14 September 2016 - Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross of Jesus - Numbers 21:4B-9 - John 3:13-17 - Philippians 2:6-11

Today’s feast of the exaltation of the holy cross was first observed in Rome in the 7th century.  Today’s feast commemorates the recovery of the Holy Cross, which had been placed on Mt. Calvary by St. Helena and preserved in Jerusalem, but then had fallen into the hands of the King of the Persians.  It was recovered and returned to Jerusalem by Emperor Heralius in 629.

It is said that Heraclius carried the cross back to Jerusalem on his shoulders, wearing costly garments with ornaments of precious stones. But, at the entrance to Mt. Calvary a strange incident occurred.  No matter how hard he tried, the Emperor could not move forward.  Bishop Zacharias of Jerusalem told him: "Consider, that with these triumphal ornaments you are wearing, you are far from resembling Jesus carrying His Cross."   The Emperor then put on a penitential garment and was able to continue his journey.

In the Roman empire, the cross represented the worst possible way a criminal could be put to death.  It was indeed a violent, painful, disrespectful death.   However, our mass commemorating the exaltation of the holy cross is indeed a triumphant liturgy.   When Moses lifted up the bronze serpent over the people in the middle of the desert on their way to the promised land, it foreshadowed the cross and the salvation we would receive through Christ’s death and resurrection.  Indeed, the message of our faith is that we must take up our own crosses in order to follow Jesus, our Lord and Savior. To follow Christ we must take up His cross, follow Him and become obedient until death, even if it means death on the cross. We identify with Christ on the Cross and become co-redeemers, sharing in His cross.  Jesus carried his cross in obedience and servanthood.  We are called to do the same. For us  Catholics, the cross is an important symbol of our faith.  When we are baptized, we are sealed with the cross as our original sins are taken away, as we die with Christ in the waters of baptism and as we receive new life in him. We make the sign of the cross as we begin and end our prayers, consecrating ourselves to God.  We make the sign of the cross at the beginning of mass to begin our celebration in the name of our Lord.   During our trials and sufferings, the cross is there give us strength and protection and hope.  O cross of Christ, you are the glorious sign of victory.  Through the power of the cross, may we all share in the triumph of Christ Jesus.

9/13/2016 - Tuesday of 24th week of Ordinary Time - St John Chrysostom - 1 Corinthians 12: 12-14, 27-31A

       Our Catholic Church is a very diverse body of faith.  It has been so since the days of the early church.  But it is also one body.  We are all in solidarity as members of the Body of Christ in which all believers are baptized.  But, as individuals, we are all important to that one Body of Christ as well.  Some of us are called as prophets or apostles.  Some of us are administrators or teachers or healers.  Each member of the Body of Christ has unique talents, abilities, and spiritual gifts.

     St John Chrysostom, Archbishop of Constantinople from the last half of the 4th century, is the saint we celebrate today.  He was in the second group of Early Church fathers who were named to be Doctors of the Church.  John was known for his great teaching and preaching abilities.  In fact, the name assigned to him - “Chrysostom” - means “golden mouthed.”  It was politics that brought him to the seat of Archbishop in Constantinople, but he was direct and honest in the way he preached to the people, not catering to the rich and influential of society.  He preached a Gospel that reached out to the poor in justice and integrity.  In fact, he once said: “If you cannot find Christ in the beggar at the Church door, you will not find him in the chalice.”  His honesty and his candor finally caught up to him when he was sent into exile by the Emperor where he died in 407.  

     John Chrysistom started his life as a monk, yet his gifts of preaching and teaching, as well as his declining health, brought him to serve the Church as a Bishop.  He is remembered today more than 1,600 years after his death as one of the patriarchs of the Early Church.  St John Chrysostom, we unite our prayers to yours.  

9/11/2016 - 24th Sunday of Ordinary Time - Cycle C - Luke 15:1-10

      Say we have a change purse of coins and we lose one of those coins - it could be a penny or a nickel, a dime or a quarter.  First of all, we probably wouldn’t even notice that the coin would be missing. And if we did notice, we probably would not spend all day looking for it. We wouldn’t lose any sleep over that one lost coin. But, look at our parable today of the woman with the lost coin. We might not understand the entire story. The coin in question in our Gospel parable today was a silver drachma.  In ancient Israel, the houses were very dark.  The floors were hardened dirt covered with dried reeds and fibers. It would be nearly impossible to find a small coin that was lost under those circumstances, but the woman in the parable never gave up, since that coin was worth much more than a dime or a quarter - it was worth more than a day’s wages for a worker in Ancient Israel.  The parable says that the lost coin was one of a set of 10 coins - for a married woman in Israel, there were ten silver coins attached by a silver chain to her head garment - those ten coins would be equivalent to a wedding ring today. Thus, the woman would be filled with so much joy at finding that coin.  God is like the woman in the parable - he is filled with joy when the lost are found again, when the sinner repents, when someone returns to the faith.  The woman never gives up on finding the lost coin in the Gospel parable today.  Likewise, God never gives up on us. We believe in the love and mercy of God that is beyond all of our human understanding of things.  We believe in the love and mercy of Jesus Christ, the Son of the Father, who came to seek the lost and to bring us salvation. 

