The Prodigal Son and the Loving Father

August 7, 2016—The Eleventh Sunday after Trinity

        How would you answer the question: what was Jesus’s greatest contribution to world history? You might say the cross, which has become the universally recognized symbol of our redemption. You might say the gift of baptism by which the faithful are initiated into His kingdom; or the Holy Eucharist, which is the means by which we directly participate in his sacrifice, thereby, receiving in our souls the salutary benefits of his death. Jesus Christ has left his mark on the world in ways that no other man has. That is beyond dispute. Considering that he was able to raise himself body and soul from the dead and leave us, in the Shroud of Turin, a material memorial of that transphysical event, you could say that he literally left an impression on the world unequaled by anyone.

       But in addition to fulfilling the scriptures by his death and resurrection and instituting the sacraments by which we access the sanctifying grace of his sacrifice, Jesus did one more thing that no one else could do, that no one before him attempted to do. He succeeded in persuading the world that love is the highest value. In a world that worships power and pleasure, that is obsessed with money and sexual fulfillment almost to the exclusion of everything else, Jesus convinced us that the greatest achievement in life is to grow a heart of compassion, humility and forgiveness. He convinced a world consumed with myriad lusts and endless selfish ambitions that the greatest among us are the saints of God, those whose singular passion is not for worldly honors but for holiness expressed as unconditional love.

       Before the early church took the name the Catholic church or even before it was called Christianity, the religion founded on faith in Jesus  was called, simply enough, “the Way” (Acts 9.2). Jesus led the way by setting an example of perfect love (John 14.6). His disciples were those who chose to give up everything that people normally cling to for security in life to follow him in living that way. A lot has changed in the two millennia since Jesus ascended into heaven but Jesus’ message remains today what it was then: always choose the way of humble love; because God is love (1 John 4.8; John 3.16).

        In last week’s sermon I said that Jesus taught that a human being has an immortal soul of divine origin, a soul made to give and receive love. And I furthermore said that the fact that we know ourselves to be soul-full people should be enough to convince us of the reality of God; because souls cannot exist apart from God who creates them. So don’t let the sick secularized world we live in psyche you out. The secular establishment keeps telling us that there is no Creator; that life on earth arose from a series of blind chance events; but this existentialist view of life, as a completely random and meaningless purely spontaneous material event without design or purpose, is utterly absurd. If there is no God there is no human soul and you and your loved ones are essentially worthless piles of clay. No one deep down believes that. No sane person believes that human beings are nothing but a mixture of magnesium, copper, potassium, carbon, and other assorted minerals. No one who has ever been loved by his mother and father believes that. No one who has loved his brother or sister can believe that. Whoever has been in love knows that chemistry alone cannot explain the chemistry between two people. Love is a mystery of the Sprit and one soul who finds his compliment in another knows that he or she has found something that is beyond the reach of science or wisdom to explain. But that’s my point: unconditional love is transcendent. The very existence of love in our hearts is proof of the transcendent nature of our souls. And the transcendent nature of human souls is proof of the existence of God.

        Human beings need love. Without unconditional love, we wither and perish not physically but spiritually. That is so because the human soul needs to give and to receive love. Love is not something we like to have when we can get it, like a year–end bonus or a pay raise. A pay raise may at times feel like a life or death issue, but it never really is. Money comes and money goes but love remains essential to life. Love is to the human soul as oxygen is to our lungs. If we go without it, we begin to suffocate, something within us dies. We need tenderness, we need compassion, we need friendship and affection; we need people to be patient with us, to listen to us, to hear what we’re saying; to understand our feelings and accept our differences. We need to know that others have not given up on us, that we matter, that we belong; that we count no matter what. Love is not a luxury item we can do without; love is essential to our happiness. We are beings made for love. It’s an injustice if a person is deprived of food, shelter and clothing. But it’s a tragedy if a person is deprived of love. A person who died, never having been loved, would have lived an empty existence, for life is only full to the extent that it is full of love. A house is just a house but add love and it becomes home.

       And our true home is with God who is not just a distant powerful deity indifferent to our individual fate, but as the giver of our soul is a true Father to each of us. He is as much your parent as is your mother with one caveat: he loves us even more. This is the revelation that Jesus brought to humankind; a revelation of the divine nature that he illustrated in the greatest of his parables known as the Prodigal Son; a story that might better be called the Loving Father. The point of the parable is as simple as it is shocking: God is radical unconditional love and God expects us to get on board and love one another as he loves us. I say shocking because both sons are shocked by their father’s behavior. It’s as if neither son before this knew who their father was or what his heart was really made of. The younger son couldn’t’ believe it when the father ran out to greet him and offered to welcome him home with a celebration. The younger son was going to offer to come home as a servant. He knew he was guilty and he thought he would be punished, if not utterly rejected. The younger son was left speechless by his father’s unexpected generosity and unconditional forgiveness. But so was the older son shocked. The older son couldn’t believe it either. He said to his father in effect, “Who are you? Do I even know you? What kind of justice is this?” And the father answers, “All that is mine is yours.” In other words: God’s mercy is justice.

