Experiencing God 246 - End Times

You can tell that Advent is just around the corner when we start to hear all those readings on the “end times”, or the end of the world as we know it.  Overall, many people today seem to have quite a fascination with this “end of times” theory.  You only have to look at all the movies on Netflix that are based on some earth shattering disaster and a suppose-it end of all life to appreciate this rather unusual fascination.  I recall clearly in my early elementary years at school some of my fellow students speaking about some possible catastrophic events that could lead to the end of life as we know it: The sun burning out, or some meteorite hitting and destroying the earth.  As we reflect on today’s scripture readings, perhaps it is a good time for us to ask ourselves the question: “How are we to understand these “end time” readings as a prelude to Advent, which for most of us is a season of expectation and hope?” 
The Gospel reading from Luke starts with Jesus and His disciples wondering through the temple in Jerusalem, and obviously admiring the beauty and grandeur of this structure.  We read that some were speaking about how magnificent it was, beautifully adorned with stones and gifts dedicated to God.  This reminded me of our recent trip to Ireland when Mary Anne and I visited the new Catholic Cathedral in Galway.  It was a magnificent structure completed in 1965 after six years of construction. It was huge with a seating capacity of over 1,500.  The floors were all made of marble from Connemara, a place close by in Ireland famous for its marble. The pews were Utile mahogany from West Africa, and the ceilings were all Western Red Cedar from the West Coast of the US.
Overall, it was really an eye catcher, and great for the many pictures I took.  Perhaps while there, if I had taken the time to listen to Jesus, I may have heard the same words that he spoke to his disciples in today’s Gospel:  “As for all these things that you see, the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; and all will be thrown down”.  With these words, I don’t believe that Jesus is denying the grandeur or the sacredness of the place.  After all, is He not the one who drove out the buyers and sellers who were turning this temple into a market place.
What I believe he is saying is that there is something much more important going on here than what you are seeing with your eyes.  What you see with your eyes is transient and passing in nature. Regardless of its magnificence and beauty, it is still an object of time, and time, in one way or another, will eventually erase all that from your view”.   But there is something much more important going on here that you are not seeing. So what Jesus is saying in respect to the fate of this magnificent temple, and his further statements on the apocalypse is not so much an explanation of the destruction of the temple, or end of world as we know it, but the unveiling of a deeper truth.  In fact apocalypse means unveiling. Something new to us is going to be unveiled; the curtain is being drawn back so that we may be able to see more clearly what is being revealed.
Therefore, our readings at this point of time before Advent become somewhat of a warning for us, a challenge to remain vigilant. 
What do I mean by being vigilant?  It means to be watchful, to be awake; not to be complacent to those things that threaten our relationship with God; not to be distracted by things that are impermanent in nature.
Malachi expresses this so forcibly in our first reading:  “See, the day is coming, burning like an over, when all the arrogant and all evildoers will be stubble.  But for you who revere my name, the sun of righteousness shall rise, with healing in its wings.”  What is it that is being unveiled to us as we hear these somewhat harsh but prophetic words from Malachi? 
As we move into Advent, our season of expectation and hope, and then into Lent and Easter, we discover what is being unveiled; “we discover the rising of the sun of righteousness with healing in its wings.”
The disciples, of course, respond to Jesus’ statement in the same manner as we often do our selves.  They asked Him: “Teacher, when will this be, and what will be the signs that this “end” is about to take place?”  And Jesus then goes into three things that they can expect to happen, and perhaps we can expect them to happen to us as well. 
1. Many will come in His name claiming the “end is near.  His advice: Don’t go after them; pay no attention to them. 
2.  There will be wars and insurrections, earthquakes, famines, plagues, but the end will not follow immediately. 
3.  For those who revere the name of Jesus, who open their lives to Him, they will experience resistance from those who do not.  Some will even be arrested, persecuted, put and prison and may even die because of it. What does Jesus ask us to do? He asks us to witness to the truth. Rely upon Him to give us the words we are to say; rely on the wisdom that comes from the Holy Spirit, a wisdom that our opponents cannot withstand or contradict.  The Gospel concludes with the very affirming words:  “Not a hair of your head will perish.  By your endurance you will gain your souls.” 
So in summary what are we to do in these in-between times: To remain vigilant.  To be seekers and witnesses to the truth: To place our reliance on Christ and the Holy Spirit to guide us in carrying out our daily responsibilities: And as St. Paul suggests in our second reading to the Thessalonians: “Work quietly to earn your own living; labor so as not to be a burden on others.”  Don’t be busybodies, living in idleness, as if some catastrophic event were about to be-fall you”.  After all, we are first and foremost advent people.  Our identities as Catholic Christians are founded on the hope, the expectation of Christ’s coming, and His daily abiding presence in our lives.
In one of the Dartmouth churches, hanging on a wall, there’s a banner with a scripture reading that I read as a reminder whenever I go there.  It is from the prophet Micah:   “O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you: Only three things: To act justly, to love tenderly, and to walk humbly with your God.”
When we do these three things, then we build our house on a foundation of rock, that neither rain nor wind can disturb. 
“Not a hair of your head will perish.  By your endurance you will gain your souls.” 

