Jonah & Jesus: "Repent!"

I don't know how many times we have readings in the Sunday lectionary from the Book of Jonah. I just know that it isn't very many. So, it strikes me as funny and a little odd that our first reading for the Third Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year B, is about Jonah finally arriving in Nineveh, walking its streets and proclaiming, "Forty days more and Nineveh shall be destroyed" (Jonah 3:4)! Looking forward to our Gospel reading for today, as well as to Lent, I suppose we can see this as an earlier version of what Mark records Jesus as saying after emerging from the desert, which 40-day sojourn was preceded by His baptism by John in the Jordan, "Repent, and believe in the gospel" (Mark 1:15b).

Before making it to Nineveh, Jonah, after being called by the LORD, jumped the first ship going West (Nineveh was to the North/Northeast), headed to Tarshish, which at that time was literally the end of the known world. After the onset of a great storm that threatened the ship, once it was determined that Jonah was the cause of the storm, the crew threw Jonah overboard. Then Jonah was swallowed by a big fish and eventually spit up on the shore somewhere closer to Nineveh. Finally figuring out that he could not evade the call God gave him, Jonah went and proclaimed the message in our first reading. As we see, the response of the Ninevites, who were the enemies of Jonah's people, was to repent.

It is not only the back story leading up to what we proclaim today, but what Jonah did afterwards. You would think Jonah would be happy, or at least relieved, that the people (and even the animals) of Nineveh repented. He was not. He was angry. He went outside the city and sat on a ledge overlooking the city and grumbled to God.

When we compare Jonah's mission with Jesus' mission we can see that Jesus did not have the kind of overwhelming response Jonah elicited. Like Jonah, Jesus wound up on a hill outside the city. However, Jesus was not sitting and grumbling out loud to the Father about the empirically modest result of His efforts, He was nailed to the Cross out of love for all, even (especially?) for those who did not repent and the believe the Gospel, largely abandoned by most who had responded favorably.

Discipleship costly for all who follow

Even as a Roman Catholic deacon, I think the Protestant Reformation achieved something important with regards to living as a Christian, something it took Catholics all the way until Vatican II to even begin to realize, what we call the Council's "universal call to holiness."

After Christianity became a licit religion in the Roman Empire, the Church quickly became more secularized, that is, more worldly. According to Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his classic The Cost of Discipleship, what was lost was the costliness of grace. Bonhoeffer contends that the ancient Church did not lose its sense of of the costliness of grace altogether because it was preserved in monasticism. Indeed, those we revere as the Desert Fathers and (yes there were some) Mothers were driven to the desert largely by the phenomenon of the Church's rapid growth and equally rapid secularization. Bonhoeffer, taking his cue from historians of the ancient Church, marvels that the monastic movement did not result in a schism. Bonhoeffer wrote, "the Church was wise enough to tolerate this protest."

Martin Luther

Over time, according to Bonhoeffer, even monasticism came to be relativized and was used by the Church "to justify the secularization of its own life." How monasticism came to be used this way was, instead of being a form of discipleship for everybody and, hence, the way of communal life for the Church, it came to be viewed "as an individual achievement which the mass of laity could not be expected to emulate." As a result of "limiting the application of the commandments of Jesus to a restricted group of specialists," Bonhoeffer insisted, "the Church evolved the fatal conception of the double standard - a maximum and a minimum standard of Christian obedience." So, when "the Church was accused of being too secularized, it could always point to monasticism as an opportunity of living a higher life within the fold, and thus justify the other possibility of a lower standard of life" for Christians who were not monastics.

"By and large," Bonhoeffer concluded, "the fatal error of monasticism lay not so much in its rigorism... as in the extent to which it departed from genuine Christianity by setting up itself as the individual achievement of the select few... "

Bonhoeffer, who was a Lutheran, saw in Martin Luther's movement from the world to the cloister and back to the world as precisely the movement required for a needed correction, wrote: "It is a fatal misunderstanding of Luther's action to suppose that his rediscovery of the gospel of pure grace offered a general dispensation from obedience to the command of Jesus, or that it was a great discovery of the Reformation that God's forgiving grace automatically conferred on the world both righteousness and holiness. On the contrary, for Luther the Christian's worldly calling is sanctified only in so far as that calling registers the final, radical, protest against the world" (emboldening and italicizing emphasis mine).

