Sunday, October 30, 2022 — Before All Souls

 

The other day, a parishioner whom I like and respect gave me some feedback on my preaching. He likes my homilies, but says I say too many things. Not that I preach too long, but that I preach too much.

He explained that it’s hard to take home one key point to think about.

So today I am following his good advice. Please listen carefully: Pray for the dead.

Four words, but especially important for every Catholic. Pray for your dead.

There are four reasons why we pray for the dead.

First, because that’s what Catholics do. When I Googled “Catholic Catechism, prayer for the…” I got seven suggestions from the search, including prayer for the Church, prayer for the sick, and prayer for the day. But the top of the list was prayer for the dead.

Our Catholic faith holds that we can indeed continue to care, help, and express generosity toward people—even after they have died—through prayer. It is a distinctive Catholic belief not shared by all our fellow Christians.

Second, because praying for our deceased loved ones and those who have done good to us is a duty. It’s something we owe our parents, mentors, friends, teachers and—yes, priests—who have left this life.

If they have been a blessing to us, we thank them with the gift of prayer. If they have been a burden to us, we forgive them through our prayers.

Third, because praying for all the faithful departed is part of belonging to the great communion that is the Church. Notice how at every single Mass we pray for the dead. No exceptions. And not only our own dead, but the unknown dead.

In the first Eucharistic prayer we pray to the Lord for his servants who have gone before us with the sign of faith. In the second Eucharistic prayer we remember “our brothers and sisters who have fallen asleep in the hope of the resurrection” and all who have died in God’s mercy.  And so on in all the Eucharistic prayers, not to mention the intercessions or prayers of the faithful each week.

All Souls Day “reminds us that the bonds of Baptism make us one in Christ and are stronger than death.” (S. Joseph Krempa, Daily Homilies: Seasonal and Sanctoral, Vol. 3, p. 211)

Fourth, because if we don’t continue praying for the dead—if we become the first generation of Catholics who no longer take this tradition seriously—who is going to pray for us?

I have some skin in this game, a real personal interest. If those to whom I have ministered stop praying for the dead, I’ll be spending a lot more time in Purgatory than I want to.

As St. Augustine said somewhere, monuments are built for the living; prayer is the best way of helping the dead. I truly do want people praying for me when I’m gone.

Let me return to my one key point. We must pray for the dead.

The point isn’t only important—it’s urgent. As you know, I have been a priest for over 35 years. In my first parish, the church was full every year for multiple Masses on All Souls Day. Here at Christ the Redeemer, we’re lucky to see an extra 75 people even though we offer three Masses every year.

It’s time to reverse the trend and to pray for the dead—not only as a duty but a privilege. What a joy to know we can try to repay the goodness of our departed loved ones, make up for some of our failings toward them in life, and exercise a sacred responsibility as members of the Mystical Body of Christ.

And how simple it is! We have Mass on Wednesday, All Souls Day, at 7:30 in the morning, at 9:00 with the school children, and at 7:00 in the evening. If you’re so busy none of those times work for you, well maybe you’re too busy.

The Church even turbocharges our prayer on All Souls Day with what is called an indulgence—remitting in the eyes of God the temporal punishment (think Purgatory) due to sins whose guilt has been forgiven. A plenary or full indulgence for the souls in Purgatory is offered just for visiting a church on Wednesday, with the prescribed condition of praying the Our Father and the Creed.

The same indulgence for the faithful departed is available all week—from November 1st through the 8th—if you visit a cemetery and pray, even silently, for the dead.

Pray for the dead.

What could be easier? Or perhaps I should ask: what could be more important?

Whatever Your Personality, Don't Judge (30.C)

 

The New York Times has a feature called “Overlooked,” a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths they failed to report over the years. Recently they told the story of Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers.

Theirs is one of the most interesting stories of modern psychology. Together they created one of the most widely used personality assessment tools in the world, now “standard at hundreds of companies and universities and in government. More than two million people take the Myers-Briggs personality test each year.” 

Before the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator came along, most psychological tests “concluded that each personality category has a positive and a negative: An extrovert is good, an introvert was bad, for instance.”

Rather than build a test that favoured one type of personality over another, Myers and Briggs had the idea to create one that was judgement-free, emphasizing what was right with a person, not what was wrong.

