Summary:

All these years, priests, including me, have been approaching the pulpit on Trinity Sunday to take a swing and giving some explanation of the mystery of the Trinity. We swing and we swing, and we swing, and we always strike out. And no, three strikes and one out is not another analogy for the Trinity. But it's kind of a project that's doomed from the start. The Church does not provide Trinity Sunday for us so that the clergy can bring the faithful one step closer to figuring out the mystery of the Trinity. The clergy themselves don't have it figured out. So not much help in that process or attaining that goal. There is certainly much we can say about God, but we're deluding ourselves if we think that we're getting God figured out. God is God. God is not to be figured out. And that's what I want to talk about today. No shamrocks for you. 

God is dynamic. God is living. God is constantly wanting to reveal more of Himself to us and to bring us into friendship with Him, into relationship with Him. As I said, the written word only goes so far. But in the person of Jesus Christ, we have the opportunity to know God fully. The more we grow in our relationship with Jesus, the more He reveals to us of the face and the heart of the Father. St. Paul writes, "No one knows what lies at the depths of God, but the Spirit of God.” We don't know what lies at the depths of God, but the Spirit will show us by bringing us into ever growing relationship with the Son, Jesus Christ. 

So, Trinity Sunday is a great opportunity, I mean, we can continue to use our minds to try to understand more and more, but it's a good opportunity for us to be reminded. We have not grasped completely the mystery of God, but the Spirit urges us to keep seeking God's face.  We want to know as we are fully known in heaven, as St. Paul says. So, we renew our resolve to seek the face of God in prayer, and in our growing relationship with Him, always being opened to allowing God to reveal to us His mystery, His heart. 

Summary:

There's kind of a three-legged stool that could describe the Christian life where there are the foundational elements of the Christian life, especially as Catholics. The first leg is receiving the Sacraments - especially Holy Eucharist - and going to Confession also on a regular basis. The second leg of that is personal prayer. Daily, personal prayer. And the third leg of the stool is a life of virtue putting the above God into practice in our interactions with our families, our neighbors, and everyone we meet. The Sacraments, personal prayer, and virtue or charity. And I think if we are doing those three things, if those for three items or aspects are strong in our life, we have a strong foundation of life in the Spirit. We are going to Mass, participating in the worship of God. We are going to Confession on a regular basis, receiving that grace of God's mercy and forgiveness of our sins, and strengthening against future sins or what we must overcome - sinful habits. We are doing that. 

So, on Pentecost, maybe something we can do then is pray “Come Holy Spirit, help me. Help me when I am doing these things. When I go to Mass; when I go to Confession; when I am in personal prayer, when I am doing good deeds for others. Help me to have my heart in the right place so that I am opening that heart to a new outpouring of Divine Love.”

The Holy Spirit has all kinds of fruits in our lives. All kinds of fruits. In some, it brings the fruit of courage and boldness to go on when things seem impossible. The Holy Spirit bears the fruit of humility in our life. The Holy Spirit bears the fruit of peace in our life. The Holy Spirit brings a healing. The Holy Spirit brings patience; the Holy Spirit brings all kinds of different gifts and bears all kinds of different fruits. It is like rain that falls on all kinds of different fruit trees. That same rain produces more oranges, apples, pomegranates, and almonds. That same rain produces zucchinis, the pumpkins, and all kinds of different foods but it is the same rain. The same Holy Spirit falls into our hearts which produces all kinds of different fruits in us but not if we are closed. 

So, every day, not just on Pentecost Sunday, we ask God to open our hearts so that we can receive a gift of the Holy Spirit and bear the fruits of the Spirit in great abundance for our sanctification and for the sanctification of the Church and our world. 

Summary:

The Ascension of Jesus seems very much like a departure. A going away. It is where it looks like Jesus is receding into this distant background and in a way becoming absent. The first thing I would like to say is that the good Lord can never be absent. He can never be absent. Look to Psalm 139, for example, that says, "If I ascend to the heavens, you are there; if I lie down among the dead, you are there; If I take the wings of dawn and dwell beyond the sea, even there your hand guides me, your right hand holds me fast.” There is no place where God is not. So, objectively speaking, there is no time or place where God can be absent. And secondly, I want to point out that the Ascension is always connected with the gift of the Holy Spirit. 

It is kind of an interesting, mysterious thing how we can be absolutely convinced intellectually that God is with us, that God is present, that God is never, ever, ever absent. And yet at the same time, subjectively feel, that He is not present at all, that he has withdrawn, or at least that He is silent. But God certainly is not the one at fault in that dynamic, is He?  So, then if the Ascension is not about absence, but presence, my question is, how can we, as disciples of Jesus Christ, more continuously have the experience that God is with us, and that God is present to us and near to us? 

