Don't Just Stand There! (Project Advance 2015)

Not long after my ordination to the priesthood, I visited a beautiful new church. The congregation had waited many years to build it, but at last got the funds they needed by selling some land beside the parish. They got a really good price which solved their money problems.

A week later I was chatting with Archbishop James Carney—who, among his other distinctions, was probably the only Archbishop of Vancouver who had been pastor of a parish. Indeed, he had built Corpus Christi church in South Vancouver.

“Boy,” I exclaimed. “That parish was sure lucky. One land deal and they got their church.”

The archbishop gave me one of his trademarked withering looks.

“Father,” he said, “they weren’t lucky at all. They lost years of sacrifice and community-building by getting their church the easy way.”

It was a lesson I’ve never forgotten. Parishes don’t raise money just to do things: it’s one of the things we do.

Supporting your parish doesn’t just help our congregation, it helps your spiritual life. 

Protestants seem to understand this better than we do.  Luther famously said that there are three conversions every person must experience: a conversion of the head, of the heart and of the purse. 

Billy Graham put it a little differently when he said “there is no clearer indication of a person’s ethical priorities than their cheque book.” 

And the wisest of us all said in the Sermon on the Mount: “where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

We’re delighted on this great feast of the Ascension to have with us Bishop Mark Hagemoen from the missionary diocese of Mackenzie-Fort Smith. It’s a shame he’s not preaching, though, since I know he would have his own way of looking at our first reading, where the angels ask the disciples “why do you stand looking upward to heaven?”

Bishop Mark would almost certainly interpret this as “Don’t just stand there, do something!”

Christianity is an active faith, not a passive one. We’re called to act, and we’re given power to act.

But not all of us are called to the same thing. The second reading tells us that there are many different jobs to be done in the Body of Christ, and we all recall where St. Paul reminds us elsewhere that there are many gifts given to us for these purposes.

The key thing is that no-one is called to be a spectator in the Church. Well, I take that back. There are a few. Their parents are keeping them busy in the crying room.

I’m not going to belabor this point. You know it, the Bible proves it, and I’ve spoken about it many times. We all must contribute to the accomplishment of the mission Christ gave the Church as he ascended to the Father: “Go into all the world and proclaim the good news to the whole creation.”

In our parish, there is a young man obeying this command by studying for the priesthood. Another’s on the altar today. There are three young people doing so as Catholic Christian Outreach missionaries. We have catechists, baptismal preparation instructors, Alpha volunteers, teachers and all kinds of generous parishioners working hard to spread the Gospel.

But there are folks whose responsibilities make it hard to be on the front line.  Catholic parents can be too busy creating the future Church to become fully involved in evangelization work; some parishioners face challenges from age or mobility. And others face major demands at school or work.

So how do we all participate in the mission? From the very beginning of the Church, one way has been by offering material support. The Holy Spirit enriches the Church with gifts, but not with riches. Part of our baptismal call is supporting financially the work of the Church,

Unlike the call to teach or to preach, this call is for each one of us, according to our means. Like every other parishioner, I’m expected to use Sunday envelopes, and I do. And every year, I donate to Project Advance.

The Sunday collection pays the bills for Christ the Redeemer Parish.  But that’s all it does. Our regular income has little or no surplus, as you’ll see when we provide the financial report next month. We depend on special collections like the one today for Nepal to help those most in need. And we depend on Project Advance for everything else.

Project Advance helped to build our church twenty five years ago and to rebuild our school in 2004.  Project Advance made it possible for us to commit well over half a million dollars to the first phase of reconstruction at St. Thomas Aquinas High School.

Project Advance helped our young adults attend World Youth Day in Spain in 2011, and it will do the same next year’s World Youth Day in Poland. We’ve supported our brothers and sisters in Sudan and in the northern Diocese of Whitehorse thanks to your generous support in past years.

More recently, the campaign has helped closer to home. Our washrooms have been renovated, and leaking roofs repaired. The back outside wall of the church has been redone, just in time to avoid significant water damage.