The results of the test are sixteen possible personality types, based on four dimensions of personality. I’ve already mentioned the first dimension: introvert or extrovert. But it’s the fourth that really interests me: how a person deals with the outside world, either as a judge or a perceiver.

It really shouldn’t surprise anyone that my Myers-Briggs profile shows me to be an E: an extrovert. But it might make you nervous coming to me for confession when I tell you I am a J: someone who judges.

If we know the positive nature of the test we won’t “confuse Judging with judgmental, in its negative sense about people and events. They are not related.” In fact, those are the words of  Mrs. Myers, who was a J herself.

These observations help us to understand what Jesus meant when he said, “Judge not lest ye be judged” (Mt. 7:1). Christians have struggled with that since the earliest times. Eventually the theologian Tertullian concluded in the second century that the command to “judge not” is a reminder to us that judgement and punishment belong to God, not to us.

Yet even if judgement ultimately resides with God,  Christians still struggle with putting these words into practice, given how naturally judgement comes to us.

Jesus and the Evangelists who recorded his teachings would have known of this problem—which may well explain why we just heard a parable that presents the wrong kind of judgement in such a truly awful light.

“Judge not lest ye be judged” might not be enough to derail our natural tendency to be judgemental, especially if we are Js on the Myers-Briggs scale. However, Jesus gives us, in just a few words, a portrait of the Pharisee that is a wonderful antidote to the poison of judgementalism.

In the first place, we naturally recoil at the self-satisfied words of the Pharisee. Even when we admire someone it’s most uncomfortable to hear them blowing their own horn.

There’s a wonderful story about a businessman known for his ruthlessness telling the American humorist Mark Twain “Before I die, I plan to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. I will climb Mount Sinai and read the Ten Commandments out loud at the top.”

 “I have a better idea,” said Twain, “you could stay home and keep them.”

And in the second place, our Gospel today offers clear judgements on the proud Pharisee. St. Luke tips us off at the very beginning of the story, telling us that the parable is about those who think they are righteous but regard others with contempt. Then Jesus himself tells us that it was the tax collector, not the Pharisee, who went home justified.

I owe a lot to the television series called “The Chosen,” even if it is a dramatization not to be confused with the Scripture texts themselves—something like the Netflix show “The Crown.”

High on the list is the figure of Matthew the tax collector. We’ve heard many times about the reputation of tax collectors at the time of Jesus, but it really took the oily and slimy Matthew in “The Chosen” to give me a vivid picture. (Thank Heaven for his conversion!)

Jesus could not have picked a better contrast to make the point of this parable. Despite their bad reputation today, Pharisees were religious men and some of them were very serious about their faith. The Pharisee Nicodemus comes off very well in “The Chosen,” and despite Matthew’s conversion, tax collectors were the bottom of the pile. Even today, my seminary classmate who had worked for the British equivalent of Revenue Canada took a lot of ribbing about his past employment.

When Jesus tells us that the tax collector’s act of contrition brought him into God’s favour—indeed that he was exalted in God’s sight—he tells us almost all we need to know about humility.

And when he tells us that God did not consider the generous Pharisee to be righteous, Jesus lets us see how God judges.

Clearly these are not side issues in Christ’s teaching. In the next chapter, St. Luke tells the story of a real tax collector, Zacchaeus, who receives the same divine judgement as the fictional one in the parable. To him Jesus speaks directly: “Today salvation has come to this house.”

To make progress the world needs every kind of personality, introverts and extroverts and the judges and perceivers. But the Kingdom of God welcomes only the penitent and the humble, because they are those whom Jesus came to save.

If we make no other prayer at Mass today, let it be “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.”

Not a Fund Raising Homily!

 

Many of my professors were distinguished scholars, but three of them made out particularly well.

One of them became Prime Minister of Canada and two were named Cardinals. (As far as I know, I had nothing to do with it!)

The future prime minister, Kim Campbell, taught me Russian politics. Sad to say, those lessons have come in handy lately.

One of the future cardinals taught me the theology of canon law, although that’s not really what he taught—the entire course revolved around one single thought.

It certainly made the exam easy! But that’s not why his course was wonderful. The one idea has shaped my understanding of the Church itself, not only canon law.

Here it is: the Church, like the Lord himself, can be seen as both divine and human: Like Christ, true God and true man, the Church is one reality “comprising a human and a divine element.”

Of course, this wasn’t an original thought from the future Cardinal Gianfranco Ghirlanda; it comes from the Second Vatican Council. Vatican II’s document Lumen gentium teaches that the Church can be compared to the mystery of the incarnate Word.

