OUDR GOD COMES IN POVERTY

The season of Advent calls us to stand back and reflect on what is happening.

It forces us to confront what God is actually like. It challenges many mistaken ideas that people have of God.

 

Overall, the entire focus on the coming of God among us, that is, God in the flesh, is a God who comes so ordinary. God comes and works among the poor; not the powerful and well educated of our society.

 

The big danger with the Christmas story is that we are so familiar with it we so often ,we miss the point of the Christmas story.

 

The first meaning of the story is how much our God wants to be with us. The entire story of the conception and birth of Jesus is that God wants to literally ‘ come and make his home with us.’ Bethlehem must not be some sweet historical place where the birth occurred. Each one of us, each Christian family, must now become the Bethlehem. Each family must be  the  location where Christ is born and takes root among humanity. Your family, your life must be the location for the birth of Christ.

 

We must discard any sweet, sentimental notion we  have of Mary.  In reality, she stands as one of the little ones of this world. She was a woman (without power), she was young and illiterate. Now God came to this powerless one and asked her to do the impossible. She was asked to become mother. And from her faith and from her body, she brought forth the very Son of God.

 

God comes among the ordinary, the poor and the marginalized of this world. God does not use the powerful, the well-healed and the talented to accomplish his work. He uses the very ordinary people.

 

Now, this Advent, get in touch with the poverty of God. No blasting fanfare. No powerful overkill by the rich of this world. No, just ordinary people, chosen and called by God.

 

Apply the Christmas story to your own life. Not many of you are rich, dominant and powerful. You are ordinary.

 

But pay attention to how God is using you. As he brought Mary into the great plan of salvation, so now you are being called to bring forth the goodness, the love and the mercy of God through your care and nourishment of the poor and the forgotten.

 

The man and woman who make sandwiches every day to sustain the homeless are using their very ordinary skills to share the love and the compassion of God. It is in their hands that the love of is made real.

 

During these four weeks of Advent, examine  in your own life where God is using you to bring forth the very love and compassion of God.

 

 

TURN TOWARD THE POOR

In all societies throughout the world the dynamic is the same: the competent look after themselves and cannot see who  invisible  or who is pushed aside to the margins. The challenge placed before Christianity by Pope Leo is to pay attention to the little ones who are forgotten. We are not asked to move into some Third World country but to look around to those who live in our neighborhood.

 

In every society there are blind spots. In e very family there are blind spots. We want to be very aware of the difficulty that most people have with taking ownership of their own blind spots; their own negatives biases. 

 

Our Christianity is a very compassionate religion. It is never a  “God-and-me” event. The closer we draw toward God (i.e., the divine), the closer we will draw to our fellow human being. Our faith does not ask whether the poor are worthy, living up-right lives and are nice persons. It sees all human beings of precious dignity and worth. No one is every born second-class. 

 

When we open ourselves to recognizing who is poor in our midst, we are very surprised how challenging this proves to be in our approach to others. Naming the poor who live close to us can be very upsetting at times.

 

When we speak about the poor we must always add “the poor with their many faces.” Poverty is not just the homeless people in our large cities or only on the East Side of Vancouver.

 

The poor are always very close to us.

 

The poor is your aged Mother who suffers dementia and can no longer be cared for by a family member. She is in a care home and does not recognize any of her children anymore.  Any chance for a conversation is very, very limited. This is why you are encouraged to visit your aged Mother with someone else. With another person you can have some conversation and will not get bored so quickly. The poor of this society live in care homes.

 

The poor person is your nephew struggling with drug and alcohol addiction. His life is on the edge of total collapse. He will lose his wife and family, his house and his job. The addiction has so messed up any sense of responsibility and ability to sustain a meaningful relationship. He is a blood relative and you feel very deeply for a messed-up life. The face of the poor is right within our families.

 

Your co-worker, aged thirty-four, has just received a cancer diagnosis. This has hit him like a punch in the stomach. He is windless and feels knocked down by his own body. The proposed treatments appear very difficult for this person. 

 

When we turn and walk with our neighbor who is suffering, confused and needing support, we are turning toward Christ.  Joining in supporting the poor with their many faces, is joining to support Christ. Our faith clearly links our human compassion with the divine compassion. Reaching out to the ‘other’ is reaching out to Christ, to the divine heart.

 

 

THE POOR ARE ALWAYS VERY CLOSE

 

It is always good to have one or two colds per winter season. It jolts us into the awareness of how important our health is, and how much we take our good health for granted. When you are sneezing, you appreciate good health. 

 

We need living encounters with the Gospel of Jesus to appreciate what religious faith is all about. We need those moments that alert us to “stop, look and listen.”

