Transcript:
Good evening, everyone, and happy All Saints. Glad that you are able to come here to rejoice, and all of those of us who have gone before us who are gazing upon God for all eternity in Heaven, and I’m glad that you got here to Mass at the last minute here, too. This is a holy day. So very blessed that we’re all here together, and also that you’ve had a very nice Halloween yesterday as well, and that you’re enjoying all your candy.

One thing I have to say is that every All Saints Day, it’s hard for me not to think about a very, very interesting conversation that took place between Thomas Merton, the famous Catholic monk of the 20th Century, and his professor in college named Robert Lax.

Robert Lax was himself a convert to the Faith, just as Thomas Merton was, and Lax played a very instrumental role in helping Merton discover his faith in Jesus and eventually becoming a Catholic. And after Merton became a Catholic, he and Lax were talking, and Robert Lax asked him saying, “Well now that you’re a Catholic, what do you hope to do?”

And Merton very much admired Lax, and he wants to impress him with some type of really sophisticated answer, now that he was a Catholic. So he kind of just thought it over and then he just kind of resort to saying,”well I hope to be a very, very devout Catholic and learn more and more about the Faith”. And Robert Lax looked at him with almost disappointment in his eyes, and he said, “You know, there’s only one thing you should hope to do now that you’re a Catholic, and that is to become a saint.” To become a saint – that it’s not necessarily about becoming part of a tribe and finding joy in becoming just Catholic for the sake of finding some sense of truth and meaning and what it means to be Catholic, but to look beyond what this world is and offers to where we are bound to go, and that is Heaven, right? That is what the Saints desire. Saints desire Heaven.

You know, it’s always profound for me thinking about that, because I have to ask myself the question: you know here as a Catholic priest; you know being in the world of Catholicism, so to speak: do I ever really think about the fact that fundamentally why I do all these things? Why I participate in the sacramental life of the Church? It is for the reason that I desire union with God: intimate union with God, and not just because I think that’s a nice thing, but because to be with He who has created and willed me into existence from the very beginning knows exactly what I need, how I need it, and desires me to want to be with him for all eternity. That is ultimately what a relationship with God looks like, right?

So this very famous encounter between Thomas Merton and Robert Lax is something that we can kind of take away and ask ourselves, “what is it that we really desire?”

Everyday or every year on All Saints Day, we hear the Beatitudes, and of course the Beatitudes we hear very often. We all know that in some way that this is the new teaching of Jesus, in a way to augment the Ten Commandments from the Old Testament that were given to Moses. And just on the surface level, we can always say that the Beatitudes always seem to have this, more of this positive tone, because it’s talking about blessed are you when you do these things, because then you receive these things as a result. Whereas the Ten Commandments are all about not doing certain things – prohibitions.

In our spiritual journey, we kind of need both. There are times where we need to really have a clear understanding what not to do. There’s going to be times for us know exactly what to do. We understand that just by the basic nature – for who we are are human beings, right? – I mean when you’re young, you’re a child, it’s better to be told what not to do than what to do, because when you’re told what to do, you end up doing the opposite.

So perhaps it is better as a rule to just understand what I should not do, because that is ultimately going to be at the problems if I do end up touching the burner when it’s hot, so to speak, right?

Yet I often find it that as well, as positive as the Beatitudes may sound, they can also have a tinge of legalism intertwined – the same type of legalism which is all too often associated with the Ten Commandments. What I mean by that is that there’s this understanding that could arrive that the Beatitudes are all about us, and our activity, and how we do things, and so we can go through them. If you just think, well okay, if I’m poor, if I try to detach myself more from the things of the world, I’m going to be blessed. Or if I really work for peace and I really try my best to mitigate peace in different relationships within my life, in the monks, the people I know, then I will be blessed, I will be a child of God.

And even the Beatitudes then become a source of obligation, a source of measuring ourselves up to see how well we’re doing. Going through them can often make us feel almost guilty because we’re not working hard enough at being detached from things. We’re not working hard enough at being humble, or we’re not working hard enough being a peacemaker. We’re not working hard enough and just allowing persecutions to hit us and being okay with that.

Yet, the Gospel of Jesus is not about us working harder in order to earn something. The Gospel – the good news of Jesus – is all about revealing the profound love that God has for us, despite our failures, despite our sin.