(It’s not a perfect analogy, of course: Christ’s human nature was perfect, and we know well that the Church’s human element is not.)

If we understand the Church properly, inseparably human and divine, we can avoid big mistakes and reap important benefits.

Very simply, if we see the Church as incarnational, we will not try to separate the visible structure from the invisible mystical Body of Christ. We will never think of our parish as a visible assembly and a spiritual community that can be divided in two. The earthly Church and the heavenly Church are one single reality.

If you love the spiritual Church but reject our messy, human, and sinful Church, you aren’t relating to the Church established by Christ on earth.

Believe it or not, I’m sharing all this heavy-duty theology just to introduce my annual homily on Project Advance! Precisely because the Church is incarnational, truly human, and truly divine, some apparently nonspiritual realities matter every bit as much as the more obviously spiritual aspects of parish life.

Just as Jesus, the incarnate Word, took on flesh and blood in order to fulfill his divine mission, so a parish has bricks and mortar, pews and kneelers, statues and stations.

Even more essential, our parish church relies on sound and light as it fulfills its divine mission.

“Sound and Light” is the theme of this year’s Project Advance campaign. Without both, we would struggle to worship together.

Project Advance 2022 will, as in the past, show the parish’s generosity beyond our walls and borders: your donation will allow us to support the good works of Ukrainian refugee relief, Alpha Canada, Domestic Abuse Services, and Good Shepherd Ministry.

But this year’s campaign will also sustain our most important gathering place: the church. It will pay for replacing our obsolete lighting and sound systems. The lights were failing regularly, while the sound has kept working due to the tender loving care of a generous and skilled parishioner who made regular adjustments.

But he has told us that none of the aging components can be repaired or replaced when one fails catastrophically, as is expected after more 30 years.  For many months we would face having no amplified sound from the sanctuary and the choir loft. So we have taken the initiative by starting this lengthy process now. The new system will also improve the quality of the sound.

If this were a fund-raising pitch, I would happily stop now. With or without all the theology, you all understand the need for sound and light. But I don’t believe in fund-raising pitches—at least not since I first read the story of the wealthy farmer who made his kids work in the barns.

When someone asked him why he didn’t just hire others to tend his cows, he replied “I’m not raising cows, I’m raising children.”

Project Advance reminds all of us, me included, that we support the Church financially because we are children of God. There is an unbreakable connection between the material and the spiritual in our parish. While I may talk about giving to meet our needs, that’s much less important than our need to give.

Certainly numbers are important in a financial campaign, and I am very grateful that our parish has already raised over $100,000. But that’s not the most important figure. The number that concerns me is 88—that’s how many households have donated as of last week—just under 14% of our registered households.

This year, right in front of us, we have great reminders of how visible things serve invisible aspects of our parish mission. They just happen to  have been the fruit of last year’s Project Advance, which paid for the beautiful renovations of our meeting spaces.

I admit that I had no idea how much these renovations and furnishings would make people feel valued at Christ the Redeemer. Let me give you one excellent example of the power of combining welcoming spaces with welcoming faces. It came in an e-mail I got last week:

“If the ‘Lost and Found Coffeehouse’ is able to make a difference for just one person, it has succeeded. I have been lost and slowly I have been found with my beautiful parishioners whom I have been able to visit and share with. This open space in the Parish to come and go, knowing that there is always someone there on certain days is just what I needed. I know that there are plenty more that feel the same. Thank you for this.”

Not much more I can say about that, so please listen to the mastermind behind Lost and Found in this video produced by the Archdiocese to highlight for all parishes the wonderful things that Project Advance can do.

Project Advance Video 2022

 

Thanksgiving (28.C)

 

When I studied English literature, I always had trouble with the word ‘irony,’ which I could never quite define.

However, I know it when I see it.

And I see it—or rather, hear it—in today’s Gospel, when Jesus says “Were not ten made clean? But the other nine, where are they?”

If that’s not irony, then it might be sarcasm. Whatever it is, this story of Jesus and the lepers shows both his humanity and his divinity. As God, he heals them; as a human being he’s pained by the nine ungrateful lepers.

None of us has ever healed a leper, but haven’t we all felt what Jesus did when he asks, “Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?”