 

Pope Leo’s exhortation, “Delexi si,” was just such a wake-up call to all Christians and people of all religious faith to turn toward the poor. The downside of religion is that we so caught up in “management” that wd can overlook the heartbeat of our Christian faith. 

 

The message can be summarized in one sentence: “Love for the Lord, then, is one with love for the poor (#5).

 

The heartbeat of our God become flesh (i.e., the Incarnation) is the outpouring of the love and mercy of God for all human beings. God comes to share the divine life, compassion and mercy with us; human beings in all our weaknesses. No one is excluded from the action and the love of God. Human beings exclude each other, consider some people more important than others, do violence to the fellow human beings. This is not of God. God is just the opposite. Every human being has been created in the likeness of God. Every human being carries the very imprint of the life, goodness and mercy of God.

 

When we begin to believe and share in the very life of our God (breathing and walking with Jesus Christ that is) we will always draw closer to our fellow human being. The more open we are with the love of God, the more open we will be with our wounded, suffering brothers and sisters. 

 

This is why Christianity is such a hands-on religion. We look for the reality of Jesus in the poor right around us. Our religion moves us to see the very face of Jesus in the poor, the forgotten and the marginalized. Authentic love for Christ always leads us to the poor with their many faces.

 

Too many people consider the poor to be the homeless people in Regina and other large cities. That is one form of poverty.

 

The poor might be your brother-in-law who is forced to retire early because of a serious breakdown in his health. The poor might be your co-worker who struggles with bouts of depression and withdraws from all involvement wit others. Isolation is a very strong indicator of poverty.

 

This little reflection is meant to move us to reflect on how the poor, with their many faces, are so close to us. To serve Christ is to walk with the poor of our own community.

 

 

 

BUT THE HEART OF GOD IS POOR

Today I want to reflect on the poverty of God. How does G od actually act and govern the world? If you want to find out what people are really like, just live with them for a few weeks. If people treat others poorly, it probably means that ‘hurting people hurt people.”

 

When we have too much religion, or are too comfortable in our religious convictions, our interpretation of the personality of God is very comfortable. Too much religion means that God will never upset us; and he will never challenge us!

 

Go back to the message that the angel (a worker-bee in God’s world) comes to Mary: young, illiterate and without power. She is a woman: a little one in that society. Now God comes to the person at the bottom (i.e., without power) and asks this young woman to become mother. God asks the impossible, and she accepts.

 

Mary recognizes what God is doing. “He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty” (Lk 1:52-53). Those whom the world regards as powerful, skillful and the people you should ask to get things done, are passed over.  The rich are sent away!

 

Recognize how this is so counter cultural. Those whom society thinks are important are passed over. God chooses the unimportant: a young woman in the backwoods of the world.

 

This is what God is like at the very center. God comes to us in littleness, in poverty. God’s actions upset so many people, and sincere believers at that!

 

As Pope Leo encourages believers and humanity to turn toward the poor, he is making explicit what God is in  reality. God will be God and act like God—no matter how upsetting it might b to so many successful human  beings  (by human standards).

 

This papal exhortation, Dilexi te, stems directly from the very life and heart of God. If God turns towards the poor, so should all the believers turn toward the poor in their own societies.

 

Born Catholics and Orthodox Christiaens have a strong devotion toward Mary. She is always one of us human beings. She sets the standard for how God is working. God comes among the working poor to bring about the great event of salvation: the revelation of the life and mercy of God in the human skin of Jesus. Mary says yes to God’s way of working. 

 

God begins the event of salvation by upsetting humanity.

 He does not choose the powerful and the famous persons.

Now, apply Mary to yourself. Are you not one of the little ones of this world?  Reflect   how God has chosen you to bring about the redemption of human beings. What great things of God’s plan is meant to work through your life?

TURNING THE CHURCH TOWARD THE POOR

When we center our focus on the Church as a universal phenomena we see the importance of coming to grips with our roots. How do we allow the original insights and concerns for Jesus influence and shape how we do church today. 

 

At the beginning of October Pope Leo issued an exhortation to the Church, and all Christiaan people, of our need to turn toward the poor of this world. 

 

Now in every country there are countless people who are without social and economic power. They are the working poor who so often are just overlooked. They struggle to survive, but they are on the margins of societies.

 

The exhortation of Pope Leo turns toward the way that Jesus actually lived and ministered in the society of his day. All the words and actions of Jesus are divine revelation. What he did speaks of who God actually is. 

 

Jesus gave scandal and was offensive because he reached out and fraternalized with the tax collectors, the lepers, the prostitutes and the outcasts of his day.  He made the unwanted feel wanted and included. 

