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July 25, 2005

FEEDING AND BEING FED - Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Somewhere in a pastoral instruction book I read a long time ago I remember the words that nine-tenths of the time spent in sermon preparation consists in nothing more than sitting and looking out the window. I can tell you from personal experience that I have done a lot of that, but it has not all been lost or wasted time. There are material objects outside my window that truly delight me, inspire me, and raise my interest every day: The white daisies that are growing along side the building across the parking lot, or the California poppies that always begin blooming in late June. In the spring of the year I wait for the new buds to appear on the cottonwood tree across the lot. In the fall, with the first frost, I expect, reluctantly, to see the same Cottonwood foliage change from green to yellow and orange. Indeed, the whole year transpires outside my window from season to season. I have always thought of those changes in the seasons as food for my spirit. I am being fed by God. All that is required of me is that I pay attention to what is happening, what is changing.

I think it is also true to say that we are fed in many ways that do not involve bread, meat, mashed potatoes and gravy. We take all those for granted, of course. But the broader question to ask is how do we feed our spirits, and if we are fed, whether by God or by our neighbor, how do we choose to feed one another?

Feeding is a rather amazing art, when one thinks about it. I have watched many mothers feed their little children, teaching them later how to feed themselves. There seems to be an assumption that we instinctively know how to do this when we are born into this world. I suppose even if no one ever taught us to use the right utensils we would eventually learn the process from watching others.

But when a father or mother teaches a child how to eat, it is more than learning a skill. I think there is a certain human gift that is shared, something beyond the food itself. I’m sure that there is a difference in a child’s perception of food when, for instance, a stranger tries to feed a child, as opposed to the situation where the child’s Mother performs that same task. Parents share something of themselves when they teach their children the use of spoons and forks. It is a personal act of love.

My sense is that the sharing of food between adult persons, the giving and receiving of food is a kind of sacred act, a holy gesture toward one another. We depend on one another to keep each other alive. It is almost a kind of miracle of life when we prepare food and share it. It is not just making sure the food is healthy and well-prepared. We actually give something of ourselves in this act, something of our own person.

Having said all this, it is interesting to notice how the prophet Isaiah in the first reading for this Sunday’s liturgy speaks about the way God feeds us: “All you who are thirsty” Isaiah says, “come to the water! You who have no money, come, receive grain and eat; come without paying and without cost, drink wine and milk! Why spend your money on what is not bread?”

We usually do not think about the fact that God does, indeed feed us. Without the power of the sun and the rain, the turning of the seasons, we would go hungry. So, God does, indeed, feed us, and it’s all free, at least free from the hand of God. We humans, of course, have apart in it too. We are not hunters and gatherers any more!

Nonetheless, it is true that many other hands have had a part in providing the meat and potatoes, the fruit and vegetables that appear on the shelves of our supermarkets. Many of the folks who provide it are migrant people who bend their backs to feed us and who receive precious little in return for their hard work. Think of that sometime when you pickup a fresh bunch of carrots or onions or a box of ripe strawberries. Who were these people who made these items available for our dining tables?

In a sense, it seems as though this is the very way that God has planned it: God gave us the original source of food and then tells us to make sure it goes around. We have a command to feed one another; otherwise, the world will go hungry.

The best example we have for all this comes from the short description of the day in Jesus’ life when some five thousand people stayed with him throughout an entire day to listen to his teaching (the food of the word). It must have been an interesting day because toward evening people were still there waiting for more and they had not yet had lunch or dinner. (Can you imagine a congregation of Catholics hanging around that long for a sermon?)

At any rate, you know the story: Jesus’ disciples sort of casually mention to Him that it was getting late and no one had yet eaten supper. Oddly enough, Jesus did not seem to get particularly excited about it. He just says: “Why don’t you feed them yourselves?” “Why wait for me?” I’m sure that must have puzzled the disciples. They, obviously, had no food of their own with them. But someone eventually came up with five barley loaves and a couple dried fish, but how was that to go around for five thousand people. Remember, these men were not stupid. Anyone obviously knows that 5 small barley loaves will not feed 5,000 people. Of course, they had to point that out to Jesus, as though he didn’t already know!