So just as Robert Lax challenges Merton to desire to become a saint, perhaps the best way for us to engage the Beatitudes is not thinking about what we need to do, but what we need to desire. And the way to know what we need to desire is to always go to the latter portion of the answer: if we desire the Kingdom of Heaven, the result will be for us to naturally want to be detached from the things of the world. If we desire to be confident, you’ll be okay when we mourn, because we know that God is with us. If we desire to inherit the land, you will know that God will give us everything that we need in order to not just survive, but to thrive and find a joyful life.

The Beatitudes aren’t caught up in us trying to live a more virtuous, moral life. They get to the very heart of speaking to our desires. What do we desire? I think in one word you could say that we all desire happiness, who desire a life – whether we are free of suffering, of pain, of anxiety – we desire a world where there’s justice. We desire a world where there’s peace. Because we know that these things resonate with how we are hardwired, because we’re hardwired not to live in a broken existence, but a whole existence.

If we take that one step further, we realize that what we ultimately desire is Heaven. Yet, we often think that Heaven is something that sounds better than Hell, but it’s not necessary something that can bring us happiness.

I was often taken from my first assignment as a priest saying daily masses, and most daily Masses are early in the morning. Especially there’s lots of older people, retired people – and there was someone who I think celebrated like an 86th birthday. I said, “Oh, happy birthday”. I said, “You’re one year now closer to Heaven.” And you think I was sentencing him to prison when I said that.

”Don’t wish on that me now, Father. Don’t talk about that.”

Don’t talk about that?! Why do you show up at Mass if you’re not thinking about Heaven?

We come here today on this holy day of obligation not just so that we can become good Catholics like Thomas Merton and what he thought he was supposed to be. We come here because we are obligated in our very being for complete union with God in Heaven. And in that sense, it’s not a burden, nor is it something that we wish to just kind of push off and one day, we’ll think about it, but it’s something that happens to us now. Because the desire for Heaven means to live life now, in its fullness, so that we can live in Heaven on Earth. And while it’s not Heaven in its fullness, it gets us more and more yearning and desiring what we are ultimately made for.

So today, on this Feast of All Saints, let’s look at our brothers and sisters who have gone before us and have reached the final goal of their life as being an inspiration for all of us who still journey and are distracted by the things of this world, thinking that they can possibly serve us, when we are made to be served by an infinite love that no finite person or thing could ever match.

God bless us all.

Transcript:

Good morning! Good morning, everyone! I thought the power outage just happened right then and there.

It’s great to be with you again here on, at 10 o’clock. Haven’t seen you guys in a while, so it’s great to be back at St. Joe’s.

You know, given the state that we’re in right now, with the winds and with the fires, I can’t help but think about what is the Holy Spirit trying to show to us, right? I mean wind and fire are so much a part of the imagery of the Spirit, as through scriptures. And of course we understand that the wind, and the fire, that we are dealing with here is a very destructive wind and fire. But yet, the Spirit may be calling us in this midst of this natural disaster, so to speak, to think about where, maybe, disaster in our own heart, where maybe actually looking at things of this world as being stable, when really nothing in this world is stable. Because we’re made for an eternity that’s yet to happen. when we leave this world to the next.

So even in the midst of this time of great instability, I think the Spirit can be calling us, even in a closer assurance to the home that’s really ultimately being prepared for us.

You know today’s Gospel is very interesting, as it touches on that in a slightly different way. Clearly as is the case with many of Jesus’s Parables, he makes things very, very wide opposites – extreme opposites if you will – so apparently you have this very self-righteous Pharisee and then you have this extremely humble tax collector, right. And it’s important to realize that you know pretty much everyone falls somewhere in the middle, right? 

But yet when I think about this tax collector and when he says, “be merciful to me, a sinner”, I’m led to ask myself the question, what was his sin? What was he ashamed of? Why did he identify with being a sinner?

Now just knowing some of the practices of tax collectors during this time, it was very common knowledge that the tax collector, who had a lot of influence in society and worked for the Romans, but were normally Jewish, so they collected taxes for the Romans from fellow Jewish people, they would often collect more than what was required. And of course by doing that, they would hold on to that extra amount of money, almost like a form of extortion.

Now clearly that’s a pretty sinful thing, and I think that maybe we could think that that is exactly what the tax collector is ashamed of, and that’s why he so humbly approached God in the temple. But yet, I think it’s very interesting that the way that Jesus positions this Parable is that he focuses on the actual positions of these guys – what they do for a living, their title: one a Pharisee who is a scholar of the law someone who knows the Scripture well, knows how to interpret it and also knows how to teach it – that’s what this man does. And then the tax collector who like I said works for the Romans and also has a different type of influence in people’s lives.

