Pastoral Reflections

Pastoral Reflections 6-28-26 - The 13th Sunday in Ordinary Time Msgr. Don Fischer Download Original Airdate: June 28, 2020 2 Kings 4:8-11, 14-16A | Romans 6:3-4, 8-11 | Matthew 10:37-42   Oh God, who through the grace of adoption chose us to be children of light, grant, we pray, that we may not be wrapped in darkness of error but always be seen to stand in the bright light of truth.  Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.   In ordinary time, we’re going to relive the experience of one of the evangelists, one of the writers of the gospel, their experience of this moment that they had with God in history, these three years and then beginning their work as moving from disciples to apostles.   A disciple is a learner, someone who’s listening and learning and spending time with someone.  An apostle is the one who’s sent forth to do it, and so you’ll notice in this particular gospel of Matthew, it’s the first chapter that we’re — this tenth chapter, rather, is when Jesus is calling his disciples to do their work, and he calls them apostles.  “I’m sending you forth.”   So what I’m asking you to imagine with me is here is Jesus sending his disciples into the world to do their work.  He is no longer with them physically, will not be with them physically when they begin.  He is, in this particular passage, with them, but what he wants them to understand is the essence of what it is they’re going to be doing.  And if you go back to that earlier part in the gospel, you see what God is asking the disciples to do seems like an impossible thing.  “Gentlemen, I want you to go into the world, and I want you to heal the sick, raise the dead and bring life to people and somehow heal leprosy.”  Now, leprosy is a beautiful, not a beautiful, but an effective way of describing sin, leprosy, something that distorts us.  It deforms us.  So when Jesus is giving that responsibility to the disciples, I don't know what it would be like, but if you would hear somebody say that to you — but in a way, Jesus does say it to all.  “I want you to go into the world, and I want you to heal people and lift them out of darkness, lift them out of a place that we might call death.”  So the main thrust, it seems, the ministry that Jesus has given to his disciples and he’s giving to us, sending us out into the world, has everything to do with this set of readings.  So let me see if I can describe it for you, give you a sense of what it is you’re empowered to do.The first story is about a prophet who comes to a woman’s house.  He comes often.  This woman was obviously very impressed with this prophet Elisha, not Elijah.  It’s close.  I tend to mispronounce Elisha a little more just to separate him from Elijah, but anyway, she loves this man’s truth.  She loves spending time with him, and so she says to her husband, “Let’s create a space for him in our house.”  Well, just think of the image that is.  Here’s a woman touched by the truth.  She wants to create a space in her home, in her very soul, in her essence for this truth to take root, and so she creates a room for him.  And when that room is there, she has been longing for something in her life, and it’s to create new life.  And so she is like the symbol of all of us, longing to make a difference, longing to create life in the world, and so she has no son.  So he said, “I will give you a son.”  So here’s the prophet, who represents the truth, coming into a person who opens their heart to him, and when he dwells with them, he has a reward for their hospitality.  You will welcome a prophet.  You receive a prophet’s reward, and the reward is truth.  And the truth is something in her that produces life.  So the symbol is she has a son.  Now, if you follow this passage from Kings, it’s interesting, because one of the next things that happens is that, as he returns again and again, he comes back, and the son is born.  But then she sends word to him one day, and she said, “My son is dead.  He’s died.  Come and heal him.  Bring him back to life,” another aspect of what the truth is able to do.  And so he sends his servant.  “This is my rod, my authority.  I’ll send it through somebody else.”  That didn’t work.  So he goes, and he does this miraculous — bringing this man back to life, and what he does is he lies on top of him, his lips to his lips, his eyes to his eyes, his hands to his hands, his feet to his feet.  It’s a powerful image of someone containing some energy, some life force, and he’s giving it to another person.  He just doesn’t put his hand toward him, or he just doesn’t say the words, “Be healed,” really fascinating image.  So let’s take this image of this figure, a prophet, as the image of the truth — the truth.  What does it do?  Opens eyes to see what is real, what is true.  Produces life, because it overcomes darkness, and what is darkness?  Sin — sin.  So the second reading then focuses on the opposite of this great gift of light and truth, and that is sin and darkness.  And it’s interesting.  St. Paul is talking about this.  What he’s saying is that Christ went through something that we have to go through, and it’s a death.  And the death we have is the death that is — we all it change, being reborn, being remade.  What is it that this change involves?  Well, it’s a moving away from darkness.  So what is darkness?  Well, darkness is the absence of truth.  What is the absence of truth?  A lie.  How did sin enter into the world?  It was a lie.  A serpent is there, and he’s seducing Adam and Eve into believing something that’s not true.  “If you rely upon yourself and you rely upon your own decision-making qualities, if you want to know what’s right and what’s wrong and be the center of your life, well, eat of this tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”  It’s so interesting in that story, the minute you buy into a lie, something in you feels odd, feels strange.  You feel estranged from some source somewhere, and that’s exactly the effect of sin entering into the human race, was a sense of distance from God.  And the distance was, “I’m not worthy.  I’m not good enough.”  The minute you say, in your relationship with God, “I am going to earn his affection.  I’m going to earn his reward of eternal life.  I’m going to work for it, and I’m going to get it.  It’s going to be my task, and I can feel really good about having accomplished it,” that is the greatest of lies.  It’s not something we are called to do by a command from God to become holy and to do all these good things.  That’s probably the most insidious lie that’s out there, and it’s more about our human nature than it is about religion.  But religion buys into it.  So what is it?  What is it that God wants us to understand about this truth that you and I are called to engage ourselves with?  And when we see it for what it is, it reveals something that has been hidden, and then we have this new life.  So how do we imagine that happening?  Well, it took redemption for it to happen.  All through the Old Testament people have been listening to prophets trying to tell the truth, and they try to live it, and they never do succeed.  And they’re punished, and then they straighten up.  And then they forget about the punishment, and they fall back into sin.  So the Old Testament is filled with people who are seemingly unable to deal with this thing called sin, darkness, another word, again, illusion, half-truths, lies.  So what was needed?  A Savior, a Messiah, someone who comes that makes a big difference.  What is the difference?  Well, without going into exactly how redemption takes place, I want to talk about how it impacts us and how and how we’re to participate in it.  And it’s the most important thing to understand.  By the second paragraph of this gospel, it’s so beautiful.  When Jesus sends his disciples into the world to do work that seems way beyond human nature’s possibility, that’s the first piece of truth I want you to ponder.  When God is asking you to love, to forgive, to give life to people around you, to be a source of wisdom for them, he is not asking you to produce that wisdom or to produce that capacity to be a healer.  It’s not something you do.  It’s something you receive.  So listen to Jesus when he’s just given his disciples this incredible challenge to go out into the world and to heal it of darkness and illusion and lies.  He said, “If you receive me, whoever receives me receives the one who sent me.”  So Jesus is saying, “You watched me make Eucharist.  You watched me make my body and blood into something that I’m asking you to take in and dwell inside of you.”  It’s so clear that the thing that was not possible in the Old Testament that is possible in the New Testament is a life force that’s been given to you and to me, and that life force is the truth, life, enlightenment.  And when it comes into us, if we receive it, then we become a prophet, and we receive a prophet’s reward.  What’s a prophet’s reward?  Well, when you give life to someone, when you are a source of life for someone, when you feel the dignity and the value of being a person participating in this life force, you’re going to feel good.  You’re going to feel full.   You’re going to feel like there’s meaning and purpose, and the reward of the truth is light, enlightenment and life.  Whenever religion or anyone tells you that you’re no good and that you have to work harder and that you have to clean your act up and you have to do everything you can to make sure that you are pleasing to God, they’ve missed the point completely, because the main issue is how do you humbly receive the wisdom, the tree of life, light, truth?  How do you receive it, and then when you receive it, how do you allow it to flow through you?  And when it flows through you, you’re going to have everything you’ve ever wanted — everything.  So what I’m trying to say is, when Jesus is saying to his disciples, “If you love Mother or Father more than me, if you love son or daughter more than me, you’re not worthy of me.  Unless you take up your cross, you can’t be worthy of me.  Whoever finds life will lose it.  Whoever loses life —”  This whole — the word in there that I want you to pay attention to is worthiness.  It sounds like merit, doesn’t it?  “If you take up your cross, if you go through some really difficult, horrible experience of pain and suffering and humiliation, then I might consider taking care of you.”  No.  Taking up your cross is going through a radical transformation.  It feels like death.  We’re not asked to go through a crucifixion like Jesus went through and be humiliated by everyone.  That’s not the goal of Christianity.  The goal of Christianity is to go through an experience that is so transforming that at the other end of it you are somebody really different.  You are resurrected.  You have new life.  So the image is that we are engaged in work that is revealing the truth to us.  Our eyes are opened, and we change.  But the process of being changed by the truth is not just simply like being told — you know something you think you know, and you’re told, “No, that’s not it, and it’s something else.”  You go, “Oh, okay.  Now I’ve got it.”  No.  No, every time you’re living in a lie, you have a pattern of behavior in your life, a way of living, a way of seeing, a way of judging people, a way — whatever.  And when the truth comes in and you find out, “Wait a minute.  