But then Jesus did a remarkable thing: It does not say that he did a miracle. All that the text says is that he asked God’s blessing on the five loaves of bread, broke them and told the disciples to hand them around.

I have often wondered whether that blessing and distributing bread might have been the first Mass Jesus celebrated? The text says that he blessed, broke and shared. That is basically what happens at Mass: Bread and wine are blessed and shared. If those actions were not the first Mass, they were surely at least a close model of what Jesus did at the Last Supper.

There is one small item that may be passed over without notice, however. Jesus did not, in fact, take the loaves and pass them around himself. He gave that responsibility to the disciples, his followers. I don’t think it was merely a matter of expediency, of getting everyone fed and down the road toward home before dark. I think it was rather a gesture on Jesus’ part to say to his disciples: “Here is what you will be doing after I am gone. Your basic responsibility will be to feed people, feed them with bread and wine and with kindness and compassion, with pastoral responsibility. That will be your task. Do all this in memory of me. Do it the way I did it. If you share there will always be enough to go around.”

Well, obviously, a lot of people since Jesus’ time have been doing what he did, blessing, breaking and sharing bread and wine, kindness and compassion. This literally is what holds our Church together as a community.

Finally, I should say that blessing and breaking bread and the sharing of the cup in our day is the pastoral responsibility of bishops and priests. But the sharing is also a “shared responsibility.” The bread and wine of the Eucharist that is shared at Mass is a sign to all of us, lay and cleric that we must continue sharing all the human gifts we have at hand from day to day in our world of work. It all boils down to this: Feeding each other is a skill we have learned from the way God feeds us. We should also find ways to do that for others this week. There is no point in letting people go hungry. And, by the way, don’t be afraid to let others give you some of their best food too. In this world we’re all in it together. That’s just the way it is.

The scriptures: Isaiah 55: 1-3; Romans 8: 35-37; Matthew 14: 13-31

Posted by Julie Galligan at 11:39 AM.

July 18, 2005

LIFE’S CHOICES - Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

No matter how old we are, it seems that we all love surprises, particularly, those kinds of surprises where we receive something we never expected to receive: Perhaps it’s a tax rebate or being named a recipient in a will we never knew existed. Even finding a five dollar bill on the street gives us a short moment of excitement. It is five bucks we never expected to have.

I always find it exciting to read the reports of legitimate professional treasure hunters who spend millions tracking down the position of long lost sunken vessels, particularly those that went down during the Fifteenth or Sixteenth Centuries, their holds filled with gold and other treasures. My hunch is that just finding the treasure was as exciting for them as knowing that they may now be millions of dollars richer. Most of those artifacts will probably go into museums or private collections anyway.

Interestingly enough, it always seems that it is the finding of gold and silver, money, material things that provides the most excitement for people. What does not seem to occur to people is that material things do not last very long; they do not give us a sense of long-lasting security. Indeed, people who amass such things always worry about how they can hang on to them. They may have electronic security fences built around their homes to make sure their possessions are safe. I know a man, for instance, who has a huge gun collection. He’s always worrying about someone breaking into his home and stealing them. He’s probably got millions invested in that collection. So, every room in his house is separately wired against burglars. He even hates to leave home on trips for fear that someone will break and enter, walking off with his “treasure!” So, what security do these guns provide?

Most of us, of course, instinctively know the answer: We know that money, gold and silver, guns or whatever else does not ultimately provide us with a sense of true peace or real security. We can lose all those in a heartbeat. Indeed, nature itself often makes our lives pretty precarious: Flood, landslides, tornadoes, fires. It happens all the time to rich and poor alike. All that we have can be lost in the blink of an eye.