I think that Jesus looks at the titles here at these positions as really being the source or the root of the sin. And it’s a root sin that the Pharisee, if anything was oblivious to, but yet the tax collector understood. 

And what I do I mean by that? Because the sin of the tax collector wasn’t just that he was stealing from his fellow Jewish people. The sin of the tax collector was that knew he identified too much with his position: he identified as being a tax collector, and realized that that was the wrong place to understand his identity. 

The Pharisee likewise identified with his position. He identified with it so much, that you listen to what he says he actually excludes himself from the rest of humanity – he says, I’m glad I’m not like the rest of humanity. So his position was so important, so unique that it stood out by itself, so we can say he had a radical dependency on his position and identify with that wholeheartedly. 

Yet this tax collector does not identify with his position as a tax collector, and as such says, be merciful on me a sinner, because what is his identity? His identity is simply to be a beloved Son of God the Father, to know that his life is something that has been given to him as a gift, and how he uses the gift of life is ultimately meant to be a continual gift to other people’s lives. 

Which is exactly why each of us are given a position in society, given a role, given the title, because the reason why we have these positions in society – whatever it may be – is so that it can be a means of us passing along the gift of our very existence, the gift of our belovedness that we receive from God.

Now, this gets to the very heart of vocation. I remember having a conversation with someone I go to school with who professes to be an atheist, and he asked me, like, what is the most important thing in your life, or what do you identify with the most in your life? I think he was expecting me to say something like a Catholic or priest or Christian. I said you know the most fundamental thing if you will reality identify myself as a beloved Son of God. Because everything else requires me to actually assent to in, a certain sense, I assent to being a Christian, assent to being a Catholic. I had to assent to being a priest. It required me to cooperate with God’s grace.  

Yet the one thing that does not require a cooperation, if you will, is the reality that your existence in and of itself is enough, because God willed you into it. And no matter what we do with our lives and no matter how many times we say yes to the Lord, or no matter how many times you say no to the Lord, we can never erase our identity. We just can’t – impossible. 

And that’s a very profound fact because that brings us right into the very essence of what humility is all about, because humility is recognizing what we are, and what we’re not. We recognize that we are beloved sons and daughters of God the Father. That’s a humble statement because that’s the reality of who we are.  We also recognize the fact that our positions, our vocations, our titles what we do, how we actually find ourselves positioned in society – all of that is also something that is a gift. It is not something that we actually earn.

When I think about the tremendous amount of Mercy that God has personally shown me in my life, they enabled me to become a priest. Sometimes I question if God knows what He’s doing. And I will also continue to say I’m still amazed the amazing amount of mercy that God shows to me as a priest, because there’s absolutely nothing about my priestly vocation that in and of itself has a power that comes from me.  At best, I can say my vocation is a conduit of God’s grace, a conduit of Jesus’s presence, which is exactly why I can say: This is My Body. This is My Blood. I absolve you from your sins. I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Absolutely nothing on my end am I actually saying about myself. A conduit of the presence of Jesus, a pure conduit of the grace that I think is what the sinner tax collector came to a realization. 

And that’s why he humbly approached God in the Temple. I think that is perhaps the greatest lesson for us to take away from this very, very powerful parable: how much do we identify with what we do? How much do we identify with our position? How much do we identify by how many degrees or how much education? How often do we identify with how much money we have, or what type of knowledge we have. 

If you’re like me, I identify with it a lot. I mean it means a lot when I tell people I have a degree from Berkeley. Berkeley.  I’m just like, you know, wish I could say I didn’t have that, because all these things are a temptation to take me off of my true identity. 

Yet all is not lost when we understand that what we’ve been given as a gift is meant to be given as a continual gift to others, and ultimately a gift for other people’s healing. Yet we ourselves need to approach the source of healing first, and that’s exactly what we do when we come to this building. The broken messes that we are, the pride that we bring with ourselves, our own ego getting in the way, is all laid down at the foot of the altar. And the One who humbles Himself so much to leave the glory of Heaven, to become one of us, humbles Himself even more to become what appears to be bread. Bread that we receive for us to once again affirm our identity in communion with Jesus, the Son of God. Confirm our identity as beloved Sons and Daughters of Jesus Christ, of God the Father, in and through Jesus Christ.

So today let us rejoice in the gift of life. Let us rejoice in how we are called to use our life. But most importantly, let’s rejoice in the gift of humility that we receive through the very Son of God, Jesus Himself. Amen.