Fr. Paul Weinberger
St. William’s Catholic Parish
Greenville, Texas
January 28, 2006
4th Sunday in Ordinary Time
The people were astonished at His teaching; for He taught them as one having authority and not as the scribes.
In the Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit
Amen
In your bulletin on page five you will see “First Thursday, February 2nd, Feast of the Presentation of the Child Jesus in the Temple.” On the cover of the bulletin is a picture, which depicts the Presentation in the Temple.
To view this picture click on the link below
http://www.wga.hu/art/c/champaig/presenta.jpg
You see the Child Jesus, and of course the custom for the Jews is to present their first-born son in the temple. This is a depiction of the Blessed Mother presenting her first-born Son in the temple.
“Ahhh ha! So she had other children!”
No, this is a term used by the Jews in a very specific way to indicate child number one, who is a male child. END OF STORY! The first-born child to us indicates something else…to the Jews it means nothing more than child number one, who could be one of one, or one of fourteen. It means one of one to the Jews.
Notice that it is not St. Joseph holding Jesus in the picture; it is Simeon, who was a man that stayed in the Temple as a priest and was told by the Lord that he would not see death until he had seen the Messiah, the Savior of the World. Well, if that is Simeon holding the Baby Jesus then where is St. Joseph? Well, you see that right near the head of Jesus is His mother, the Virgin Mary, and right behind her at her side is St. Joseph. He is carrying a basket of pigeons. He always had two pigeons for lunch. [Laughter] Oh, I am sorry, that was an offering in the Temple for the Presentation. He had to make some payment and the payment from the poor was two pigeons.
Look right next to Simeon’s left shoulder and you see Anna. In the Gospel Anna was also in the Temple praying the day that the Blessed Virgin Mary and St. Joseph presented Jesus in His Father’s house for the first time. She was married for seven years and when she was widowed she lived a very long life and spent most of that time praying in the Temple. She had also received similar words from God that she would see the Messiah.
So Simeon and Anna are there, who actually receive the Lord when He would come; to acknowledge His presence in the Temple so that He wouldn’t just be overlooked and not noticed. Simeon and Anna made a great fuss over the child that day. It is also interesting in the picture to see that everyone is looking at the Child except Simeon. He is looking toward Heaven along with the Baby Jesus.
The Presentation in the Temple is a very important day on the calendar of the Church, which is February 2nd, Thursday of this week. Simeon called Jesus “A Light to the Nations.” The “nations”…again, this is a Jewish term, which means all of the people who are not Jewish. You and I and our ancestors and all who will come after us are part of the “nations.” God inspired Simeon and he said that this Child Jesus would be a light to the nations. Just as the sun in the sky touches every inch of the earth through the course of the day, shining, warming, and lighting every piece of the Earth’s surface, so should the very Son of God shine His teaching over the Earth.
Simeon and Anna are noted because God had spoken to them and they trusted in His Word; they waited patiently and spent their lives in prayer listening to the Lord. That is why we hear in the Responsorial Psalm today,
If today you hear His voice, harden not your heart.
This is so that when God speaks to us, we listen.
Last Saturday a friend of mine went to Mass. Now…remember the old television series, Dragnet…the names have been changed to protect the innocent. I will say that the names have been changed to protect the guilty. My friend attended her Church on Saturday because she doesn’t like the rush on Sunday that so many are on. I won’t say which diocese or Church she belong to. My friend goes to church forty-five minutes early. Most people complain when they get to Church early and wonder what in the world they are going to do now. That is sad but I am sure that is the sentiment of many.
My friend likes to get to Mass early and prepare for the greatest prayer that will be offered in her presence over a seven-day period. Mass on Sunday is the perfect prayer of Jesus Christ, offered on the day of His Resurrection. It is the perfect prayer, prayer par excellence and my friend wishes to prepare. My friend is in her early 80s and she lost her husband about fifteen years ago. She used to teach on the graduate level at a medical school and her husband was a doctor as well. She loved her husband very much and they had children together but none survived to grow up.
My friend is alone and she spends all of her time in prayer at home. She reads at least two newspapers every day as well as many periodicals, ones that I would pick up like Time and Newsweek, she reads. She reads all of these not because she is a friend for news but because she wants to know what is going on in the world and she has to pray for all these people. She is the kind of person, who when she reads about someone’s home burning down in the paper, she would send something to them to help out. What a sweetie! She is very dear to me as a friend.
Last Saturday she went to the church she has been going to for years now and she genuflected and went into her bench. Before she got there that day something had happened at Church; there was no priest, deacon or Church employee when she arrived early. There were no adults at the Church. There were about 50 teenagers in the Church. They’d just had some kind of service; you could tell because the young ladies were appropriately “undressed.” You know what I am talking about…the way people get dressed up by undressing and walking out the front door.