       We call this story the Parable of the Prodigal Son, but it really should be called the Parable of the Loving Father. It’s the Father whose passion for his sons that captures our hearts. And so as much as we are moved by the sons’ conversion, we recognize that this is more than a story about our need for penance and faith. This is the paramount story of how to spread the gospel and of how to save souls. We spread the gospel by winning hearts and minds for Christ, the best way to do evangelism, is to do as the Loving Father did. Love them. Love them with so great a love that they cannot resist your love. Love them as the Father loved his sons; love them in other words as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us. People will instinctively argue and resist your politics and your religion when you push it on them; but no one argues with unconditional love. Win their hearts with love and soon their souls will hunger to have what you have: the Holy Spirit alive in you, the fountain of God’s Word, joy in your soul.

        As much as preachers would like to imagine that souls are converted by their great preaching, few are. Souls are converted to faith in Jesus Christ by love. Saint Francis knew this which is why he said, “Preach the gospel always; if necessary use words.” How can one preach without words? By living the gospel. The gospel is, after all, a revelation from God as to how we are to live our lives. “The faith once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3) is not just a set of dogmas to which we give our assent; divinely revealed truths we defend with conviction. The faith is nothing until it becomes a way of life. “Walk in love as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God,” (Eph. 5.1-2) is how Saint Paul put it. That is the church’s marching orders. Go into the world and conquer with love; always remembering what love is and from where it comes. Love is not what happens at an orgy nor is love what happens when you manage to manipulate people to get our own way with them. Love is what happened in a manger in Bethlehem; love is what happened on the cross. Love does not seek its own glory but God’s. Love carries the burden of sinners without complaint. Love does what is right, even to the point of suffering death. Love is holiness in action, a prayer that doesn’t cease. Love forgives even our executioners, because love has a singular aim: to save souls.

         So that is the word for today. Let Jesus Christ love you. Don’t be afraid of his love. Don’t put him off or shut him out. Open your heart to him and let him fill you with the Holy Spirit, the joy of his perfect love with the Father. And then, go out into a world of sinners desperate for love and be saint. Be the one in your family and circle of friends who loves others as Christ loves us; be a person of radical forgiveness and compassion, giving until there is nothing left to give and then, having given your all, offer it up to God who in His Son gave his all to us.  And be assured that as Christ by his love changed the world in his day, He will do the same today through you. 

The Soul and the Perfect Love of God

July 31, 2016—The Tenth Sunday after Trinity

Luke 12.21

          If there was an award for the book with the best title ever it would go to a book of Christian apologetics by Norman Geisler entitled, I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist. I love that title because it catches the reader by surprise. We all know that Christians have faith. We think of atheists as being people who have no faith. But that analysis is a little too simplistic. Christian faith in Jesus Christ is based on the evidence for God deduced from natural theology and philosophical reasoning, Biblical revelation, especially the resurrection of Christ, the witness of countless miracles and answered prayers that are central to the history of the Holy Spirit guiding the Church, and modern scientific research into the beginning of the universe and the origin of life itself. Christian faith is based on a studied analysis of the evidence. It is reasoned faith.

        Atheists to have their beliefs to, but their belief that God does not exist is a blind faith. It is faith that adheres to what atheists want to be true despite the overwhelming evidence against it; which is why professor Geisler says that he has not enough faith to be an atheist. He means that the case for God’s existence and for Jesus Christ being the incarnation of that God is too strong to deny. And deny it is all atheists can do, they cannot actually refute the evidence. In the end, they just refuse to accept it. Atheism isn’t really a faith at all, it’s a rebellion.

       I know that many atheists will take offense at what I just said. I have read many debates between Christians and atheists and the atheists in those debates are very intelligent people who make very sophisticated arguments. I don’t mean to insult my opponent’s intelligence. But I would point to something obvious that exposes the atheists view as reasonably indefensible and that is the absence in atheism of a doctrine of the soul. Once you deny the existence of God you are forced into denying the existence of souls, because immaterial transcendent souls cannot exist apart from the deity who makes them. This denial of the soul exposes atheism as the blind faith that it is.