I’m not here to become the best believer.  I’m not here to become better than somebody else.  I’m not here to impress people with what I can do and who I am.  I’m here as a servant, and that kind of change, if your pattern of life has been to produce something beautiful for someone else in your life and to win affection and attention, that’s a radical shift.  If it doesn’t command death, I don't know what I can call it.  You need to die to all those patterns.  It’s really difficult, but it doesn’t demand that you do it.  It demands that you allow it to happen.  You allow God’s truth and light to come into your life, and it has its own strength and power.  It will change you.  It will change you.So the image of being worthy is more like God is saying, “If you go through this, you’ll be worthy of me,” meaning, “You’ll be of worth to me.  You’ll be valuable to me.”  You’re already valuable in the term of God sees you, sees me, loves us as we are, unconditionally.  We can’t imagine what it’s like to be loved that way, but that’s what God wants us to feel when he says, “Receive me.  Receive my love.”  We have this sense of our dignity, our value.  When someone loves us, it’s an amazing experience, and in turn, we’re willing then to become whatever that transforming love creates.  And what it will create is someone who is there to be an instrument of bringing this same mysterious, new life to another person, and so if you can feel it with me in saying Jesus comes into our life and says, “I want to dwell inside of you.  If I’m inside of you, my Father is inside of you.  If we’re inside of you, then we are the source of the wisdom and the ability and the capacity you have to change the people around you.  And you are so — it is so important you do that, because then you are really valuable to me.”  It’s almost like God is saying, “I need you to take care of the people around you.  I want to take care of them, but I need you to receive me to be able to do that for them.”  Does that sound more exciting, more wonderful, more life-giving than being a person who turns out to be the best person in the room and has everybody’s admiration and everybody says, “You’re so great.  You’re so wonderful.  You’re beyond anybody I’ve ever seen”?  The ego loves that.  The heart can’t even fathom it.  What the heart wants is to be of value, and to know that you are a source of bringing light and life and healing and lifting someone out of the darkness of depression and fear, you can do that if you receive.  Whoever receives is the key.  That’s the work.  The lie is perform.  The truth is receive, and what an amazing difference that makes.  So we are all apostles.  We are all called to be instruments of God’s grace to the world, and it’s not about work.  It’s about a gift and receiving it.    Father, open our eyes to see you as you are, to know your intention, your plan, your desire to use us, fill us with all the gifts that those around us are in longing for and to give us the enthusiasm and the excitement about being a channel for you.  And let us feel the joy that comes from watching those around us that we love enter into a place of greater wholeness and light and peace.  And we ask this through Christ our Lord, amen.  

Pastoral Reflections 6-14-26 - The 11th Sunday in Ordinary Time Msgr. Don Fischer Download Original Airdate: June 18, 2023 Exodus 19:2-6a | Romans 5:6-11 | Matthew 9:36—10:8   Oh God, strength of those who hope in you, graciously hear our pleas, and since without you mortal frailty can do nothing, grant us always the help of your grace that, in following your commands, we may please you by our resolve and our deeds.  Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.   Somehow I’m struck today with the idea that I’ve been looking at these stories over and over and over again, 56 years of preaching and teaching from really a very small part of what the Bible is all about, in terms of the readings that are chosen for the liturgy, but one thing it’s consistently called to my mind is the way in which this story evolves slowly.  And that slow evolution that we see in the relationship between God and his people is a very, very good way of understanding our personal relationship with him in our own personal lifespan.  In the beginning, it’s clear that God needed to speak to his people.  He needed connection, and so he took them out of a place that they’d got themselves into because of their human nature.  It’s pretty clear that we, before we kind of figure the world out, we get into a lot of trouble, because we don’t really see the whole picture.  And so God is slowly revealing to human beings the relationship that he has with us and begins, first and foremost, by the simple invitation on his part that he wants a relationship with human beings, and he wants it to be personal, and he wants to reveal himself to them.  And so you see him doing the thing that is basically an archetype for the whole story of our relationship with God.  He takes us from a place of slavery, bondage, not being able to do what we want, not being able to become who we need to be, and says, “I want to tell you that you are special to me.  This group of you, I want to start with a small community, and you are special.  And I’m going to take care of you.  I just want you to come with me, away from where you are into something brand new.”  So the story begins, and then as you see it unfold, you realize that, in the process, God took them to a place where they were asked to perform for him.  They had to follow his rules and regulations.  If they did that, he would stay with them.  If not, he would leave them, but then they were still helpless.  As the next reading of Romans starts out, in their helplessness of being able to follow what they were supposed to do for fear of punishment was never enough, so they found themselves still struggling.  So there had to be something more given to them, and that was called redemption, because the sin that’s in us is always isolating and separating us.  And so he said, “I’ve got to do something to break down this separation that people feel with me, because they fail, and they can’t seem to keep my commandments.  So I will do something.  I will enter into their life and radically change the whole system.  They no longer have to earn anything from me.  I have a covenant with them I will never ever break.”  And then when Jesus comes, the fulness is a message, and he’s looking at the crowds, and he says, “My heart is moved,” because they’re still troubled and abandoned.  That’s so much an experience that most of us have even now, today.  The world is troubling, and we don’t know that there’s anything there for us that’s going to take care of us and protect us.  We feel like we’re abandoned by systems that were there to protect us and keep us safe, and so we’re lost.  Then he says something so clearly.  He said, “I am going to send people out into your midst, because I’ve discovered that I can’t save you at a distance.  I have to come in the form of a human being.”  And that’s what he did when he became the Savior of the world, but he did that as a way of saying, “This is what I need you to be for me.  I cannot and will not and do not intend to save these people directly just through me but through me in you.  And so I have to tell you that I’m giving you the same power that you saw in Jesus.”  And when you think about it, you say, “Well, I haven’t felt that power that much.  Come on.  I still struggle with things, and I can’t make things perfect.”  But no, what he’s simply saying is, “Look, I’m sending you these disciples.  This is the way I’m going to work from now on.  I’m going to send people to you who are different, who have an ability to do things.”  When he describes the things that they’re asked to do, it’s amazing when he asks those to pay attention to what he’s going to give to people.  It’s too much in a way.  He says, “You will open the eyes of the blind. You’ll help people be free of demons.  You’ll raise people from the dead.  You’ll heal every disease.”  Do you know anybody that’s doing that right now?  Yeah, I think I do.  Maybe not in that direct way and maybe not in that literal way, but raising people from the dead is not necessarily different than lifting someone out of a dark, deep depression.  And opening people’s eyes is not anything more, maybe, than being a model for them so they can see who they could be that they might have what we have, because they see it in us as something attractive, less troubled, less abandoned.  All kinds of ways he’s doing this work, and that’s the task, to not only be open to the way in which God works through the people around us but also how he works in the circumstances around us, in the direction we see the world going.  If you really have a broader sense of history than just right here and now, you’ll realize that every dark, horrible time creates something new and exciting and different.  Change is violent, in a sense.  It’s difficult and hard on us.  When we see people around us giving in to that spirit of abandonment and troubled and anxious and dark, we are crying out, in a sense, for others around us to reach us and speak to us and bring us something that we need.  It’s believing in a plan, which is a covenant plan, not a contractual plan.  He is saying, “No matter what you do, no matter how far you go, I’m going to work as hard as I can,” and that is a lot to say, when God says as hard as he can, “In the lives of other people to touch you and free you and work with you.”  That’s both exciting, when you think about the day-to-day things you’re experiencing, not only from the perspective of what you might be receiving, but from an even more exciting perspective of what you might be giving.  And do you think you have that power in you, from you, in you, alone in you?  No, that’s where we get bogged down.  We’re not used to allowing power to work through us without it being connected to us.  Our egos are just too quick to grab hold of that and say, “Wow, I can do anything.”  We can’t do anything, but we can do everything we need to do if God is in us.  And that’s always the heart of this message of God speaking to his people, from the very beginning of the call of Abraham until this very moment.  He’s been working on this relationship with us where we’re co-workers in the vineyard, and we’re making things happen.  And if you look at the broader picture, we are better off now than we’ve ever been, even though there’s a lot of division and a lot of problems.  Problems are not the problem.  Problems are the solution, because in working through them, that’s when God shows himself more powerfully than in any other time.  Good times are wonderful.  Peaceful times are absolutely essential.  Happiness is core need, but struggle is equally essential, equally important, and it’s the meat of this work we have as spiritual creatures in this world.  It’s the drink.  It’s the food.  It’s him in us.  That’s the key, and without it, we stay abandoned and hopeless.  Amen.   Father, help us to remember always that your plan for us is not so much that we grow in a personal perfection but rather we enter more fully into the participation of you saving the world.  Bless us with this hope.  Bless us with this kind of sense that there is meaning in all that we do, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.  