This work was necessary stewardship of our beautiful buildings, not cosmetic upgrades. And it’s not finished, which is why we’ve continued last year’s theme of “Rebuild my church,” taken from the life of St. Francis of Assisi.

Practical projects may not pull at your heartstrings. But they are an important part of the mission of the Church. Jesus told us to baptize. Where do we do that? In the parking lot?

And to baptize we must first instruct, whether it’s parents or adult converts. We do that indoors as well, and if this year’s Project Advance is the success we hope for, there will soon be efficient projection equipment in all the meeting rooms to support the work of adult faith formation.

Brother and sisters, Jesus has ordered us to go into the whole world and proclaim the good news. But where do we start? This morning/afternoon I suggest we start here, right here where you are sitting. Our “going out” must begin somewhere if it’s to mean anything at all.

One way to begin is by making a gift or pledge today to Project Advance. As the bulletin explains, no gift is too small, because no person here is not called to the mission Christ has given to each and every one of the baptized.  

Great Couple, Great Readings: Robert and Lydia's Wedding

Can't resist posting my homily from today’s wedding of Lydia Shives and Robert Shyleyko. Longest wedding homily ever given, but I blame their wonderful choice of readings. Lydia is a nurse and Bobby a doctor, so I thought I could get away with talking about medical matters (even though I wasn’t about to try pronouncing sphygmomanometer!) Their obvious commitment to the faith made it easy to speak from the heart… 

We don’t have that many weddings in the parish—fewer than one a month. But this week I had two, and I was not happy about the first one.

Not because the bride and groom weren’t a lovely couple, but because I was wearing something only a doctor could love: an automatic blood pressure monitor. Poorly hidden under layers of vestments was a machine that beeped and inflated a blood pressure cuff every half hour for the 24 hours I was hooked up to it.

I asked the clinic if I could take it off, but the nurse gave me that look reserved for seniors and said “no, because you wouldn’t be able to put it back on properly.”

It was a highly uncomfortable situation as I tried to finish the ceremony before the darn thing was due to go off again. I failed, producing a big grin from the groom as it inflated during the Our Father.

Under those circumstances, I felt I had to say something.
And what I said was this: maybe God’s trying to tell us something! This device—ask the groom later for the proper name, which is harder to spell than Shyleyko—measures your health by putting pressure on your arm. Under pressure, the veins (or arteries—I gave up my hopes for medical school when I saw my marks in grade nine science) disclose important information.

The same general principal works in marriage. When everything is going along smoothly, when life is free of worry or disagreement, we may think our relationships are perfect. But that’s fair-weather sailing. The real proof of married love comes under pressure, when you weather storms and rely on the grace of God rather than your feelings.

How do we live with grace under pressure? St. Paul spells it out for us in a one-word formula: “Rejoice!” Think about it for a moment—you don’t need to tell happy people to rejoice. You don’t need to tell carefree people not to worry. You don’t offer peace to those who are calm and serene.

The apostle knows what he’s talking about. He knows what it is to be well-fed, and he knows what it is to be hungry; he’s been rich and he’s been poor. But his attitude remained the same, rooted in the peace of Christ. Under pressure, his faith did not falter.

The readings you have chosen are, quite frankly, the best of all possible choices. But Paul’s words offer more than inspiration on this happy day: they are a program for life. The famous Protestant preacher Norman Vincent Peale made a whole career of repackaging that reading in practical terms: his book The Power of Positive Thinking sold five million copies.

To fill your hearts every morning with positive affirmations of faith, hope and love, to live according to the Christian teachings you have learned and received and heard and seen in your parents and other role models, is to be assured that the God of peace will be with you. By cultivating an attitude of gratitude you can face life challenges together, but not only together—with God, the only source of the peace that surpasses all understanding.

I could stop there; perhaps I should. But since you’ve come all the way from Calgary I feel it’s my duty to add two more things.

The first is that pressure also tests the strength of our relationship with the Church. Our lives as Catholics have something in common with marriage, as St. Paul points out somewhere else. It’s not just at home that we have ups and downs; the Church—whether nationally, internationally, or in the parish—can try our patience and lead us to wonder whether it’s worth hanging in.