When you occasionally hear peoples’ responses to the questions of reporters after a flood or a tornado, it is interesting to hear how they feel about their losses. Some just don’t know how they will continue to live. But others will say, “Well, it was just stuff, just ordinary material things that I can probably recoup in a few years.”
Interestingly though, the thing that people hate most to lose are photographs, photographs of weddings, family gatherings, snapshots of grandpa or grandma, now long deceased. And even so, it was probably not so much the photo itself, but the thought that the person would lose the memories of those dear ones. This is what makes people feel sad. Memories are so dear to us, more dear than silver and gold.

Well, given all we have said, is there anything in our scriptures for this Sunday that will help us understand the question about what is truly precious in life? I think we probably already instinctively know that some things in life are worth finding and keeping and other things are not worth our time, mainly because they do not last, indeed, they may have no meaning in our life for the long haul, for eternity. So, we all know that: Money and material things do not last forever. So, the question remains, what does last forever? What can give us a sense of peace today and tomorrow and over the long haul?

There are two individuals who can give us an insight about that in today’s scriptures: One is the famous King Solomon, a man who obviously never had any great worry about where his next buck was coming from. The other is Jesus who, by the way, also did not worry about where his next buck was coming from but for a different reason.

Let’s take the case of Solomon first: One would have thought that he, like most kings of that time, would have been much concerned about having a reputation for riches. That’s what gave a man status in those times, the money you had in the bank, if there was a bank.

But you will notice in the narration of the text that when Solomon was being nominated to be king, God asked him what he really wanted out of life. He said, “Not riches, nor a long life, not even power over my enemies. What I really want is understanding, insight. I want to know how to tell the difference between right and wrong, that’s what I really want.” And God told him, “it’s all yours Solomon because you asked for the right things in life, things that could bring you peace of mind, things that could bring you the admiration and respect of your subjects.

So, the answer Solomon gave tells us a lot: He instinctively knew that he lived in a very dangerous and unpredictable world: In a heartbeat, the Assyrians could come down from the North and take away his kingdom along with all his riches. So, he asked for the so-called non-material things: Wisdom, understanding, a compassionate heart, the insight to find the truth in all things.

Now, I submit that this was a rather brave response on Solomon’s part. If God were to ask any one of us today what we would prefer, a million bucks, for instance, or a sense of wisdom, my hunch is that you would say: Give me the bucks. Those I can take to the bank. But if we did answer like that, we still would not be any the richer for it. Being a wise person is still more precious than having a big bank account.

So, what is the all about? It is ultimately all about attitude, about wisdom, abut knowing the difference between the perishable things of this world and the imperishable treasures of this world. (Notice, I did not say the imperishable things of heaven!)

Now, you may say: “Well, I’ll never have to make that sort of choice in life anyway, so what’s the problem? Well, whether we ever have to make the choice or not, the question is, would we be ready to choose wisdom over money if the choice should present itself? That’s what ultimately counts. It’s all about our way of looking at life.

Jesus also seemed to have the same attitude about material things. It is described in that lovely story of the pearl of great price. “If you find one,” Jesus says, “cash in your assets and buy it. Don’t lose any time.”

Now, right away you know Jesus is not talking about clams and pearls. He is talking about whatever it is in life that you could describe as precious, that you would be willing to sell everything for in order to have it. So, the question lands right back in our laps: How do we look at life? What is truly important to us? What temporary world object are we willing to give up for the sake of something that will last forever?

I would like to suggest that this is not an easy question to answer. It is not easy because most of us, with the exception of a few “philosophical types” of people, are pretty much immersed in this world, security mainly, the assurance that we will have enough tomorrow to get along on. Asking for wisdom can often seem like some sort of abstract, hypothetical reality something we cannot take to the bank, something that will not put food on our table.