Pastoral Reflections 3-22-26 - The 5th Sunday of Lent Msgr. Don Fischer Download Orginal Airdate: March 26, 2023 Ezekiel 37:12-14 | Romans 8:8-11 | John 11:1-45   By your help we beseech you, oh Lord our God.  May we walk eagerly in the same charity with which, out of love for the world, your Son handed himself over to death.  Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God forever and ever, amen.   Today’s gospel completes the five major teachings we find in the season of Lent.  In the early church, these gospels were used, because people would be baptized on Easter, and so in a way, you could say that these were the gospels chosen for a person who was entering into a life with God would have to understand these before they could be baptized.  And they are powerful teachers.  And one of the things I want to start with is that we see very much the notion in these set of readings a progression of how we are to understand our faith, and by understanding it, I don’t mean figuring it out or describing it perfectly.  It’s a mysterious way of being in the world.  It’s mystical, and it starts off with just describing who it is that Jesus is, a human being filled with divinity who comes into the world, who pockets his divinity, in a sense, and then goes through a process that we all go through in order to fulfill our destiny here.  And Jesus’ destiny was to be there for other people, invite them into being who they really are.The Old Testament was very, very clear and, in a way, very over-simplified and not very complex about the way we would relate to God.  He will give us a rule, a law.  We will do everything he says; 613 laws pretty much covers everything you do during the day, so I know I’m doing what God wants when I follow his rules and regulations.  If I break those, he’ll punish me.  So I don’t want to be punished, so I have a motive to do what he wants, and then when I die, I will go and live with ⎯ the bosom of Abraham was what they thought, but let’s just say that they would go to a better place.  It's not that simple, and so what does God reveal through Jesus?  He brings someone into the world who is God, and he does this by a miraculous birth so that we know that Jesus is not simply a human being but uniquely connected to God.  And what we’re taught throughout the New Testament is that Jesus is God, and of course that gets very confusing.  So back to my image of the danger of oversimplifying our religious life, our spiritual life as a simple choice between good and evil.  Jesus awakes in us a new nuance into the somewhat binary world that we live in, in that it’s not about good and evil.  It’s about darkness and light, truth and lies.  Interesting how different that makes things, because we look at this first story, and what we see in Jesus, the God/man ⎯ now, when I use the word even God, be careful, because the essence of God is not that he is a male father figure.  He’s not male; he’s not female; he’s not a dad.  He never named himself.   He only invited us to begin to know him by using images that we already knew and take them to a new level, but one of the things that’s interesting about God giving himself a name.  He said the best name that I think we should all think we are, and he says, “I am.  Who am I?  I am who I am.”  So let’s take this image of Jesus coming into the world, who is fully human, fully divine.  The union between the two is the major teaching of this set of readings.  God is not separate from you.  He is in you, and he is not a male figure who’s a daddy, but he is being  fulness.  He is being.  And when you look at yourself ⎯ I don't know if you do this, but I look in the mirror, and I say, “Well, I was a young man.  Now I’m an old man.”  So my image of myself is I’m an old man.  Or do I think I’m a white man, therefore I’m not a black man, I’m different or that I’m short or tall or whatever?  Think of it.  We have a label for ourselves that is so limiting and really kind of insane when we look at what God is trying to say to us.  It’s that every one of us is a reflection of who God is.  We all participate in beingness of being human.  To see each other as human beings created by God, filled with Spirit would do away with all kinds of racism and illusions and lies that we’re told about other people.  So we start off with an image then of what it means to be human.  We’re human and divine, and then we think about, “Well, what are we here for?  To obey everything that God tells us?”  No, Jesus reveals to his disciples on that second Sunday, we’re here to be enlightened, to be the fulfillment of the Old Testament and not just to be enlightened but to be a light that enlightens other people.  Darkness is illusion, is lies.  We lie about who we are.  We lie about other people.  We lie about what the world ⎯ the world will tell us things about itself.  It’s not the world.  The world is a place for beings to exist and to be engaged in a relationship with one another so intimate and so connected that the only way we can sort of begin to describe that is that we are light.  And this light that is given to us, this truth of who we are is like a lifegiving water inside of us.  We thirst for it.  We long for it.  When we see ourselves as isolated and separated and less than or more than, we’re in an illusion, in a lie, and none of that satisfies us.  What does satisfy us?  And so we’re told that what God has come to do in our life is to give us this understanding, this lifegiving water, which then opens our eyes, and when our eyes are open, the gospel today makes so much more sense.  Then we have life.Look at the first reading.  Way back in the Old Testament, God was using these images of light and life.  He’s looking at the Israelite people, and he’s saying, “You live in your humanity.  You think you’re human.  That’s all you think you are, a person, but you’re so much more than that.  And what I want to do is pour something into you, an awareness, a Spirit of understanding, a kind of wisdom that you, when you’re only human, you are like dried up bones in graves.  You’re not really fully alive.  So what I want for you to be is more in tune with the fact that I’m putting my Spirit in you.”  He said it at the very beginning.  “I’m putting my Spirit in you.”   Then the second reading is Paul talking about living in the Spirit.  God lives in you.  God lived in Jesus.  Jesus is the model.  God lives in us.  If you see that, you’ll see life and light.  So today’s readings are really wonderfully in ⎯ how would I say this?  They have the quality of awakening us to something that is so essential, and if you look at all five of these gospels, you can’t miss it.  And so what is Jesus doing?  He is doing the very thing that human beings are made to do.  We are ⎯ we are beings made to bring life into other beings, and that life is something that is absolutely indestructible.  It never dies.  It never fades.  It always is there.  So once he’s opened the eyes of the blind and seeing God more clearly who he is, we see him as the one who destroys death.  There is no more darkness.  Only there is always light in darkness.  Notice the difference between the image of good and bad and light and darkness, because light can life in darkness.  You can light a match around a circle of people in total darkness, and you see they are enlightened, but there’s still darkness all around them.  The world is filled with light and darkness, death and life.  And when Jesus is in this beautiful gospel, you see him, at one point, weeping.  The shortest line in scripture, “Jesus wept.”  He only wept two times in his life.  What did he weep over?  One was the temple, and one was this moment when everybody around him was wailing and crying, and the people that he loved the most, when he wasn’t there to accomplish the task that he hoped they would know he could do, they kept saying, “If you were just here, this wouldn’t have happened.”  Martha, “If you were just here, this wouldn’t have happened.”  And maybe his weeping and his deep ⎯ he was perturbed, which is a deep anxiety.  Maybe he’s just, as a human being, thinking, “They still haven’t gotten it.  I’ve been with them.  I’ve shown them this.  I’ve done all kinds of miracles.  They simply won’t look at it.  They can’t see it.”  And maybe he just felt the wave of, “It’s not going to work.”  As a human being, he could say that, because he’s human.  And so he shouts it.  He shouts out, “Lazarus, be a symbol for these people of who I am and what I am in them when they have me in them, and it’s you’re no longer tied up.”  I love the image at the end of this gospel when Jesus is looking at Lazarus, and he’s all wrapped up in all these kind of things.  And he doesn’t say, “Someone unwrap him.”  No, “Lazarus, you now are an image of who all these people are, and you have the ability to unwrap, untie all those things that keep you from being who you are.  You are a being.  You’re neither male or female or old or young or tall or short, and you connect with every other living being.”  Think of that.  Our destiny is to be belonging to one another.  How can we condemn or judge or criticize someone else when they are ourselves?  Why would Jesus say, “When you forgive your brother, you’re forgiving yourself?”  This oneness is the key message of the gospel, being conscious, aware.  I am who I am.  I am in everyone, and they are in me.  And in that process of that union and communion, we become, together, who God intended us to be, his body.  It’s called the church, not a building, not a denomination, but people filled with Spirit.  Amen.   Father, we so often don’t really see who you are, and we see religion as a burden, something that keeps us from being who we want to be or what we want to do.  Just free us from all the lies that we’ve been told about who you are and who we are so we can be free to truly enter into this communion, this union with you and with each other, with nature.  It’s what we’re made for.  It’s the only thing that can bring us the joy and the peace of the thing that you taught us to believe in called the kingdom of God.  Amen.  