It is no wonder that so many spiritual writers today are expounding those ancient Christian practices preserved in monasticism and applying them so fruitfully to daily living for all Christians. Several works come immediately to mind: Debra Farrington's Living Faith Day By Day: How the Sacred Rules of Monastic Traditions Can Help You Live Spiritually in the Modern World, Esther de Waal's Seeking Life: The Baptismal Invitation of the Rule of St. Benedict, Scot McKnight's Fasting, which is part of Thomas Nelson Publisher's "The Ancient Practices" series, and Richard Foster's still relevant and valuable Celebration of Discipline. I could list many, many more

From the fifth chapter of Lumen Gentium (Dogmatic Constitution on the Church) is entitled "The Universal Call to Holiness":

Thus it is evident to everyone, that all the faithful of Christ of whatever rank or status, are called to the fullness of the Christian life and to the perfection of charity; by this holiness as such a more human manner of living is promoted in this earthly society. In order that the faithful may reach this perfection, they must use their strength accordingly as they have received it, as a gift from Christ. They must follow in His footsteps and conform themselves to His image seeking the will of the Father in all things. They must devote themselves with all their being to the glory of God and the service of their neighbor. In this way, the holiness of the People of God will grow into an abundant harvest of good, as is admirably shown by the life of so many saints in Church history (par. 40)

God's love, our response

My friend and brother, Deacon Bob Yerhot, as is his wont, left a very thoughtful comment on my last post. It seems nigh unto impossible to discuss God's unbounded and unconditional love for us without thinking and discussing how to respond, which is by loving God with my whole being and my neighbor as myself. Any moral code not rooted in love is not authentically moral. This axiom also has a lot of bearing on why true religion is not a form of social control. Even when we look at the Ten Commandments we see this with the first three commandments being about loving God, the fourth (honoring our parents) is in a category by itself, our Dad and Mom occupying a space between God and everybody else, and the final six about loving our neighbor.

Even when I mess all that up by failing in some small, or even catastrophic, way God doesn't love me any less. Because God's  relentless and unfailing love is unlike anything I have ever experienced, grasping this is not just important, but necessary- "God loves you as you are and not as you should be." I'll go further, God's love is the only way I can become who I should be, who God created and redeemed me to be. Sanctification, which is what we call the process of being made holy, consists in nothing other than loving God and others in a Christ-like way.

In Mere Christianity C.S. Lewis sagely observed, "On the whole, God's love for us is a much safer subject to think about than our love for Him." Our love runs hot and cold, even tending at times towards the Biblically-terrifying lukewarm. "But the great thing to remember," Lewis continued, "is that, though our feelings come and go, His love for us does not." God's love, as Lewis knew, "is not wearied by our sins, or our indifference; and, therefore, it is quite relentless in its determination that we shall be cured of those sins, at whatever cost to us, at whatever cost to Him."

"Do you really believe this?"

Brennan Manning on the reality of God's love for you. Yes, you.

As skeptical and untrusting as I am, I am usually the first to say, "If it sounds too good to be true, it probably isn't true." I would feel that way about God's love for me if I hadn't experienced it first hand. While, God's love for me made real, concrete, actual in Jesus sounds too good to be true, it is the hardest truth to live by, to build my life on, to use to shape my relationships. I mean, what Brennan is saying is easy to grasp, that is, comprehend, but difficult to believe, but what if I lived each moment as if this were true, or even lived that way a lot of the time? Because I am forgetful and vacillating, Jesus' love for me is something I need to be reminded of over and over. Nothing is more fundamental, even elemental.

Therefore, I think when we invoke John 3:16, "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life"(ESV), we need to keep in mind John 3:17: "For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him" (ESV). You might say, "Well Deacon Scott, should we read further and include John 3:18, which talks about the condemnation of those who refuse to believe?" I would say that even if we go to the end of verse 20 we see that those who refuse the love of God condemn themselves by their refusal, not by God.