Now, I realize, of course that we do not think about these options every day, but nonetheless, I think it is important, at least in our reflective moments, that we think about this question: What is it that I would not want to lose today? What is it that I feel is truly precious? What is my treasure? If the first answer that comes to mind is our billfold or our credit cards, then perhaps we still have not found the answer that Jesus thought so important. I really think that this is one of those questions that will keep pestering us all our life, whether we are rich or poor, or even whether we ever suddenly find that someone has left us a million dollars in a will. If the question of material things is the point at which we stop asking the question about life, then, perhaps, we still may have a problem. Wisdom may still have escaped us and that would be a tragedy.

The scriptures: 1 Kings 3: 5, 7-12; Romans 8: 28-30; Matthew 13: 44-52

Posted by Julie Galligan at 08:44 AM.

July 11, 2005

A WEED BY ANY OTHER NAME - Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

I notice that most of the nurseries are going full bore during these summer days. Even WalMart and Fred Meyer have large sections of their parking lot set aside for the sale of flowers and shrubs. In spring it seems everyone suddenly becomes an “instant farmer,” at least for a couple months.

There is something healthy, however, indeed, even cathartic about working in the dirt. Even better, all our creative instincts come to the surface when we can take delight in seeing our lettuce, carrots, radishes or marigolds come up and give us the pleasure of eating something or just observing beauty. We, gardeners, that we are, have become creators, at least in a relative sense. It just feels good to grow things. I can vouch for that, having been the son of farm folks. There was a moment in history, however, when I decided that growing things was not all that exciting. So, I went to college and then the seminary and have not grown anything since!

Now, despite all our best efforts, not all seeds that lie in the ground come up daisies, far from it. In fact, two thirds of our efforts at gardening are spent weeding out weeds. Of course, how is one to know what’s what? One would have to have a Ph.D. in agronomy to be able to distinguish between a weed and a carrot shoot when they first pop up out of the ground.

When you think about it, both are living things and they both have the right to grow and mature. The problem is we humans have decided that weeds are not useful to us, whereas carrots and radishes and onions are. So, the weeds we dig up and discard and the carrots we harvest for the table.

Nonetheless, I suppose we would have to say, at least philosophically, that weeds have some value in this world even though we don’t eat the product. Indeed, our historical forebears used to eat many of the plants we would not touch today. So, the old saying, “a weed by any other name could be flower.” It all depends on what we think they are useful for, how they serve us or, better, how we think about them. None of us care much for thistles, but we surely enjoy fresh strawberries.

I’m not sure whether Jesus ever cultivated a garden, but most people of his time surely must at least have had a little plot of ground to grow things for household use. After all, Safeway and Costco did not exist in those times. So, Jesus’ family must sure must have had access to some garden products.

And even if they didn’t, Jesus was a fairly astute observer of nature. As he walked along preaching, I’m sure he must have noticed the fields of wheat and the weeds that were growing up along side one another. Not only that, he made a point one day to his followers that it might prove rather difficult in the middle of the growing season to separate the two. Any farmer with an ounce of brains could also tell you that.

So, right away, we know that Jesus is not talking about weeds and wheat. Jesus had more important things to think about. Jesus always talked about the world about the folks who live in this world with all their peculiar habits, positive and negative. Actually, what Jesus basically always talked about was the kingdom of God, or a vision of what the world would look like if God had his way.

Now, there is one thing that is absolutely clear, at least to me, when you read the life of Jesus: He was a ferocious defender of people who were considered “low-life’s” by so-called upper class people, especially, the religious elites, types who felt that God was obviously on their side because they knew the Torah, the Law of God and they kept it scrupulously. Jesus got into more arguments with these people than any other.

The question Jesus kept asking was this: Who, outside of God himself, really knows who is good or bad, who is or is not God’s favorite person? The very example Jesus gives in the gospel passage today about the difficulty of knowing what is weeds and what is wheat tells you how he felt about human relationships.

In this world of ours, Jesus would say, there are all sorts of people. Everyone struggles with life, everyone is also basically good, but some also struggle with life too, with bad habits, with temptations, with failures. But it is still too early now to tell start condemning people out of hand. Judgments about moral character are always notoriously undependable. Who is “wheat” and who is “weeds” is difficult to say, and, as a matter of fact, the distinction is nobody’s business…except God’s.