I hope our family life is less complicated than a Shakespeare play, but we can understand what King Lear meant when he called ingratitude a “marble-hearted fiend.” Ingratitude hurts.

Now we can’t literally hurt God, whom St. Paul tells us is “immortal and lives in unapproachable light.” But when we are ungrateful, we hurt ourselves by damaging our relationship with him, the giver of all good gifts.

It’s almost ironic! When we fail to be grateful to God, we’re the losers. Jesus is just helping us to understand that by showing his consternation with respect to the nine no-show lepers.

I once did a series of enormous favours for a young man I was mentoring. To my amazement, he failed to thank me for any of them. Although I did feel some personal pain, it was mostly on his account that I was disappointed; he missed out on an important life lesson by failing to express his gratitude, even if he may have felt it inside.

(We talked about it many years later, when he had grown as a disciple, and he was deeply sorry; by then he had learned well the importance of saying thanks to others and to God.)

Happily, the liturgy this Sunday gives us Naaman the Syrian, a great example of a thankful man. He’s so thankful that he almost annoys his benefactor, the Prophet Elisha, by insisting on giving him an offering.

It’s a great story because, of course, it shows that there’s nothing we can give to God in return for all his blessings. Just our thanks.

It’s worth noting that neither of the two fine examples of thanksgiving we meet today are Christians. Indeed, both are religious outsiders—Naaman a foreigner and the grateful leper a Samaritan.

But God has given Christians the perfect way to express our gratitude to him, a means not available to the leper, to Naaman, or even the Prophet Elisha—the Mass.

The psalmist was prophesying about the Eucharistic sacrifice when he prayed: “How can I repay the Lord for all his goodness to me? The cup of salvation I will raise; I will call on the name of the Lord.”  (Ps. 116)

Do we come before the Lord every Sunday with that attitude of gratitude? It’s easy to place our complaints or petitions on the altar, and we are allowed to do that. But arriving in church with thanksgiving—not just a general feeling but specifically aware of the graces we receive every day—can transform our experience of the weekly Eucharist.

There is a great blessing if we come before the Lord with gratitude. It changes our approach to life; even more important, it changes our relationship with God. I mentioned how we feel bad when someone fails to thank us; we can feel even worse when someone takes us for granted.

When we take God for granted, our relationship with him suffers. One author has asked “How many are the graces we receive from the morning sun, the smile of a friend, a comfortable bed at night? How bountifully have we received from the Lord: knowledge of Jesus Christ, the community of faith, and the sacraments that keep us strong in the Lord’s love?”*

Our celebration of Thanksgiving this weekend is an ideal time to say thanks to our family and friends. But most of all, it is a time to thank the One who is the giver of all good gifts.

 

* Rev. William F. Maestri, A Word in Season, page 136.

Feeding the Spiritually Hungry (26.C)

If the pastor of one of Canada’s most affluent parishes can’t make his congregation feel guilty while preaching about the parable of Lazarus and the rich man he should probably find another line of work! However, I’m not much for making people feel guilty and I don’t think that concern for the poor—which many in our parish show to a remarkable degree, as it happens—is the only message in today’s Gospel.

What really struck me this time as I read the familiar parable was the rich man’s desperate pleading that Lazarus be sent to warn his brothers, to help them avoid his own unhappy fate. He was tormented by the desire to call them to repent and reform, about which he could do nothing from beyond the grave.

Let’s think about this fellow for a moment. The parable doesn’t say that the rich man kicked Lazarus as he walked by. Or more likely, he never even noticed him lying at the gate. His sin was blindness, rather than contempt. It was, we might say, not what he had done but what he had failed to do.

I have to tell you that those are the sins that frighten me—not things I knew were wrong but sins of omission I never thought about.

Is it possible that those of us who listen every Sunday to Moses and the Prophets, those of us who hear the Gospel proclaiming that Jesus has risen from the dead, are failing to warn our brothers and sisters to avoid the unhappy fate of the rich man in the story?

Is it possible that we might share the rich man’s sorrow because we have not shared with our brothers and sisters the good news of Salvation?

As you all know by now, our monthly Water in the Desert evening of adoration and prayer features a faith testimony given by someone from the parish. They do so humbly and simply but they are doing what the rich man was unable to accomplish after death: they are sharing the truth, the truth of the Gospel, with their brothers and sisters so that they might follow the poor man’s path to life and receive an eternal reward of with Abraham and the angels.

