Sparrows - 12th Sunday in OT (A)

You are worth more than many sparrows.

So there are many apps for your phone out there. Some interesting and productive; others not at all. Recently, I was introduced to Merlin. Merlin is an app that can identify a bird just by its song. Now, I'm not a bird guy (I've actually always thought that bird watchers were a little eccentric, forgive me), but I did find it fascinating that there was an app that could identify birds just by their song.

So I downloaded Merlin one evening and sat on my back patio with a beveragee and gave it a shot. Sure enough, it worked. And I was blown away by the number of birds just in my back yard: I've heard cardinals, house finches, mockingbirds, hawks, and sparrows -- lots of sparrows.

Since downloading the app, I have unconsciously trained my ear to hear the songs of birds and now I can identify several without using the app. And the bird that I hear the most of: sparrows. There are so, so many house sparrows around here. And at gas stations. I've noticed they like gas stations. (Hmm, I appear to have become eccentric).

Here's the thing: if one of those sparrows would die, I wouldn't notice. There are too many of them. Yet, Jesus says, "Not one of them falls to the ground without your Father's knowledge" (Mt 10:29). That's amazing to me, that God knows every sparrow -- and He knows them because each and every one of them is important to Him. He created each one.

Jesus then says: "You are worth more than many sparrows" (Mt 10:31). That is to say, if the heavenly Father should notice just one sparrow's death, and you are worth more than many sparrows, how much more will he notice you -- how terribly important you are to Him."

"Even all the hairs of your head have been counted" (Mt 10:30).

He knows what happened in the depths of the Atlantic this week. He knew each and every one of those men. Each one was terribly important to Him. He even know each and every hair on their head. And he knows yours. Each and every one.

My mind struggles to fathom this. But as I try to, I find a deep consolation. I am important to the Father.

***

In between all of these lines is a little phrase. Jesus says, "So do not be afraid" (Mt 10:30-31). Why does He say this?

Two reasons: because the world is dangerous; death can come at a moment's notice and at times seem arbitrary; things can look absurd, flimsy, meaningless. And because of all of that, we can easily become anxious and afraid. So, Jesus reassures us: Your life is not meaningless; and when you die (and we all will), it will be noticed by the Father.

A second reason why Jesus tells us not to be afraid: well, because when we think that our life or death is meaningless, when we think we are just another sparrow among a flock of sparrows, it is easy to just remain there. When I think my song is unimportant or unheard, I easily stop singing. Or, to flip the coin over, when everyone else is silent, I too can easily remain silent.

The low-hanging-fruit example is when it comes to witnessing to the faith. So, so many people are quiet when it comes to speaking about the faith. That Jesus is real. That He died and rose. That He founded the Catholic Church. That the Church, despite her warts and all, is still the treasure house of objective Truth and grace. That her voice is the voice of Jesus. And He speaks tenderly but firmly about things like how your must forgive if you want to be forgiven; you must repent of sin; the Eucharist is the greatest gift; marriage is between one man and one woman only; God only made two sexes, male and female; each is made in His image and therefore has inviolable dignity and cannot be willy-nilly destroyed as in euthanasia and abortion....

There are clearly more sparrows than blue jays out in this world. And the sparrows need to speak up a little more. And by sparrows, I mean you. And me.

And I know: we can be afraid. I'm afraid that if I speak the truth in clarity, will I be seen as unloving. Truth can be spoken in firmness and kindness; that is Love. Love wills the good of another. I want people to be free of the slavery which our social ills are causing. I speak, truly, from compassion.

Can I tell you something I have realized? 

I can be as gentle and compassionate as Jesus, but when it comes to speaking hard truths, many will not listen, just like many didn't listen to the gentle and compassionate Jesus.

And that is irksome to me. I believe that my sparrow-song is important. And gentle.

But to the world, I am just a sparrow. And annoying.

But my Father notices. And He loves hearing the song He has placed in my mouth. So I will not be afraid. I will keep on singing....