So, the whole theme of the scriptures for this Sunday is about tolerance, about being slow to judge. It’s all about the tolerance of God and the intolerance of humans in this world.

It is interesting to notice, if one is an historian, that we humans have the need to categorize people, to judge people negatively because they seem to be different from us, whether religiously, culturally, racially, sexually or morally. It’s an old habit we have of “scape-goating” people. We all know what tht word means.

So, the whole point Jesus is making about the weeds and the wheat growing up together is about being careful not to prejudge people. We humans do not tolerate each other very well. We are well known for having our prejudices. It is a common habit among us. We make assumptions about folks without really knowing them well, without knowing their personal life-styles, about how they think, how they feel, et cetera. The assumption seems to be that “we” are not like they are. We don’t fit into their category. We are different.

What seems odd about prejudice or intolerance is that it happens more often than not regarding religious or moral issues. It’s the old assumption that God has to be on our side, but surely not on the side of the person who is different from us.

This has been a consistent problem, not on the personal level, but even within our church as institution. We have all heard the horror stories about how Catholics over the centuries have publicly persecuted Jews and Moslems, heretics, gay and lesbian people and people generally different from “us” whoever “us” happens to be.

So, how should we deal with prejudice which, unfortunately, seems to infect most of us in small and large ways? The first question one might ask is this: Why does this person or this person’s life-style bother me? Most likely, as a human being, he or she is just a very normal person, a good person, morally and ethically. Few people deliberately choose to be evil. Another question might be: Does this person’s actions affect me personally, or is it that I just don’t like the way they live?

Perhaps it all boils down to our need to have everyone be perfect. Perhaps we don’t like to live with ambiguity. Life needs to be either white or black for many people. We can’t live with the gray areas. But ultimately we may need to get used to that. Nothing and no one is perfect in this world, including ourselves.

So, picking weeds may be a worthwhile endeavor if you are trying to save your vegetables. But “weeding out people” is another matter. Jesus couldn’t bear to see it happen and neither should we. In this world we are all half way to the harvest, to the time when God will make the decisions about who’s who.

The scriptures: Wisdom 12: 13, 16-19; Romans 8: 26-27; Matthew 13: 24-43

Posted by Julie Galligan at 09:03 AM.

July 05, 2005

WORD POWER - Scripture Reflection for the Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Many people who come to Alaska in summer, especially around the time of the State Fair, want to go out and have a look at the monstrous vegetables that grow here during these long sunny days: Pumpkins that you can’t lift, tomatoes almost as large as your head, carrots as big as baseball bats (almost). It’s true, we do have vegetables that practically make the Guiness Book of Records” each year.

The amazing thing, of course, is that the humongous pumpkin we just spoke of came from a seed no larger than a dime. Think of the inherent power of growth that is contained that little seed, and the fact too that it can multiply itself by another couple thousand seeds. It’s pretty amazing when you think about it; and, of course, we simply take it all for granted. That is what God does with nature, with sun and rain and good black earth. Living things multiply themselves a thousand-fold given the right environment.

Among wine growers in California, the story is told of a vine that was brought over from Italy in the year 1842. By the year 1900 it was yielding 10 tons of grapes in peak years. By the time it died in 1920 at the age of 78 years, it had produced more than 600 tons of grapes, all from one spindly little vine!

I often think too of words that are “seeded” in our human world, words that multiply themselves and grow beyond all measure. Think, for instance, of all the works of literature, history, mathematics, fiction, poetry that have ever been written over the time of human history. Think how many peoples’ lives have been affected by the author of one good novel, by someone like Ernest Hemmingway or James Joyce or Nikos Kazantzakis, to mention only a few? Words, like pumpkins seeds, are living realities.

Or, think for instance, of the number of homilies and sermons that have been preached in churches throughout the world over the centuries. My hunch is that all these must have done some good for humanity; someone must have learned how to live, how to be Christian, how to praise God. And, of course, they all came from the mind and lips of one person, the preacher. One preacher probably made the difference (I hope for good) in the ways thousands of Christians have lived the Christian life and praised their God.