This really offended my friend. As beautiful as these young ladies are, they should have been covered. It is a shame but they probably don’t have fathers or mothers that care for them. Uncaring parents would allow their children to leave the house dressed like that. There were young men who were dressed in Tuxedos or suits and they were taking pictures. There is nothing wrong with taking pictures in Church but when the teens, who were at the late end of the teen spectrum, yell from the front to the back of the church for others to come up and take a picture this is very sad. My friend also noticed that some of them had telephones and they would open them and start calling people. Maybe they were even calling their friends at the back of the Church instead of yelling at them.
Anyway, some of these teens had evidentially walked out of the house in a hurry and had failed to eat so they pulled out a sandwich and were eating it up near the Altar. My friend told me that someone had a radio. They didn’t have a radio…my friend doesn’t know that music can be downloaded on cell phones, as well as pornography. Isn’t technology great! Sigh…That would have been the worst and fortunately it didn’t happen, or at least she didn’t see it. Anyway, someone downloaded some music and the whole group began dancing in the Church. I’M SORRY! Listen; every time I am up here I am in God’s Presence! I couldn’t make this stuff up anyway!
My friend felt it was her obligation to tell them what they were doing was wrong and probably the teacher in her as well. She told them if they wanted to do all this to just go outside; if they wanted to do this, just please go outside. She was so moved by all of this and the way the Church was being mistreated that she couldn’t stay. She left and went home and was physically ill. My friend became physically ill! I guess the teens thought the lady needed to get a thicker skin. That’s right! When people are desecrating a Church we really need to be adults about this and let them. Does that make any sense? Of course it doesn’t but that is what was going on. The Church was being desecrated and because this lady leads such a solitary life of prayer and study she was in total horror.
This lady studies her Catechism every day. YES! She studies her faith every day. If Christ is the founder of the church and the church teaches us, well, she is always learning. So she leads a very reclusive life but it is a life she has become very accustomed to, one of listening to the Lord speaking to her through the teachings of the Church. As I said, she was a teacher at graduate level in medical school and spends a couple hours a day reading the Catechism and a lot of times during our conversations she is grilling me on one item or another. I mean, it is a pop quiz for me and I have to dig my way out of the question.
I am afraid that this whole thing was a bit like turning a corner. Pretend you were walking down the hall, not a care in the world and you turn the corner and someone, with all his or her force punched you in the face. You had no idea they were there. This lady, this very dear friend of mine could actually die this week. She doesn’t want to go to the hospital or anything like that. This took her so much by surprise she is ill. You may be thinking that the lady should just get over it. Our Lord says in the gospels that if your light is darkness, how dark will the dark be? Her light is the light of Christ, the light to the Nations, but there are so many today that have no idea about God and no idea about the inside of a Church or how they are supposed to live their lives and so the lives they do live are very dark!
Is this a judgment? Am I better than they are? No, I am not but we have to see that there are very specific differences. It is our Lord Himself that said if your light is darkness, how dark will the dark be, not Father Paul but Our Lord Himself! What has happened is that these young people can actually be inside a Catholic Church after some ceremony or another and somehow disconnect that Church from God. If you are making something in the kitchen and putting something in the blender and it is buzz, buzz, buzzing and then you pull the plug, then there it goes, right? If you are vacuuming the living room and tidying up getting ready for a visit from Fr. Paul and you go too far with the vacuum, the plug comes out of the wall and there it goes, right? If you disconnect the Church, the temple itself from God then it doesn’t teach and has no ability to reach out.
My friend got up and tried to teach them. The Church she was in is aligned very much like this Church and the Tabernacle is in the center of the Altar. She got up and asked them if they knew Jesus was in the Tabernacle. They probably could spell Tabernacle, they probably could pronounce Tabernacle and they probably had no clue about Our Lord’s True Presence…capital “T”, in the Eucharist reserved in the Tabernacle. That is why these two red lamps are here burning bright; to indicate that in this Church the Real Presence of Our Lord is there. How sad! But, they were able to disconnect or perhaps they have never made the connection between God and Church. The Church is just where you have one of these “things”. I am surprised that they didn’t tell my friend that they paid their money. That’s right, I love it when we are able to turn our Church into a Wal-Mart or K-Mart. They think if they paid their money they have a right to be there. Oh, that’s nice!
It is interesting that this happened because just in October the Pope met with the Cardinals and many bishops in Rome for three weeks in a Synod on the Eucharist. What did they come up with? They discovered that this problem that surfaced in the Church that my friend attends, seems to be common and how a lot of people feel…no connection what ever to the Church except some kind of vague cultural connection because their grandmother was Catholic and didn’t go to Church so it makes them something, something, something, something! That kind of connection is not a connection. It is very foggy and gaseous.