Pastoral Reflections 3-8-26 - The 3rd Sunday of Lent Msgr. Don Fischer Download Original Airdate: March 12, 2026Exodus 17:3-7 | Romans 5:1-2,5-8 | John 4:5-42   O God, author of every mercy and of all goodness, who in fasting, prayer and almsgiving have shown us a remedy for sin, look graciously on this confession of our lowliness, that we, who are bowed down by our conscience, may always be lifted up by your mercy. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever    

Pastoral Reflections 2-22-26 - The 1st Sunday of Lent Msgr. Don Fischer Download Original Airdate: February 26, 2023Genesis 2:7-9; 3:1-7 | Romans 5:12-19 | Matthew 4:1-11   Grant, almighty God, through the yearly observances of holy Lent, that we may grow in understanding of the riches hidden in Christ and, by worthy conduct, pursue their effects.    Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.   We have begun a very, very important season called Lent.  The word means springtime, and in the opening prayer, we asked God to bless us with the benefits that anything we do during Lent, the observances of holy Lent, might have an impact on us.  And it’s so clear in that opening prayer we’re saying, “The observances that we choose in Lent are there to help us grow in understanding of who you are and what is hidden in you.”  So even though there’s a long tradition of choosing things that are difficult or painful, being without certain comforts during Lent is beneficial.  Well, it is if it means that we’re creating more space, more time for reflection.  Who is this Christ?  What is he trying to teach me about my life and about the way I live that would engage me in a more intimate relationship with God the Father?So let’s look at this first set of readings and see if it doesn’t set a tone for something that we could hold onto through the whole season, and that is the difference between life and death.  We have a choice, to live the life that God has called us to or to reject it and pick something else, something that is more attuned to our lower nature and to live that, which is a kind of death.  So let’s go back to the beginning.  I love that this is the beginning, first Sunday of this particular season, and we go back to the very beginning of God’s relationship with human beings, the Garden of Eden.  In it we have a story.  We all know that story very well, but it’s funny.  This story has a lot of things added to it that aren’t really there.  For example, there’s nothing about an apple in this story.  It’s about fruit, but we’ve made it an apple.  And most people will talk about Satan in the form of a snake that is tempting Adam and Eve, but it’s not a snake at all.  It’s the most cunning of human beings but not even a human being, an animal.  So let’s say it’s the most cunning part of our lower nature, and the serpent comes to the woman and questions what command that God had given Adam Eve not to eat of the tree in the middle of the garden, though that’s just implied, and not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  What is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil?  Well, the more I reflect upon it, the more I think about it, it’s a kind of desire to become like gods.  At least that is what’s told to them by this cunning animal spirit in all of us.  It’s saying, “If you really want to, you can use God, and you can use everything in you to make you into this strong, autonomous being that has power over people.  Wouldn’t you like to be like God, that kind of God?”  I’m sure that was the most primitive sense of who God was.  And so the woman thought, “Well, maybe this would be good for wisdom.  Maybe ⎯ it certainly looks beautiful.  It’s good for nourishment,” logic working its way in.  But just think for a minute.  She’s choosing to eat the apple, because she thinks it will bring the wisdom of God inside of her, and you’ll notice that, when God talked about the tree in the center of the garden, he said, “Don’t even think about eating that.  Don’t even touch it, because if you do, you’ll die.  And what is the tree of life?  It’s wisdom, the hidden knowledge of who God really is and who you really are, and you can’t take that in now, because you’re not evolved enough to deal with it.”  So we have this very strong image that, in the first story we have about God’s relationship with us, we see this warning about death.  “Be careful what you choose.”  And notice that the cunning animal instinct says, “You know what?  You break the rules, and your eyes will be opened, and you’ll be like God.  And it will be wonderful.”  And then just a few lines later they broke with the commandment of God.  Their eyes were opened, and they were ashamed.  They were naked.  They covered themselves.Could this story be the story about the choice to evolve as God intends us to or just simply bypass the whole process and demand that we become almost omniscient and able to do anything we want?  Hubris, pride, that’s part of it, but it’s also a wonderful story about the evolution of the human nature into a being that has some kind of inner moral code that, when you break it, your body reacts.  It’s interesting.  Guilt, you feel bad about something you did.  Shame, your whole body feels it.  Somehow you’re the sin.  So maybe we can see very much in this story that the most important thing we learn from this first encounter of God with his people is he wants them to grow slowly, naturally and to evolve into being not like God, being a god, but being in God and being with God.  So now if we look at the beginning of ⎯ we look at this story as the beginning of the Old Testament.  Let’s look at the beginning of the New Testament, and the beginning of the New Testament is similar.  A temptation takes place, and so we find ourselves, after many centuries of struggling to become who God calls us to be ⎯ God enters the world to fulfill his promises in the Old Testament and to reveal fully who he is, to give his true wisdom.  We’re ready now to enter a new stage of existence.  No longer are we dependent solely on ourselves and our struggle to do what we’re told, but now we’re entering into a world where we’re going to become someone, not by being like God, being like him in the sense of doing what he does, but being with him and becoming something brand new.  So look at Jesus.  He’s tempted by now not the highest form of our animal nature, but no, he is directly confronting evil.  So it’s the devil that’s there, and he asks him three things.  “Command these loaves to become bread, or jump off this tower to prove that God is there to help you.”  Or again he says, “Why don’t you look at the world as it is and know that you could run the whole thing?  You are so wise and so talented and so creative.”  Think about that.  Every one of them is a call to truth.  It’s like a temptation not to be in tune with the way things really are.  Jesus says, “The only thing I ever long for is the truth, the bread of God.  God’s presence in me is my bread.  It’s not something outside of me that makes me strong.  It is my interior presence of God that offers me the insight into what the world is really like and who God is and who I am.”  And then if you look at very much the second one, it’s so easy that he's saying, “Look, I don’t doubt in any way, shape or form that this is taking place.  I have absolute trust that this process that I’m engaged in, no matter what it turns into or how it works.  I’m going to believe that it’s the unfolding of what must be.”  What an incredible decision for Jesus to make at the beginning of his ministry.  “I want nothing but the truth.  I want to live through whatever is happening to me and accept it, knowing it’s bringing me to truth.”  And then at last, with that truth so much coursing through his veins as God’s Spirit courses through his whole body, he’s saying, “I am dedicated to a life not of being served the world, but I’m dedicated to a life of service.  I want the truth.  I want to trust.  I want to be in service.  I want human beings to be awakened to what you’ve awakened in me, and I’m living it.  And I want to teach it.”  And the most amazing thing about Jesus is he spoke less in words and more in who he was.  That’s our challenge during Lent, to be one, to resonate out of your heart that you are longing for truth.  You’re longing for things to be understood in your heart, that they must be, and you are open and growing in your ability to serve.  That’s our season, and that’s our work.  Amen.So in the first reading, from Zephaniah, there’s something there that struck me, and that is he says, “For those of you who observe a law, you can seek justice, seek humility.”  And then he just says, “Perhaps God may not be angry with you.”  The reason I say that is because, if you create a rigid system of laws and rules and you break one, you have this sense that God is angry, and God isn’t wanting a relationship like that with you.  He doesn’t want you tiptoeing around and making sure you do every single thing right so that he doesn’t get angry, because he's not ⎯ that’s not his major longing with human beings.  It’s not to be their corrector and their judge and their punisher.  No, he wants them to be intimately engaged with him, and that intimate engagement is really fascinating, because it’s not just for us that he wants to be a part of our lives.  But unless he’s a part of our lives, we will never be able to be what we need to be for other people.  In other words, the gift that God’s presence brings to you and me, the capacity to love, to heal, to save, to free, all that, when it comes into us, it becomes this thing that is there not just for us but is for those around us.  God longs for a relationship with us, because it can radically change the relationship we have with each other, and so it’s interesting in Zephaniah when God says, “I will always have a remnant in your midst.  There will always be a people humble and lowly that take refuge in my name, and they do no wrong.  They speak no lies, no deceit in them.  They take care of their people, their flocks, and they are protected.”  So that seems to me that God will promise not necessarily that one set of unique individuals will never fall into the trap of sin.  It just means that there’s always someone around that has this gift within them.  That’s God’s promise.  