        It’s one thing to deny the existence of God whom we cannot see, who is invisible to us, whose existence we deduce from the effects of his grace upon us and the order of the world around us. But it is another thing entirely to deny the soul, which by looking inward we can all readily perceive. Every human being knows himself or herself to be more than the sum of his or her parts. We look within and see within us an infinite horizon of dreams, values and ideals, of conscience and of mind, of goodness and desire, of meaning and truth. There is no one who looks into himself and thinks I’m just a collocation of atoms and nothing more. People occasionally do that and when they do we recognize that they are clinically depressed and we help them out of it. But everyone in a healthy state of mind knows that he or she is not just a congeries of randomly assorted chemicals but he or she is a person, a unique being unlike any other with inalienable rights and duties and relationships that only a person could have. A person is not a thing; a person is an embodied soul; a living being someone who not only has a brain but has a mind of her own. A mind that is to the brain as electricity is to a light bulb. Every light bulb in the world could break and disappear but electricity will forever be. Likewise, bodies are born and die but souls are immortal.

       Christian faith is rational it is a reasonable inference based on the evidence that God exists and that Jesus Christ really is Lord. But atheism is irrational. It is absurd for a creature who knows himself to be a living soul to deny the existence of God, without whom souls could not exist. That is why the author said it takes more faith than a rational person has to be an atheist. To be an atheist you essentially have to deny what you are: a living soul; and believe that you are nothing more than the sum of your chemical parts; that there is no transcendent dimension to the human experience; no higher purpose to life than physical survival, no higher universal values to pursue beyond one’s own immediate temporal needs, no higher meaning that defines us other than material existence. Who really believes that life has no higher meaning? What could be more insane than that?  It takes reasoned faith to be a Christian but it takes absolute blind faith to be an atheist. If the American Psychological Association were not entirely dominated by atheists, the DSM IV would list atheism as a psycho-pathology, a form of abnormal psychology called the 'Pontius Pilate Syndrome': a deranged state of acute narcissism in which a person cannot see the truth even when looking straight at it.

       Some of you are wondering, I’m sure, what is this sermon about? This sermon is about the most important debate in the modern age: is Western Civilization, the nations that used to comprise Christendom, going to fully embrace the soulless psychology of atheism or will we be true to Christ?  The rich man in the parable that Jesus told today is an atheist. He didn’t care about God, nor did he care about his immortal soul. He lived only for himself in the here and now. His motto was “eat, drink and be merry”, as if that is all that matters. The man in the parable is blind to the higher transcendent reality of life in God’s universe. He does not understand that he has an immortal soul and that God has given us the soul for a purpose: to love and serve him who is our Maker and to love and serve others who like us are made in his sacred image. Jesus essentially makes fun of the atheist in the parable who thinks he’s so smart but he’s really a fool. He thinks that he has a good plan for his life, but he is actually clueless to the higher purpose of life. If there is one parable in the Bible that addresses the situation in America and Europe today this is it. When Moslems are beheading priests during mass and grown men defecate on the door of the church, you know that time is running out, the end is near.

      So many people today doubt that God exists that if you are a devout believer you may feel like an outsider. Don’t be intimidated by this increasingly anti-Christian society we now live in. Atheism is absurd and dangerous and there is no scientific reason or good philosophical reason to embrace it. Those who embrace atheism do so for emotional reasons of their own. God exists, God is the creator of all else that exists; nothing would exist were it not for God and nothing can exist apart from God. And I can make that case by one simple reason; a reason that proceeds from the heart of Jesus’ teaching. A human being is body and soul. It’s the immortal soul that defines the human being as a creature of God.

       How do we save civilization and turn this tragic situation around? The hope for our salvation is in one word: love. Our need for love and our ability to give and receive love should be enough to tell us that God is not imaginary. Love is not imaginary. Love is universal. Everyone wants it and everyone knows what it is. Everyone knows that we need more of it. How do we know this? We know it because every human being has a soul. A soul is not chemical or biological but is spiritual in nature. A soul is transcendent spirit. We receive our physical bodies from our parents who like us are made from the dust of the earth but the soul is a gift of God, it is immortal. That’s what it means to be created in God’s image. God is love (1John4.8) and God has made us like himself, he has equipped us with a transcendent soul able to give and receive love. This is the thing that is most important about us and makes us uniquely human. We love.