So, we need to say that words affect the way we live. They make us think, make us laugh, make us weep, make us ask forgiveness; they give us reason to wonder, to be amazed and astonished at the meaning of life itself.

When you think about it then, the prophet Isaiah, whom we just heard speak in the first reading, is correct: God speaks through human words. God’s words are like the rain or the snow that shower the earth. Those words will not go back to where they came from until they have had their effect on someone’s life. We literally live on words. They are living and life-giving.

I have often wondered too whether Jesus thought about the power of words when he decided to choose his life career of preaching. People who listened to him said that they had never heard anything like this. Maybe Jesus saw that one could do as much good with one sermon of good words as he could with a dozen miracles. At any rate, he did a lot of preaching in his short career and we are still listening to those sermons today. That says something.

The point is that Jesus did not just preach some vague philosophical principles. He told stories; they called them parables, comparisons. He talked about ordinary stuff like wheat and weeds, about pearls and swine, of lilies and thistles, images people could readily understand. Whether the folks always understood all the implications that Jesus had in mind, of course, is another thing, but at least they heard the story and could make of it whatever they wanted. At any rate, they were willing to sit on the grass all day listening, so they must have been fascinated and entertained.

We need to say, therefore, that there is some mysterious power in stories and in story telling. A good story teller can make people sit up and listen and think. I can vouch for that when giving a homily: The moment you say, “Let me tell you a story”, people immediately perk up and listen.

Why is that? I think the reason for it is because stories are about ourselves. Story tellers put us into the middle of the story and make us think. They also make us laugh or cry. But basically stories are about our lives. We can’t deny it. They make us say to ourselves: “Hey that was myself he was talking about.”

Why do you think people like Jay Leno or David Letterman, the late-night talk-show hosts, are so popular? They tell stories about other people, but they also remind us about ourselves. That’s why we laugh, isn’t it?

But the important question is still this: We’ve all heard Jesus’ parables over and over. What are the chances that those stories will have any effect on our lives, make us think; help us change if we need to change?

I think the answer is the one which made the pumpkin grow so large: If the sun and the water are there, but especially of the seed ground is rich and fertile, something will grow. It’s the same with Jesus’ stories: they can’t help but change our lives if the conditions (our conditions) are right. If we are willing to provide the metaphorical good ground for the seed, God’s sun and rain will do the rest. Of course, if the seed falls on dry ground, nothing is going to happen.

It seems important then to realize that whenever we hear one of Jesus’ favorite stories again in the context of a homily, this is not just “cutesy” entertainment. There are some serious implications contained there. Otherwise, why Jesus would ever have wasted his time telling these stories in the first place?

A couple points seem to follow from all this: First, the Jesus stories are all about God or about God’s kingdom, the way God must see life in this world and the way God must expect us to view the world around us and ourselves as well.

Secondly, each of us is a story teller, whether we think we are professionally so or not. All of us have a story to tell, indeed, we are a story for anyone who will listen. The point is, we need to be willing to tell It.

Lastly, there is one interesting line in the gospel that always fascinates me. Jesus’ disciples asked him one day why he always talked in parables. Jesus had this interesting reply: He said something like this: “You guys already know about God’s mysteries, but not everybody has the insights you guys have. So, for those folks who long to understand God’s ways, I need to tell stories. It’s easier that way. That’s the only way they will ever understand. So, whatever it takes, that’s what I need to do.”

I suspect lots of us are like those people Jesus talked about who did not understand God’s mysteries. But we too, disciples of Jesus, long to understand mysteries. So, it’s always nice to know that someone like Jesus cares enough about us to speak our language. Now, the question is: Are we listening?

The scriptures: Isaiah 55: 10-11; Romans 8: 1-23; Matthew 13: 1-23

Posted by Julie Galligan at 09:23 AM.