There may be a variety of answers to that question - I just want to propose one and that is that by entering into worship more continuously, by entering into worship, we open ourselves to a more consistent experience of God with us. 

Summary: 

When I teach, I often say that Jesus parting gift to the world was not the Bible. He didn't go to His apostles before His ascension and hand them each copy of a bible and say, "Read this, this is going to guide you from here on out.” No, Jesus’ parting gift to the world was the Church. The Church. And the New Testament would later be a gift to the Church. But there was a time when the Church existed, and the New Testament did not. In the early days of the Church, there were no Gospels to read. There were no letters of St. Paul. There was no Book of Revelation or any letters of John or Peter, or any of the others that make up the New Testament today. There was a time when the Church lived, but there were no New Testament writings. They had the Old Testament still, of course, but their teachings of Jesus had not been committed to writing yet. So, when the question arose about how to live the Christian life, what could they do? They couldn't consult a New Testament that didn't exist. 

But we have an example of this very situation in the first reading in the Acts of the Apostles, where some people went down to Antioch from Judea, and they were teaching that basically, if you wanted to be a disciple of Jesus, you have to accept and live by all of the Mosaic law as well. And this was a big dispute in the early Church. Basically, to become a disciple of Jesus, could you go straight from being a Gentile, or did you have to become a Jew first and then a Christian? And so, Paul and Barnabas go up to Jerusalem, to consult the apostles and the elders about this question. And of course, then the apostles and the elders send this letter back to Antioch with Paul and Barnabas, and they read it in the community. Amazingly, we have the text of this letter in which the bottom line is, as they say, ‘No, you don't have to accept all of the Mosaic Law.” Just follow these four principles with regard to that: abstain from meat sacrificed to idols, abstain from blood, abstain from meats of strangled animals, and abstain from unlawful marriage, and that will be fine.’ All of the Mosaic Law kind of condensed into these four little principles. 

Again, our efforts as a parish at evangelization rest very much on our ability to articulate what makes our Church unique, special. All of this, all of that study, all that learning, all that understanding, helps us to keep His Word, to remain in His Word, to receive the Father's love, and to receive the gift of their Holy Spirit, making their dwelling Father, Son, and Holy Spirit within us. Pray that God give us an ever-deeper gratitude for the gift of our Church, the gift of that Word, that helps us to be effective in proclaiming that Word to the world.

Summary:

Wouldn't it be glorious if we as Catholics were known once again in today's world as we were in the early years for our love? If I overheard someone in the store talking about our parish, and they said, “How those Catholics love one another,” I would be absolutely elated! Ah, yes, we are on the right track. “How they love one another.”  I do believe that in our parish we do more than just tolerate one another. Although, I think some parishioners do have this attitude toward other parishioners just sort of putting up with them. But I sincerely hope that by the grace of God, we can overcome whatever it is that would keep us at the level of mere coexistence. There are definitely people in our parish who model Christian lov3 very well, but I wonder if overall, our parish might be better described as friendly and loving. Friendly is good, of course. It is certainly a step up from tolerating each other or merely coexistence. But it's not yet where the Lord calls us to be - we need to move that needle away from just coexistence, beyond friendship to true Christian love. 

What is that love like? The love of spouses? The love of spouses is a love that entails mutual self-gift. It is a man and a woman who give themselves completely to each other. And in that Sacrament, we have in a very powerful way, a visible manifestation of the love of Christ for the Church. But that's how He commands us to love, not just married people, but all people, whatever their vocation and whatever their circumstances in life. He calls us to love. He calls us to make us gift of self, a sincere and total gift of self, and in that giving of self, we find our deepest satisfaction and deepest happiness and deepest peace. That is how Jesus loves the Church. In a total, unrestricted, unreserved gift of self. “As I have loved you, as I have loved you,” my bride would say, "So you also should love one another in giving of yourselves for one another, laying down their lives in service, in humility, and in generosity.” 

What is it that keeps the community merely at the level of friendly instead of going to the level of to the truly embodying Christian love? It is the failure to give the complete gift of self. It is the keeping of one’s heart closed to some degree. Perhaps we close our hearts because we are afraid. Maybe we have opened our hearts in the past, and we got burned, we got stung, we got betrayed. So, we don't want to open our heart anymore. We don't want to suffer that anymore. Maybe it's a general distrust of people. I mean it could be a lot of different things. Maybe it's just an overconcern for our own agenda and the things that we want, and we fear that opening hearts to others might bring too many demands on us that are significant. But Jesus says, “As I have loved you, so you also should love one another.” Is Jesus' heart in any way closed to us? Does He pull back anything of Himself from us? No. Not one bit.

