Dear Brothers and Sisters,
We have an enemy of our faith. Do you know what it is? It’s the ideal we have of Christianity. You think you need to reach a goal. St. Paul never speaks about a goal or the one he speaks about is very different from the one you have. Maybe your goal is to be good and you get frustrated every day because you can’t be good. Only God is good! The goal of faith is to love. So the ideal we often have is our biggest enemy.
St. Paul speaks often a conversion, in Greek, a metanoia, a change of mentality. Evangelization must first be focused on those who are in the Church, then we can go to those outside the Church. Because if we carry the wrong message we don’t do anything but bring religiosity, a new set of legalisms that so many others already have.
It is true that we all have our own style to announce the Good News but we cannot impose this on others. I can’t make you think and speak like me. I’m not selling myself. The point is to bring Christ to others, not ourselves. I hope that you can take Christ to your spouse, to your children, to your work, to whomever you meet. How do you bring Christ to others? Always with humility, never with pride. Pride is to impose a schema, a way of being, on others. Christ doesn’t impose anything on us. In the gospel he never imposes anything on anyone. He says if you want to follow me let the dead bury the dead, but you follow me.
To the young rich man who asks what must he do to gain eternal life, Jesus says sell your goods and give your money to the poor, and follow me. This man went away sad. The Lord proposes faith to us; he doesn’t impose it. He proposes and then you have to decide. Today the Word of God proposes faith to us. What is the Christian ideal we hear today? St. Paul tells us in the second reading. It’s something marvelous.
He hears from the Lord: my grace is sufficient for you! This is Christianity. A Christian tells his daughter don’t be proud, don’t think you are better than the others. Don’t announce your own message but the message of Jesus Christ. Don’t bring yourself but bring the strength of Christ.
St. Paul says a thorn in my flesh was given to me so that I wouldn’t be so proud. What was that thorn? We don’t know. Each one of us has a thorn, a weakness to help you to see that you’re not so great. St. Paul asked the Lord three times to take it away. To ask three times in the Bible means to always ask. But the answer he got was: my grace is sufficient for you. You are not here to be good, to be perfect, immaculate, to pee holy water, no, no, no! You are here to live by my grace, by my help, not by the law. You’re not a law abiding Pharisee. God allows something in your life so you can see that you’re not so good, something that helps you to see the love of God. We are all very poor and need God’s grace.
Faith is not the love I have for God but the love he has for me, because I have nothing. I have only the love he has for me. This is what I can bring to others. This is the mission I have. I can live on that love in the seminary, as a priest, or a married person. I can live chastity with my boy friend or girlfriend. Your grace is enough for me.
Your grace also helps me to recognize my weaknesses. I can be content with them, with insults, hardships, persecutions, with everything that the world says is bad, for the sake of Christ. In the midst of my weaknesses, of my sins, of my temptations, I can be happy because I experience the strength of God. The Pharisees despised him because they thought they were strong. They didn’t boast of their weaknesses. They thought they were better than him.
In his home town they said, where does he get all this? Where did he get this wisdom? And how can he perform these mighty deeds. They murmur and dont allow him to act in them. Christ cannot act in you and in me unless we acknowledge our weaknesses. If you think you can be a Christian on your strength, the Lord will never act in you because you don’t allow it. If you’re god of your own life, there’s no room for another god. You are enough for yourself. This is why he can’t act in you.
Look at his contemporaries who say is this not the son of the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of so and so? Isn’t he the one who doesn’t know his real father? And he comes to give lessons to us. They think they are better than he.
The invitation today is to brag about our weaknesses because we cannot live our faith as a cat. When a cat poops he covers it in the litter box. As Christians we cannot always be covering our poop, our sins. We don’t want anyone else to see them. They want to appear perfect like a super-Christian.
We can live our Christianity like a dog who goes here and there taking a dump and they hope their owner will clean it up. Who is their owner? It’s Jesus Christ. He comes to pick up your poop. Excuse me for the simile but it fits very well.
Don’t be afraid to show your weakness, your poverty. The world doesn’t love the weak one, thebpoor one, the one who shows who he is. The world is hypocritical. They have to put on masks, to disguise themselves to be loved. But you are loved by your brothers and sisters in the community as you are. If they think you’re worse than them its because they don’t know themselves. Why do they love you as you are? Because the community is the body of Christ who does not judge; he loves you in the midst of your crap. This is something marvelous.
Christianity is the best thing the Lord has given us. The Lord gives us the experience of his love, the gratuitousness of his love. To experience this grace, this unconditional love that comes to us always helps us to never doubt of his love.
When children make their first communion or their first penance and it looks like the last time they will make it, or may not for many, many years. I say only one thing to them. I tell them that there is something they cannot forget, even if they one day forget their names. I tell them that God will always love you as you are! And they stare at me! And I ask them to repeat what I just said, and they do it.
God will always love you and no matter where you are living, whether you have not been to church for forty years, God will always love you. He will be willing to pick up your crap and throw it in the trash. Don’t cover up your sin for God so that he loves you. This is the moment you can brag about your weaknesses. Don’t put on a good face and be a hypocrite, don’t cover up your sins.
When you show who you are then you can show the strength of God to others. This is when Christ can start to do miracles in your life because you are no longer god. He made you a man or a woman, a creature, an earthen vessel that has a treasure inside of you. We carry this treasure in clay pots.
What a wonderful miracle the Lord makes in our lives. When you can love, this is the miracle. You can stop living for yourself and can live for others. You can stop thinking about yourself, about your money, your projects, your affections. You can reach the other and give your live for the other. Through this gift of yourself you can experience tremendous happiness and eternal life.