Preaching the Gospel really doesn't consist of anything more than bearing witness to God's love poured out for us. When we make it about more, which we often do, putting, say, morality up-front, like the proverbial cart before the horse, we fail Him by telling others that God will only love them as they should be and could never love them as they are. To paraphrase Fr. Timothy Radcliffe, we have no business discussing morality with someone until that person knows that God loves them just as they are and that any movement towards "should be" is a movement of grace requiring cooperation as a loving to response to the love they have received. Sure, it's a mouth full, which is why we can be brief and just say, "God loves you just as you are, right now, at this moment. Do you believe?

Lord,
true light and source of all light,
listen to our morning prayer.
Turn our thoughts to what is holy
and may we ever live in the light of your love. Amen.


Turning our thoughts to what is holy means turning our thoughts to Jesus, who sanctifies us by loving us.

How does grace work?

I don't know how grace works, I only know that it does. What's so amazing about grace to me is that God always meets my need. I know for a fact that it is not because I deserve it, or because I have done something good. I guess that's the part I don't get.

A year ago today my Dad died. I've been kind of numb all day, but thinking about him. When I close my eyes I see his face. I am grateful beyond words that the last words we exchanged went something like this:

Dad: You need go be with Holly and your kids.
Me: I don't want to leave because I don't know if you'll be here when I get back.
Dad: Go, your family needs you.
Me (kissing his forehead): I love you.
Dad: Son, I love you so much.

It took me all day to be able to conjure up that memory. I was avoiding it. Anyway,  here's the grace part. Yesterday, I went to the book store with a gift certificate I received for Christmas. I found a book that surprised me: Brennan Manning's recently published autobiography, All Is Grace: A Ragamuffin Memoir. If you're not familiar with Manning, do yourself a favor and read some of his books. I highly recommend two that had a profound impact on me, The Ragamuffin Gospel: Good News for the Bedraggled, Beat-Up, and Burnt Out and Abba's Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging.

I read almost the whole book yesterday afternoon between the time I arrived home and had to leave to attend to some pastoral duties and lead School of Community. I hated having to put the book down, but I know now there's a reason I didn't read it all. So this evening when I arrived home I picked up the book and started to read it again. I very quickly arrived at Brennan's account of the death of his sort-of-adopted second Mom, Ma Brennan, whose last name he took as his religious name when he entered the Franciscan order shortly after mustering out of the Marine Corps. He met the woman he called Ma Brennan through his best friend, Ray, whom he met in the Marines. Ray died tragically at a young age, but Manning maintained his close connection to Ray's mom and family.

Upon arriving at home in New Orleans after a speaking trip, he learned that Ma Brennan, who lived outside of Chicago, was dying and asking for him. The next morning Brennan was on a plane to Chicago and arrived at the care facility where Ma Brennan lay rapidly expiring. Like many whose lives have been negatively impacted by alcohol, Manning has a hard time believing people like him. So, it is significant that he wrote, "Ma didn't just love me; she liked me enough, I believe, to wait until I arrived to say good-bye." As he walked in the room and arrived at her bedside, Ma pointed to her lips, asking him for a kiss. So, he kissed her. He writes, "She whispered, 'More.' I kissed her a second time, and again she smiled and said, 'More.'" Thinking back on it, he wondered how weird the nun in the room thought this was before writing, "I don't know what all a kiss holds, but that night I hoped ours held grace sufficient for the next step on Ma's journey."

Manning's motto, which he picked up from the saintly Br. Dominique during his time in France and Spain with the Little Brothers of Jesus, is "God loves you unconditionally as you are and not as you should be."

Since my Dad, through his lovely Mother, Isabelle Minnie, loved poetry, I'll post one by Leonard Cohen:

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in

A year ago today my life was cracked. It's tough to live in a world my Dad no longer inhabits, especially as I hold my little Evan, born last June, who never met his Grandpa. There were only two things that really bothered my Dad as he lay dying-  that he would not make his 50th wedding anniversary, which was last 25 August, and that he would not meet his grandson, who was conceived, but not yet born. Today, God in His amazing grace, shone some light through that crack.

