The Celebration of the Mass: Gathering Rites

In today’s first reading from the book of Nehemiah we see that the people of Israel gathered for worship and to hear the words of Ezra the priest. The reading tells us that everyone is called, men, women, and children. Certain rituals and movements occur, i.e. Ezra stands on a wooden platform, the people fall prostrate in worship, etc. Many Jewish rituals of worship have carried down to our own day; in the very mass we celebrate here and now. When I reflected on today’s first reading, I thought; why not explain the mass, the first part of it that is, “The Gathering Rites.”

The first pressing and most important question is, “why do we gather in the first place? We gather because it is today that the world is remade, made new again, because Jesus rose on a Sunday, the beginning of a new week, and the beginning of our salvation, known to us in Scripture as the Lord’s Day.

The Gathering rites do not begin when the priest makes the sign of the cross, they actually begin before. They begin as soon as you enter the Narthex. It is there that you are hopefully greeted by our ushers\greeters. It is also there where you need to leave your conversations. This is something that we need to take seriously. When we enter the Church we are entering into the Temple which hold the presence of God, for us it is Jesus in the Tabernacle. Our attention should be towards Jesus when entering the Church and our prayers should also begin if not continue since the time we have left our homes and began heading to the Church.

There are two rituals that we all do as Catholics when we enter the. Upon entering we bless ourselves with holy water. This is not simply something nice or just something to do, rather when we bless ourselves it is a reminder of our baptism, that we share an intimate relationship with the Trinity, a reminder that we are priests, prophets, and kings, coming together as individuals and as a community to offer prayer and worship.

The other thing we do is either genuflect or bow in the presence of the Lord. Genuflecting is an old medieval custom from Europe that was done to show reverence to a king or person of high rank. This custom slowly worked its way into the Church, in our case genuflecting before the King of kings. An older custom going back to the very early Church was a simple bow in the presence of the Lord, now working its way back into custom.

The celebration of the liturgy begins with a processional hymn. We sing our praises to the Lord. You have heard it before, “When we sing we pray twice,” as St. Augustine said. If your singing voice is awful, like mine, then just sing low, and let your voice sort of blend in as best as possible. We also stand at this time, standing means that we are at attention, like a soldier, ready to do his duty.

Next comes the greeting: The priest begins with the sign of the cross and then greeting everyone with, “The Lord be with you”, response “and with your spirit.” This is an ancient biblical greeting as found in the book of Ruth chapter 2 verse 4, “Boaz said to the reapers (of the harvest), ‘The Lord be with You.’” You can see that just about the entire mass has its roots in Scripture and that is why it is odd when non-Catholics, especially Fundamentalists-Evangelicals claim that the mass is not biblical, indeed it is more so than even their own services.

Next, we do an examination of conscience in our penitential rite, “Brothers and Sisters, let us recall to mind our sins and failings and ask the Lord for his mercy and pardon.” Then there is a pause in order to allow everyone time to bring before the Lord their sins and weaknesses. We then ask for forgiveness either by reciting the Confetier or the Kyrie. Then we give Glory to God for His kindness and compassion by either singing or reciting the Gloria, during some Church seasons, i.e. Advent and Lent the Gloria is omitted.

Then we have the Opening prayer, there is a pause here, and rightly so, because this gives us the opportunity to make our individual prayers before the Lord, then while the priest begins the prayer he collects all the prayers offered individually and offers them as one prayer to Almighty God. So at mass we pray individually but also as one, hence the importance of going to mass.

One other thing I would like to discuss is a matter of importance and that is getting here on time. I will end our reflection with a story about Vince Lombardi.

Those of you who do not know who he was, he was one of the greatest NFL coaches ever and he had a work ethic second to none. At his first meeting with the Packers he asked the guys to be ready to go the next morning at 7am, the team’s first practice. The next day, as some of the guys were coming on to the field they saw that part of the team was already practicing. Once everyone arrived, by 7am, Coach Lombardi blew the whistle and called everyone in. He said, “Gentleman many of you were late.” One of the players said, “Coach, we were all here by 7am.” Coach Lombardi responded, “Real champions arrive 15 to 30 minutes early to get in extra practice, like I said, you guys were late.”

The Wedding Feast at Cana: Our Wedding Feast!