The first reading, from the Acts of the Apostles, tells the story of the earliest Christian community, right after the Ascension of Christ: “The whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common.”

Someday, biblical archaeologists will find the missing page of the manuscript, where it adds “This lasted for about six weeks.”

The rest of the story appears in Paul’s letters, which are full of accounts of friction, misunderstanding, and human sinfulness. But he, and generations after him, rejoiced in the good he found in the Church and recognized the radical holiness that human weakness cannot destroy.

So when your parish or your pastor or a choir that’s nothing like this wonderful group you have brought here today makes you want to become a sun-worshipper rather than a Christian, do not worry. The Lord is near.

Finally, there will be times when pressure will test the state of your relationship with God. It’s well known that God allows difficult times in our friendship with him. After a long period of dryness, St. Teresa of Avila received a vision of Jesus. She asked why he had allowed the darkness. When Jesus said “This is how I treat my friends,” she is said to have replied “Well, that’s why you have so few!”

If God ever seems more distant from you than he is today, the first thing to do is made clear in the psalm you chose: wait for him. Trust in his holy name. Wait for the fog to lift that obscures the Lord.

And if following him ever seems more than you can manage, remember the Gospel you chose for this day: the wedding feast of Cana. Know that Mary, the mother of Jesus, is aware of your needs and will make them known to her son.

And then, with confidence and trust, follow her advice: “Do whatever he tells you.” Live as disciples, not churchgoers, and all that is promised you today will be richly fulfilled through the years of your married life.

Mothers Love Like Christ Loves (5.B-Mother's Day)

A parishioner came up to me after Mass not long ago and said "my wife thought last week's homily was one of your best ever." As I started to say thanks for such a nice compliment, he added cheerfully "although I didn't agree with her"!

Such are the perils of preaching. You can't please everybody.

There's a good reason for this: it's a rare homily that connects with everybody. Our backgrounds, ages, interests and experiences are so different that it's very hard to find common ground in applying the Gospel message in a concrete and practical way.

Today, though, it's easy to connect the Gospel to our experience. The common ground today is universal: motherhood. Every single person in church this morning has a mother, whether living or deceased. And of course nearly half the congregation lives the vocation of motherhood.

(By the way, notice that I used the present tense--because a mother's job is never finished. The other day the mother of adults told me that she'd sighed to her own mother when her children were young "Twenty more years of worry," only to be told "No such luck. You'll pray and worry about them for the rest of your days!")

But don't expect a sentimental Mother's Day homily. There's nothing sentimental about my message , which comes straight from this morning's Gospel: Mothers lay down their lives for their children. Mothers do for their children what Christ did for us on the cross.


As I said, this is not a sentimental message. Imitating Christ is not sentimental. It is hard work, and all of us are called to do it.

Obviously, the call comes in different forms to different people. All of us are called to lay down our lives by sacrificing our will for God's will--by fulfilling the demands that come with being friends of Jesus, who has commanded us freely to love one another. But on this special day it seems more than appropriate to reflect on how mothers live out their particular call.

First, a mother's love is about as close as you'll come on earth to Christ's self-giving, sacrificial and unconditional love. When I Googled "a mother," it immediately completed the phrase as "a mother's love." Short of voluntary martyrdom, it is hard to find a greater love on earth than the love a mother shows for her children. There is even something Christ-like in the suffering of childbirth.

Secondly, by definition a mother's love is fruitful. Children, of course, are the fruit born of the love between mother and father, between husband and wife. But their successful upbringing is the fruit of patience, love, encouragement, correction, and much more--not, I hasten to add, from the mother only, but certainly from her particularly, especially in the early years of development.

So much that all of us do in life disappears from view. Former Canuck star Trevor Linden was always the most popular visitor to children in hospital. He laughed the other day when he said that now he can only excite their parents, since seven years after his retirement, the kids have no idea who he is!

Parenthood, however, is a fruit of love that lasts, as the faith and solid values are handed down through the generations.