I was in Toronto last Saturday and I missed Water in the Desert but I heard a lot about Karen Magee’s testimony. She had everyone’s attention as she told how she had moved away from God as a young woman—“I put God on the shelf,” she said, “and went out on my own.” At first Karen felt great, freed from the judgement she felt from church, but that freedom was fleeting. Her self-esteem depended on the current culture but that only made her feel empty.

God found a way to enter into her life again. He used a young man named Kieran to whom she was attracted precisely because of his faith; on their first date Kieran asked Karen if she wanted to come to church with him!

Of course Kieran wasn’t the only one who showed her the goodness of God and the joy of Christian living. The members of her own family, and Kieran’s, offered her wonderful examples and prayers.

And here, if this were a parable, I would end with “and they lived happily ever after.” But life is more complex than that and God always wants more for us than even Christian family life and faithful church-going. Karen began with the famous Cursillo retreat and weekly Scripture study, which helped to open her eyes to the beauty of God’s word.

But her testimony last week reached its peak when she said “it wasn’t until I went to Alpha that I truly was able to experience that personal relationship with Christ, that he ‘personally’ loved ME.”

And she didn’t stop there: “I learned through Discovery that it was not my work that would save me, it was a personal relationship with Jesus; it was through his death and resurrection.”

At last, Karen said, “I was able to fully give my life to Christ to faithfully put him at the center because he had already saved me and he would work through me to save others.

“Now through leading Discovery I am finding my voice to bring the good news that God loves us, sin divides us, Christ has saved us and wants a personal relationship with each and every one of us.”

Alpha, as many of you know, is a series of videos and discussions that describe the basic message of Christianity. Discovery is a small-group faith study taking participants deeper into the mystery of salvation.

I could talk for half an hour on Alpha and faith studies—they are at the heart of our parish evangelization efforts. But today I am not focusing on inviting you to Alpha or Discovery. Inspired by today’s Gospel I am asking those who have taken Discovery or gone through Alpha to ask others. There is surely no greater missed opportunity than to fail to share a life-giving message with those we love or even just with those whom the Lord has placed on our path.

As the rich man realized, too late, it can be a matter of life or death. So asking someone once is not enough; if you’ve already asked them, ask them again.

Ed Zadeiks, whom we like to call Mr. Alpha in our parish, used to ask the regulars he saw at Tim Horton’s to come to Alpha, in the days when he had the time to go to Tim Horton’s. When they said no he smiled and said “I know you won’t mind if I ask you again next year.”

Dear friends, I’m not afraid that you  or I will be like the rich man in our blindness to the physical needs of others; we live in a much more compassionate and aware society than Jesus did. But I do fear that we may be blind to the spiritual hunger of those around us, a hunger less visible than what Lazarus suffered but just as painful and just as much demanding our charity.

Our parish Alpha and the Discovery faith study resumes this month. We do not need to ask God to send a messenger to warn our friends of the dangers of the modern culture. We can still, as long as we live, deliver the message ourselves.

Reading on Labour Day

 

People keep asking how my retreat was. No-one wants to believe that I was on holiday at a monastery!

(“That’s a bit weird,” one young parishioner said.)

But I very much enjoy my visits to Mount Angel Abbey, and every year I learn something new that gets me thinking about about parish life.

This year, I was struck by how important reading is to the life of the monk. As you probably know, Benedictines eat in silence—more precisely, they eat while listening to books.

At lunch and supper they hear the Bible, St. Benedict’s Rule, and some other book chosen by the abbot. During my visit last month, Abbot Jeremy Driscoll asked if I would like to see the list of books the monks have heard in the last few years, and I accepted eagerly.

It was an eye-opener! I could hardly believe so much material could be covered in a year, nor the range of books and topics.

This led me to wonder: do Catholics hear too much preaching, and too little reading?

Now this thought is still half-baked. The homily, as you know, is a very important part of the Mass, and you’d get bored pretty quickly if I just opened a book and read from it after the Gospel. After all, the monks are multi-tasking—listening to the book and eating their meal.

Still, today I would like to experiment a bit by doing some reading connected to tomorrow, Labour Day. Work is such an important topic that it deserves more thought than we usually give it, and I think I’ve found something that might help us connect this secular holiday to our spiritual journey.

What I want to read comes from a book called The Benedictine Handbook and is inspired, of course, by St. Benedict’s Rule.

        What sort of things do we think are holy?