If he decided that he wanted us to be co-workers with bringing life and light into people’s life, then it would seem that, as he promises his presence with us, he’ll also present ⎯ there’s people around you if you can find them.  You’ll know them when you’re with them, because there’s something that resonates from them that feels so right, so good.  There will always be someone there for you, and it’s your work to be open to them.  Now, it’s reiterated in the reading from St. Paul to the Corinthians.  He’s saying that the whole notion of God wanting a relationship with us is based in the fact that we are not enough, that we need to be humble.  We’re not the most powerful.  We’re not of noble birth.  We’re not always wise.  We’re not always the strongest.  We’re not always the best, but that is the way God intended us to be so that, when we admit to that, when we realize that and allow him to then do something within us, then we are close to what his message is, because the message of Jesus is to reinterpret the relationship the Old Testament was guilty of producing within people.  And by guilty I mean that they were constantly told they had to be obedient, and they had to do everything that God called them to do in order for him to be on their side in battles or there for them or making sure their crops were raised correctly.  So we listen to this beautiful prayer.  It’s really kind of a prayer that he’s offering to this crowd, and then he seems to gather his disciples over maybe afterwards, or maybe it was during it.  But it seems like he was almost teaching this to the crowd certainly, but he really needed his disciples to understand it.  So he saw the crowd, but then he calls his disciples close to him, like he’s saying, “Listen to this.”  And the first thing he says is that, “Everyone who understands who they are, for them to know they are blessed, which means somehow in sync with me, in relationship, a healthy relationship with me, they have to be poor in spirit.”  And that simply means that they’re not enough.  Their spirit, human spirit is not enough.  Divine spirit is what human spirit is made to be entangled and intwined with so that we can be the people that the kingdom of heaven is asking us to be, and remember, the kingdom of heaven is not something that’s happening later.  It’s happening now.  The kingdom of heaven is now.  Jesus would say that.  It’s like the whole world continues to be created toward this goal, and we keep moving, moving closer to what we might call heaven or a place of peace, a place of wonder, a place of beauty.  We make mistakes, and we keep trying to learn from our mistakes.  So we have the reminder that you have to be poor in spirit, and then you have to mourn.  And I think the mourning is everything to do with facing everything in you and everything in the world that isn’t the way you want it to be.  It’s sad that there’s such violence and discord and wars in this world.  And if you can mourn that, you’re blessed, meaning you don’t expect it not to be there, but you know how to somehow suffer it with humanity so that that suffering brings about a new relationship in a situation that will not fall into the trap that causes these conflicts and this pain in the world.  And I love the image of meekness, because the meek are those people who don’t have a clear, perfect answer for everything.  They are not falling into the trap of Christianity that is constantly oversimplified by preachers that just simply say, “It’s as simple as stop sinning.  God is good.  You’re bad.  God will save you if you stop doing what you’re doing.”  Meekness is softening your whole notion of all these nice, neat explanations.  What you have to do is hunger, hunger and thirst for God and hunger and thirst for right relationships with people, and when you do that, you’re going to be filled with this capacity to resonate from your heart mercy, wisdom, peace, all the things promised in this wonderful set of readings.  And then he must have looked directly at his disciples eyes and said, “But you know what?  One day you’re going to be really persecuted for my sake, and you are going to go through something awful.  And they’ll be persecuting you, utter every kind of evil falsely against you, but when you take a stand in this world with this new vision of who I am and what I’m calling them to do, it’s going to be rejected and resisted intensely.”  He doesn’t go so far as to say, “And all of you will be murdered except for one.”  This isn’t something that’s just sweetness and light.  To live the way that the Beatitudes calls us to live is a way to be open to the reality of the world, finding the peace that is your inheritance, but being a peace giver, a lover, a forgiver, and at times, the victim of misunderstanding and even hatred.  God bless you.   Father, bless this season with rich experiences that awaken in us the truth of who you are and what you’ve come to teach.  Lead us away from places that create and emptiness, a darkness, a kind of death, and lead us into the light of your truth.  And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.  

Pastoral Reflections 2-8-26 - The 5th Sunday in Ordinary Time Msgr. Don Fischer Download Original Airdate: February 5, 2023Isaiah 58:7-10 | 1 Corinthians 2:1-5 | Matthew 5:13-16   Keep your family safe, oh Lord, with unfailing care that, relying solely on the hope of heavenly grace, they may be defended always by your protection.  Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God forever and ever, amen.   This set of readings carries a beautiful message of light and life.  I love the opening prayer, because it started with the idea that we are here in relationship with people, and God, who has care for us, interest in how our life goes, he looks at our family, the people that are in our life with us and asks us simply to rely on something called grace ⎯ grace, unmerited love, presence, care, attention from God and that he gives us enormous protection from something that the first reading talks about.  And I love this image, because it’s so real in my life and in many of your lives, and that is this thing called gloom or darkness.  I don't know how exactly to describe it, but one way I could is to say it’s about anxiety and about fear and about dread and even depression.  So when we think about what God asks us to do and we think about why we should follow him, when we aren’t in union with him, when we’re not in the place that he calls us to be, there will be a sign that there’s something missing, and it is often anxiety and fear and shame.  And it’s just a sign to us, like any corruption in any institution says things need to change, things need to be different, and maybe our relationship to God has to be radically different, because so often we’re doing what we think we have to do in order for God to love us.  We have to clean up our act, do the right thing, stop doing bad things.  And sometimes homilies do nothing more than give us good advice as to how to act, but when you listen to carefully to the insights of scripture, it really isn’t talk about doing as much as it’s talking about being.  Who are you?  For the thing that is overarching in this particular set of readings, I can say that who we are is someone who is dedicated and in need of a relationship with God that is real, that is tangible, that feels different.  Life is different when you’re in it with someone, and when you’re with the one who’s created you and created the world and is in charge of it, there is a really wonderful chance that you will not be caught in darkness and gloom.  How do you know you’re with him?  What is it he’s asking you to do or to be?  Well, he uses images, and that’s really important, but the images are always more than what they seem on the surface.  So here he’s saying, in Isaiah, God is saying, “I want you to be attentive to the needs of the people around you.  If they’re hungry, I want you to feed them.  If they’re oppressed and homeless, if they’re drifting and have no place that they feel is protecting them, do something to help them feel protected, feel enclosed in a safe place.  And if they’re naked,” meaning if they don’t have a role or a place in the world, because clothing often depicts a certain office that you have, a police uniform, a collar on a priest, a beautiful dress on someone who’s not going out to do something like the market but going to something special.  Clothes, in a way, have a way of saying, “This is who I’m about.  This is what I’m doing.  This is my persona in this particular case.”  So when we see this promise in Isaiah that, if you listen to God’s desire, first and foremost, to do these things for you, then you will do them for others, and the sign that he’s not doing them for you is this darkness, and he’ll remove it.  And the interesting thing of the sign that it’s removed from you, that you’re no longer feeling that you don’t have a place, that you’re somehow not enough, that you don’t know what you’re called to do, you don’t have a team of people around you that support you, then you’re going to be negative.  And you know what it’s like to have a negative person in your midst.  They’re constantly feeling ⎯ you feel oppressed, and you listen to them accuse everyone of bad choices and misinformation and conspiracies.  It’s malicious speech that just pours out of you, because somehow you’re not in touch with who you are.  Most of the complaining we do about other people is what we really are afraid is happening within us.  So the first reading says, “Look, there’s something you have to allow God to do for you if you are going to be able to do it for others.”  And I want to talk more about what it is that God offers you and me.  The two images that are so strong in this set of readings is a belief in who God is first and foremost, and that’s what we see in St. Paul.  I used this particular passage ⎯ it’s really interesting to me.  I used this when I had my first job of being in charge of a community.  I’d been an associate pastor for six years, and I was made chaplain of the University of Dallas, and I was terrified.  I was on my own, and I didn’t know how to do ministry with students.  I’d never had that ⎯ I was a student at once.  I had a chaplain that was deeply impactful in my life, but I didn’t know what to do, and I didn’t think I had enough wisdom or enough strength to do it.  