As we ponder our Lord's words in the Gospel today, we find many reasons to admire and appreciate our mothers. Stopping there, however, would miss the point. Motherhood is only an example of living Christ's call in everyday life. Motherhood's just a particularly obvious way to lay down your life for others. The call is for everyone--parent, child, married, single, young, old.

Today Jesus challenges us all to love as he did. What that means if you're a young mother--or father--of three is pretty obvious. You don't need to go looking for ways to sacrifice, though you do need to connect the demands of parenthood to your faith, to the carrying of the cross, because that connection makes your burden lighter and nobler.

What it means if you suffer from a malicious neighbour or relative is something else again; to love as Christ loved means loving the truly unlovable.

Loving others with the love of Jesus is fruitful loving. I've already used children as an example of the fruit of love. But sacrificial loving also bears fruit in our own hearts. It makes us better persons. It burns away our natural selfishness and brings us closer to God.

And what unexpected fruit can come loving the unlovable. We all know at least one or two of those folks--the bitter, the spiteful, the critical--and if they're next door or in the family they can make us truly miserable. Learning to love them with the love of Christ can bear two lasting fruits. First, it always frees our hearts. But sometimes it also frees them from their narrow prison, often many years after we first began to pray for them and show them love.

Today, we give thanks to God for the gift of our mothers and their fruitful love. But in doing so, let's all renew our commitment to follow their example in our daily lives by loving one another as Christ loved us.

Most Rev. Raymond Roussin, SM: A Good Shepherd

For five years, Archbishop Raymond Roussin was our archbishop. But he almost became our fellow parishioner, since he had decided to live in retirement in the rectory here at Christ the Redeemer.

His suite had been painted and his moving-in date was set, but just a few weeks before his arrival he had a significant medical setback and the doctors determined he needed more care than we could provide.

It didn’t surprise me that the archbishop wanted to stay here. He had shown a warm personal interest in the parish while still in office, choosing to celebrate the Easter Vigil with us in 2008, the year he asked his coadjutor, Archbishop Miller, to preside at half of the Holy Week liturgies.

I remember very well that Easter Vigil. It was my first as a pastor, and anything that could go wrong, did. Archbishop Roussin never missed a beat, and was gracious from start to finish.

You might wonder why I’m reminiscing like this if you haven’t yet heard that our archbishop emeritus died on Friday after a long illness. But his death is not the main reason I am speaking about him this morning; it’s his life that makes the late archbishop the perfect starting place for my homily—because today is Good Shepherd Sunday, and Raymond Roussin was a good shepherd.

To be precise, he was a bishop in the image of Jesus the Good Shepherd: a man whose life followed the pattern Jesus presents in the Gospel today.

The Lord tells us several important things about a good shepherd: he knows his flock and they know him; he holds his ground when the flock is threatened; and he seeks out sheep from other sheepfolds, so there can be one flock.

To all of us who belong to the flock of Christ, these are comforting words; to all who lead the flock of Christ they are challenging words.

Yet it’s quite clear that these qualities are not at the center of what Jesus tells us about himself as the Good Shepherd. He tells us the most important thing at the beginning of this passage, in the middle, and at the end. What matters most is that the Good Shepherd lays down his life for his sheep.

In fact, in this short text we hear Jesus speak of laying down his life five times.

Pictures of the Good Shepherd are often sentimental, showing Jesus holding a little lamb in his arms or carrying one on his shoulders. The truth is, there’s nothing sentimental about today’s Gospel, because a better illustration is the cross, on which Jesus lay down his life for the sheep.

Christ is speaking plainly about his passion and death when he says “I lay down my life for the sheep.” The Good Shepherd suffers for his flock.

Suffering was at the heart of Raymond Roussin’s ministry as a bishop, almost without a break. When first named a bishop, he was called upon to close down the small diocese to which he was sent. We never spoke about it, but it cannot have been easy.

From there he went to the Diocese of Victoria. He was hardly settled when its financial crisis exploded, threatening the Church on the Island in many ways. His patient leadership kept things afloat, but all the while there were people publicly accusing him of being the cause of the problems he had only inherited and sought to resolve.