A good mother anticipates the needs of her children and family before others realize a possible problem, challenge, change of direction, or obstacle up ahead.  The innate sense of a mother is profound and this gift I believe is given to mothers by God in order to be a protector, a person of sensibility, great awareness, and practical.  Mary, therefore, realizes, anticipates the problem of the wine running short and goes to Jesus to see if He can do anything about it.  Jesus can do something about it and He does.  But that is not the point of this reflection, the point here is that Mary knew He could.

Jewish weddings in those were large events, many people were invited and they lasted a number of days, even up to a week.  That is a lot of singing, dancing, and drinking!  And Croatians and Italians think they have big weddings?  Anyway, it is interesting that Mary knows Jesus can do something about it.  For one, she knows he can’t go buy more wine, they don’t have the money; therefore she knows He will make it. 

Scripture tells us this was the first of His signs, but I am sure Mary and even Joseph had witnessed many signs before Jesus began His public ministry, they may have been done more subtly, but nothing escapes a good mother’s eye.  Knowing these past miracles Mary knew Jesus could help. 

But, it is not only in the knowing that Jesus could turn water into wine, but that He would!  Mary tells us “Do whatever He tells you.”  She is a woman of pure and excellent faith, never hesitating when God calls, but there right away and believing without doubt.  She is a model for us, a model of faith, one that knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that God can and that God will.  

The wine running out is not just literal, but also symbolic, we run out of things in life and when we do – do we turn to Jesus like Mary did?  Do we believe that He can do it and that He will do it for us?  This is a question of our faith.  Mary was asked many times to have faith.  God is asking us the same thing today, for we also are at a wedding feast, our wedding to Christ, and in a little while Jesus will make that miracle again, but this time turning bread and wine into His Body and Blood, now celebrating the real wedding at Cana.

Faith Series Talk 1: The Bible and its Development

This was originally in outline form, adjusted here to read more like an essay, please forgive the grammar.  Picture is that of St. Jerome translating the Old and New Testaments into Latin.  St. Jerome was born in what was called Stridon, Dalmatia, now better known as Split, Croatia.  

Introduction:  As you know Pope Benedict has declared this year as “A Year of Faith” and has encouraged the entire Church, especially at the local level, the Parish to offer reflection, prayer, fellowship, study, liturgy, etc. for the benefit of the faithful.  We have been asked to reflect especially on Vatican Council II, the Catechism, and our beliefs as Catholics.

My approach will apologetical, based on Sacred Scripture and the Church fathers.  My themes will be taken from Gus Llyods’ “A Minute in the Church” which we have more of in the Narthex.

What are apologetics?  You may have heard this term before.  Apologetics as defined by Gus Lloyd is, “the branch of theology concerned with the defense and rational justification of Christianity (in our case, Catholicism).” P.7

When I thought about where I would start, I thought why not from the beginning, from Scripture.

So, tonight I want to take a look at what the Bible is, how it formed, and its use in the Church.

What is the Bible?

Simply put the bible or Sacred Scripture is the inerrant and inspired Word of God.

Now that is a mouthful, what does inerrant mean?  Inerrant means, “Without error.” Inspired means that God either through direct revelation, visions, dreams, prayer, to the authors of Scripture helped them to write exactly what He wanted.  This does not mean, however, that the author’s personality, writing style, quirks, foibles, and everything about them is not present within the writing, it is.  It means that in some Divine way, without hindering the author, God got His Word across.

Sacred Scripture is NOT a police report, nor is it written in modern style.  It does not follow a nice historical timeline or record events the way we expect.  The authors were men of their time, influenced and educated differently, teaching styles tended to be much more repetitive, there was no mandatory rule to give credit to previous authors or resources you may have used, no such thing as plagiarism in those days.  They tended to write more fluidly when it came to history or recording events, especially when dealing with the Divine.  For example, if I asked you to write a biography on Abraham Lincoln you would follow certain rules and go about it in a very uniformed way.  You would first sit and think about a thesis statement, then from there you would acquire resource materials to help prove your thesis.  You most likely would follow a very chronological time line, trying to be as historically accurate as possible.  That is the way we write about history today, but not the way they did 2,000 or 3,000 years ago.

The Bible is also made up of two parts, which we call “The Old Testament” and “The New Testament.”

The Old Testament tells the story of Creation, the Law, the Prophets, and God’s unfolding plan of salvation.

The New Testament tells the story of the plan of salvation coming to fruition, the prophecies now fulfilled in God made man, Jesus Christ.

The entire Bible is God speaking to us, historically, theologically, and even personally, revealing to us God and His promises.