You are worth more than many sparrows.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Corpus Christi, 2023

When I was little, I loved being at church. It was a delight to the senses. When the people said the creed, it reminded me of thunder. When the older priest spoke in his deep but calm voice, I thought it was the voice of God. And when the ministers gave out holy communion, I had this belief that as they gave out one host from their ciborium, another one host would appear in its place.

I guess you could say that I’ve always known that something special was happening here. And, as I grew older, and I would read passages from the Sixth Chapter of John or the Eleventh Chapter of Saint Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians, I would take Jesus and the Apostles at their word. I wasn’t eating bread. I was receiving Jesus’ body and blood. Even the crowds that disagreed with Him at least knew that Jesus was being serious about His words.

 

Yet, even with all of that faith, I never really understood why there was the Holy Mass. It seemed to me, firstly, that it was about the priest changing bread and wine into Jesus and us receiving Jesus. And that’s true. But, if that is all that the Mass is about, why can’t the priest just make a lot of Jesus and then just kind of have a Chick-fil-A drive thru distribution line to receive Jesus?

So I thought, ok-ok, maybe there is something more to Holy Mass. Maybe Mass is about receiving Jesus and …  being taught. And so the readings and the homily. But that conclusion was unsatisfactory as well because, well, the preachers weren’t really good at preaching. I could easily leave church without getting anything out of it.

This is all to say that, even with faith, I always felt that there was something more to the Mass than just listening and eating.

 

And then, one day, I found it. I found the key to understand what the Holy Mass is.

It’s found right in the middle of Mass. The priest says:

Pray, brothers and sisters, that my sacrifice and yours may be acceptable to God the Almighty Father.

 And the people reply: 

May the Lord accept the sacrifice at your hands, for the praise and glory of His name, for our good and the good of all His Holy Church.           

At its very deepest, most essential level, the Holy Mass is a sacrifice. If we don’t understand that, we don’t understand the Mass. 

 

So, when the priest lifts up the host, he isn’t just showing it to everyone. He is lifting it up, offering Jesus, to the Father. 

The entire Triduum is present at the Mass. You have the Last Supper, where bread and wine are changed into Jesus. You have Good Friday, where Jesus offers Himself to the Father. And you have Easter Sunday in that, when you receive the Eucharist, you aren’t receiving a dead Jesus, you are receiving a living Jesus, in His glorified, resurrected body, a body which is hidden for now. 

The Holy Mass and the Holy Triduum are one and the same thing: they are both a Sacrifice of Jesus Christ, the High Priest, offered to the Father for our good and the good of all the Holy Church. 

 

This changed everything for me. Because, you see, I believed that God gave me everything. I believed that there was more to religion than just being taught something. I believed that there had to be a way that we could express the totality of our thanks and our sorrows, our hopes and our fears; a way to express our worship of the transcendent God and a way to express our utmost regret for sin; … 

And nothing-- no offering, no sacrifice of religion – could express that totality. That is, until I realized that our religion was offering Jesus, God, under the appearance of bread and wine, yet nevertheless present in His totality (body, blood, soul, and divinity) to the Father – Jesus, the only one who could express that totality and do so perfectly on my behalf and in a way that was acceptable to God the Almighty Father. That’s the sacrifice at our hands. 

That’s the definitive, perfect, and highest sacrifice God has given you and me to offer in praise and worship of Him. 

That’s the Holy Mass. 

And I believe that it matters to God. Even more than a child's work of art matters to a parent that places that child's art on the fridge. Sacrifices matter to God. It's why the First Holy Mass, given at the Last Supper, came with a holy command: Do this.

In the Octave of Pentecost ... (2023)

As we venture past the Easter Season, the Gospels this week have been rather striking to me; for the past three weeks, we have been walking with Jesus from the Upper Room and into Gethsemane, listening to Him, hearing His prayer -- but now we see Him doing miracles. And that is rather striking. We are reminded of how His public ministry began: at His baptism in the Jordan, the Holy Spirit descended upon Him, not because Jesus needed the Holy Spirit, but for our benefit: that we would know the Holy Spirit was with Him. Shortly thereafter, he arrives in His hometown, Nazareth, where He enters the synagogue, and pulls a scroll from Isaiah which says, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because He has anointed me, to bring glad tiding to the poor ... and to announce a year of favor for the Lord."

