Become what you receive.

Teaching Mass III

By: Rev. Fr. Ronnie Floyd, STL

Given at St. Patrick's in Wareham

on November 14th, 2010

In one of my favorite movies, the Godfather, a Cardinal talking with Michael Corleone talks a stone from the bottom of a fountain. And showing the stone to the Godfather, he notes, "this stone has been sitting at the bottom of this fountain for a long time hundreds of years even." Then Cracking it open, he says, "and yet it is still dry inside. This is like the faith and men's hearts. For a thousand years Europe has been emersed in Christianity
and yet it has not penetrated."

The famous English author and reporter G.K. Chesterton makes this same observation, saying: Christianity has not been tried and found wanting, it has been found difficult and not tried.

Today we arrive at the last part of our teaching Mass, and we are asked to consider the Communion rite. In the Liturgy of the Word we began our prayer of the Mass by recalling God's mighty deeds and promises, using these memories to direct our prayer, asking God to do for us what he promised to do for our forefathers.

In the Liturgy of the Word, we asked God's Spirit to come upon the Church--and to CHANGE--common things Bread and Wine into the actual Body and Blood of Christ. In doing so, we prayed that the same Spirit of God, would also change us into Christ's mystical body, into the Church,
into Saints destined to sing the joyful song "Holy Holy Holy" together with the Saints forever in Heaven.

And now today, we consider the communion rite--which is also know as:

the procedure for shuffling up to the Altar to receive Communion so that we can get out of here as quick as we can. Right?

You know one of the great reforms of the second Vatican Council was to rethink the meaning of this part of the Mass completely. In the "old days" many priests viewed this part pragmatically
as a necessary evil--the way we give all you folks the fruit of the Mass--the Eucharist.
In fact before 1962 the communion of the faithful, wasn't a necessary part of the Mass--it could be, and routinely was, simply skipped!

Just think about how much shorter Mass would be if we didn't have to wait for all you folks to come up to the altar to receive communion! And after all, Mass real is about getting an obligation
out of the way as quick as possible--right?

WRONG! Mass is the Divine Liturgy, a word that I have used for the last two weeks without defining. Divine, of course, simply means having to do with God but Liturgy, is a word we throw around a lot, without understanding. The word means WORK; and so the Divine Liturgy means God's work, and what is He working at? To quote the hymn Amazing Grace, "He saves a wretch like me!"

God is working to save the World--and the gift of His Life, His body and blood on the Cross, is a means to this end. As I said in my homily, last week, changing bread and wine, into His body and blood, is not just a parlor trick, It's an invitation to receive Him into our hearts and be transformed by Him--to become like Christ to become sons and daughters in the Son,
so that we can grow ever closer to and eventually at the end of our life enter in to the presence of God, His interpersonal love story, forever in Heaven.

If this is what the Son of God was born to do, giving His life to you on the Cross, then receiving communion must be a central part of the God's work, the Divine Liturgy. But just receiving the Body and Blood is not enough, we must be humble before him and open to His Liturgy,
the work He wants to do in our soul.

Remember that rock, taken out of the fountain. Receiving communion each Sunday, being surround it by it doesn't mean that it is going to penetrate us. And although we receive the Body of Christ, as a symbol of God's desire to penetrate our heart and our desire for God to enliven our souls with God's life. If we do so in Bad Faith, with sin on our heart, we make that communion we receive a LIE.

People often think that the Church is on some sort of power trip when she teaches that if you are in a state of grave sin you shouldn't receive communion. When in reality, we are saying that if you have been shoveling manure all day, and your hands are dirty, you shouldn't shake the President of the United States, of for that matter anyone's, hand.

It doesn't do us any good to receive Communion, and spiritually spit it out because we have committed adultery, or murder, theft, or lying. It doesn't do us any good to receive God's life within us if we don't make Him #1 in our life, if we misuse his holy name, or don't worship him each week on Sunday. It's a lie, and a lie to the ultimate lie detector, the God of Truth.

That's why St. Paul warns us: whosoever shall eat this bread, or drink the chalice of the Lord unworthily, shall be guilty of the body and of the blood of the Lord.

When the priest hold's up Jesus' Body and Blood, saying behold the Lamb of God, we make it our prayer--that God might heal us make us worthy to receive such a great gift--but for this prayer to be sincere--we must "confess our sins to on another" so that the Church, which Jesus gave the keys to the Kingdom to might set us free to be able to worthily receive Him.

I would like to end with a little story--a priest friend was telling me the other day how when he was a Child, after Mass, if he had been good, his parents would take him to a local bakery and let him buy whatever pastry he wanted. He always wanted a jelly donut.

One day he asked his mother, "what happens to the jelly donut after I eat it?"

His mother looked at him and smiled and said, "well if you chew it very carefully, it goes down your throat, into your stomach, and then becomes a part of you."

