Sail on Silver Girl

Lately, as most of you know, I've been having some kidney issues.  As part of the treatment for this 10mm kidney stone my doctor suggested I invert myself to 45 degrees every night after having consumed sixteen ounces of water.  They already took the step of doing lithotripsy to break the stone up into smaller pieces (hopefully).   Now the goal is to use gravity and fluid to get those pieces up out of the bottom of my kidneys and through the bladder to freedom.  The Exodus of the kidney stones eh? So I've been taking this old box spring and placing it on the couch to create as much of an angle as I can.  Then I drink my water, wait thirty minutes and lay with my face downhill for half an hour.

What I did not expect is that my daughter would love this time.  She can't wait to get on the mattress and lay next to me reading or watching TV.  Daddy are we going to do that tonight?  Then we play around, I poke her and tickle her.. and sometimes I roll over on her and mash her like I forgot she was there.  All the while she's giggling, reading, or often just falling asleep.  It's a comforting time.  It's an amazing moment of bonding that I will cherish for years to come.

Yesterday my buddy Clyde Joshua came over while I was cleaning out the garage and it reminded me of when Moira was very little.  He was walking around asking questions, pointing at this or that, or laughing and running away when he thought I was going to 'get him.'  He would follow right in my footsteps and hand me this or that, and mimic the things I was doing.  Moira used to do that when she was very small.  In fact, she mimicked not just the good, but the bad.  Isn't that how kids learn to do the bad anyway?  Children remind us of that fact when they pull out those special words in front of grandma or at school.  They become their parents.  Sometimes I open my mouth and my dad pops right out...  That's a big responsibility!

Today's Gospel reminds us of that truth, and gives us a better option.  Jesus is always upsetting the cart.  He never walks away with people indifferent.  Either they love him or hate him, but they always make a choice, they are always challenged.  Today they are mad at him, again.   He has just equated himself with God!   Today we would just kind of laugh if someone did that... "they're crazy!"  It was very serious to his contemporaries.   Serious enough they had him killed for it right?  Then he goes on to speak that truth, that children do what their parents did.

Amen, amen, I say to you, the Son cannot do anything on his own,

but only what he sees the Father doing;

for what he does, the Son will do also.

There is that pesky Amen, Amen again.  Remember, in the Semitic languages often there are no superlatives. (Good, better, best would be "good" "good good" "good good good", brings a whole new meaning to Holy, Holy, Holy eh?)  Amen means that what he is saying is truth.  It has that connotation of this has been confirmed, it has been supported, it is upheld as the truth.  So to say Amen and Amen.. he's saying this is the truth of the truth!  It's as if Jesus is saying "Pay attention to what I am about to say!"  Then he goes on to affirm that notion that as the Son he mimics his Father.. he follows in his footsteps.  If God raises the dead? So does Christ.  If the Father heals the sick? So does the Son.   If He frees the captor and forgives sin?  Well so will Jesus himself.

That brings an amazing level of depth to that reading from Isaiah in which God lists off a litany of the things he will do to bring his people back to him, back to freedom, back to love.  He declares he will feed them, give them drink, protect them from the elements and never forsake them.  Regardless of what they ever do he will always remember them.  That's a powerful promise to us today as well.  God wants us to be in relationship with Him.  Jesus himself is offering a personal invitation to each and everyone of us to be in this amazing personal covenant, not just a private one with God alone but in communion with his entire Body, the Church.
That begs the question for those of us who claim to be a part of that Body though... If children mimic their parents, then who can we claim as ours?  When I was young my daughter would follow me around, just as Clyde Joshua did yesterday.  The words I used? She used.   The things I did? She did.  The places I went? She went.  I was just telling my friends last night that Saturday of last week I had a bad day.  You know those days when you wake up and the world seems off kilter?  I couldn't get out of this bad funk.  I was snappy.  I was rude.  I was a jerk.   I stormed around like some monster seeking to destroy an enchanted forest.   My wife and kids took the brunt of it.  If anyone had seen me that day, would any of them been convinced I was a Catholic at all? Probably not.   I wasn't acting like my Father at all.

