Sunday word, 26 Jul 15

Jesus’ Food Is Ours

Seventeenth Sunday of the Year B (26 Jul 2015)

2Kg 4. 42–44; Ps 145; Eph 4. 1-6; Jn 6. 1-15

Homily of Fr. Paul Panaretos, S.J.

Bishop Persico endorsed the suggestion to pray to the Holy Spirit this weekend throughout our diocese. We ask Holy Spirit to grace each of us and our Pastoral Planning Process.¹ The recently-arrived August issue of Faith Magazine focuses our prayer: our diocese “pastoral planning [seeks] to strengthen parish ministries, enhance the life of parishes and schools, make the church more responsible as a steward of limited resources and create a stronger, more viable and capable church to carry out the mission of Jesus Christ.”²

In a word pastoral planning is about mission, Jesus’ mission. The church serves the world in Jesus’ name. After the Vatican Council closed in 1965 the church in its local incarnations worldwide has been engaged in pastoral planning. The Council realized the church was in the world, the modern world. It freed the church to touch the joys, hopes, griefs and anxieties of modern people.³ Jesus did the very same among his peers.

When Jesus placed himself in the joys, hopes, griefs and anxieties of his contemporaries, some were scandalized. They had decided he ignored or slighted God; he did not.To celebrate with the joyful; to long with those who hoped in God; to weep with the grieving; and to honor the anxious: Jesus respected the dignity of each person as created in the divine image. For that Jesus was among people, close to people, concerned for people.

Among people, close to people, concerned for people express a human hallmark: we are social. The church is social because it is an assembly of people who worship God in risen Jesus by Holy Spirit; who rejoice and grieve with each other; and who live for others in imitation of Jesus.⁴

The mission of the church continues Jesus’ mission. Pope Francis embodies Jesus’ mission as our example. He is joyful and full of hope; he does not turn from griefs or anxieties.⁵ He models how to grow more sensitive to people on the margins.

Today’s gospel reminds us that attending to the sick—as important as that is—did not absolve Jesus from nourishing the large crowd [that] followed him. The gospel clues us to that: Jesus knew what he was going to do. Pastoral planning helps us know how to act like Jesus. It considers the many faces of nourishing each and every Catholic in our diocese—strengthening Catholic education; parish life and ministries; using resources better to help us bring Jesus to everyone in ways that defend and deepen each one’s dignity.

Nourishing body and spirit is the prophetic vocation of the church. Pastoral planning is the ongoing process helping us be prophetic. Pastoral planning reawakens and reconnects us to risen Jesus and his prophetic mission. Pastoral planning equips us to live in a manner worthy of who we are: one with Jesus as his body in the world by the power of his Spirit.

Holy Spirit empowers us each moment. Holy Spirit guides us as we discern how our parish and our diocese can live more like Jesus. St. Paul sketched Jesus’ way and invites us to let ourselves be recreated to live it with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another through love, striving to preserve the unity of the spirit through the bond of peace.

Are those possible for us to do? The readings remind us we easily dismiss what we consider impossible. God worked through Elijah and Jesus and people received superabundantly. Creation and recreation happen by the Spirit’s power. From Jesus’ Spirit flows abundance to answer…the needs the Diocese of Erie faces. Prayer informs pastoral planning; prayer also opens us to the possibilities Holy Spirit will create anew and lavish on us and our diocese as we make Jesus present.⁶

In your daily 15 minutes with Jesus this week

• Rest in our triune God.
• Ask our diocesan patron, St. Patrick, and our parish patrons, Sts. Michael and Margaret, to present you to Jesus.
• Chat with him: praise him for dying and rising for you; thank him for inviting you to follow him and be his ambassadors here and now.
• Ask Jesus for grace to enter our diocesan pastoral planning process with greater freedom.
• Close saying slowly the Lord’s Prayer. His words, give us…our daily bread, include diocesan pastoral planning. Jesus’ food gave everyone access to God’s saving work.⁷ His prayer recreates us more like Jesus and empowers us to do the same work the entrusts to us.

Link to this homily’s Spiritual Exercise

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1. Faith Magazine, August 2015 issue, p. 23.
2. “The Basics,” in August 2015 issue, p. 7.
3. Its final document immediately noticed them. Church in the Modern World, 1.
4. Philippians 2.3; 1Peter 4.10; Hebrews 13.16; 1Corinthians 12.28.
5. For words, recall him with the survivors of Typhoon Haiyan; images of him including all abound.
6. The Prayer-Planning-Possibilities: the motto of the current pastoral planning process.
7. John 4.34.