In the sacred Sacrament of the Eucharist, we have a sublime opportunity to contemplate the love of God. And we will never plume the depths of that reality, that mystery. If we are contemplating the love of God, we will always find something new. If we say, “Oh, the love of God, I already thought about that. I already understand that.” No, we keep coming, especially in the Eucharist, this mystery of divine love, that we might believe, but also that we might, in imitation of that mystery of divine gift, of divine love, be better equipped to fulfill the Lord's command.

Summary:  

• My greatest desire is that we as a community would glorify God; that we would glorify God in the manner of our life and in the way that we worship. 

• I want to see the quality of our liturgical celebrations, especially the Mass, always improve. Always improve. This means  that not only lectors and musicians, and altar servers, and priests, and sacristans and everyone who plays a particular role like that prepares diligently for the Mass, but that all of us, all of us together, enter really wholeheartedly, not partially or with any degree of apathy or anything like that, not half heartedly, that we would all enter wholeheartedly  into each celebration of the sacred mysteries.

• But all of us ought to be saints in the making. Saints in the making in dealing and addressing the areas of sin in our life that need conversion and certainly availing ourselves of this sacrament of Reconciliation, Confession to purify our hearts so that we can glorify God and the Holy Spirit can truly flourish in our community. 

• I dream of having a parish where everyone’s heart is on fire for the Lord, and that we're growing in purity of heart. 

• My desire that we share life as a community and that our sense of family and mutual belonging is grounded in the lived experience of being loved by God, and being in real relationship with him; a real experiential relationship with God through the Lord Jesus in the power of the Holy Spirit. 

• I desire that our parish would be a place of healing. Ultimately that healing is what allows us to receive God’s love more fully, more deeply more fruitfully. 

• My desire is that our parish be a place where vulnerability is reverenced and where sharing from the heart is normal, actually even comfortable. 

• And we are not scared or afraid to open our heart to share what is going on in our life with someone else, because we know that it we will be received with charity, respected. We will not be betrayed or rejected. 

• I desire that no one ever goes home from Mass wondering if anyone here actually cares about them. 

• I desire that you, even as we are a community, would also become an agent for healing in the broader community around us. 

• I would love to see our outreach increase. 

• I would love to see that the Catholic Church be a major, major player in the improvement of conditions in our homes and surrounding area. 

• I desire that we would proclaim the truth of Jesus Christ as the apostles and the disciples boldly proclaimed it in the early Church as we heard it in the first reading from the Acts of the Apostles. 

• I desire that we would proclaim the Gospel with joy as witnesses of their resurrection; that we would demonstrate by our manner of living what it means to be transformed in the grace of God, especially in the Sacraments. 

• I envision a vibrant dynamic Catholic community that doesn't limp along for lack of numbers, or lack of involvement, but one that bursting at the seams because not only Catholics want to come back, but more and more individuals who have never experienced life in the Church, see and witness life in the Church and want to be one of participated in it; want to share in it.

• I would love to see our particular parish right here be an agent for that [expansion of the Church] Being out there in the community, being that instrument that the Lord uses to bring more and more people to himself in His church. 

• I desire that the same Spirit that animated the early Church would animate all of us. A Spirit that can compel us to go out and proclaim the Gospel, to announce Jesus risen from the dead, to continue celebrating the sacred mysteries, gathering together on the first day of the week, every first week, celebrating the breaking of the bread, receiving Jesus in the Holy Eucharist.

• I desire that that the same Spirit will animate all of us. And if it does, we will continue to see our parish grow.

Summary: Father Kruse

Why are you here? You know, it's a question that I think we need to remind ourselves of often. Why do we do what we do? Why do we pray? Why do we come Church? Why involve our lives in all of this? Is it that we can have a social circle? That's part of it. Or is it more? What is the goal, in other words, friends, of the spiritual life? What is the goal of engaging in spiritual exercises? And, of course, coming to Church to being the most important. The goal is simply this, to repair what we once had, and what we all once had in our very first parents, which was a relationship that was in perfect communion with God, in union with God. He created us to share His love and His life with us. And we experience that as a human race only at the very beginning of our history.

And so now, we do what we do, we come to Church, we pray at home. We try to live a good life according to the way God wants us to live so that we can grow in that union with God, in that relationship with God. Friends, that is the key to a happy life. Are we going to be perfectly happy in this life? Of course not. Can we be reasonably happy in this life? Yes, of course. Can we experience joy and even peace while we suffer? Can we experience disappointment? Can we experience the brokenness of life? Yes, we can. Anchored in a great hope that one day, when we cross from this life to the next, we will experience perfect happiness. This is why we do what we do. We've got to have that underlying motivation and reason. Otherwise, it's really easy just to stop coming to Church, or to stop praying, like what's the point of it all? 

