Saint Mary of the Immaculate Conception Roman Catholic Church

Dear Good People of Saint Mary,

This past week we held our first Interreligious Prayer Service in Fredericksburg at Market Square, with readings, reflections and a prayer from each of three representatives of world religion: Muslim Imam Sheikh Lamptey,  Jewish Rabbi Jeremy Weisblatt, and Christian Rev. Larry Haun of Fredericksburg Baptist Church. I was very touched with what Pastor Haun had to say, I must say I have seldom encountered a man with such authentic love of God and integrity. I wanted to share his message here for the World Day of Prayer. God bless you.

Social anthropologists tell us that humans are hardwired for worship. Evidence reveals humanity’s desire to locate a creator and offer words, songs, gestures, and ways of life in praise. Christianity, along with Judaism and Islam, trace their hopes and religious understandings to a common heritage. It is the heritage of a covenant relationship with God. This God revealed presence is to Abram, re-named Abraham, meaning “the father of multitudes.”

Abraham’s turn to the Old Testament God in Genesis 2 (vs. 1-3) is a turn from the many idolatrous gods of polytheism to the one Creator God who sustains the world. The covenant offered by God to Abraham is a promise of relationship fulfilled across future generations. It is an unconditional covenant, a gift from God.

Now the Lord said to Abram, ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. 2 And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. 3 I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.’

Through this covenant God offers God’s self for the sake of the world, giving all who would turn to him from family, from land, from any and all other claims that might call forth worship, the blessing of the Creator God. This is the common beginning of the three religious expressions gathered here today for prayer—they have turned to the Creating and Sustaining God, recognizing a truth larger than what they can see or know in gratitude on faith. This is our common ground—gratitude and faith for a God who extends God’s self to us first, wanting our response, wanting our relationship.

I would be unfaithful to my tradition today, however, if I failed to mention Jesus as the revelation of my Christian faith that informs my fuller knowing of God as well as the pattern of my response to God and the world. The biblical Jesus, through his life, death, and resurrection, shapes the way I know God, the way I speak of faith, and the way I love my neighbor. As Christians, the baptism with water and the Lord’s Supper at the table are distinctive acts that identify us with Jesus and should remind us of God’s love for the world—all of the world. Jesus’ living example of how to treat one another with truth, justice, mercy, compassion, forgiveness, and decency helps me to know how I should be with others. The way of Jesus is not a way of separation for me but it is rather a way of loving and serving others. It is a way that benefits me as it deepens my encounter with God. And, I pray, that it is a way that benefits others, healing their hurts, and helping them to also begin to sense God’s love for them through me.

For me, as a Christian, it is Jesus who carries on the covenant of God, revealing the redemptive and sustaining care of the Creator God. Abraham is blessed so that the multitudes that come after him, through him, can bless the world. Blessing is giving. God gives to us that we might give. The distinctions between our religions could be counted as many. They could be called divisive. They could be called insurmountable. They could be called too large to be held by any one God. But, we must remember, it is the God who creates and sustains who has promised, who has covenanted to bless us for our blessing the world. That is a God greater than any difference humanity can claim. That is an overcoming God, a delivering God, capable of bringing peace, healing, and respect especially to those to whom blessing has been promised. Let us take up our blessing that we might bless the world together, realizing our common need of the sustaining God over and over and over again for the living of our days in this world. Let us lay down our suspicions, our fears, and our misunderstandings in recognition of our common humanity. Let us see one another as people who work, have families, know joy, feel pain, seek God, and have hope for a future. Although our worship lives take different turns, in different houses, with different ways, we have all received breath and being from God who creates and sustains the world. In that may we find great joy, great unity, and great humility— at least enough to keep our hands from violence, our words from hurt, and our hearts from unfounded fear toward each other. May God make it so. Amen and Amen.

Before we pray together, though, I will speak the unspoken here. The tension we feel between religions is a tension of finality, a tension of our ultimate destination, a tension of living lives directed by our end. The plurality of religions in our nation can be confusing, frightening, and insulating for those of us who profess faith; as a result, we cleave to our own and are suspicious of the other. When we who worship despise each other, religion becomes the world’s problem instead of the world’s blessing. But, I want you to consider something. I want you to consider Peter Ochs’ prayer; he is the Edgar M. Bronfman Professor of Modern Judaic Studies at the University of Virginia. He offered it at the Yale Center for Faith and Culture consultation in answer to the conference question, “Do we worship the same God?” He began by simply and profoundly stating, “I pray that we worship the same God.”