     These blue wristbands that we have been wearing here at St James Catholic Church during the Year of Mercy have imprinted on them one of the slogans of this Jubilee Year declared by Pope Francis: Merciful like the Father.  I look at the wristband often, pondering the meaning of the Father’s mercy.  I think all of us Christians aspire to be merciful like God the Father.  But, implementing mercy into the messy reality of our lives is never easy.  All of us in the Diocese of Jackson have been touched by the two Catholic sisters, Sister Margaret and Sister Paula, who were killed in their home in Holmes county last month. Marie Sanders, the wife of Rodney Earl Sanders, the man who confessed to killing the two sisters, was touched by the way that the relatives and members of the sisters’ religious orders embraced her and reached out to her in love, mercy and forgiveness, comforting her and reassuring her. While many here in Mississippi advocate for the death penalty for perpetrators of capital murder, the families of Sister Paula and Sister Margaret, their two religious orders, and our Diocese of Jackson have all advocated against the death penalty for Mr Sanders.  Bishop Kopacz writes that for Rodney Sanders and others who are accused of such devastating crimes, “justice (indeed) must be enacted, society must be protected, but the violence must not be perpetuated by demanding the death sentence for…capital crimes.”  

     A lot of people find it hard to let go of wrongs that have been done against them. Sometimes the wrongs done against us are deliberate, sometimes they are unintentional.  So many in our world today go through life harboring grudges, making themselves miserable because they cannot let go, holding on to things for years and years. Many imagine that God is like this too - that God wants to take revenge on us for the wrongs we have done, that he does not search us out when we’ve turned away from him, that he lets us get what we deserve.  But this isn’t the God who is presented in Jesus’ parables in the Gospel today. According to Jesus, God does not want to judge us out of harshness and anger, but rather God wants to be close to us and he wants us to be close to him.  The true God - the God of our Catholic faith -  is like the loving parent who has lost a child, the parent who cannot rest until the child is safely back.  It is true that we see a lot of acts of hatred, anger, and revenge in action in our world today.   We see nations amassing weapons of mass destruction, ready to annihilate their enemies.  We see acts of terrorism where many innocent lives are taken away.  We see politicians willing to lash out against their people.  But that is not the way of God.  And that is not the way believers are called to live out their faith. 

      God loves the just.  But God does not ignore the sinner.  He does not turn his back on the lost.  He does not give up on those who have missed the mark.  All of us can have a place in God’s kingdom.  The Church is not an exclusive club.  Church is not a reward for those who are perfect. The Pharisees resented God’s mercy.  The parable of the lost sheep does not deny the goodness and virtues of the majority, but reminds that there’s a special place for the sinner who repents.  Just like the parable of the lost coin, all of us have value and worth in God’s eyes, especially when we are lost and then are found. 

Mass with Bishop Joseph Kopacz - The Year of Mercy

"Even if we stand at the very summit of virtue, it is by mercy that we shall be saved." - St John Chrysostom, Doctor of the Church (349-407)

Mass for the Year of Mercy at St James Catholic Church in Tupelo - celebrated by Bishop Kopacz for the Catholic parishes in Northeast Mississippi - join us in this joyful liturgical celebration on Thursday, September 8, 2016 at 6:30 pm. A reception in Shelton hall will follow. Let us all be merciful as the Father is merciful.