Knowing what the Bible is – is very important but so too is its development.  As Gus Lloyd says, “You see, the Bible didn’t just fall out of the sky, or off of a local printing press,” no indeed, it actually took quite some time for all the letters and books of the Old and New Testament to take shape and then to be considered Sacred Scripture.

The Old Testament developed under many sources, some of which are referred to as the priestly class, the Elhoist class, the Deuteronomist and the Yahwist class.  They had a great influence, especially on the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament, also referred to as the Law.  The Old Testament is also made up of single authors, multiple authors, students or disciples of prophets and oral Tradition finding its way onto written parchment.  Eventually the Old Testament would be Hellenized; fancy way of saying that those Jews who lived in Greek areas had a Greek version and those Jews from Israel had a more Hebrew version.  Aside from all of that it took a couple of thousand years for the books to find themselves in one volume.  It took the decision of the People of Israel, mainly its scholars and priestly class through the power of the Holy Spirit to give us what we have today in what we call the Jewish Scripture or Old Testament.  You can clearly see that something of this nature took time and did not fall out of the sky.

The New Testament also took some time to all come together into the neat package we have today that consists of Four Gospels, Two books: Acts and Revelation, and 21 letters, 13 from St. Paul, 3 from St. John,  2 from St. Peter, 1 from James, and 1 from St. Jude, and one unknown author to the Hebrews.  The first letter written was from St. Paul about 20 years after Jesus’ resurrection and the last book written was Revelation about 95 AD.  So we have about a 50 year period in which these works were written.  Then it took another 300 years or so for the Church to decide, dogmatically which books and letters made up the New Testament – the Canon of Scripture.

How did they go about doing this, what was the criteria they used to decide what was inspired by God and what was not?

They used two major criteria to determine what would make up the New Testament Canon.

What were the people using at Liturgy?

Which letters, books, and Gospels held commonality and continuity?

Also looked at the books, letters, and Gospels themselves to see if they claimed to be Scripture, which was rare – only happens in three places.

"And consider the patience of our Lord as salvation, as our beloved brother Paul, according to the wisdom given to him, also wrote to you, speaking of these things as he does in all his letters. In them there are some things hard to understand that the ignorant and unstable distort to their own destruction, just as they do the other scriptures." 2 Pt. 3:15-16.

"Give greetings to the brothers in Laodicea and to Nympha and to the church in her house. And when this letter is read before you, have it read also in the church of the Laodiceans, and you yourselves read the one from Laodicea. And tell Archippus, “See that you fulfill the ministry that you received in the Lord.” The greeting is in my own hand, Paul’s. Remember my chains. Grace be with you." Col 4:15-18

"All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for refutation, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that one who belongs to God may be competent, equipped for every good work." 1 Tim. 3:16-17

Even with all these three passages we are not given a comprehensive and definite statement of which books and letters are truly inspired and which are not, for e.g. the Gospel of Matthew does not say “This is Scripture”  No book or letter explicitly says that.

The Church for three hundred years or so went by popular opinion or the voice of the people “vox popoli” or better to say “sensus fidelium” – sense of the faithful.  It was not until approx 375 AD that Pope Damasus the 1st asked St. Jerome to translate the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek Scriptures into Latin, from which came the Latin Vulgate.  When Jerome completed his work Pope Damasus also asked St. Augustine and others to determine what the churches were using in their worship, their liturgy and also to look at what provided continuity.

Hence Pope Damasus declared in 382 by virtue of his office what books and letters comprised the OT and NT, his decisions were also ratified in subsequent Church councils of Hippo and Carthage in 393 and 397, both of which were presided by St. Augustine and again confirmed by Rome.  From that period up until the Reformation, 1,200 years, there was no real major concern with the Canon.

Finally the usages of the Bible in the Church.

Even though we have a Magisterium, a governing body with authority the Scriptures remain the norm for the Church, we are shaped by them, influenced by them, and know that it is the Word of God.

We use it throughout mass, the readings, prayers, hymns, etc.

We need to use it more for prayer, study, and reflection.

Public vs. Private Revelation: Public Revelation is all of Sacred Scripture and all Sacred Tradition.  There is no longer any public revelation.  Once the last Apostle died, John, all public revelation stopped.  Any revealing of dogmatic Truth that is defined by the Church as public belief finds its roots in Scripture or Oral Tradition from that time before the last apostle’s death.