How then do we know how to act?  We emulate the Son.  He healed the sick, he cured the blind, he fed the poor and hungry, he offered forgiveness and compassion to all he met, and above all he proclaimed the Kingdom of God.  Are we doing that?  Do our actions show others that we are Children of the Most High?  Are we reaching out to the poor, the destitute, the widow, and the orphan?  Are we welcoming the strangers who come into our midst?  Are we building walls or bridges?  As we journey through the last remaining days of our desert of Lent, let us take time to examine who we are... to draw closer to God... so that when people look at us, they can say "Now there is a child of God, there is a person who loves others!  There is someone I want to be more like."

His servant and yours,
Brian

"He must increase, I must decrease."

An Evil and Perverse generation

The Readings for Monday of the 28th Week of Ordinary time can be found here.

In Monday's Gospel reading we find Jesus proclaiming that "This generation is an evil generation; it seeks a sign, but no sign will be given it, except the sign of Jonah."  These words seem to  make a lot of sense to us as Christians 2000 years later looking back on these amazing and miraculous events in first century Palestine.   How though would these men have reacted to hearing this statement though?  First and foremost, who was Jonah and what does that have to do with them?

If we look back at the story of Jonah we see a man who was called by God.   He was called to go preach to the Ninevites.  Jesus just compared the men listening to Him, the ones demanding a sign to these Ninevites.  Who were they?  They were a despised race.  The war driven enemies of the Israelites.  The Assyrians. In 722 B.C. the Assyrians had completely conquered most of the Israelite people and took them captive.   This led eventually to the destruction of the temple during the Babylonian captivity.  Here Jesus is comparing the people standing around him to the Ninevites, the very people they would have blamed for the start of the worst time in Jewish history.  The temple was everything!  That was where God was, and here Solomon's temple had been completely destroyed as a result of the Ninevites. 

The story of Jonah itself took place before that event.   Jonah himself also didn't want to reach out to the Ninevites.  They were the "Las Vegas", the Sin City of their time. The darkest of the dark.  The cruelest of the cruel.  They were the enemy.   He would rather have seen God's justice rain down on them from on high, destroying them entirely.  In the Veggi Tales version, we see Jonah sitting up on a very high place watching for this very thing to occur.  They were Jonah's other, the enemy, "them." Time had not changed this and if anything, the Assyrian people were more hated by the contemporary Jew of Jesus time. 

Then we have the very nature of the sign of Jonah itself.   Jonah of course, we all know is the story of the man who ran from God and was swallowed by a fish for 3 nights and 3 days.   Here we have Jesus telling the people around him that Jonah, who ran from God at first, when he came to do God's will was completely successful in God's endeavor.  The people of Nineveh immediately repented of their sin and hard hearts, putting on sack cloth and ashes.  Jesus, who came performing miracles, and from the very outset of his ministry was completely obedient to God... was watching those around him not turn their hearts. 

He was both predicting his own death and resurrection, but also warning them that they were accountable for their refusal to hear his message.  Here was the rub of what he said, he in effect said "Those sinners, the worst ones you can think of, the people you hate the most, your very enemies... listened to God before you will.  They were the ones who came to God, and you refuse to hear me.  So I will show you the same sign that God showed them, for three days and three nights I will be lost to the world.  Then I shall be found again, in your presence, and my message of repentance will call out to you." 

What does this all mean to us?   How do we actualize this to our lives?  When Jonah came to call the Ninevites to repentance, the message was "40 days more and this city will be destroyed."  We have a similar call to repentance, in which we hear the "wages of sin is death."   We, just like the Pharisees gathered around Jesus in the Gospel are called to repent.   Our city, our earthly body, is eventually going to be destroyed.  For it is appointed unto man, once to die.  We all have that in common, but we all have a choice.  We can continue on in our sin and not worry, refusing to hear and believe in the sign of Jesus Christ, in the resurrection that frees us from the impending death for eternity; or we can turn from our sin like the Ninevites and trust in God's promise.

Which brings us back to the First reading:

Through him we have received the grace of apostleship, 

to bring about the obedience of faith,

for the sake of his name, among all the Gentiles,

among whom are you also, who are called to belong to Jesus Christ;

to all the beloved of God in Rome, called to be holy.

You are called to be Holy.   You are called to belong to Jesus Christ. Do you follow Him?  Or reject him? What do you choose?

In Christ,
Brian