Don't forget to pray

Whether we care to admit it or not, our mortal life is made up only of time. To complicate matters, we do not know how much time we have. So, how we spend our time is hugely important. Life is too amazing and wonderful to waste time or to kill time, though I suppose we all do that at least once in awhile. All of these observations make us think of things like so-called "bucket lists," a term with which I was wholly unfamiliar until very recently. Bucket lists, far from being bad, are good when used appropriately.

I remember a professor I had in college, a man who took me under his wing a little bit, who was really interested in reality. He told me once that his parents came into some inherited money and that they spent most of the money traveling the world, visiting many historical, cultural, and exotic locations. He also said that all his mother had at the end of the day were boxes full of unsorted pictures.

The calculable finitude of our mortal lives, about which the psalmist wrote, "The years of our life are seventy, or even by reason of strength eighty; yet their span is but toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away" (Ps. 90:10), should aid us in keeping things in perspective. A few years ago a heard an interview with an international journalist who, late in his career, went back and interviewed the happiest people he had met while traveling the world. He asked them to tell him the reasons for their happiness. One elderly German man insisted that to be happy you must reflect for a few minutes each day on the fact that you're going to die, not in order to be morbid, but to help you continually focus on what truly matters in life and not get distracted by all the shiny objects. As Shakespeare memorably wrote: "All that glisters is not gold." So, memento mori (i.e., remembering death) is not necessarily an exercise in morbidity. In his dialogue Phaedo (Sections 61-69), Plato's Socrates insists that philosophy is but preparation for death.

All of this is a long wind up to bring me to the point I want to make, which is about the utter necessity of prayer, our need to pray. Billy Graham once asked, "Have you ever said, 'Well, all we can do now is pray'?" He went on to observe that prayer is very (too?) often our last resort instead of our very first. Wisely, instead of lambasting his readers for this failure, Dr. Graham goes on to note, "When we come to the end of ourselves, we come to the beginning of God." When we consider our finitude, the inevitability of death, which is the horizon over which we cannot see, it is comforting to know that our perceived end is only God's beginning. Put another way, what we see as our end is only a means to fully realizing the end for which we were created, redeemed, and for which we are being sanctified: our loving and lovely God, who, because of Jesus and by the power of the Spirit, we say, "Abba, Father." Hence, prayer is an opportunity for us to experience, at least to some degree, the "not yet" right now.

In this same piece, Dr. Graham assured us, "We don't need to be embarrassed that we are needy. God doesn't demand that we pray in King James English, or even eloquence. Every feeble, stumbling prayer...is heard by God. A cry, a sigh, a 'Help!' are all prayers according to the Psalms."

There is a reason that praying first thing in the morning and last thing at night are time-proven practices. Don't forget, even taking time to utter feeble words of petition, lament, and/or gratitude are ways not just of remembering death and expressing our great need, but are acts of hope in the One who loved us not only to death, but enough to conquer death.

For MLK/Human Rights Day, I draw your attention to something from the archives: MLK/Human Rights Day- X Factor Ed(Add?)ition

A prayer for dispossession, a plea for ecumenism

When it comes to following Christ, so-called Christian living (a.k.a. discipleship), it is often the case that Catholics feel as though Evangelicals have nothing to offer us. In my experience this bias exists for a number of reasons, but generally speaking revolves around two things: fundamentalism, also known as biblicism (i.e., reading the Bible in a very literal and flat way, ignoring the various genres  found in Sacred Scripture, particularly in the Hebrew Scriptures), and what is perceived as a lack of theological and intellectual rigor. In some instances these concerns are justified and born out. Nonetheless, it is important not to approach matters by way of a preconception, judging all the trees by taking a ten thousand foot view of the forest. Plus, experience matters. Knowing the Lord is not first and foremost an intellectual endeavor, but, as Pope Benedict stated clearly at the beginning of Deus caritas est, "Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction" (par. 1).