So I immediately gravitated to this image of Paul being a person who said, “Look, I’m not a really smart guy, and I don’t have a lot of wisdom.”  And I was going to be surrounded by intellectual people at the University of Dallas, and I thought, “Do I have anything to say that is smart, wise?”  And all of a sudden, it made clear ⎯ Paul made it clear to me, is that I’m not here to talk in perfect sentences and perfect grammar and perfect insight and perfect, well-crafted sentences.  I’ve come to offer something, and what I offer is my experience of Christ and Christ crucified.  And what is Christ crucified for Paul, and what does he see in God so clearly that he never saw before and it caused his conversion?  That was the crucifixion.  God forgave sin through the act of Jesus dying on the cross so that Paul could be drawn into a religion that he felt and knew that he sinned against.  And so he’s saying, “I can witness that.  I can’t maybe articulate it like I’d like to, but I can witness the fact that I walk around being who I am because of a God who has taken me in in my imperfection, in my darkness, and he is leading me, and he is asking me to be a light to the world.”  That’s what we’re asked to be to each other, a light, the light of life.The gospel gives us two images of how we can imagine what this gift is like and what God gives us and what we’re asked to give to another.  So Jesus talking to his disciples about their ministry, he’s not talking about how you start a homily and start a talk and then do this conclusion, you visit each house three, four times.  He doesn’t give you things to do.  He’s saying, “Here’s what I want you to believe.  I’ve given you something.  In fact you are something if you’ll just open your mind and your heart to being who I’ve called you to be.  You are salt.”  And what I love about salt, when he says, “Now, be sure you don’t lose this,” he’s saying, by using salt ⎯ salt doesn’t lose its seasoning.  You can take salt and pick up a piece of salt that’s been on the salt for ten years, and it’s still salt.  So there’s something about saying, “You have to be salt to the earth and don’t let that salt ever lose its taste.”  Well, the only way you can do that is to not use salt, and what does salt do?  It has two roles.  It enhances the flavor of something.  If you put it on spinach, it doesn’t make the spinach salty necessarily as much as it makes it more tasting like spinach.  It’s like salt makes things more of what they are.  What a beautiful image of who we want to be for each other.  Help people to be who they really are.  And then it is a preservative.  It preserves things.  It keeps things alive, from being ⎯ free of decay, darkness, gloom.  So Jesus is giving his disciples, in this first image, a beautiful way of imagining what it means to be his follower.  “Stay with me.  Watch me salt people.  Watch me do something that brings people into a place where they are being protected against that which would destroy them.”  And then he says, “Another thing you are is light.”  And this one is so rich, because it’s all about being enlightened.  Enlightenment is consciousness.  It is an awareness of the reality of the mystery of God in a way that makes total sense and infuses itself into everything you do.  It’s not just an idea.  It’s not just a direction of what to do.  It’s an experience.  To be enlightened is to have light in you.  To have light in you means that you’ve accepted your darkness as an impossible thing for you to remove, and yet you want it removed.  So you open your heart to and your mind to enlightenment, and when you are enlightened, it is not for you to go in a closet and feel how wonderful the light is.  No, your light is to shine before others so that they can see something.  And notice it doesn’t say so they can see your good deeds, just you, but to see your good deeds and then, in the process of seeing deeds, to glorify your Heavenly Father, because he’s the source of all your good deeds, all your good works, all your good intentions, all the resonance of light and life that comes from you that helps the gloom and the darkness of another to be dispelled in the most beautiful and wonderful way.  God bless you.   Father, you give light.  You give life.  You give us a spirit that awakens the richness and the beauty of everything we see and everyone we encounter.  Help us be aware of this great gift.  Don’t let us wallow in gloom, but fill us with enthusiasm.  Fill us with you, God, resonating through us, and let us feel the joy that is at the heart of the life you’ve called us to.  And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.  

Pastoral Reflections 1-25-26 - The 3rd Sunday in Ordinary Time Msgr. Don Fischer Download Original Airdate: January 22, 2023Isaiah 8:23—9:3 | 1 Corinthians 1:10-13, 17 | Matthew 4:12-23   Almighty, everliving God, direct our actions according to your good pleasure that, in the name of your Beloved Son, we might be found in good works.  Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God forever and ever, amen.   Every time we begin this ordinary time, we go through the life of Jesus, the transition from the Old Testament to the New Testament, and there’s a wonderful way of trying to pay attention to the radical difference between the old and the new.  And it’s so important that that be the focus of the beginning of your awareness of who Jesus really is to recognize that so much of what we normally grow up believing in, in terms of authority, in terms of seeking wisdom ⎯ we grow up naturally leaning upon other people to tell us what we should do.  That’s our parents or anybody in authority.  So for the first years of our existence, until, let’s say, we get into our, I don't know, teenage years now, 18, 17, 16, you start believing that you have a right to make your own decisions, and there’s a tension in you, from obedience, authority over you, to an inner authority.  And so as we’re looking at this wonderful set of readings, you’re going to be invited with me to journey into this transition place, from old to new, and one of the ways it’s described in this set of readings is from darkness to light.  The darkness that’s in the first reading is really an interesting one, because it’s talking about a kind of something that we’re dealing with that causes anguish and gloom and darkness, and yet when we see, even in the Old Testament, those things overcoming the Jewish people ⎯ they were stiff-necked.  They weren’t very easy to deal with, and God found himself at times very angry and even at one time wanted to destroy them all because they didn’t obey him.  They kept going back to their own ways, but here in Isaiah, he’s foretelling something that’s going to come.  It’s going to be something like a light, and so the darkness that you’re in is going to seem not so dark.  It’s going to have light in it, and the light will bring about abundant joy as people rejoice when everything is working for them, when their crops have been beautifully grown during the time that they have no control over how it grows because of the weather and they’re just filled with delight that something has worked.  So there’s this image of something being broken, taken away from the people in the New Testament, and I love the way this passage ends, where it says, “The yoke that burdened them, the pole of their shoulder, the rod of their taskmaster you’ve smashed.”  How’s that for a word to change.  Smashed the way it was, and all of those three images, the yoke, the pole, the rod, they’re all about being burdened by something created for you by an authority over you.  And that’s really basically what the Old Testament is about, and unfortunately it’s a lot about the way people think about religion even today.  “Why do I need this burden on me?  Why don’t I be free?  Why can’t I be free?  Why can’t I do what I want to do?”  And it’s so interesting that that sounds so selfish and self-centered, but the truth is that’s exactly what God has placed in you and me, a desire not to be controlled by an outer authority but to come to a place where the inner authority is what does the work, our choices, what we think, what we do. So here’s Paul, in the second reading, talking very clearly about the fact that, “Look, I see something that’s happening that isn’t the intention of God.  You all seem to be going in different directions.”  And when you go in different directions, it’s not just that everybody agrees, “It’s okay.  You go in that one.  You go in this one.”  But they’re rivalries.  “You should be with me.  You should be doing this.  You should have this.”  And it’s so interesting that all of that is a very interesting way of imagining, again, the way religion turns into something that’s my way or the highway.  If you were Jewish, that’s what you should be.  If you’re a Christian, you should be Christian.  If you’re a Muslim, you should be Muslim or follow Islam.  It’s really a divided kind of world, and yet even in the Vatican Council, the beauty of that council was that every religion that teaches the truth is a means of salvation.  So it’s not about everybody having to be one religion.  It’s everybody has to be on the same page when it comes to who God is and what he does for you and for me and the work that we are engaged in together, and that work that every religion should draw us into is the participation in this extraordinary work of the evolution of consciousness, to be able to see the truth so clearly, so beautifully that the darkness that sin creates, the darkness that is created by addiction to things that control us and all of that is to be destroyed by this beautiful coming of God into the world.  And his coming into the world, as you well know, is more than his coming into a human form at one time in history, but that action of God becoming human is something so powerful about what it is that religion promises.  All religions promise a union, a communion with God.  What’s different about some of the religions is they might have a different emphasis on who God is, and I often think it’s so interesting that it’s also about a religion that makes a clear distinction between the Old Testament and New Testament, not that the Old Testament is wrong.  It is a beautiful, beautiful religion and a beautiful message, but Jesus had instore for us a radically different message.  