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The inner word

25 Jan 2015 - Third Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle B

In the Ninevites and the apostles Simon, James, and John, scripture today has examples of immediate repentance and turning to follow God. Make a brief examination of conscience and identify what you need to repent. Where have you had difficulty following God’s ways? What do you need to do to get back on track?

repentance

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08 Dec 2013 - Second Sunday of Advent, Cycle A

A shoot shall sprout from the stump of Jesse. Justice will flourish. A time of hope and encouragement is blossoming in our world. Prepare the way of the Lord! Everything scripture says this week is fresh and budding with possibility. Do we feel it? Are we prepared to be renewed and enlivened, to burst forth with brilliant new life? Some of us are. For some this season poised between two great American holidays is reason enough to revive our spirits. Jingle those bells and sing those carols! Deck the halls and decorate that tree! Send cards to everyone you ever met and see how many fond replies are returned. Go ahead: Bake something you shouldn’t be eating; buy gifts that stretch your budget to the brink. Attend every party. In a thousand ways tell all the world the good news that all of us are loved, cared for, remembered, included. Spread the warmth and cheer. Of course the nonstop, wall-to-wall environment of celebration we call December is only one aspect of Advent. There’s also an internal side, and John the Baptist is the master of ceremonies for that. Preparing the way of the Lord is not about stringing up the lights and putting an angel at the top of the evergreen. It’s not about listening to Perry Como or Burl Ives and an endless loop of holiday songs. Those are external signs of an inward reality we don’t want to overlook or neglect. In preparing for the reign of God, the kingdom of heaven, there is one thing John says we simply must do: repent! For only an instant that may appear to be like a dark word added to a season devoted to good cheer. Repent sounds harsh and makes John the Baptist seem like the school marm determined to wreck our fun in the one season dedicated to happy thoughts and lovely memories. So think of repent as helpful advice rather than a grim kibosh lowered on your sleigh ride through Advent. If happiness is our aim, then repentance is the most reliable way to get there. We’re after the good fruit in this blooming season, as John reminds us. If a shoot is to sprout from Jesse and justice is to flower in the land, then some careful pruning is in order first. Just think: The holidays won’t be as joyful if unforgiveness is the atmosphere around the table. If we’re feasting while others can’t feed their families, that’s no good either. If Advent is all about shopping for things no one wants or needs, and we neglect contemplation of the mystery of divine love at the heart of this season, we’ll find ourselves with a hollow feeling at the end of the year and wonder why. Repent, return, reassess—and there will plenty of reasons to rejoice. Related scripture links The Baptist’s warning to tax collectors and soldiers: Luke 3:10-14 Prince of Peace: Isa. 9:5-6 Last Judgment: Matt. 25:31-46 Love the enemy: Luke 6:27-36 Snake imagery: Gen. 3:1-15; Mark 16:17-18 Catechism links Justice: CCC 1905-1917; 19

Authors Alice Camille

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The inner word

22 Jan 2012 - Third Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle B

In the Ninevites and the apostles Simon, James, and John, scripture today has examples of immediate repentance and turning to follow God. Make a brief examination of conscience and identify what you need to repent. Where have you had difficulty following God's ways? What do you need to do to get back on track?

repentance

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Exploring the word

05 Dec 2010 - Second Sunday of Advent, Cycle A

CHRISTMAS IS ON its way. You can feel it rushing in toward us like a runaway train, uncontrollable and inevitable. It transforms the environment of the church as much as the landscape of the community, not to mention the economic reality of many parishioners. Already folks are taunted by the constant consumer demands to enter into the spirit of the season with each new purchase. Purses are achingly stuffed with receipts for things no one needs. Is this hurtle toward the holidays what we want? Is this momentum that catches us what our hopes are pinned on? God knows we need Christmas, wait on it, and look forward to it every winter like the answer to a prayer at the end of a long, weary year. Christmas will lighten our hearts. It will bring the family back together. It will satisfy our hunger for belonging, warmth, cheer, and a multitude of sugar cookies. For only a few weeks we can be children again, anticipating the impossible good fortune that magically wrapped presents apparently grow on trees. Such is our modern version of the peaceable kingdom, Isaiah’s description of the remarkable hour when wolves and lambs become pals and children need not fear snakes. Whatever elements are necessary for us to experience this blissful harmonic convergence, that’s what we expect from Christmas each year. That’s why we have this peculiar phenomenon of the Christmas shop: stores dedicated to selling Christmas 365 days of the year. We want Christmas to come and don’t want it to end. Yet even when it arrives, a lot of people experience a deflation of hope, a letdown of unmet expectation. Maybe the loved one didn’t come, the hoped-for reconciliation postponed to another year. Maybe the desired gift wasn’t offered or received. Maybe we burned the cookies. When John the Baptist announces the arrival of the kingdom of heaven, he doesn’t offer the cookies casually. Repent is the Baptist’s first word—not a suggestion but a command. If you repent, you get heaven. You get your heart’s desire. If you don’t repent, you get nothing. That’s serious. The psalmist says it another way: Peace follows justice. You can’t have a world at peace unless you first have a just society. Paul says it a third way: You want hope, first you must endure in Christ Jesus. The world we want is in our grasp. The Christmas we anticipate is absolutely doable. But there are prerequisites. To have the Christmas cookie, there are things we must do: Assemble the right ingredients. Follow the instructions. Take the time to bake the results, not too much and not too little. Be patient. Wait. The delight you seek is almost ready. Related scripture links God's promise to David: 2 Sam. 7:8-16 John speaks truth to power: Matt. 14:3-12 Behold the Lamb of God: John 1:29-34 Violence in the kingdom: Matt. 11:12 John must decrease: John 3:22-30 Samson and the pillars: Judg. 16:23-30 Another story of the ax: Matt. 7:15-20 Catechism links Justice: CCC 1905-1917; 1928-1942; 2401-2406 Peace: CCC 2302-2317

