Homily: 5th Sunday of Lent, cycle C.

This is the novel that I read.

The other day I finished reading a long novel. My mother gave me it as a Christmas gift and I finally got around to reading it. When I started reading the book I was fighting the temptation, I was trying to resist the urge... but I finally gave in. I flipped to the last page of the book and I read the last few sentences. I was weak and I gave into the desire to see how the story ended.

I think we all want to know how things end. It may be a novel, or a movie, or in this case life. And that is exactly what we see today in our second reading. We see how the whole story ends.

This reading is from the 21st chapter of the Book of Revelation. That book is the last book of the Bible and there are only 22 chapters. This is the final vision. This is the end of the story. Here we see, not just the end of the Bible, but the completion of the whole story.

We see, in this passage, what God has always been doing. We see what God is going to do and what the end of the story of our faith is. Here we see the end of your story, or my story, and of our story.
This is it!

We see that from the very beginning God created from nothing a world that was good. In that world God raised up from the dust humans like Himself. Man and woman are in God's image and likeness. But that wasn't enough!

God so longed and desired to be united with His beloved children that He drew us into a relationship with Him through the covenants of old. Then He desired to draw even closer to us and He became one of us so that we could be completely united to Him.


Even that was not enough. In His flesh He saved us by dying but, most importantly, by rising from the dead. In this we finally see the ultimate victory over death and sin. In the resurrection we see what God has desired to do all along. 

And yet, God is not even done there. God is still working to draw all of creation closer to Himself. This is what we see in this vision from the Book of Revelation.

At the end of the world God will unite heaven and earth in a perfect union. No longer will those two places be separate. God will finally put this world right. This is what God has been doing from ancient times. He has been working to draw the world into a perfect union with himself. 

At the Second Coming of Jesus, at the end of the world, all the dead will be raised just as Jesus was raised from the dead, and this world will finally be put right. Then God will perfectly and completely unite heaven and earth in an eternal and complete union, a new heaven and a new earth, a new Heavenly Jerusalem!

We hear: "Behold, God's dwelling is with the human race. He will dwell with them and they will be his people and God himself will always be with them as their God.  He will Wipe every tear from their eyes, and there shall be no more death or mourning, wailing or pain."  

God's desire is to put this world right, unite this world to Himself, and destroy death and pain for all eternity.  This is what He has been doing from the beginning!

This is heaven, a very real physical place.  God does not want us to spend eternity in some fluffy place where we go about skipping from fluffy cloud to fluffy cloud all the while strumming a small harp.  NO! 

We will be raised from the dead (as Jesus was) and this earth will be put right and united with God perfectly.That is heaven!  That is what we've always hoped for.  Not some fluffy spiritual place.

So the question then becomes... what are we doing now?  Are we just killing time between now and then when Jesus returns in the Second Coming?  Is our job just to take up space in a church pew once a week, be good for the rest of the week, and then just waiting?

NO!  Not at all!  We've got something to do.

The best example that I can give is similar to the old commercial for "Shake 'N Bake" chicken.

You might remember the old commercial.  A young girl helps her grandmother make chicken for dinner. Everyone thinks the chicken is fried but the young girl tells everyone that it is "Shake 'N Bake" and then she proudly exclaims, "And I helped"

This is very much like what we are supposed to be doing.

Notice what we hear in the Gospel.  Jesus is speaking to His Apostles at the end of the Last Supper, just a few hours before He will suffer and die on the Cross.

It is in this act of love, in this gift of Himself on the cross, that we see the fullest expression of God's glory.  

Look! Look upon the crucifix and see the Glory of God!  There it is!  That is God's love and glory on full display.  God's glory is seen in His total, complete, and limitless gift of Himself in Love.

This is the reason that He tells us, "I give you a new commandment; love one another.  As I have loved you, so you also should love one another."  

Jesus isn't asking us to just "be nice" to others.  Rather, He is commanding us to love others as He loved us.  This is a call to give of ourselves is sacrificial love.  This type of love isn't easy.  That's why St. Paul said, in the first reading, that, "it is necessary for us to undergo many hardships to enter the Kingdom of God."

This self-sacrifical love is hard and difficult.  And yet this is what Jesus is commanding us to do.

Our job is not just to kill time between now and Jesus' Second coming rather we are called to work with the Holy Spirit as God continues to put this world right.  God is working to get this world ready for it's union with Heaven, at the end of time.  Our job is to cooperate and work with God by our self-sacrificial love.

You and I should be working with God, through our work of loving.  When the end of the world comes  and God has put this world right and united it to Himself, we should be able to say, like that little girl in the commercial, "I HELPED!"

That is what we are supposed to be doing between now and then, between now and Jesus' Second coming.  The world should know that we are working with God to put this world right because they will see that we are His disciples because we have love for one another.

Homily 4th Sunday of Easter: April 21st

Here is my homily from Sunday April 21st, the Fourth Sunday of Easter.

I'm back

Hello All,

I've been really bad about updating my blog recently.  

I am going to try to make a greater effort to post things more consistently.

Feel free to send me an email if I'm getting lazy again and remind me to post more stuff.