An example of something worthwhile by an Evangelical is the late A.W. Tozer's still magnificent book, The Pursuit of God. Tozer came to Christ as a teenager while walking home from his job at a tire company in Akron, Ohio. While on his way home one day he heard a street preacher say, "If you don't know how to be saved... just call on God." When he arrived home, he went up into the attic of his family's house and called upon God. The rest, as we say, is history. Despite never receiving any formal theological training, Tozer became very respected for his learning, not only about the Bible, but his grasp of theology and the Christian tradition. Proof of his knowledge are his books, which show his erudition. When combined with his obvious love of the Lord, what he writes is eminently worth reading, pondering, and praying.

At the end of each chapter in his The Pursuit of God (you can read the whole book by going to the link where you can download it as an Adobe Acrobat [.pdf] file), he composed a prayer. Below is the prayer taken from the end of his second chapter, "The Blessedness of Possessing Nothing," which chapter gives one of the best theological expositions I have read (including Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling) of the episode from Genesis 22:1-19, in which God calls upon Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. Showing forth the same view as that expressed by the fathers of the Second Vatican Council in the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum, when they taught, "God, the inspirer and author of both Testaments, wisely arranged that the New Testament be hidden in the Old and the Old be made manifest in the New" (par. 16), Tozer observed that it "is frequently true, this New Testament principle of spiritual life finds its best illustration in the Old Testament. In the story of Abraham and Isaac we have a dramatic picture of the surrendered life as well as an excellent commentary on the first Beatitude."

Father, I want to know Thee, but my coward heart fears to give up its toys. I cannot part with them without inward bleeding, and I do not try to hide from Thee the terror of the parting. I come trembling, but I do come. Please root from my heart all those things which I have cherished so long and which have become a very part of my living self, so that Thou mayest enter and dwell there without a rival. Then shalt Thou make the place of Thy feet glorious. Then shall my heart have no need of the sun to shine in it, for Thyself wilt be the light of it, and there shall be no night there. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

Since this year we will mark the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council, in addition to showing certain affinities among Christians regarding Scripture and other discrete doctrines, I am including a quote from the Council's Decree on Ecumenism, Unitatis Redintegratio: "Today, in many parts of the world, under the inspiring grace of the Holy Spirit, many efforts are being made in prayer, word and action to attain that fullness of unity which Jesus Christ desires. The Sacred Council exhorts all the Catholic faithful to recognize the signs of the times and to take an active and intelligent part in the work of ecumenism" (par. 4).

Indeed, important ecumenical strides have been made with the various Orthodox and other ancient Eastern Churches, as well as with Protestant ecclesial communions, like the Lutheran-Catholic Joint Declaration on Justification and Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission's decree on Mary. However, in the United States and increasingly in other parts of the world, even places, like Brazil, which are traditionally Catholic, we must not neglect dialogue with Evangelical Christians, even those who are Pentecostal. After all, the tension in the Church between charisma and institution is one that needs to be held balance. As Catholics we tend towards institutionalization often at the expense of authentic charismata. I am waiting for new life to be breathed into the initiative undertaken by the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, which began with the declaration Catholics and Evangelicals Together.

What I see lacking in many Catholic responses to the popular YouTube video, Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus and to the expressed faith of Tim Tebow, is that many lack either the intelligence or the prudence with which we are called upon to engage in ecumenism (some lack both), not to mention charity. Let's not kid ourselves, the practice of our beautiful Catholic faith can and often does turn into an empty formalism/ritualism, something Vatican II, being a deliberately pastoral council, sought to remedy. One of the remedies was to engage with other Christians, those whom we now call our separated sisters and brothers, from whom we can learn and who can learn from us. There is nothing inevitable about falling into formalism and/or ritualism, but it is a tendency of which we need to be aware and to resist, even as we recognize how liturgy shapes, molds, and makes us. Part of the genius of Catholicism is our avoidance of false dilemmas, that is, seeking to embrace both/and instead of rigidly insisting either/or.