Take a moment and think on that. It is an answer fueled by hope in a God who would offer a human race of broken relationships and broken images the promise of blessing—the promise of being so blessed that they might bless others. In Peter Ochs’ words, “I pray that we worship the same God,” there is hope for peace; there is hope for God’s reconciling hand to come upon and between all the peoples of the world; there is hope for God’s ignoring of our more destructive prayers—prayers that would harm the other; there is hope for God’s hearing all of our hurts together as his hurting children and deciding for our mutual good, our mutual blessing.

Prayer:

Holy God, revealed most fully to we Christians through Christ of the Cross, we meet You today casting back to Your history of creating what is new from what is chaos, Your history of sustaining life in the midst of great struggle.

Help us, each one of us, to respect the other, loving the other as a child of the Covenant, a child of the Creating and Sustaining God.

Let us provoke one another to do good and not evil. Guide us to guard our ways and our words that they would be pleasing to You.

As followers of Christ, change us day-by-day into being more like the Jesus we know from Scripture.

For others, direct them to become the best of their understanding in service of others.

Hear our prayers as children that seek and acknowledge need.

We Christians, through the light of Christ, our clearest revelation of You, offer our prayers. Others pray here today as well, bringing prayers in the ways they know best. Hear us.

But truly, Holy God, we pray that it is You who will know us and claim us. We know You only as we have worshipped, but You know us beyond such earthly limitations. We give thanks for all You have provided, All You have freely given.

May our relationships with each other be worthy of Your gift of life. Amen.

Dear Good People of Saint Mary,

We Arlington priests were at our annual convocation last week, half of the priests of the diocese for the first half of the week, the second half for the second. We go to a place near Emmitsburg MD, a ski resort that apparently has good prices in the summer for such meetings. We usually listen to a speaker give presentations on a certain topic. This year, a Dominican priest spoke to all the priests in the diocese on giving better homilies.

I found what he had to say rang true, it was a talk that we needed to hear as a diocesan presbyterate. I came away with a lot of good reflections, one in particular that I wanted to share with you today that I found particularly compelling.

He said that each homily must actualize Sacred Scripture as a gift that is meant especially for us, an inspired text that is able to speak to each of us in the way in which each of us needs to be answered. Each of us brings something to Mass that is real, that needs to be respected, that seeks an answer. He said—and this is the point—that the act of preaching has to be the act of giving people back their heart.

It spoke to me in a way that seemed so familiar, in a way that I believe the Gospel empowers us as adults to make sense of our lives and find God at the center. That we become thrown off center by the world, that we have our hearts stolen in so many ways by our own sin, and by the confusion and cruelty and inhumanity of the world—not to begin speaking of the absence of grace—that we encounter every day, nearly everywhere we go. Sometimes people begin to feel that God is far away, when it is really our own hearts to which we have become estranged. We are meant for better!

To get back our hearts by the unfolding of the Word of God, and then to have his body and blood literally become the life that flows in our veins. Only then can we have the courage, the confidence, to go and be true disciples. The Word of God is spoken from a loving Father: all that the Son has, the Father has given. It makes for a powerful reflection on Mothers’ Day. Isn’t this the love that gives you back your hearts, the place you can always go when all else in the passing world leaves us unsatisfied and broken? There is a love that endures.

We first come to know this love from our parents, if we are lucky. But even our parents may not have come to learn this from their parents, the brokenness of our humanity is something that can be handed for many years, unless the love of Christ enters and transforms.

Jesus speaks of his relationship in the Trinity as the relationship of himself to a parent, his Father. Of course, his Father isn’t a man (or a woman), but he reveals the relationship as one of a son to a father, the image of God and his sons and daughters. This parenthood is one of perfect love, absolute gift, constant and eternal giving of life and receiving of life, perfect joy. We can see clearly in Jesus how to be a good son, but it is not so clear how to be a good parent. So here, a perfect mother is included in God’s plan so that the relationship of parent to child is perfectly given, to give us hope as well as the reassurance of possibility. Mary is given to Jesus, and Jesus gives Mary to us in just the same way he hands over to us everything else that the Father is and has given to him. On the cross, Jesus’ heart is pierced in order to be raised. Mary is given the beautiful role of the one to whom we can always go whenever we need to get back our heart, her perfect love and welcome home is offered to each of us. It is the heart of Jesus himself, to which she gave birth, formed in youth, cared for in his greatest suffering, to whom she brings us back in her role as our Mother.

Mothers of Saint Mary, consider this incomparable role that teaches us to know Mary and approach the love of Jesus: you have always been the place we can go to get back our hearts. May mothers today learn this most exalted role as the one they best can fulfill, and bring all us children back to the love of Jesus by first revealing this love to us in our hearts. May God bless our families, especially you moms, all of you, whether you are still with us or have gone on to know the perfect love of heaven. Happy Mothers’ Day.