Experiencing God 245 - Thanksgiving

Welcome to our Thanksgiving mass.  Thanksgiving day provides for us, not only an opportunity to gather around a dinner table and share time with family and friends, but also a chance to thank the one who makes it all possible. We gather here this morning to give thanks to God, because everything that we have has been ultimately gifted to us in and through Him.

Meister Eckhert, a German mystic once wrote:  “If the only prayer you ever say in our whole life is ‘thank-you’, then that will suffice’.  You see, we cannot be thankful if nothing has been given to us.  Therefore to be a thankful, we must first understand and know that there is a source behind all good things that come our way.  Good things just do not happen by coincidence.  Good things are given to us by someone, and as Catholic Christians, we know who that someone is.  A thankful person recognizes this, and with this recognition comes that great attribute of gratitude.  Have you ever been with someone who is filled with gratitude, a gratitude for life?  We all have, and we know they are a joy to be with.  You are that joy when you share the virtue of gratitude with others.
When I was looking through the different options for Gospel readings for Thanksgiving, I discovered that the most popular one is the story of Jesus healing the ten lepers.   
In this story, as you know, only one comes back to express his gratitude directly to Jesus for being cleansed.  This Gospel is perfect lead-in to speak about the power and the joy of heart-felt gratitude.  But I ended up opting for the Gospel from Matthew; the one you have just heard.  I did this after asking myself a question.  And I throw out this question to you. “What is the greatest gift that you are thankful for this thanksgiving in 2019?  What fills your heart with the greatest sense of gratitude?  The answer that came immediately to my mind as I asked this question was the gift of faith.  Today, we hear Jesus saying in the Gospel:  “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent, and have revealed them to infants.  What has the Father hidden from the so called wise and the intelligent of the world?  What has the Father revealed to mere infants?  It is this mysterious ability to be able to see through the eyes of faith, to see God’s presence and at work in all things. I believe Jesus’ reference to the so called wise and learned is probably directed to the Scribes and Pharisees who got so caught up in the thousands of rules and regulations that though they had to follow, along with everyone else, that they lost sight of God’s presence in the world and the people all around them.    
All things have been handed to me by my Father, Jesus says; and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom I choose to reveal Him. 
We are so blessed to have our gift of faith in the Father who Jesus chooses to reveal to us on a daily basis.  We are fortunate to be able to receive Jesus so personally in the Eucharist, to be forgiven through the sacrament of reconciliation, to be blessed in the sacraments of marriage and orders.  Everything that gives witness to our lives as being special springs from this gift of faith freely given to us by Jesus. In fact, for me, it is only by looking at life through this lens of faith that everything else in this somewhat crazy world begins to make sense.  And in spite of the fact that there is much darkness in the world around us, we can live with thankfulness. We can live in gratitude.
To be a thankful person means firstly that we understand and know, in a heart-felt way, that it is through faith that we discover the source behind the good things that come our way.  The blessings of our family, the blessings of our faith community, our good fortune as Haligonians and Canadians, the joy of the friendships we share with one another. It is through these blessing from God that we can live in gratitude and live out that commission with one another that St. Paul explains in his letter to the Colossians. 
As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness and patience.  Bear with one another, and if anyone has a complaint against another, then forgive that person just as the Lord has forgiven you.  Teach and admonish one another in wisdom and with gratitude in your hearts.”   
During this Eucharistic celebration where we are able once again to invite Jesus into our hearts, let us also remember those who perhaps are not doing as we as we are ourselves. 
We remember those who may not have enough food, those who have lost so much in natural disasters, and those who have lost loved ones who will be missed at their Thanksgiving table.  Through their own gift of faith, let us pray that they may, with open hearts, accept Jesus’ invitation as we have heard in today’s Gospel.  “Come to me all you who are weary and carrying heavy burdens.  And I will give you rest.”

Experiencing God 244 - Zacchaeus

“The whole world before you, O Lord, is like a speck that tips the scales, and like a drop of morning dew that falls on the ground.”  In this reading from Wisdom, if the whole world before the Lord is only a speck, imagine how small we are.  In the total scheme of things, we are very small, our lives very insignificant  but in God’s eyes, very precious. There’s an old Zen expression that is similar to this that I have used at funerals:  “How should we view life in this fleeting world: Like a star at dawn, like a bubble in a stream, like a flash of lightening in a summer cloud, or like a flickering lamp."  In other words, our lives are over in a flash. We need to hear these wisdom teachings and reflect upon them in order to jolt us from our conventional and often conditioned ways of thinking.  The secular culture in which we live has a way of shaping our thoughts and our behavior in ways that are neither true nor reflect reality.  We often end up placing an inordinate importance on things that are really not important at all, and forgetting the things that are the most important. In Thursday’s church prayer this week, a reading from Thessalonians jolted me in this way. It reads: “You know very well that the day of the Lord is coming like a thief in the night.  Just when people are saying, “peace and security”, ruin will fall on them with the suddenness of pains overtaking a woman in labor, and there will be no escape. You are not in the dark that this day should catch you off guard like a thief. We belong, not to darkness but to light, therefore let us not be asleep, but awake.” 