At last an appointment to the Archdiocese of Vancouver, recognition it seemed of his faithful service and a community that faced no major problems. But within a short time, he began to experience symptoms of depression that required him to seek help.

I was part of the discussion of whether or not the archbishop should go public with an illness that still makes many people uncomfortable. As is well known, he decided to keep no secrets from his flock, and in speaking out about his depression he encouraged thousands who had felt their depression meant there was something wrong with their spiritual lives.

After treatment for depression, the Archbishop returned to work, but it was clear his health was not what it should be. Eventually, the Holy Father appointed Archbishop Miller to work alongside Archbishop Roussin, and he succeeded him early in 2009.

If this were the whole story, it would be enough to compare Raymond Roussin not only to the Good Shepherd but to the suffering servant of whom the prophet Isaiah called “a man of suffering, acquainted with grief.”

But, sadly, it was not the whole story. Although details of the diagnosis were never shared, the late archbishop was found to suffer from a neurological illness that incapacitated him in recent years and which, by the end of his life, had taken his power of speech.

How much his sufferings as a bishop contributed to his physical condition will never be known; but the only conclusion I can reach is that this was a man whose life was received by God the Father as an offering for the flock of Christ.

If that were the end of the story, it would be enough to inspire us to be thankful. But, happily, it is not the end of the story. Jesus says clearly that he has the power to lay down his life, and the power to take it up again.

That is the end of the story of the Good Shepherd—the Resurrection. Easter. And that is where the story of the humble and holy and long-suffering Archbishop Roussin must end, too: not with the crosses he bore, but with the hope he treasured and which is now fulfilled.

What would his life and death be without the paschal mystery? A long Good Friday without Easter. But the Lord who called him to lay down his life for the sheep shared with him the power of his own Resurrection.

I hope my words this morning don’t come across as a eulogy. They’re not even adequate for that purpose. This is a homily, not a eulogy. What I’m saying applies to all who suffer and especially to all who suffer greatly.

All of us celebrate Easter, but the Christian who lays down his or her life by the patient endurance of  suffering experiences it in a particular way.

In an article in the current issue of Restoration, the Madonna House newspaper, Father David May offers several features of the love of the Risen Lord that he showed to his disciples and longs to show to us. Three of these things help us understand the power Easter can have in our lives, and the power it certainly had in Archbishop Roussin’s.

The first is that Jesus “walked the length” of his disciples’ sadness. He took no shortcuts on the road to Emmaus. He didn’t interrupt but let them experience and pour out their sorrows. When they’d finished, he “poured into their thirsty hearts the words of truth.”

Having himself “suffered to the end the way of the Cross, Jesus spoke with the knowledge of experience” of both “the meaning of suffering and of its true outcome.”

If we embrace our suffering and allow Christ to raise us with him, we too “can walk with patience and sure hope the length of the road” with others who suffer.

A second feature of the love of the Risen Lord is that “he absorbed bitterness, grief and skepticism with patient understanding.” Here Father May could be describing Archbishop Roussin no less than Jesus; this is exactly what he did many, many times in his ministry as a bishop: more than once I was privileged to witness him absorb the bitterness of others with unflinching patience.

Jesus let Thomas express his doubts and fears, and then answered with the proof of suffering: “Real suffering! Real wounds.” Jesus, of course, was the “man of sorrows,” of whom Isaiah spoke, and understood the grief behind Thomas’ outburst.

Finally, the Risen Lord spoke a word of peace to Thomas and the other disciples huddled in the Upper Room. “Shalom! Peace!” he proclaimed to them, in the face of the near-despair of the doubting apostle.

He spoke that word of peace in response “to every hard question that can be asked, every burden of despair a human being can know, all the disappointment of lost dreams and failed promises that can make life a burden,” Father May eloquently writes.

He spoke that word of peace as a one-word summary of the hope and power that his Resurrection has brought to suffering humanity.

And now, we pray, he speaks it eternally to Raymond Roussin, his beloved brother, his suffering servant, and our good shepherd.