Just last week, Pope Benedict published his first Encyclical, “Deus Caritas Est,” which means, “God Is Love.” These are the words of Christ again and again in the New Testament, especially the Gospel of St. John. We hear all the time about how everyone is connected to the Internet. You can download the Internet from your cell phone; of course that is after you finish your DANCE at the front of the Church. You can also download the latest Encyclical by the Pope. What he says in this encyclical is that when we disconnect love from God. It is no longer love and it becomes something terrible. When love is connected to God it leads to life. When love is disconnected from God it leads to death, it is sentimentality.
Flannery O’Connor, a very wise Catholic Author from the south who died in the 60s, was very profound when she said,
“Sentimentality always leads to the gas chamber.”
Notice how that just kind of reaches out and grabs you? I don’t want to be grabbed like that, but it is true. Sentimentality always leads to death, always leads to the gas chamber. When love is disconnected from God, it is love not life that follows.
Think of the continent of Africa, the greatest river, the Nile, which empties into the Mediterranean there at Cairo. It starts way up in the interior of African at Lake Victoria. What if it were possible to sever the connection between the Nile and Lake Victoria? That river keeps millions alive and they have been farming the banks of that river for centuries. The river would flood and very fertile silt would cover the banks making it possible to grow enough wheat to feed nations. If the water were to be cut off from the river all you would have are springs and wells drying up and a rut where the river use to be. All the natural wildlife around and in the river would be dead; all you would find is death. So, when we disconnect love from God that is all there is, death.
Last Sunday on January 22, 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court formally disconnected love from God. Remember that they’d found “emanations from the penumbra” and said that it was now legal to kill the child awaiting birth. They disconnected love from God. And we are just right on the threshold of killing fifty million of our own children.
When we think of God’s law, too often we only think of sexual morality. That is not true. As a Christian, these catechumens that came up today along with every Christian is asking that God shine the light of Christ on their thoughts, words, and deeds, as we prayed at the beginning of Mass at the Confiteor. It is not merely sexual morality that Jesus is concerned with but absolutely every thought that cross our mind, words that cross our lips, and deeds that we perform. He wants His light to shine in absolutely every way.
Yesterday there was a priest here that grew up in Canada and he has been serving many years at Lourdes in the South of France. Fr. Duguay spoke yesterday at the Knights of Columbus Hall. The place was packed and there were people standing in the back. It was tremendous to hear about. He spoke about St. Bernadette. I think it was in the late 50s that a movie came out called “The Song of Bernadette,” which was very good. After the 7:45 Mass a man reminded me of the words before the movie starts. The movie is about the miracles that have occurred in the South of France at Lourdes and it says,
“If you believe in God, no explanation is necessary. If you do not believe in God, no explanation is possible.”
That is really true. Fr. Duguay mentioned again and again yesterday that he is not someone who has been sent to convince anyone of anything, he has been sent to tell the story of what occurred and of course for others to listen to that story. In Lourdes he spends most of his time in a building that is a little wider than this Church and about twice as tall. It is a church but they never have Mass there. It is full of little rooms all up and down and rows up and down the middle and next to each one there is a sign that says it is for the language of French, English, German etc., languages the priest can speak. It is a whole church full of Confessionals because many people from all over the world go to Lourdes and many want to go to Confession; they feel drawn. So I found out that Father hears confessions there. I was there is 2001 and I told him that maybe he heard my Confession. Without missing a beat, Fr. Duguay said,
“Yes! I remember”
[Laughter] Fine, I remember going to Confession too but I don’t remember to whom. Fr. Duguay was talking about one Confession that he didn’t hear. He was sitting in the confessional and a man walked in who was Muslim. He walked in and told Fr. that “they” told him to see the priest. At Lourdes there is a huge rock wall that juts from the river into the air. At the top of this rock is this huge Basilica to Our Lady. At the bottom of the rock is a cave that is not very deep; it is a grotto that has been carved out over the centuries. Just above the grotto is a little niche and in the niche is where Our Lady appeared to St. Bernadette 1858, eighteen different times.
St. Bernadette couldn’t read or write and she lived in a jail that had been condemned. What is worse than living in a jail is living in one that has been condemned. She was very, very poor and this is the young woman Our Lady appeared to at the age of 14. She was questioned again and again by the priest and her bishop; she was even questioned by the police. At one point the commissioner said to her,
So you think we are convinced
Bernadette said,
I did not come to convince you, I was sent to tell you what happened."