 

Now, this is the gift and the challenge that Pope Leo is presenting to the people of the Church (and all Christiaan believers). We take as the opening to this reflection the very words from the exhortation: “in this call to recognize him in the poor and the suffering, we see revealed the very heart of Christ, his deepest feelings and choices, which every saint seeks to imitate.”

 

Our Christian faith leads us to recognize in the faces of the poor, the rejected and forgotten ones, the very face of Christ. One of the key moments to seeing Christ in our daily lives is to recognize Christ in the poor and the suffering. That is what the description of the final judgment in Matthew 25, 31-46, spells it out so clearly. Jesus did not say that “you feed the hungry,” but rather, “I was hungry.” This has gripped the imagination and the  commitment of so many Christiaens throughout the ages, that they are challenged by the reality of the poor within their own countries.  They have not walked away, indifferent to the neglect and sufferings of the poor. 

 

We live in such a good time in the history of Christianity. We live in the Church that challenges everyone to turn toward the poor and marginalized. Will our hearts not respond the challenging words of Pope Leo: “There we saw how Jesus identified himself “with the lowest ranks of society” and how, with his love poured out to the end, he confirms the dignity of every human being, especially when “they are weak, scorned, or suffering.”

 

 

 

 

WHERE DID HALLOWEEN COME FROM?

 

Friday of this week is Halloween. Where did this come from?

 

We have to go back at least one thousand years to the movement of Christianity into what is now northern France, Belgium and England. The people who lived there were the Celtes. They lived in what was the Northwestern part of the Roman empire. Now in their religious beliefs and practice, November 01, was New Year’s Day. Their calendar was structured to begin in what we call the month of November. 

 

But on the night before New Year’s Day (October 31) they would go out into the forests and countryside, make a huge bonfires and pray to drive away all evil spirits.   They lived in a world that could be tormented and damaged by the evil spirits that moved on the face of the earth.  Their experience of the world was  attacked and supported by the forces of good and evil. The bonfires and prayers in the night were to drive away any evil spirits that might do them harm.

 

Now, Christianity was not too successful in trying to suppress these pagan practices. The Celtes got baptized but they still practiced many of their pagan practices. Now, this is the genius of Christianity. If you cannot suppress something you turn around and baptize it and make it fit into the Christiaan framework of life.

 

So, they made November 01, the Celtes New Year, into the feast of All Saints. Gather all the holly people together on this ‘catch all ‘ feast day. And the night before became All Hallows Eve. They made this former pagan night a ‘Christian holy night.’ 

 

Our Christian ancestors,  one thousand years ago, were very creative.

 

Enjoy handing out treats to the kids who come trick or treating.

 

This points us to seeing that everything on this earth does and can reveal the goodness and the love of God. Nothing is profane or to be rejected by God. Begin with creation; everything from the first rays of sunshine in the morning are an expression of God’s goodness. Live in joy and song that you have been born into such a wonderful world. Everything can relate to the very heart and creative force of God.

 

Enjoy every one of the trick or treaters that come to your door. Sing a song pf praise that you can share in this happy event with the children at your door.

 

 

HE OUTSIDER IS IN? HOW SO?

 t is hard to get people born in the church to understand that Jesus will often upset our way of thinking.  They want a comfortable religion where they have control over everything. No surprises. When we hear the parable (teaching story) of the Pharisee (a religious observant Jew) and the tax collector (a despised turn-coat to the oppressed Jewish people)  we have our system of good and bad turned upside down (Lk. 18, 9-14).

 

The Pharisee (he was a good guy) came forward and informed God of all the good things he was doing. He fasted twice a week and gave a tenth of his income to others. Thank goodness he was not like the despised tax collector at the back of this prayer hall!

 

What a contrast! The despised one (he was complicit with the Roman enemies who oppressed and taxed the people very heavily) could only stand at the back and pray, “Be merciful to me, a sinner.”

 

Jesus uses the despised one to show the honesty and humility that we all must have as we stand before God.

 

No one can earn their salvation and say to God “you owe me because of my good and dutiful life!” Our goodness with God always comes as a gift from God. We are made holy first and foremost because the Holy Spirit is working in us. Salvation does not depend on how good we are but on the work and gift of God. 

 

This tax collector stands as a model for all believers. We come before God with all our failings, with all our sinfulness and our hard-heartedness. We do not use our goodness to downgrade the weakness and failings of others.

 

If we all knew ourselves (the personality that others have to live with and get along wtith) we would all be humble!

 

Today, gather together your sinfulness, your self-centeredness and your indifference toward the sufferings and woundedness of others. Hold your sins and our weaknesses in your hand and begin your prayer. You will feel very humble.

 

But as Jesus will teach us: your littleness and your humility will bring you to understand what Jesus is all about and deepen your life of faith. Hold on to your weaknesses and it will bring you freedom!