Authors Alice Camille

repentance john the baptist

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12 Sep 2010 - Twenty-fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle C

You're in the forgiveness business. How good are you at it? How many prodigals have you welcomed back to the fold? Was it grudgingly like the brother in today's parable, or with open arms like the father? What sins have you truly and deeply repented? Have you felt the power and truth of God's unconditional forgiveness? If not, why not? What does it mean for you to associate with sinners? What as a sinner can you learn from preachers? What as a preacher can you learn from sinners?

Forgiveness prodigal son repentance Acceptance

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07 Dec 2014 - Second Sunday of Advent, Cycle B

On the global scene and the personal one, there may not be much evidence for hope. A voice comes from the most barren place—not the apparently fruitful one—to announce good news. We are the road to be made smooth for the arrival of the Lord. Repentance is key to embracing the indwelling Holy Spirit.

Hope repentance

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22 Feb 2015 - First Sunday of Lent, Cycle B

Sam’s drinking had begun as a social thing, a way to relax at lunch, a way to make up for a bad day. But soon enough, Sam was the last to leave the party and the last to punch in at work. He ignored his wife’s pleas and family fights ensued. Then one night after too much drinking, he had a serious car accident. In the ambulance he heard a voice like a whisper, “Sam, get your life together before it is too late. Now’s your chance. Now.” He began to attend AA meetings and is now in recovery. Recovering people call a moment like the ambulance ride “hitting bottom,” which sounds like the absolute end, doesn’t it? Nowhere to go, it’s all over. But if you ask Sam, he’ll tell you that for him it was actually the beginning. You don’t need to wait for a crisis to make a needed change. The Lenten call to repentance is not to be delayed. The call from Christ is now.

Authors Father Larry Janowski O.F.M.

repentance Lent

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24 Jun 2012 - Solemnity of the Nativity of Saint John the Baptist, Cycle B

John the Baptist said he was making way for someone greater, and over the centuries Christians have tended to take him at his word, maybe a little too much so, seeing him as a figure who played his part and exited stage left. To think of him this way, though, is to make him into exactly the opposite of what he stood for: a radically new way to relate to God. True, in a sense John dressed and acted like a prophet, but he rejected a key aspect of the tradition from which he came. He was not to be Zechariah, Jr. the son who would carry on the family Temple priesthood business. Piety, birth, and the prestige of institutional religion weren’t enough to get you saved, John was saying. Being a member of the people whom God led across the Jordan River didn’t mean you needn’t immerse yourself in it again. No, what you needed was repentance—turning away from your old life and going out to meet God’s judgment now. “Christians are made, not born,” said the early church figure Tertullian. To be a Christian is to be reborn, to begin again, to seek a new righteousness with God. Of this message, John the Baptist was a prophet.

Authors Joel Schorn

repentance john the baptist tertullian

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22 Jan 2012 - Third Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle B

In her autobiography The Long Loneliness, Dorothy Day, the cofounder of the Catholic Worker movement, told many stories of how people came to be part of the Worker. One was Hazen Ordway. He had been the librarian at the seminary of the Marist order in Washington. He heard Dorothy speak there in 1937, and in her words, "left immediately to join us, associating himself with us ever since." Ordway heard something that persuaded him to stop what he was doing and follow a call. When Jesus called his apostles, he also came to them in the midst of their everyday work, and they literally dropped it and followed him. They recognized something so compelling and true and vital to them that they threw caution to the wind and changed the direction of their lives on a dime, much like the citizens of Nineveh who repented at the words of Jonah so immediately and completely that even God was impressed and changed God's mind--that is, repented. Repentance is much more than turning to God out of fear. It's being able, in every moment of our lives, to take a chance that answering God's call is always a risk worth taking.

Authors Joel Schorn

dorothy day call repentance

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22 Apr 2012 - Third Sunday of Easter, Cycle B

When Jesus appeared to the disciples in Jerusalem after the Resurrection, he commissioned them to preach repentence and forgiveness in his name to all the nations. They embraced their charge with gusto. Jesus’ ragtag band of followers spread out to every major urban center: Jerusalem, Antioch, and eventually Rome. They were ridiculed, persecuted, or simply ignored by most, but they made inroads and their passion persuaded a few in each town to follow “The Way.” Early church historian Fr. Columba Stewart, O.S.B. describes the apostles as the movement’s cutting edge: “To study the lives of the apostles,” says Stewart in National Geographic (March 2012), “is a bit like what we’ve been doing with the Hubble telescope—getting as close as we can to seeing these earliest galaxies. This was the big bang moment for Christianity, with the apostles blasting out of Jerusalem and scattering across the known world.”

Authors Patrice J. Tuohy

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