She was right! Many people today line up at Lourdes and pass along the base of that rock and then when they get to the grotto they can actually move along the very cave where St. Bernadette knelt and prayed. Above in the niche is where Our Lady prayed with St. Bernadette. When you see people walking along the wall it is very much like seeing the people at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, which is supposedly the foundation of the Temple. It could be and then it might not be. Anyway, people will pray there and touch and kiss the stone with reverence. The same thing happens in Lourdes; people walk along this rock and rub their hands over it and when they get to the cave, it looks like they are reading the wall in brail. People as you go to the back you can see the very same spring that Our Lady asked Our Lady to dig. It is covered with glass.
Why is that?
I figured it out. If they didn’t cover that spring..,
”Got a quarter?
That is the Trevi fountain. Just think of it, they would have to scrape the money out every hour. Just before you leave the grotto, many people stop because now you are directly below the spot where Our Lady appeared to St. Bernadette in 1858. This Moslem I spoke of earlier was doing it because he saw the others doing it. As he was doing it, he heard a voice and something moved in him and when he got out of there he was asking people what he should do and they said to go to talk to a priest. I mean, when you have a difficulty that you can’t figure out and you tell your friends, they tell you to go talk to Fr. Paul, right? [Laughter]
The young man found Fr. Duguay. Everyone probably thinks that Father would lasso the guy and tell him he needs to study and that he needed to become Catholic. Then he would make him sign on the dotted line. None of that! Father Duguay told him that perhaps God was talking to him. Notice he said conditionally, “perhaps.” It is kind of like Samuel a few weeks ago thinking Eli called him and Eli kept telling him he didn’t call but told Samuel that the next time he heard the voice to say,
Speak Lord, for your servant is listening.
Kind of like some of us in a mechanical way said today,
If today you hear His voice, harden not your heart.
If God was speaking to this Moslem, Father Duguay was basically telling him not to harden his heart. He told the man that perhaps God was speaking to him and that God wanted him to go back home and tell his friends what he experienced and heard. He could have been living in France or Iran or Iraq, who knows, but Father told him that perhaps God wanted him to go and tell his friends about this and his friends would say it didn’t happen and the man would have to decide whether his friends were right or wrong and go from there. So, someone did speak to this man and he is beginning a journey to find out what this means.
Father Duguay spoke of the miracles that happen at Lourdes and people always connect them with Our Lady of Lourdes. He said that for every miracle connected to Our Lady of Lourdes and the water there, ten miracles happen every day or so with the great procession where the Blessed Sacrament is taken out of the Tabernacle and there is a huge candlelight procession and the people sing hymns. This happens every day there and Father said that more miracles happen in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament than those having anything to do with the water there.
This Gospel today shows that Christ wished to heal the sick. This unclean spirit…other translations call him a mute spirit, make this man who other wise could not speak, do so. It seems like the unclean spirit got it right.
What have you to do with us Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who You are, the Holy One of God!
If you take that middle sentence out and just look at the first and last sentence, it sounds like the unclean spirit has it right. But how about that part where they ask Jesus if He has come to destroy them? Jesus says again and again in the Gospels that He has come so that we may have life and have it to the fullest. If we turn off His light and disconnect our thoughts, words, and actions from God, we are in the dark. It is not the power company’s fault, it is not mom or dad’s fault, it is my fault for disconnecting my thoughts, words, and actions from God and now my light is darkness. It is really dark in the darkness!
When your light is darkness, how dark will the dark be? Christ founded His Church and His Church teaches us and so if we are wise we will listen to the Church. How many people could easily order something from Amazon or ebay? How many Catholics are going to go home and download “Deus Caritas Est,” and study it? How many people have a computer? If you don’t have a computer your son or daughter probably has one, so you can get it. It is the First Encyclical from Pope Benedict and it is terribly important. If we are wise we will pray about it and study it and learn our Faith every day. That gives Christ authority over us. If Christ is not given that authority over us then we are not floating and someone else has that authority over us and he is connected with darkness and death.
The fact is, Our Lord spoke with authority, not so He could make sure that no one is ever going to have a good time, People think that to be a good Catholic Christian, to be a follower of Jesus, means that someone will appear at your home everyday and say like the wicked witch,
“I understand someone over here is having fun and it must stop!
How weird. The people who think they are having fun being disconnected from God are actually running headlong over a cliff and they are taking many with them. The house is on fire and we aren’t even screaming “fire!” We aren’t even lifting a hand. Jesus is speaking to us through prayer and the study of our faith if only we will lift a finger and recognize His authority, which leads us through this valley of tears to eternal life, life without end, with Him.
The people were astonished at His teaching; for He taught them as one having authority and not as the scribes.
In the Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit
Amen