reached out to touch the ark of the covenant and died and those who touched Jesus and lived? It was because of the direction of the touch, and the faith that welcomed it.

But if it is by the finger of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you (see Luke 11:20).

Even though hemorrhaging woman seemed to be reaching out to touch God it was actually the case, that, by the incarnation, God had first reached out to her in order to be touched.

she came up in the crowd behind Him and touched His cloak. For she had been saying to herself, “If I just touch His garments, I will get well.” And immediately the flow of her blood was dried up; and she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease (see Mark 5:27-29)

Have we not yet received the healing we desire? Let us come to the Lord with faith in the superabundant grace with which he is filled, which flows from him at the slightest touch. He will certainly do what it takes to bring us back into the community, to restore our intimacy with himself and with our brothers and sisters. If he even heals us physically those eyes of faith will not be surprised. Yet this isn't the main point. It wasn't for the leper, which is why Jesus did not want to be known for the mere externalities of the event.

See that you tell no one anything

There is something that is so intimate in the touch of Jesus as to be incommunicable. When we speak of him to others the risk is that we only hit on externals because the true effects of the intimacy of his touch are harder to convey. Yet, though the external aspects of the way Jesus came to heal us may not be a template that he intends for everyone, and though the true intimacy of his touch is beyond words and not something which we ourselves can convey, it is the possibility of this intimacy to which we can point. We can't reduce it to a formula or a definition. But we can point to it. We can share the wonder of it. 

We should remember too that, when we receive the Eucharist, we are experiencing this same touch that healed the leper, that cast out demons, that healed the hemorrhaging woman. We don't always experience anything spectacular when we receive Jesus in Holy Communion. But if we receive him with eyes of faith, with expectation of an overflow of grace, there is no limit to what he might do.

He who eats it with faith, eats Fire and Spirit

- Ecclesia de Eucharistia 17 - Saint John Paul the Great

Andy Park - In The Secret