The question seems silly and easy to answer at first. God is holy, so whatever is to do with God is holy too. This leads us very naturally to think about prayer, going to church, acting justly and other spiritual things.

All of these are holy and worthwhile, but if we concentrate on them alone, we miss out some very large parts of our lives. Most people spend much of their time working for their living, and working for and within their families. Our daily lives often seem to have nothing holy about them at all. This is a thoroughly un-Christian way of looking at things and the Rule of St Benedict provides something of an antidote.

Work is not simply … another good monastic practice… there is something about it which sums up the goals of monastic, and hence of Christian life.

At this point, you may be wondering what a sixth-century saint has to tell modern men and women about their work? Let’s read on… the author applies the Rule’s insights to our own situation in the world. 

Today there is a large degree of confusion about the purpose and value of work. There are two opposing tendencies, which to some degree are present in everyone.

One is to minimize work as much as possible, ‘clocking’ on and off, with little regard for what is done in between or the sense of purpose in it. The other is the workaholic, who cannot stop, who stays late at work, or even brings it home at weekends. Work becomes a person’s life.

Many people feel alienated from their work. While some individuals have work which is fulfilling, many more feel no connection with the actual work they do and drudge away at something whose only direct bearing on their lives is that it provides them, if they are lucky, with the means to survive and perhaps raise children.

Others feel alienated because the process of working for gain can itself be dehumanizing. People who do rotten jobs, or none at all, are easily seen as inferior, and easily see themselves as inferior.

There is also a third level of alienation… It is a curious phenomenon of social history that at some point work became something one went out to do. We talk of domestic work, but it is not seen in the same way as, say, ploughing a field or brokering a deal. The trouble with this division is that we end up with a very artificial conception of what work is. It is seen as something which earns money from ‘outside’ and is judged by what it brings in…

The worker is also judged in the same way. The focus is on what is done and for whom. We have to look instead at who is doing it.

If we wish to arrive at a Christian understanding of work, we have to begin with the basic facts of the faith. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Everything is changed by this, including our work. …

To get the right view of work, we have to get the right view of humanity. Instead of valuing certain types of work above others, we should think that each is being done by a human being, created and loved by God.

The incarnation of the Word has given us a gospel of work, the first tenet of which is that work has value precisely because it is done by human beings.

Whatever we do in our God-given capacity for action can be grace-bearing since we may do it as human beings fully restored to the full image of God who took on our nature. Perhaps this seems too grand a vision of the daily round of the office [or school or home] or factory, but we must bear in mind who is doing that daily grind: a human person made in the image of God.

At this point our reading echoes today’s Gospel, where we heard Jesus say “Whoever does not carry their cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.”

“Work we are reluctant to do, or the unwelcome idleness of unemployment, is part of what God has taken to himself on the cross. Idleness is the enemy of the soul because it springs from the conviction that God is not found in those things that bore or hurt us.”

But he is. And so everyone in our parish is called to work. Circumstances call some to the work of prayer from a care facility, others to leadership of major enterprises, still others to the classroom, and others to the care of the home.

Our reading concludes: “[All] work, whether it be designing planes or washing dishes, is part of [what St. Benedict calls] the “labour of obedience” which brings us back to God.”

Happy Labour Day!

---------------------------------

The Benedictine Handbook is published by Liturgical Press. The article on “Work” quoted above is by Laurence McTaggart.

We Have Come to the City of the Living God (22.C)

When I got back from two peaceful weeks at Mount Angel Abbey, I was delighted to find new lighting in the church, with energy-efficient, long-lasting bulbs. It’s a project we started before the pandemic, so it’s long overdue.

But this morning what we really need is a spotlight—like the ones that focus attention in a darkened theatre. Because our second reading deserves center stage and real concentration from every one of us in church this morning.

Before we look at it, let me read the passage to you again, in the old Jerusalem Bible translation. It’s less literal, but more poetic. And it was in the days when we heard the Jerusalem Bible at Mass that I first came to love this text.

Here it is: 

What you have come to is nothing known to the senses; not a blazing fire, or a gloom turning to total darkness, or a storm; or trumpeting thunder or the great voice speaking which made everyone that heard it beg that no more should be said to them. 

But what you have come to is Mount Zion and the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem where the millions of angels have gathered for the festival, with the whole Church in which everyone is a ‘first-born son’ and a citizen of heaven. You have come to God himself, the supreme Judge, and been placed with the spirits of saints who have been made perfect; and to Jesus, the mediator who brings a new covenant.