Private Revelation is that revelation given by the Holy Spirit to any believer outside of Sacred Scripture or Sacred Tradition, i.e. Fatima.  There are two kinds of private revelations, those affirmed by the Church as authentic and those that are not (either because they are still being investigated or they have been deemed heretical or false)  For e.g. Medjugorge, has not been affirmed.  In either case, whether affirmed by the Church or not each individual believer is given the option to either accept or not to accept any private revelation.  The Church encourages those private revelations, i.e. Sr. Faustina for our benefit, but we are not bound to them in regards to our salvation or sanctification.

There are false teachings out there as well, those that oppose Sacred Scripture and the Church, be careful in your readings and devotions, for e.g. one such false prophet or teaching comes from Maria Divine Mercy.  Please check the following to link to see her numerous errors: http://warningsecondcoming.blogspot.com/

The Magi: Bearing our Gifts

As St. Paul so beautifully says in his letter to the Ephesians, “. . . we are coheirs and co-partners in the promise of Christ Jesus.”  That promise is none other than our eternal salvation.  This promise of eternal life is seen when the three wise men (the magi) come to Jesus and “offer Him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.” 

Jesus is first praised by the people who are the apple of His eye – the people of Israel as it was the shepherds, farm hands, and stable boys who first give him honor after they hear the message of the angel.  Afterwards, and we don’t know exactly how far afterwards, come the three kings from the East (representing the Gentiles) offering gifts to the Christ child.  So it is the entire world who gives honor and praise to Jesus, and the promise of being coheirs and co-partners with Christ can be found in the meaning of the magi and especially in the gifts that they give.

The magi themselves are believed to be from a priestly class of a Gentile religion called Zoroastrianism, they were a group of priests who were basically astronomers and philosophers from the East and possibly Far East.  They were probably also of royalty, kings themselves or at least from families of prominence.  More importantly for our purposes is that these kings-magi were not Jewish and that they were also included in the promise of Christ.

Can you imagine just for a moment what would have been going through the minds of Joseph and Mary when these three Easterners – kings bowing down before their baby boy?  It must have been something special, and the gifts would have been very special; something Joseph and Mary would not have been lost on.

The gift of gold is given to a King, representing His Kingship.  The gift of frankincense is given to a God or priest for sacrificial offerings.  Finally the gift of myrrh is given for burial.  These gifts would have brought great joy to Mary and Joseph as well as wonder and even some concern especially the gift of myrrh which again is for burial.

Two amazing things are happening here, one is in the gifts presented to Christ, but also that Christ would give us a share in these gifts – the promise of being coheirs and co-partners with Him in everything.

This is why the Church takes so seriously the sacrament of baptism, in which we also become priests, prophets, and kings.  I know I have spoken to you about this before but it is imperative to understand it.  The gifts given to Jesus are also given to all of us to share in.  All of us are part of the Epiphany. 

All of us are priests (the royal priesthood) because just as Jesus we must offer sacrifice every day, the sacrifice of our very selves.  We must become one with Jesus in every way, offering and joining ourselves to the Cross, because it is there in which the ultimate act of love is both seen and lived.  People seek the Gospel, they are always looking for Truth, for salvation, when they see us they must see Jesus’ partners, they must see Jesus Himself otherwise the words we preach have no meaning.

We also are given gold, for we too are royalty; think how precious we are to God.  We are so precious to Him that He would take up the cross of the world and carry it for us and even be crucified on it, all for us.

And finally, the gift of myrrh.  It symbolizes burial, death in fact.  Something that is hard for all of us.  All of us must face death.  We do everything in the world to cover it up.  When we go to a funeral viewing we make the person look alive.  We don’t like to face it, but death comes for us all.  Death serves two purposes, one it gives us relief from this life.  Everybody wants to live here and to live here forever.  St. Augustine tells us that death is a way out for us from this life of toil.  Everything we do it is never fully perfect, there is always something lacking, and we must work the daily grind of life with all the sufferings that come with it.  Sure, we are happy as well, and there are great moments of joy in this life, but we never truly reach perfect happiness, its part of our original sin.  And after a while it takes its toll on us, but God being good gives us a way out, through death.  More importantly is that we share Christ’s death with our own, that everything we do is always connected to His Cross but also His resurrection.

The Epiphany was meant to be an eye opener, not just for Mary and Joseph, but for the whole world.  It’s not just a nice cute scene with Three Kings bringing Christmas presents, no indeed; in its essence it is about intimacy with Christ, an intimacy in which we share His Kingship, His Priesthood, and even His death.  We belong to Jesus, we are His coheirs, and we are His co-partners.  Amen.