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Wiki-images: Jesus feeds thousands PD-US  Planning logo of Diocese of Erie

Sunday word, 19 Jul 15

Not What We Think

Sixteenth Sunday of the Year B (19 Jul 2015)

Jer 23. 1-6; Ps 23; Eph 2. 13-18; Mk 6. 30-34

Homily of Fr. Paul Panaretos, S.J.

We know that some words we use daily have more than single meanings. Take hot and cool. Each can mean a different way we sense temperature. In conversation their meanings change to mean something is excellent—the restaurant is cool; someone is stunningly attractive—the fashion model is hot. We rarely give words thought.

The bible, though, uses certain words with meanings very different from what we expect. One of them is peace. We think absence of war or an end to hostilities. The word peace points to both in the bible; it is not its key meaning. The bible connects peace with God. In fact, peace is God; people who experience peace experience it as God’s presence.

St. Paul put it crisply: [Christ Jesus] is our peace. To illustrate St. Paul used imagery of the temple; it was not alien to his contemporaries as it is to us. The temple was its own neighborhood¹: it had large courtyards; colonnades; and a complex of buildings. A barrier surrounded the building enshrining God’s presence. Gentiles as well as Jews deemed not pure were not allowed beyond it; a sign warned Gentiles with death.

That dividing wall was established to protect God’s holy place; but it had the unintended consequence of denying access to God to those who needed it. Long before Jesus God revealed through prophets that Gentile nations would join themselves to the restored Israel.² By dying and rising Jesus completed its restoration: he creat[ed] in himself one new person in place of the two.

Putting that enmity to death by…his cross suggests peace as we think of it. Yet hostility’s end is no human action but a divine one—creating. Christian peace is much more than end of hostility: it is God acting in Jesus by their Spirit. The Spirit gives all peoples access to the Father, who is peace and the source of peace for all peoples.

Other impressions from scripture we heard help us notice ways divine peace registers. The shepherd guided and protected sheep. Left to themselves sheep eat what is around them then lay down. They do not search for food; shepherds drive them so they have food and then rest in the calm of a meadow. Little wonder that people whose lives depended on flocks would give God the title shepherd.³Security and nourishment for people were achieved by staying near God and living God’s justice.

Famous Psalm 23 enshrines God’s activity of leading; guiding; shielding; and nourishing, on earth and beyond in God’s very presence—peace and its security. God’s presence, God’s peace who is risen Jesus, we experience sacramentally. Jesus spread[s his] table before us to nourish our Christian selves. Jesus’ eucharist deepens his teaching in us; it lets us experience his saving care then imitate his compassion.⁴

To summarize my impression of the Word today: we experience sacramentally the presence and person of risen Jesus, God’s son and Mary’s son. Though our experience is partial this side of heaven it is truly real, more real than anything else. Our nourishing communion with Jesus who is our peace constantly creates us and shapes us to live among others his compassion and justice for the sake of our world.

In your daily 15 minutes with Jesus this week

• Rest in our triune God.
• Ask the Twelve apostles to present you to Jesus. 
• Chat with him: praise him for dying and rising for you; recall for him one way you have enjoyed his goodness and kindness he has offered you; savor it.
• Ask Jesus to help you welcome his peace—his faithful, creative love—each moment.
• Close saying slowly the Lord’s Prayer. By praying it we allow Jesus to shape us as his apostles of peace today. Apostles of his peace today as in earlier times bring him near to those who most need him.

Link to this homily’s Spiritual Exercise

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1. This diagram may help appreciate St. Paul’s imagery.
2. Isaiah 14.1.
3. Very early in the bible Patriarch Joseph extolled: God has been my shepherd all my life long to this day (Genesis 49.2).
4. The NAB translates with pity the word that means moved at one’s inmost self (Mark 6.34). Jesus was more than disappointed—that other connotation of pity.

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Wiki-images: Warning Inscription in the temple dividing wall, copyright Giovanni Dall’Orto; With Jesus in a deserted place PD-US

A TV-Character and a Biblical Prophet

Sometimes people notice commentary after an event that was intended to be noticed beforehand. U.S. Catholic Blog posted a thought-and-prayer-starter last Friday. It sought to help readers think about the mission of Prophet Amos and their mission as baptized prophets. Because the post—entitled “Where are the prophets?”—is more about the present than the past it can be read this week and beyond.

