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Daily Scripture

+ 20th Week in Ordinary Time

I’ll do it myself.

Readings: Ezekiel 34:1-11 Psalm 23:1-6 Matthew 20:1-16

Therefore, shepherds, hear the word of the Lord: because my shepherds did not look after my sheep, but pastured themselves and did not pasture my sheep, I will claim my sheep from them and put a stop to their shepherding my sheep. I will save my sheep, that they may no longer be food for their mouths. [Ezekiel 34:10]

There is much talk about a vocation shortage—fewer young men entering the seminary and fewer still persevering to ordination. Not withstanding some notable exceptions this has resulted in the lowering of standards for ordination. Moreover, priests and candidates for the priesthood are being ‘imported’ from other countries whose needs are as urgent as ours.

The prevailing accent seems to be on the need to have a sufficient number of priests to ‘say Mass’ and provide for the sacramental needs of the faithful. But surely in the light of the Second Vatican Council, priests need to be more than presiders at Mass and providers of the sacraments, as important as are these roles.

The earliest experience of the Church can be instructive in this regard. The notion of presbyter provided the early church with presiders for worship and leaders for base communities. Celibacy was not an issue and there was no clerical caste. The gifts of the faithful were recognized in such a manner that men and women, married and single fulfilled the spiritual needs of the community including the sacramental needs.

Notwithstanding the inadequacy of the notion of shepherding people (sheeple?) the need remains for qualified men and women to minister to the needs of the community.

Ezekiel warned the priests and assured the people of Israel that God would find away to pasture his people.

Ezekiel’s words need to be taken to heart again and in fact we already see that God is indeed providing a way through the action of the Holy Spirit in the lives of men and women, married and single, who are tending to the needs of the faithful.

Christmas Day 2007

Monday December 24, 2007

Close to the Moment

As a young student many years ago, I had an opportunity to be in the Holy Land just prior to Christmas. It was a memorable trip not because it fulfilled my expectations of what I had hoped to find but because of what I didn’t find. One of the shrines I had most looked forward to visiting was the place of the birth of Jesus. The road to Bethlehem hasn’t changed much through the centuries. It winds through barren hills accented with olive trees and small clay houses. Our first visit to the town of Bethlehem was early in the morning but we tried to remember what it might have been like 2000 years ago when shepherds “watched their flocks by night.”

I knew of course that the place of Jesus’ birth could not be documented with scientific certitude and surely didn’t expect to find a stable or a manger. I’m not sure I had a clear notion or vague image of anything other than a simple icon or creche much like we display in our churches at Christmas time.

We arrived at the Church of the Nativity. It looked more like two churches constructed over the remnant of a third. We entered through a small door and made our way through a circuitous route down a narrow circular stairway into a small crowded basement. The odor of burning oil from the lamps and the scent of eastern spices was very different from the smell of sheep, goats and hay and most certainly unlike the fragrance of a Douglas Fur. The room was filled with altars of varying sizes and degrees of ornamentation, each belonging to a church that claims Jesus as its founder.
The sound of people praying in different languages was strange to my ears and resembled the basement of a department store on Fourteenth Street in lower Manhattan back in the forties.

His ‘birthplace’ was marked by a small circular hole surrounded by a silver star.

People had gathered from all parts of the world, I wanted to believe, not so much to find the spot where Jesus was born or to see a replica of a manger but to get as close as possible in mind, heart and soul to the moment in which God joined humanity in this great act of divine generosity beyond imagining.

The experience changed my perspective and affected my understanding of the feast. It caused me to think about all those people, young and old, crowded into that small cave-like basement all sharing the same world but each one holding a unique and special world within; each with a different history and a personal story about life and its strange mix of dreams fulfilled and dreams broken.

But we are here today not to travel back to Bethlehem or to depict in graphic words the biological birth of Jesus as if to explain the inexplicable or to prove to cynics that it happened. We are here to ponder a mystery that repeats itself over and over again within the hearts of sincere believers of every race and religion.

In Christ God has become powerless so that we might recognize our powerlessness in the face of selfish interests and the pursuit of what is good for me rather than what is for the common good of humanity.

This feast is the fulfillment of a promise but it also a plea for human acceptance one for another. The God who loved us into being is the same God who continues to intervene not to smite or to wound but to build what the nations destroy and heal the wounds inflicted by human hostility or indifference.

Then where are you, God, in the midst of human suffering? Can it be that the God who is always engaged in our transformation stands aloof as the heavy hands of foe strike at one another for the sake of justice and peace as if might makes right or brute force can ever change the course of human history for good?

People who study the origins of human violence tells us that in order to kill another human being we have to make them ‘other’—other race, other ethnic group, other nationality, other religion, other culture, other class—different. It is the result of linear thinking.

Christmas is not a linear feast for Christians only. It is a celebration of diversity.

The question this raises is not whether or not God is on our side but whether or not we are on the side of God. The feast is not only a invitation that we accept God into our hearts but yet another reminder that we are in the heart of God.

I think we have heard enough from those who define God as male or female; as judge or general who think God is ‘on their side.’ Such talk makes enemies of kindred spirits.

The greatest challenge of Bethlehem – House of Bread – is not to be found in a manger but on the cross. Jesus was destined to become the bread of life ‘broken’ for all humanity, destined for death not by God but by the vanity of humanity. But those of sincere belief who eat this bread become the bread that we eat and together we become the ‘house’ of God, house of blessing for all humanity.

Just as Jesus’ love was inclusive, so must our love be inclusive. Just as Jesus crossed the borders and boundaries of hatred, so must we cross borders and boundaries of hatred for Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever.

We celebrate this feast not so much a moment of past history as of an ongoing event: God taking on a human form over and over again in the hearts of all who believe in the impossible-in the mystery of God incarnate who came to us once in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, who comes to us today, tomorrow and every time we speak or act in his name.

Amelia Herlihy stated it well in her meditative verse entitled, “Experiencing God:”

When I was younger, I held in my head
the way Michaelangelo presented ‘him’—a bearded old man in the clouds, afloat,
pointing a finger down
to create an “image and likeness” of himself.
And I used to think, he looks grumpy and haughty
_and I don’t want to be like him; not his likeness, please_…
and then I would scruple myself
about the sinfulness of blasphemy,
and resort to the safety of formal prayer:
God nicely boxed in a mysterious trinity.
Unassailable, remote.

But God wouldn’t stay there.
As life drop-kicked me about, highs and lows,
grief and pain chewing away at my toes,
God just wouldn’t stay put in the box.
I felt the spirit surround me,
warm and comforting, absorbing the worst of the blows,
Always there, soft, touching, protective
like that gel that surrounds a canned ham.
Filling in the gouges eaten away by time,
soothing the scalding wounds of change.
Making the goings-on somehow tolerable, somehow mine,
A more reflective me now, a more sesoned view
getting used to the shape I’m in.
More able to accept myself as I am.

And now I think about the day the canned ham
will be opened.
(_Hearing the gasp as the key turns on the vacuum-packed tin_.)
Then I hope to see the bright light of God,
not as a remote being, not some stranger afloat in the clouds,
but rather that same surrounding Spirit now in full beam,
the same Old Friend who got me there,
saw me through it all, helped me together,
contoured me into a likeness made for heaven.
Then, I dream (oh, yes, I dream);
I become a soaring “image and likeness”
of that Spirited Friend.
Freed from the restraints of time and space, (and gender)
able to rejoin old friends and old loves,
radiant, uninhibited, savoring, “foreverness”
within the loving cosmos,
of this our Spirit-God.

[National Catholic Reporter, Dec 14, 2001]

Welcome the Christ however and wherever he appears.