What did winning a soccer game lead to change your life? Nothing. What did winning a basketball game do to improve the world? Nothing. What did the resurrection of Jesus Christ do to change your life and prove the world? Everything, friends! 

So, my suggestion to you this week is to help you with this. So last Sunday, Divine Mercy Sunday, we read from John Chapter 20, and that was the reading that described the very first time Jesus appeared to the disciples on Easter Sunday. So, remember, in the upper room, they're hiding from fear of the Jews, and then Jesus appears to them. This is on Sunday after Good Friday. And He appears to them, He says, "Peace be with you." My recommendation is you take that passage of scripture and use it for your prayer time some this week. 

Summary:

But Divine Mercy Sunday which we celebrate today, announces to us and the Church and to the whole world that God does not treat us the way we treat other people. Divine Mercy Sunday announces to us that when God sees us in our human misery, whatever that is whatever that is – our addiction, our illness, our doubt, our confusion, our fear, our shame, our discouragement, our depression, our hopelessness, our feelings of abandonment - when God looks at us in our human misery, He suffers with us. He enters into our suffering with us. He doesn’t turn His back. His heart is moved for us. The very Latin word ‘misericordia’ meaning ‘mercy’ joins two words, ‘mercy’ and ‘heart.’  God opens His heart in our misery. He doesn’t reject or turn away from us or abandon us. He suffers with us. God very easily distinguishes between the person we are and the words and deeds and thoughts. He always loves the person. Yes, God hates sin. He doesn't want there to be sin in our life. He loves us. He loves us unconditionally and no matter what. He delights in us because we are His beloved children.

Everything changes in our life when we accept this truth. The deep truth of God’s mercy – the acceptance of us as we are. When He sees us even in our sin, He recognizes our suffering because of it. People come to confession because they are suffering, right? Sin brings suffering. God has mercy on us in our suffering. He will not reject us. He certainly does not withdraw from us in our time of suffering and in our misery that we experience in this life. 

So, if there is one thing that we take from Divine Mercy Sunday celebration, I hope it is this: a deeper understanding of how God regards us. A deep appreciation of God’s infinite mercy for us. A deeper understanding of what that means in practical ways as we continue to struggle in this Valley of Tears. But if there is a second thing we can take away, I hope it would be this: that the Lord in His goodness invites us to regard others with mercy just as He regards us with mercy. That the Lord invites us to put on a new perspective when we look at our brothers and sisters. Not just to see their fault, their failing, their weakness, their brokenness, their sinfulness, but to see beyond it, deeper than that – to the person who is suffering and is in need of love. That might bring about a great revolution in our life. If we could look at that person who offends us with compassion. 

When we celebrate the Eucharist, we are invited into a deep communion with our Lord, and he may just give us the grace to put on new eyes to receive that new perspective to see the outpouring of mercy from God and share it then with our neighbor. 

Summary:

Happy Easter! Our Lord Jesus Christ is truly risen. Risen from the dead. He has conquered sin and death and brought us new life. We must rejoice. We must rejoice! ‘Alleluia’ wells up from the deep belly of the Church on this day. So, rejoice. Alleluia.

Easter reminds us that Christ has conquered the grave so there is hope for each and every one of us. So, I encourage you in this Jubilee Easter to set aside these little bits of doubt, big bits of doubts, set aside everything that encumbers or hinders your relationship with God. 

Jesus transformed the Cross however so that as it is no longer merely a symbol of death or failure or defeat, but it has become the very path for us to new life. It is a Jubilee. Get ready because the Lord, if you're willing, will come into your heart in a new way. He is going to stir things up in a new way.

We celebrated four baptisms last night. Four people, new to our community, just entering the Church, forgiven of their sins, born to new life. That grace of Baptism is stirred up in each one of us who are Baptized when we receive the body and blood of the Lord. The same life we receive in Baptism, we receive from the altar because it's the very life of Christ Himself. We may need to work on purifying our hearts to receive Him more and more worthily. Maybe if it has been a long time since we went to Confession, it would be good to go to Confession before receiving Holy Communion. For those who receive Holy Communion regularly, let the Lord purify our hearts through this beautiful sacrament of forgiveness. But receiving Holy Communion worthily in a new and divine light, the Easter spirit stirred when you receive Holy Communion. That mystery of the Cross and the resurrection comes into our very body, into our soul, into our life.