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Wiki-image Papyrus Book of Amos PD-US

Sunday word, 12 Jul 15

“Calmly and Gently”

Fifteenth Sunday of the Year B (12 Jul 2015)

Am 7. 12-15; Ps 85; Eph 1. 3-14; Mk 6. 7-13

Homily of Fr. Paul Panaretos, S.J.

A key feature of Jewish prayer has been blessing God for all God has done and continues doing. To bless God is to praise God. The shortest psalm blesses God for God’s faithful loving kindness; it invites all the world to join in blessing God:

Hallelujah [that is] Praise the Lord! all you nations. Extol him, all you peoples!/His mercy for us is strong;the faithfulness of the Lord is forever. Hallelujah!

St. Paul blessed God in risen Jesus because he embodied God’s sure, faithful loving kindness¹; Paul experienced risen Jesus exactly that way—not for anything Paul did.²

St. Paul began his Letter to the Ephesians with a blessing with which he and all Jews were familiar. Its simple design—praising God and naming why—was expanded as prayers saw fit. Paul blessed God for favoring humans with God’s life in Messiah Jesus. God’s life mediated by Messiah Jesus reunified people to the praise of his glory. Jesus’ active, living presence guarantees his faithful disci-ples will enjoy what Jesus had begun: both Jews who recognized Jesus as their long-awaited Messiah and the more recent believers of every nation to the praise of his glory. Holy Spirit actively sealed the promise God made in Messiah Jesus to the praise of his glory.

Paul’s blessing prayer describes our transformation: redemption as God’s possession…in Christ is nothing less. We are transformed now, even when we are unaware. Christian transformation is indeed a mystery that eludes us. The mystery is also risen and exalted Jesus actively at work by his Spirit. By praising God the way he did St. Paul outlined God’s providence.

Humans resist transformation; we can-do-Americans resist trusting God’s providence, God’s loving kindness. God’s providence is Jesus: his person and his powerful activity in and by his Spirit. Our need to be free agents makes us distrust grace, God’s life. Yet God in Jesus by their Spirit transform us that way and no other. By grace you have been saved through faith, St. Paul wrote the Ephesians, and this is not from you; it is the gift of God; it is not from works, so no one may boast.³

Such gifting by God is God’s way. Take Amos, a breeder of sheep. God transformed him to speak God’s word not the words of self-styled prophets who lolled at the court of the king: the Lord took me from following the flock, and…said to me, ‘Go, prophesy to my people Israel.’ What-ever resistance Amos felt he moved through it to allow himself to become God’s mouthpiece.

Amos illuminates today’s gospel. Jesus chose ordinary people as his mouthpieces, his ambassadors. Jesus chose them; they did not choose him.⁴ He knowingly chose fishermen, a tax-collector, a traitor, one called a fanatic—who left him alone at the end.⁵ By his Spirit they accomplished his mission and extended it to the ends of the earth.

When next we doubt ourselves and our role in Jesus’ mission we are wise to recall Amos and Jesus’ apostles. They were ordinary folk, talented and limited in their ways. Jesus transformed them into his ambassadors of his life, his salvation, his redemption, his glory, our inheritance.

How may we allow the Spirit of Jesus work through us as ambassadors of his salvation, his redemption, his glory, our inheritance? St. Ignatius of Loyola recommended this to someone busy and worried: “Do whatever you can, calmly and gently. Do not be anxious about the rest; leave it to God’s providence to take care of what [you] cannot provide…; for [God] wishes that our limitations and weak-ness should lean upon his strength and omnipotence and…trust that [God] in his goodness will make up for what is lacking in our imperfection and infirmity.”⁶ The most challenging part of his advice may be to act calmly and gently. Acting that way opens us to Jesus’ calm and gentleness: fruits of his Spirit.⁷

In your daily 15 minutes with Jesus this week

• Rest in our triune God.
• Ask Amos and the Twelve apostles to present you to Jesus.
• Chat with him: praise him for dying and rising for you; thank him for sending you as his ambassadors, ambassadors of his gospel.
• Ask Jesus for this twin grace: a deeper trust in him that lets us share in his calm and his peace in all we do.
• Close saying slowly the Lord’s Prayer. Jesus gave it to us so we may bless God before we ask for what we need—exactly what Jesus did as he lived our human life.

Link to this homily’s Spiritual Exercise

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1. Romans 15:11.
2. Acts 22.7-11; 1Corinthians 15.8-10; 2Corinthians 12.9; Ephesians 3.8-9.
3. Ephesians 2.5, 8-9.
4. John 15.16.
5. Luke 6.13-16—Mark 14.50 and John 16.32.
6. Letter 5,945 in his Letters and Instructions (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 2006), pp. 607-608. Another translation here.
7. Galatians 5.22.