       Love includes awareness that we need others. As the poet said, no man is an island. But as we love others and are loved in family and in community we become aware of something else. Our love is incomplete and less than perfect. When it comes to love, the best of us are like children learning to walk. We walk but then we fall. We get up. We fall again. We are encouraged by love but then we are disappointed; disappointed in ourselves for not loving others in the way they need us to love them and disappointed in others who do not love us fully either. And so we soon learn something else about ourselves: we are made for love but we don’t know entirely how to do it. Love requires a lot of learning. Migrating animals know by instinct how to migrate, where to go and how to get there. But love is not an instinct. Love is a skill. Like any skill, love aims at perfection. God is perfect love. God alone loves perfectly. God alone does everything in love. This means that if we are going to fulfill our deepest need for love, we must become one with God. God alone is the answer to what plagues this world because God alone can teach us to love perfectly.

       Faith is the humble awareness that we are inadequate to the task of love and that we will never be perfect in love unless God by his grace enables us. When we confess that we are sinners in God’s sight, we mean that we know ourselves to be imperfect and inadequate to the task of love and that we have no hope of loving perfectly unless God enables us to do it. In other words we will never be perfectly happy until we are one with God, because perfect happiness is the result of perfect love and there is only one source of perfect love: God, the Holy Spirit.

      This is what Saint Augustine meant by his confession: “O Lord, you have made us for yourself and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” He meant that he had searched for meaning and happiness in many places in sexual conquests, in power, in fame, in wealth. None of that satisfied him because he realized what he had so long denied: that the human heart is made for unconditional love; therefore, only  God, the perfect love, can fulfill a human soul.

       This is why everyone in this world needs Jesus Christ. Jesus is not just one more religious leader among many. Jesus is the incarnation of God’s perfect love. Jesus is the perfect love of God among us; teaching us to love by example and completing our imperfect love by divine grace. “All that the father has is mine” he said. This means that God’s perfect love flows to the souls of the world through Him. That is what John meant when he said of Jesus, “He will baptize you in the Holy Spirit.” He meant that Jesus will pour into our hearts the love that will make us both holy in the sight of God and fully able to love others unconditionally as he loves us. Jesus came into the world to change the world forever by giving us direct access to the one thing we most need, the love of God. Whenever we receive communion, God is literally pouring his love into our souls, healing all that is broken and imperfect with us.

       The goal of a every Christian who really is a Christian is to become like Jesus Christ in showing unconditional love for all people, always. And Christ established the church for this purpose: to train an army of saints who follow Him in the way of love. Every church that really is a church should be a school for learning unconditional love; learning not only from sermons and Sunday school lessons but from each other. A church is true to its purpose only in so far as its members show each other and the larger community around them unconditional love. “By this all men will know you are my disciples,” Jesus said, “ by the love you have for one another.” In the kingdom of God, love is the standard by which we are known and judged.

        That’s what prayer is for. Ask God to fill you today and everyday with the Holy Spirit, and prepare your soul to receive the fullness of his love. And keep your commitment to receive the body and blood of Christ each Sunday and more often than that if you can, for his body and blood is the very love of God poured into our souls. It is thru union with Him who is eternally one with God that we too will become perfect in love.

Ask to Receive the Holy Spirit: the Fullness of God’s love

July 24, 2016—The Ninth Sunday after Trinity

Luke 11.13

       In the gospel we read this morning, we hear Jesus make an amazing promise to his disciples. He tells them, “If you then who are evil know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him?” (Lk.11.13). He says this in the larger context of a teaching on prayer. His doctrine of prayer is very reassuring.  “Ask and you shall receive, seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you” (LK.11.9) he tells them. In other words he assures them that God hears our prayers and that God is anxious to answer our prayers and meet our needs.

       But how far will God go to meet our needs? Anyone who has ever asked God for anything concrete, like a new sports car, learns quickly that the heavenly Father is not like the genie in Aladdin’s lamp. God does not appear in response to prayer to fulfill our dreams, bow to our vanities and serve our selfish wishes. God has a purpose for prayer and it’s not to make us all successful, brilliant, attractive, millionaires; too bad. God is Goodness with a capital “G”. God wants us to become all that He is, like him in every way. God has given us prayer as a means to achieving that end.

      True prayer always begins with a question on our part:  not just what do I need here and now to get through the present crisis, but what do I need to become more like God? If we fail to see our prayers answered, it may be because we are not praying. Prayer is not just asking God for favors for ourselves and others. That is allowed and encouraged, but that is not the primary purpose of prayer. Prayer is asking God to give us those virtues that will make us more like His Son. God wants us to become like Jesus. Prayer is the means by which we grow into his likeness. Whatever God does for us in response to our prayers, He does to that end.