And it’s not that the Jewish religion doesn’t lead one to the same closeness to God, which is what Christianity and every religion calls us to, but it’s not ⎯ it's this wonderful thing about Jesus being the model, and the model could be just also the maturity of the Jewish faith.  It’s becoming so connected to God that you are in his way of living and his plan for you, and that plan is just marvelous.  In the gospel, we listen to it, as Jesus is revealed to us, and he’s revealed as light.  And isn’t it interesting, when you look at creation, the first thing that God created was light, day and night?  And it’s true.  In the Old Testament and New Testament, there is still going to be always light and darkness, truth and error, reality and illusion, and yet in the Old Testament, it seemed that it was taught in a way that frightened people into complete submission to rules and regulations, because the darkness had great power to overtake them, and they had to have something that kept them out of it.  But now we’re told that the darkness has been destroyed.  There still is problems.  There still will be darkness, but it’s never going to overtake you.  And when you realize that, you realize that then, if it’s never going to win, then every battle with it is going to be some kind of achievement, some kind of growth, and that’s exactly what Jesus means when he says repent.  Repent is a change of heart.  It’s regret.  It’s looking back on those things you did years ago and saying, “What was I thinking?  That was crazy.  I was so full of myself,” or, “I was so doubting myself,” or, “I was so angry at other people for what they had.”  I don't know.  Whatever it would be, you grow out of those things.  That’s called repentance, and the thing that’s interesting about the way Jesus says it in the gospel verses, the way that John the Baptist would say it is John the Baptist called for repentance, but Jesus says, “Repent.  The kingdom is at hand.”  The thing that you want, the thing that you long for, the peace that comes from an inner authority living within you, guiding you and directing you, not because you have to, not because you’re made to, not because you’re going to be punished if you don’t, but it simply makes sense.  And you want to do it, and you see the fruits of doing it.  That’s called the kingdom, and it’s supposed to be now.  So then we end this set of readings with something happening, and that’s Jesus calling his disciples.  And he’s saying, “Just come after me.”  Notice he doesn’t say, “Do what I say.”  He doesn’t say, “Come and I’ll tell you what to do.”  No.  “Come after me.  Dwell with me.”  “Come see where I live,” is another thing he said to some of the disciples that he invited to follow him, and so what it is is that Jesus is not anything like the temple and the law and the demands and the inflicting of punishment if one does not do what they’re told.  It’s another world from that, and the image of that change is, again, mentioned in this particular gospel by the fact that, when he called someone, they immediately left their work and their father.  And I don't know if this is, in any way, shape, the intention of the gospel, but it just struck me that their work, or I’d say, the work of the Old Testament was following the law.  The work of the New Testament is experiencing God inside of you, guiding you, enabling you to make the decisions that bring the most life and love to you and the people that you care about.  And then leaving their father is, in a way, leaving everything the father had taught them.  That’s not what it means literally, but I’m just playing with it, saying could that be leaving the work of the Old Testament, leaving the image of God the Father and opening it to the fullness of who God the Father is and follow that and enter into a wonderful place, a kingdom that is marked by the work of those who believe in what the kingdom is?  They imitate the one who describes the kingdom by his life, and you and I are in a world where we can cure every disease and illness among the people.  And that doesn’t mean that there will not be disease and illness.  It means that we’re in the business of conquering those things that would destroy us, make us uncomfortable, take away our ability to be up and around and working.  So we have a new kingdom that is being proclaimed and so important for all of us, and I long for it to be within your heart, that you’re no longer feeling religion is a binding burden but an invitation into a new life, infused with Spirit, infused with light, infused with wisdom, infused with insight, and the more you grow and participate in that work of healing, you bring that same healing to everyone around you.  God bless you.     Father, help us to leave what we have been taught and told that isn’t fully the truth that God wants us to live by.  Help us to be awakened and see what the kingdom is really like.  Help us to experience it, to know it, so we can truly be like the disciples who became, after learning, became apostles, which was teachers, not by words so much but by who they are.  And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.   

Pastoral Reflections 1-11-26 - The Baptism of the Lord Msgr. Don Fischer Download Original Airdate: January 12, 2020Isaiah 42:1-4, 6-7 | Acts 10:34-38 | Matthew 3:13-17   Almighty, everliving God who, when Christ had been baptized in the River Jordan and as the Holy Spirit descended upon him, solemnly declared him your beloved Son, grant that your children by adoption, reborn of water and the Holy Spirit may always be well-pleasing to you.  Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.   We’re about to begin the ordinary time.  The ordinary time is the time we reflect, focusing on one of the synoptic gospels to look more thoroughly into the biography of this God/man, Jesus.  He has within himself and within the experience he had the experience that all of us are destined to have.  We have to pay attention to him.  He is the model.  He is the example.  He is who we are to become.  When I grew up, I think I was told that, but one of the things I misunderstood was I felt that Jesus was unique.  He wasn’t like me exactly.  Well, he was human, but he had one thing that I never had, and that was he was sinless — sinless.  And I have to say that, when I grew up in my Catholic Church, I felt that sin was — well, it was obviously the most important thing that I was taught that I must avoid, but it seemed that the descriptions of the sins that I was told that would separate me from God were mostly my human weaknesses.  I would tell a lie.  I would steal a cookie.  I would get angry, but when you look at sin, the essence of sin, the real, mortal, deadly sin is the only one that is really dangerous.  The others are signs that we need help and we need support, but the basic core thing that we are — where it’s so important for us to avoid is an out and out rejection of God.  And generally, people don’t necessarily make that decision, “I reject God,” but they rather say, “I am the best source of what I need for my life.  I am my own savior, my best chance to be who I want to be.  I have to do it.  I have to do it.”  And you add to that kind of egocentric focus, you add that you have to be sinless at the same time.  It seems that the majority of my religions in my early years was primarily how to avoid sin, which I mean by that, how not to make mistakes, and basically how to try my best to be the person that I knew God wanted me to be.  And I thought that was to imitate him, and I thought it was perfection.  But I don’t think that anymore.  I don’t want you to think that anymore.  So today we celebrate the baptism of Jesus.  The interesting thing about Jesus is he is 100 percent human — 100 percent human.  I don't know how you can be 100 percent human and not struggle with weaknesses and make mistakes, and those are not necessarily sins like I was taught.  One thing I can say about Jesus, I know that he never, ever gave up on his Father.  He didn’t always want to do what his Father asked him to do, but he never, ever doubted his Father’s love for him or his Father’s call for him to be someone in the world that would be essential to the world’s wellbeing.  He knew he had a purpose.  He knew he was loved, and he was promised that he would be safe.  “Nothing will harm you, Son, nothing.”  And Jesus believed that.  He showed he believed that in the temptations in the desert when he was asked to test and, “See if God is really going to take care of you.  Jump off the parapet and see if angel catches you.”  Well, that was just a way of saying, “If you want to prove it, that means you must doubt it.”  He said, “No, I know I’m going to be safe.”  So what is it that Jesus had that we don’t have naturally?  What is it about him that is so different than we are in a sense, in terms of his humanity?  And that was his capacity to receive 100 percent of divinity, that he was free, by some mysterious way, as a full human being, to surrender 1,000 percent to a being living inside of him, guiding him, being his mentor, not explaining everything to him, not making him successful at everything he did.  I’ve always thought, if I trusted in God and turned to him and said, “God, you do this through me,” it would be spectacular.  It’s be wonderful.  I’d be a miracle man.  Why wasn’t Jesus more successful with his disciples while he lived on this earth?  Why wasn’t he more successful with the temple?  Why did he get so cross ways with them?  Why didn’t he take his time and maybe take 20, 30, 40 years to slowly teach and make people aware of who he was and what he’s here to teach?  No, it worked out the way it worked out, and it wasn’t in any way, shape or form, one might say, perfect.  God, perfection, it’s such a — every time I say the word, I get a little chill, because it’s just the word that I used to use all the time for my goal, and now I don’t want to be perfect.  I want to be perfectly myself.  I want to be who I am, and I want to grow.  I know I can’t grow without mistakes and faults, and I know, if I’m going to do what Jesus did, if I’m going to allow God to enter into me — and I think it’s so interesting that he begins his public ministry by making a very dramatic statement that, “I am not doing this work on my own.”  