Holding his hand up to the light and looking at his hand, he said, "but I don't see it?"

His mother responded, "you might not see it, because it breaks into tiny piece which strengthens every part of your body."

When, we receive Jesus, reverently either by making a throne with our hands or by opening our mouth allowing the Lord to feed us like a little child and we spiritually chew on the Body of Christ really thinking about the gift of Love Jesus is giving us, dying for us on the cross to feed us with His own body and Blood then we become, what we receive, we become truly like God,
just as Jesus became truly Man.

Lord I want to see.

Teaching Mass II

By: Rev. Fr. Ronnie P. Floyd, STL

Given at St. Patrick's in Wareham

On November 7th, 2010

C.S. Lewis, the great English Novelist, maybe best know for His, "Chronicles of Narnia," grew up an Atheist, and yet at the mid-point of His life had a great conversion to Chrisitianity, caused in part by another great author, JRR Tolkien, a devout Catholic.

And so as a convert, or maybe one should say a revert, having come back to the faith of his childhood, Lewis had great insights into the experiences of non-practicing, non-believing people. Insights that he put to great use in latter life, as he tried to share the good news of the Gospel with so many people who had written it off as irrelevant. Much of his evangelical and apologetically efforts can be seen in his writings. Even his children's stories has strong Christian overtones. This is particularly true of one of His best works of adult fiction, which every Christian should read. The Screwtape Letters are a fictional account of the corresponded between two demons engaged in the work of stealing souls.

In one of my favorite passages, their target, an average man, has fallen into the camp of the Enemy, that is the Church. As a result, the senior demon writes the junior tempter
to express his displeasure. He notes however that all is not lost. Saying:

One of our great allies at present is the Church itself. Do not misunderstand me. [not] the Church as we see her spread but through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners.

That, I confess, is a spectacle which makes I our boldest tempters uneasy. But fortunately it is quite invisible to these humans. All your patient sees is the half-finished, sham Gothic erection on the new building estate. When he goes inside, he sees the local grocer with rather in oily expression on his face bustling up to offer him one shiny little book containing a liturgy which neither of them understands, and one shabby little book containing corrupt texts of a number of religious lyrics, mostly bad, and in very small print.

When he gets to his pew and looks round him he sees just that selection of his neighbours whom he has hitherto avoided. You want to lean pretty heavily on those neighbours.

Make his mind flit to and fro between an expression like "the body of Christ" and the actual faces in the next pew...

Does this sound familiar? How often do we hear the truth that the Church is the mystical Body of Christ, One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic and then look around and think with typical New England cynicism: YEAH RIGHT!

Friends look to your right, and to your left, look at the person in front of you and behind you; these are God's Children, people called to be saints in heaven, they are irrepeatable GIFTS from God to the World, they are gifts to you. God has placed them in your life, to help you be happy, and grow in Holiness. The splendor of the Church is all around you in the POTENTIAL that each of us has as Baptized Children of God, and yet so often we don't see it!

Today, we will consider the second major part of the Mass the preface and Liturgy of the Eucharist, which is the mystery of the unseen reality of what is going on in the Church at every moment, of every day--the sanctification of the World, through the Church by the Sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the Cross.

As the Liturgy of the Eucharist begins, simple gifts are brought forward gifts that symbolize human life--bread the basic food of the world and wine, a symbol of the celebration of life. They are plain, ordinary, and yet these ordinary symbols show us that all things are possible for God. God takes these ordinary things, and promises to transform them into something extra-ordinary! The Body and the Blood of Christ!

SO THAT, I think we often forget why Jesus changes the bread and wine into His Body and Blood He does it SO THAT we who eat His Body and Drink His Blood might be transformed, just like the bread and the wine! Into sons and daughters of God. As the Greek Fathers used to say:
God became man so that man could become God. And just like the Body and the Blood, this transformation, that is taking place on the Altar AND in us is spirit and truth. We like the Eucharist, continue to look the same, perhaps we even act the same, once we are changed, and yet we believe that we are at the level of our being different given POWER to become God's Children, saints in Christ.

My friends, don't be blinded by your eyes! Don't let sight get in the way of your seeing, what God is doing for and in you right now! Like the mother of the seven brothers in the book of Maccabees realize that there is more to life than what we see, and feel, and touch. Realize that life is a gift from God that must be given back to Him, as a spotless and unstained Sacrificed to His Glory. Realize as Jesus says in the Gospel that the physical realities and institutions of this life are only a precussor of the REALITY of Heaven that we are made for.

Live for that reality!

Open the eyes of your Soul to see the good things that is doing. See that all the promises made to
the Patriarchs and Prophets, Apostles and Evangelists are now, at this moment being fulfilled in Heaven and on Earth at this Altar.