9/7/2016 - Wednesday of the 23rd week of Ordinary Time - Luke 6:20-26

     Franciscan priest Father Richard Rohr, wrote the following in his book Falling Upwards: A Spirituality Through the Two Halves of Life:  “I have always wondered why people never want to put a stone monument of the Eight Beatitudes on the courthouse lawn,” like they do for the Ten Commandments.  Perhaps that is because the Beatitudes are not as straight forward as the Ten Commandments.  They are not as easy to understand.  The Beatitudes are supposed to be blessings, but how can it be a blessing to grieve or to be poor or to weep or to be hated?  Then I think about how when we are thrown out our comfort zone or when we are challenged or pushed or stretched, those are often the times of the greatest growth and enrichment in our lives.  Perhaps the beatitudes challenge those things that we assume to be the foundation of our culture and our values.  Perhaps they challenge our safety and our security.  Perhaps we don’t quite know what to make of the beatitudes, even though we have heard them again and again and again.  Perhaps the wise elders that we have in society are the ones who exemplify the beatitudes to us.  They are not the rich reality stars or sport stars that we see on TV who bring attention and accolades to themselves, who think that they speak for others and who think they have it all figured out.  The beatitudes describe the humble, unassuming individuals who quietly go about living the values of the faith in their lives.  They are not perfect.  They go through their own sufferings and troubles.  But blessed are they.  

9/6/2016 - Tuesday of 23rd week in Ordinary Time - Luke 6:12-19

      This past weekend, we had an ladies ACTS retreat here in our parish in Spanish. We had about 45 ladies attending it.  I could tell that the retreat had a profound affect on many of them.  If you are familiar with Cursillo, the ACTS retreat had a very similar format, with faith sharing and different sacraments and devotionals.  Many of the ladies that attended the ACTS retreat have not had an opportunity to go on a retreat before; with many of them with families and small children to take care of, it was certainly something that had to be well coordinated.  Prayer and discernment are the foundation of our Catholic faith.  We should not make a big decision in our lives without prayer and discernment.  And it is always helpful to have someone trained in spiritual direction and discernment to help us in the discernment process.  In fact, most of you know that we Catholic priests have to attend an annual spiritual retreat each year as dictated by Canon law.  What is interesting is that I asked the other Protestant minister who attend our Tupelo ministerial association meetings, and none of them had that same requirement.  I bring this up because even Jesus prayed and discerned before he chose his apostles from the many disciples that gathered around him through his ministry.  All of us, whether we are lay or ordained, would greatly benefit from an annual retreat or spiritual exercise that will help us discern God’s will on our journey of faith.  As in many aspects of our faith, Jesus is a model for us in his words and his actions.  May God always be close to our thoughts and our hearts.  

9/9/2016 - Blessed Frédéric Ozanam and St Peter Claver - Friday of the 23rd week in Ordinary Time - Luke 6:39-42

      Our Gospel today reminded me about the new evangelization that Pope Francis and Pope Benedict XVI have been proclaiming. This new evangelization is a plan to proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the world and particularly to those countries in the West that have been traditionally Christian for centuries, but perhaps have abandoned Christianity and the Gospel of Jesus Christ for secularism in recent years. This evangelization is to start with us, with educating and forming ourselves in the faith before we go out to evangelize others. In the Gospel today, Christ tells us that before we help others, we must first take care of ourselves.  Before we proclaim the Gospel, we are to be true believers ourselves, to follow the true Gospel of Christ, to know what that Gospel really teaches. 

     Today, we celebrate two saints who share this feast day, two individuals who truly lived out the Gospel of Jesus Christ in their lives and who had a particular calling to bring that Gospel to others. Frédéric Ozanam was a student at the University of Paris in the early part of the 19th century.  In France at that time, in the decades after the French revolution, many were abandoning the faith. Ozanam and his group of friends claimed to be practicing Catholics and disciples of Christ, but other students challenged them as to how the values of the Gospel were being lived out in their lives and making a different in the world.  He and his fellow students started the Conference of Charity, which would later become the Society of St Vincent de Paul, which today is an international Catholic charitable organization that reaches out to so many people throughout the world.  It was named after Vincent de Paul, a French priest who lived two centuries earlier, who had a particular love for the poor and the marginalized in society.  You may have heard of the Ozanam Inn in New Orleans, which is run by the Society of St Vincent de Paul there; since the 1950s has provided outreach to the poor and homeless where they can spend the night or get something to eat or get a clean set of clothing.  At St Richard Catholic Church, when I served there as the associate pastor, we started a Society of St Vincent de Paul that had a major impact in the community there. 

     While Frédéric Ozanam was a married Catholic lay person, Peter Claver was a Jesuit priest who arrived in the Spanish colony of Colombia in 1610.  Rather than ministering to the colonists there, Claver reached out to the slaves who were brought there against their will.  Peter Claver ministered to the sick slaves, bringing them food and drink.  Before he died, after ministering to the slaves for more than 4 decades, Peter had brought more than 300,000 souls into the Catholic faith.  He is a symbol of social justice and Catholic charity to us in the modern world.  

       Frédéric Ozanam and Peter Claver heard the Gospel of Jesus Christ and pondered its meaning in the reality of their world.  May all of us hear the call that God has for us and respond accordingly.