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Wiki-images: Prophet Amos PD-US  Jesus exhorts his apostles PD-US

Sunday word, 05 Jul 15

“Seeing God’s Face”

Fourteenth Sunday of the Year B (05 Jul 2015)

Ez 2. 2-5; Ps 123; 2Co. 12. 7-10; Mk 6. 1-6

Homily of Fr. Paul Panaretos, S.J.

Over half century ago benefactors gave property in northern Michigan to the Jesuits. Jesuits gather there, especially in summer. We connect with Jesuits that ministry locations separate. We cook and dine together and celebrate eucharist. We relax and enjoy the area’s natural beauty—individually and together. I just returned.

My brother-in-law expresses beholding natural splendor with a phrase: “seeing God’s face.” His phrase echoed in me each day I enjoyed our gift to us Jesuits. I think it opened my inmost self to our psalm response today; particularly the words

To you I lift up my eyes [O God] who are enthroned in heaven—As the eyes of servants [and maids] are on the hands of their masters [and mistresses], So are our eyes on the Lord, our God.

We may not immediately identify with the image; we are after all heirs of our self-reliant culture. The image reflects not our culture but that of the bible. In its culture heads of households provided food, shelter and other essential needs for all who lived with them, their children and help alike. Those verses of the psalm describe a healthy attitude: confident in generosity, of God and others.

The verses extend from human experience—flawed as the best human care always is—to God enthroned in heaven. Another psalm reveals God’s enthronement to be no distant, insensitive sitting: God judges the world with [God’s] justice…The Lord is a stronghold for the oppressed, a stronghold in times of trouble.¹

To you [O God] I lift up my eyes was one of 15 psalms pilgrims sang on their way to God’s temple in Jerusalem. Not every pilgrimage was carefree. Crises of different sorts accompanied, even motivated, pilgrim journeys. The psalm that let us respond to the first reading at mass today suggests that refashioning or deepening confidence on God may well have filled those who sang it. One way someone would not depend in a healthy way on God—or others—registers as claiming things as in one’s control. One who claims control over things is called arrogant. If I am arrogant, I assume, I take for granted, gifts given me by others and God. When natural splendors give me a partial glimpse of “God’s face” but I see with haughty eyes, I remain un-awed by the Creator’s kindness to me. Not filled with awe can register as overly self-assured² and nonchalant³—words used for arrogant in the psalm.

Aware that we are unable to supply all our needs; seeing as if for the first time things that nature surrounds us with  often, even daily; recalling when others paused to see if we were O.K.; and narrow escapes after our inattention or health changes: those and other experiences protect us from living arrogant, unhealthy self-assured and nonchalant lives.

Arrogance, unhealthy self-assured and nonchalant attitudes distance, even disconnect us, from our Creator and Redeemer. Our Creator and Redeemer favors us yet never forces. Obstinate of heart is one more way scripture describes arrogant, unhealthy self-assured, nonchalant people. Such people do not unmake prophets like Ezekiel and Jesus; even in the presence of prophets they do not respond to God’s desires and life-giving, healing power.

Very different are those who respond. St. Paul witnessed the living power of risen Jesus operate in him as Paul opened himself to Jesus; the living power of risen Jesus surged in him in his weakness and other constraints. Psalm 123—To you I lift up my eyes [O God]—names a grace to desire: a healthy dependence on God. The grace is an attitude helping us be filled with awe; notice God’s many gifts; and use them for good. That grace frees us to be ambassadors of risen Jesus and the power of his life.

In your daily 15 minutes with Jesus this week

• Rest in our triune God.
• Ask the communion of saints to present you to Jesus.
• Chat with him: praise him for dying and rising for you; thank him for creating and redeeming you.
• Ask Jesus for his grace to be in awe that Jesus creates you, everyone and all things at each moment and lavishes us with so many gifts. 
• Close saying slowly the Lord’s Prayer. Jesus’ words allow us to deepen our awe before God and others; it lets us look afresh at nature and other humans; it helps us grow more confident in God’s generosity and glorify God by our care for the world and others.

Link to this homily’s Spiritual Exercise

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1. Psalm 9.9-10.
2. Psalm 123.4, NET version.
3. By Mitchell Dahood, S.J., The Anchor Bible, Vol. 17A.

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Wiki-images: Omena Bay by PDP; Jesus did no miracles... PD-US