The first paragraph of this abbreviated reading just sets the stage; no spotlight needed. It tells us that the letter is talking about what happened on Mount Sinai when the Lord gave the Ten Commandments to Moses amidst fire and cloud and thunder. The old covenant was accompanied by shock and awe as God showed his power and might. It was terrifying.

With that backdrop, the letter shifts the scene to the present, to the life of those reading and hearing its words.

Your experience, it says, is something quite different. What you have come to is Mount Zion and the city of the living God. You are not quaking at Mount Sinai out in desert. No, you stand without fear at Mount Zion, the holy hill at Jerusalem.

The change from one mountain to the other overflows with meaning. Mount Zion is a synonym for Jerusalem, while Jerusalem points to heaven, as the text reminds us.

When the author takes us from past to present, it seems as if he also shifts to the future. He writes as if we are in heaven already, united with the angels and saints. Isn’t that a ways off?

Not for the Christian. Five chapters earlier, Hebrews says that in baptism we have “been enlightened, and have tasted the heavenly gift, and have shared in the Holy Spirit, and have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the age to come.” (6:4-5)

The “them” in the first part of the reading is the Chosen People, but the “you” in the second part is not just the readers of the letter. You is us—here at Mass this morning. We are the ones gathered as an assembly of the firstborn enrolled in heaven.

The Jerusalem Bible translation takes this a step further: we are “gathered for the festival, with the whole Church.” Scholars tell us that those who first heard the letter would have understood “assembly” as church.

And so should we.

Coming to church can become routine, but these magnificent words remind us what’s really happening, in all its wonder and excitement, and what’s going to happen, more wonderful still.

We are gathered as women and men whose baptismal birthright is the heavenly Jerusalem. As St. Paul says to the Philippians, “our citizenship is in heaven.”

We are “enrolled” in heaven—we have a place reserved for us there. Jesus says to the disciples in Luke’s Gospel “rejoice that your names are written in heaven.” (10:20)

But we do not only approach the city of God: we approach God, here and now.

The Revised Standard Version translation we hear at Mass uses a run-on sentence, but the Jerusalem translation puts it simply: “You have come to God himself.”

This is not a future verb. It’s happened. It happened in baptism and it’s happening now.

We have come to “the supreme Judge,” before whom we stood at the penitential rite at the beginning of Mass. We have “been placed with the spirits of saints,” whom we invoked during the “I confess” of the penitential rite, and on whom we call in each of the Eucharistic prayers.

And we have come “to Jesus, the mediator who brings a new covenant.” At every Mass, the priest consecrates the wine as “the Blood of the new and eternal covenant” poured out for the forgiveness of sins.

The late Albert Vanhoye, an eminent scholar on Hebrews, points out that the letter does not just say “new covenant. ” It uses a special Greek word meaning “brand new covenant,” which expresses the newness of a covenant that “has all the freshness of youth.”

“The covenant established by Jesus,” Cardinal Vanhoye writes. “is not only of a new kind; it is at the same time radiant with youth, bursting out like a spring of fresh water.” (The Letter to the Hebrews: A New Commentary, p. 214)

This is what we are here for this morning— to celebrate a “beauty ever ancient, ever new,” to use the words of St. Augustine, whose feast we celebrate today.

Which takes us to this very moment, here in church. As the pandemic fades, some of us are still adjusting to regular Sunday worship. So we might ask ourselves whether we are experiencing the Mass with the freshness and richness that the Letter to the Hebrews presents.

Do we recognize that angels and saints gather with us around the altar? Are we lifting up our hearts and minds to the heavenly Jerusalem, which St. Paul calls “our mother” (Gal. 4:26) and which tradition has understood as the Church of Christ?

We gather this morning at the intersection of past, present, and future. The promises of the past are fulfilled, the one sacrifice of Christ is made present, and future glory is anticipated and promised.

Let’s spend a few moments now shining a spotlight on our hearts, preparing to approach the Lord’s table this Sunday as people who are enrolled in heaven, joyfully claiming our birthright as brothers and sisters of Christ, “the firstborn of all creation.” (Col. 1:15)

The beautiful stained glass window at the top is from the Chapel of the New Jerusalem in the Anglican cathedral, Christ Church, in Victoria, BC.