Jesus brings the Holy Spirit with Him and it is by the power of the Holy Spirit that He cures such people as Bartimaeus. It is the Holy Spirit who accompanies Mary at the Visitation. And Elizabeth, when she hears Mary's greeting, is also filled with the Holy Spirit. John the baptism, still in her womb, is sanctified by the Holy Spirit. And Mary and Elizabeth, seeing what the Holy Spirit has been doing in their lives (see the pregnant bump!), rejoice in the Holy Spirit.

In former days, we used to have what was called an Octave of Pentecost. It was one of the mini-seasons like the Triduum, or the days before Christmas (which we call the days of the O Antiphons). We have the twelve days of Christmas and the Octave of Easter. The Church, in Her wisdom, once had eight days -- an octave -- celebrating the gift of the Holy Spirit and the gifts which He brings (much like celebrating the gifts Jesus brings at Christmas). But whereas at Christmas we celebrated the coming of the Second Person of the Trinity, here we celebrate the Advent of the Third.

In former days, too, the Sundays after Pentecost were not numbered as, for example, the Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time. Rather, it would be the First Sunday after Pentecost (Trinity Sunday). Every Sunday was numbered in relation to Pentecost. The Second Sunday after Pentecost, the Third, and so on. 

The Church understood that we lived in the days of the Holy Spirit -- the Spirit who comes not simply to save, but to sanctify. It is by His power that we can become holy, saints (from the Latin: sanctus, meaning holy). It is by His power that martyrs can give witness to Jesus unto death and receive the crown of glory (as we see in the case of St. Justin -- a contemporary of Saint John, the Beloved Apostle).

It is important, then, that we do not simply go from Easter to Ordinary Time -- as if these days were Ordinary. They are full with the power of the Holy Spirit! -- the Spirit of Truth, which sets us free. The Spirit that convicts us of sin and which pours through the Church's priests in the power of the Sacrament of Reconciliation.

Well before the Second Vatican Council and the liturgical changes that happened after it, the Church was already battling a kind of iconoclasm -- that is, the destruction of images and symbols.

Images and symbols are important. Destroy them and you hurt the faith of those who see what the symbols represent. And, beyond that, destroy the faith and you destroy the community. Case in point: if we saw the destruction of the American Flag (and there are many these days who would do it), that destruction of the symbol of our country would destroy and would be an indicator of the destruction of the ground on which this country has been built; as a result, there would also be a ripping apart of the country. Communities and faith are built upon the symbolic. So when the symbolic is lost, so is the community of faith.

It is one of the reasons why we have emptier pews that years past. The solution is not found in fancy programs or strategic initiatives -- as necessary as they are to prune the vine so as to produce more fruit. Rather, the solution is found in the recovery of the symbolic.

Take, for example, the Easter Candle. One of the coolest things I have seen in our Holy Mass was, when I was celebrating the Solemnity of the Ascension in the ancient use. During the Gospel, as the Deacon proclaimed that Jesus ascended into heaven, a server came to the Easter candle and extinguished it.

The natural question was: why did this happen?

The symbol of the extinguished candle was clear: Jesus is the light of the world. And that the Ascension, that light was taken away.

And it would forever be taken away -- unless, and until the moment that, the Holy Spirit came upon the Apostles as tongues of fire, relighting the candle, casting fire upon the earth.

I found that awesome.

We did lose something when we took away the symbolic numbering of Sundays in relation to Pentecost and turned them into days of "Ordinary Time." 

Ordinary. It is about as inspiring as a white-washed protestant church.

And that's the problem. Can we be surprised at a loss of faith and the community when we describe our religion and our time as ordinary? Catholic Churches are known for their sacred art, their smells, their bells, their vestments. There is nothing ordinary about them. 

Strangely, they manifest to the senses the Incarnational reality that God, who is spirit, became flesh. The senses are important. And the Holy Spirit came upon the flesh and its senses at Pentecost -- elevated them, sanctified them, and everything about them: the people, the place, and the time.

These are the days of the power of the Holy Spirit, God, the Third Person of the Trinity. To Him be all glory forever. Amen.