That’s why I think he asked John to baptize him, because he said baptism is the symbol.  It is the celebration.  It is the thing we need to know and be aware of, that we have a God who, at some moment, will enter into our lives and be present to us in a way that is absolutely beyond our imagining.  Nothing is more important to me than teaching that one single doctrine of faith.  God dwells in his people.  He loves them.  He’s on their side.  He wants nothing other, for them, than to save them.  That’s what he wants, yet if you’re living in a world of perfection, like I was, and you keep thinking, “Well, the minute I fail,” what I was taught, and I don’t think it was intended this way, but it’s what I received, that God was upset and disgusted even and turned against me instantly, just because I did something that the law told me I shouldn’t do.  And often I felt like I really wasn’t free not to do it, but I did it anyway.  But that didn’t seem to change the teaching that they had given me, that it isn’t always my fault.  The actions I do are not always my fault.  Sometimes they’re just things that I’ve inherited from my ancestors.  Sometimes it’s the family of origin I entered into and taught me all kinds of half-truths and lies, or sometimes it’s the culture that just overwhelms me.  But the point I’m trying to make is this experience of God in us is never in any way, shape or form conditioned on our actions.  I wish somebody had taught me that.  He is the God of mercy, we know, and he’s also the God of justice.  And I don’t know that we’ve been able to put those two things together, justice and mercy.  I sometimes think that I teach a God that is so sweet and so loving and so kind that he doesn’t give a darn about us doing anything bad.  He’s just crazy about us.  Well, that’s not anything like I want to teach.  No, he has a burning, burning desire to do something for you and for me.  That’s why he dwells inside of us.  He said it over and over and over again.  “I want to open your eyes so you see what’s true.  Get out of lies and half-truths.  I’ll show you what’s true.  I promise I will if you trust in me and go with me.”  And the other thing he said, “I want to free you from this thing that imprisons you, that keeps you from being the person I intended you to be.”  The pressures on you are incredible.  He knows that.  He knows how hard it is to be living an authentic, intentional life.  It is not easy, and it has to stand in the face of so many other people who we respect, perhaps, and who want things from us, and they ask us to live a certain way, because that’s what they think is best for us, and we have to say no, even though we deeply respect and love them.  It’s not easy, and then he promises us, “Look, I’ve created a world for you that is peaceful.  It is not a world of darkness.”  Darkness is in the world.  There’s darkness everywhere.  We just have to — we don’t have to look very far to find pain and suffering and violence and abuse.   Yeah, there’s pain, and there’s suffering and abuse, and there’s dark.  It makes people dark, but then there’s a way to be engaged in a world that is dark, where you have within you this light that frees you from the burdens of excessive shame or fear or anger.  There’s a way to be at peace when your world is just falling apart.  How do you do all that?  How does anybody do these things that go way beyond the basic human nature that we have? Human nature was never meant to be alone and work out of its own stuff.  That was the sin of Adam and Eve.  “Tell us what’s right and wrong, and we’ll take it from here.  And give us what we need, and we’ll be fine.”  Autonomy, that’s the great sin.  “I don’t need God.  I don’t want him.  What’s the use of turning to somebody who doesn’t necessarily make himself that clearly known to me?  He doesn’t answer my questions directly, and he’s telling me I need to trust in him living in me, guiding me, and I need to be watching for the signs that he’s giving me.”  Dreams, situation after situation, problems in relationships, are they just accidental problems that just creep in and mess our life up, or are they the signs?  Are they the work of a God that is living in us?  If you don’t believe that you have that kind of resonance inside of you, of truth and light and peace, you can’t try to achieve these goals, because human beings aren’t going to get there, because about the only way you can do it, at least the way I was taught, is you have to do everything perfectly — perfectly.  And then God’s pleased, and then everything starts working out for you.  It’s a really nice, kind of, justice system, and that’s where we started, with justice.  And what is justice?  We’ve turned justice into something it isn’t.  At least it was turned into something different for me, and it was I felt that, when justice was called for, it was, if somebody caused me pain, I had a right and even sometimes an obligation to cause them pain.  Justice is you hurt me; I’ll hurt you back.  You take life; I’ll take your life.  And that’s not the justice of God.  The justice of God is more that things have ramifications, and your actions have ramifications, and you need to face them. You need to look at them.  You need to own them.  You need to know what you’re doing, and then you need to change, struggle to change, ask for forgiveness and reconcile.  That’s justice.  I know it happens to me all the time.  You’ll have somebody do something really lousy to you and treat you really rotten, and you don’t really — I always think that, when people do things, we think that they’re absolutely free not to, and it’s all about us.  At least that’s what happens to me.  But no, people do things they don’t mean to do.  Their actions are not necessarily who they really are.  Why do we say, if a person acts in a certain way, he is that?  A person who lies is a liar.  A person who murders is a murderer.  A person who has abused someone is an abuser.  Like that becomes that identity.  What is our identity?  What is it about us that God is so pleased with?   He said to his Son, “You’re my Son.  I think you’re wonderful.”  Isn’t he saying that to every single person?  Every time I baptize a child or an adult, I say something like that very clearly in the ritual.  You are God’s beloved son.  He lives inside of you.  He is your light.  He is your wisdom.  He is your direction.  He is all that, yet when I was growing up, I always felt like I lost that presence of God whenever my actions were against what the church or he or the law or whatever said, so I was doomed.  How can you grow without making mistakes?  And if a mistake makes you unacceptable to God, then you don’t have him inside of you, and the vicious cycle just goes round and round and round.  How can we possibly conceive of a God who’s created us, knows us inside and out, knows our ancestors, knows everything in us that would make us capable of doing the things that we need to do?  There’s some people that just can’t do certain things.  That’s just not in their ability.  People that can’t see or can’t walk or can’t talk, we don’t call that evil, because it’s not something they’re responsible for.  Well, can you say that same thing about certain things that people do instinctively or without thinking?  I think you can.  I think there’s a way for, when justice is seen as something that needs to be seen as fair and equal and should be resolved, you can also add to that a tremendous thing that God has also added to justice, and that’s mercy.  Mercy, what is mercy?  The best words I can say to you about mercy is it’s a form of compassion and empathy — compassion and empathy.  What is compassion?  It’s being able to feel something that a person’s going through.  It kind of understands another person’s pain, and if justice has to do with inflicting pain, then we’ll be probably caught up in a lot of creating pain for people, thinking this is the right thing to do.  But mercy says no.  No, understand who they are.  Understand their weaknesses.  Know they’re like you.  Know how many times you would need someone to say to you, because you’ve done something intuitively or instinctively, without thinking, and hurting them.  Would you want them to turn around and say, “I know that wasn’t you.  I’m there for you.  I’m there with you.  I’m connected to you.  I love you”?  That’s compassion.  Empathy, same thing, only it goes a little deeper.  Empathy is knowing someone’s pain because you have directly experienced it, and you’re somehow experiencing it with them.  Experiencing pain with someone is a creative force that brings life into this world.  It’s called grace.  It’s called forgiveness, understanding, but how do we do this work without a conviction that there’s a divine force in us that is doing the work with us?  If you’re counting on your human nature to be perfect, you’re going to fail or become a really dangerous, egocentric person, but if you know somehow that there’s a force, and the force is going to combat every negative feeling you have because of perhaps the way you’ve been treated or the way you see the world unfolding in front of you, it’s going to say a contradictory message.  “No, this is all for you.  I love you.  I’m inside of you.  I’m not going to let anything harm you.  You’re safe.  You’re loved.  You have a purpose.”  There’s no way someone can sit down with a chart and show you everything that’s happening in your life to say, “Can’t you see it?  It’s so obvious.”  No, it may never be obvious to you, but that’s the mystery of faith.  It’s believing in something, and the belief is so real and so strong that you are affected by it even though you can’t understand it.  That’s the life that God has called us to live.  It’s called a spiritual life.     Father, the simplicity of your message, your love for us, your desire to be a part of us, your willingness to share your life and your wisdom with us slips through our fingers, I think, because people are trying too hard to make us into something that we’re not necessarily ready to be yet.  So give all those who lead others in their spiritual journey for patience and for wisdom and to ensure that the goals that they set do not simply create a world of oppression and depression but lead one into a life of great light.  And we ask this through Christ, our Lord, amen.