We belong, not to darkness, but to light.  Today’s Gospel from Luke we’ve just heard is a story of a man who was lost in darkness, but who found the light.  It is a story of man, not too much different from ourselves, who was lost.  Lost to what?  Lost from God; lost to community; maybe lost to family and even lost to himself: A man caught in the grips of power, inordinate need for success and financial security that extended far beyond his own physical needs.  Zacchaeus, we are told, was a chief tax collector, and was very rich.  His riches were attained by appropriating taxes from those who were poor or just getting by, and profiting a great deal from it himself.  Luke tells us that he was short in stature, but it is very obvious he is also short in moral attributes as well.  His own Jewish name, Zacchaeus, meant “Righteous One”, but there is little that is righteous about him at this point. And as you can well imagine, he was not well liked and respected by his town folks. But when he heard that Jesus was among the many travelling through Jericho, making that 18 mile journey to Jerusalem, he became very interested in seeing Him. Zacchaeus would probably have heard about Jesus from his town folks, and let’s face it, most of what he would have heard would be in direct conflict with his own behavior and lifestyle.  Yet his desire to see him, this mysterious itinerate preacher, out-weighed the jeers, laughter and cat calls he received from the crowds as he the climbed that sycamore trees in the public square.  So he humbled himself in order to see, to make eye contact with that one person who was so different from himself. Zacchaeus was looking for Jesus, but as it turned out, it appears that Jesus was also looking for Zacchaeus. 

And it was this eye contact they made, and the greeting and invitation that followed that jolted Zacchaeus from his conditioned ways of thinking, his self-centered way behaving to see the light of reality, the light of truth. 
He did not hear: “What are you doing Zacchaeus; You look and are acting like such a fool.”  Nor: “You scoundrel Zacchaeus, how dare your cheat people like you do.  But what he heard was Jesus calling him by name: “Zacchaeus, hurry down from there, for I must stay at your house today”.
There’s a powerful line in the first letter of John chapter 4 which says: “We love because God first loved us.”   “We love because God first loved us”. This particular line of scripture has particular significance for me because it wasn’t until I had personally encountered Christ, and experienced His love for me, even though unworthy, that I was able to begin let go of much of my own conditioned behavior that kept me a prisoner, mainly a prisoner to myself.  The quickest and most powerful way of breaking the grips of our own self-centeredness, our own distorted way of seeing things, is through an experiential knowing that we are loved by God.  This correspondingly creates an experiential knowing that we are loved by others and that, we are in fact, loving persons ourselves. 
I don’t think Zacchaeus had much experience of this being loved by God or, very likely, by anyone else.  He had probably grown accustomed to the belief that if you don’t look after yourself, then nobody else will: So first and foremost, look after yourself.  Except, as we all know, just looking after yourself is a very lonely and very empty place. 
The human heart is not designed for the purpose of looking solely after yourself.  If this is your foremost preoccupation, then most likely you will be left a deep sense of emptiness, a life without purpose.   So something or someone is needed to break that false self-centered illusion of life that sticks to us so easily. For Zacchaeus, that someone is Jesus.   I believe you will all agree that it is not possible to have a true encounter with Jesus without being changed by it.  This encounter has a way of restructuring our priorities, and putting them in line with Gospel values.  This is not only true for Zacchaeus, as he was to find out, but it is also true for us today.  Through his own encounter with Jesus, Zacchaeus discovered within himself something more precious than the way of life he had adopted and wealth he had accumulated. 
Many of you may have read in Tuesday’s Chronicle Herald the story about the Dunsworth couple from the South end of Halifax who had their own faith encounter some 22 years ago. I believe they are now living in Nicaragua.   The husband writes: “Back in ‘97 when I was a cultural Catholic who identified with my religion, but not actually going to church, I used to think the notion of a spiritual ah-ha moment a lot of hooey.  That is, until I had one.   We had a comfortable life, a house in the south end, members of the Waeg, good public schools for our 4 children.  I had a decent but unfulfilling legal practice.  Things begin to happen when I attended a Halifax dinner for the Canadian Cancer Society where I met a group who had just come back from Guatemala on a project of building homes for Habitat for Humanity, and were now going to Nicaragua on a similar mission. I joined them.   The poverty I saw there caused me to question my whole life course and values. 
More than that, I felt like I was being called by some higher entity to do something, even if I wasn’t sure exactly what.” 
After the Guatemala trip, the Dunsworths continued the same charitable work in Costa Rica and Belize, and then Argentina where they ended up staying for four and one-half years.
In 2005, they moved to Nicaragua where they started their own project relating to a student work development program. This program continues today and currently has 74 students ranging from ages 6 to 16 years funded mainly through US and Canadian sources.  
We are all inspired by these stories of conversion and change.  We are inspired by the fact that the courage to undertake such change does not come from ourselves, but from the faith we possess and share.  As Catholic Christians, like Zacchaeus, we discover that the instrument of change is found in the person of Christ.  Our Gospel ends with the teaching: “For the Son of Man came, (not to judge) but to seek out and to save those who are lost.”