        Prayer is to the human spirit what physical training is to an athlete. If you engage in prayer deliberately and consistently for the right purpose, you will see results. Prayer is like keeping to a healthy diet. It requires discipline and you have to keep at it. But unlike dieting in which you are largely on your own, God helps us in prayer. God wants us to succeed.  God wants to forgive us our sins and to give us patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, self-control, wisdom, a charitable and generous spirit, courage in the face of suffering, a hunger for righteousness, a humble heart, unshakable faith. That’s what, “ask and you will receive,” means. God is Spirit. His chief concern in prayer is for our spiritual and moral growth. If we accept prayer for what it is and enter into it on God’s terms, there is virtually no limit to what God will do for us. He will even give each one of us, personally, the Holy Spirit, if we ask. In fact, that is the point of Jesus’ teaching: we are to ask for the Holy Spirit.

        That sounds simple enough, but many Christians are hesitant to ask for the Holy Spirit because they have no idea what the Holy Spirit is or what he does. We baptize and offer up our collects “in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.”He seems familiar enough to us. And yet, many Christians are puzzled by the Holy Spirit. It doesn’t help to be told that He’s the third person of the Holy Trinity. I have had many faithful Christians tell me something to the effect that, “God I get, and Jesus I get, but I don’t get the Holy Spirit? What is it?” The Holy Spirit is the perfect love of God. The work of the Spirit is to abide in the church, sanctifying each one of us in love (John14.15-17). When Jesus says that God wants to give us the Holy Spirit he means that God wants to give us the fullness of his love. And by giving us the Holy Spirit, God wants to transform us from selfish, fearful little people pre-occupied with our own immediate needs into great lovers of God and of sinful humanity. He wants to make us into saints, into living souls who walk in love as Christ loved us, who gave himself up for us, so that strengthened in his Spirit we might do the same for others (Eph.5.1-2). To this end God wants nothing so much as to pour the Holy Spirit into your heart and mine (Rom.5.5) so that we might grow into the image of Christ and become like him, men and women of faith and holiness who do everything in love (1Cor.16.14).

        Why does God wish to do this for us? The answer is as obvious. Why did God send his Son to suffer and die on a cross for us?  God wishes to hear our prayers and answer them, even going so far as to give us his own Holy Spirit, because God loves us. God does not just like us, sort of, or have crush on us. God loves us with the passion of a groom ready to take his bride on the wedding night. God wants to lavish everything he has on us. He wants to pour out all of his love on us and fill us with the fullness of his love. The Holy Spirit is the fullness of God’s love. It is his whole heart, mind and soul. It is, therefore, his most precious gift. The Holy Spirit is God himself, in all his sweetness, all his tenderness, all his power, all his glamour, all his goodness, all his generosity, giving himself to us unconditionally.

        If that causes us to feel a little embarrassed, it is because we know all too well, how undeserving we are of such total love. He wants to make a total commitment to us; but how many are ready to give him the same kind of love in return? Have you ever had someone be more in love with you than you were with him or her? It’s awkward. That’s how it is with us and God. He loves us more than we deserve, and we know it. What but do you do? He won’t take “no” for an answer.

       Take all that Sunday school fluff about prayer being a little talk with Jesus and stow it. Prayer is not holding hands in the park, prayer is the honeymoon night, it’s letting him who loves you have you and giving your all to him in return. Are you ready for that? Many would say, I’m not so sure. And that’s an honest answer because love is a commitment and total love is total commitment. That’s what God is after. He wants us to make a total commitment to Him as He has to us. The Holy Spirit is God’s total commitment pledged to us, the passion of his perfect love poured into our hearts at baptism, renewed in every act of Holy Communion, and renewed again in every humble prayer.

       I’ll be the first to admit: that much love frightens me. But Jesus has assured us that this is the way forward in life. Don’t be afraid of God’s love. “Perfect love casts out fear” (1 John 4.18).  As I said to you last week, Jesus is the incarnation of God’s perfect love. He has shown us the way in his own life of constant prayer. Let God have his way with you and God will enlarge your heart until it is large enough to receive the fullness of his love. Love is not easy. Keeping love’s commitment demands struggle, sacrifice and suffering. Jesus who loved us perfectly loved us all the way to the cross; even as we crucified him, he loved us. That’s why God is anxious to give us the Holy Spirit, so that he can strengthen us to love one another even as he loves us.

       So, here is your homework assignment for this week. Pray for the Holy Spirit. Move your lips and open your mouth and tell God that you love him, and ask to be filled with the fullness of his love. Do it once and then do it again and again and again. Let God pour his love into your heart and don’t stop until your heart is full, which means don’t stop being open to his love. Let God fill you with the Holy Spirit!