Fr Richard McAlear 2006

Father Richard McAleer, a member of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, believes his work is a ministry of hope and healing. He travels around the world sharing God's love and peace, emphasizing the importance of forgiveness. Christianity stands out for its belief in mercy and forgiveness, in contrast to other religions that focus on retribution and revenge. Forgiveness is a gift from God, won through Jesus' death on the cross. It is not something that can be earned or achieved. Once forgiven, the challenge is to share that forgiveness with others and to love them as God loves us. Forgiveness is an act of love and is central to the Christian faith. Father Richard McAleer considers his work to be truly a ministry of hope and healing. They believe his teaching gift is that of someone who brings the word of God, the voice of Christ, to our hearts and minds. Father McAleer is a member of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, a worldwide congregation. His ministry has taken him all over the United States and across the globe, including Asia, South America, Australia, New Guinea, and most of Europe. Father McAleer feels he was called to be a priest in order to bring this message of God's love and peace to believers who earnestly seek the spirit of truth. He will tell you that only a living faith in Christ can bring you true hope. He will encourage each of us to seek holiness in life, a stronger faith, and a renewed depth of sincerity in our belief in Christ. The founder of the Oblates of Mary left this challenge to his Oblate community, leave nothing undared in proclaiming the kingdom of God. I'm sure you will agree after hearing Father McAleer that you, too, have been challenged to leave nothing undared. Gentlemen, please welcome Father Richard McAleer. Thank you. Let's begin with a prayer and ask God's blessing. We've come here in the name of the Lord to hear his word and to be touched by the spirit, and so we open our hearts to the gift of the spirit, and I pray in the name of Jesus that we would be empowered, anointed, and blessed with the spirit of Jesus Christ. Give glory to the Father. Amen. Amen. It's always difficult to speak at this time, because after you've all had lunch, in any civilized civilization, any country that has real understanding of human nature, they take a siesta. I lived in Italy for seven years and it became part of the routine, and I realized that's a very civilized way to live, so we're here, we have to be empowered by the spirit so that we don't do that right now. We're here, looking at so many people, it becomes intimidating to think, speaking of such an august group of men, until I realize that there's only one thing that we all have in common. There's one common denominator to everybody in this room. We're all sinners, and that is our fellowship. Because we're sinners, we all have the same needs. We need forgiveness, we need God, and we need one another. This is not the fellowship of the holy ones. If that were true, I wouldn't be here. You might be, but I wouldn't be here. There's a great mistaken idea that the church is for the sanctified, you know, the ones who are holy, the ones who have it all together. No, it's for the seekers, and the ones who struggle, and the ones who recognize their need for God and for forgiveness. And when I'm thinking about all the things we could say about the gospel, about Jesus Christ, I want to focus on forgiveness today as the great gift of God and the great challenge that stands before us. If you pick up your paper any day of the week, you'll see usually on the front page examples in writing of religion that does not believe in forgiveness, but rather retribution, revenge, retaliation, and death. Christianity stands in stark contrast as a religion that believes in mercy, forgiveness, and love. And that was John Paul II, and the word that he spoke throughout his 26 years was the word that is needed in the world today, not just the church, but in the world today, is the word forgiveness and mercy, and to understand what that means. Now, I'll tell you where I came to that some years ago when I was young and didn't have gray hair. I went to Israel, I went to Jerusalem to study scripture. It was a short course. It was like one of those refresher things for four or five months. And part of the course, we had discussion groups, sharing groups with other religions, either Jewish or Muslim. And one of the group discussions that we had one day was with some Muslim men who spoke very highly of Jesus Christ. They loved the guy. They believed he was a prophet. They even believed he rose from the dead. I said, why aren't you Christian then if you believe all these good things about Jesus? It's because of the way Jesus spoke about God the Father. Because of his idea, concept, image of God the Father, we could never be Christian. How did Jesus speak about God the Father? Well, the parable in the scriptures of the prodigal son. It says, I understand that the father of the prodigal son is your image of God. So the prodigal son insults the father, takes the money, goes to a far off country, wastes the money, dishonors the father, shames the family, embarrasses his family, and then comes home. And what does the father do? He welcomes him back, embraces him in love, gives him the robe and the ring and the sandals and has a celebration in receiving his son home again. If that is your image of the father, if that is your image of God, I will never be Christian. Because that man, that father, is weak, soft, without honor, and not deserving of any respect. Think about that. Jesus spoke about forgiveness and God who is rich in mercy, a God of forgiveness and a God of pardon and a God of reconciliation. Those are the words that should mark the Christian. When people tell you that all religions are about the same, they all teach the same thing, it's not true. Christianity teaches about forgiveness in a way that no one else does. God is a father of mercy and he has mercy on the sinner. And the father is never satisfied, the father is never happy, the father is never content, and to all his wayward children, all the sinful parts of his family are restored to him. And to do that, he offers forgiveness. Forgiveness without qualification, forgiveness without measure, forgiveness without limit. It is the gift. And if he's had Jesus into the world, it's for the forgiveness of sin. And if Jesus is called Jesus, a name which means the Savior, the angel said, it's because he will save his people from their sins. And Jesus dies on the cross for the forgiveness of sin. He sheds his blood so that sin may be forgiven. Everything that characterizes a Christian centers on the forgiveness of sin. I'm going to unfold that a little bit for us. The first thing is that forgiveness is a gift. In the song Amazing Grace, what is the grace? And what is amazing about that grace? Is that the father has proclaimed, the father has declared reconciliation, pardon, and peace. His arms are open, his heart is open, and he welcomes his children home without retribution, without punishment, but to come home, to home to the father's heart. And as long as you wander far from the father, you're never home. As long as you're not reconciled to God, you're not home. You're restless, you're empty, you're seeking, but you're never at peace. And Jesus comes as the word of peace and reconciliation from the father. And it's gift. This is gift. It is nothing that you can achieve. It's nothing that you can win. It's nothing you can purchase, nothing you can buy. Forgiveness is a gift of God, proclaimed by Jesus and won for us by his death on the cross. We are graced, we are gifted, and we are blessed by having our sins forgiven. Today, hopefully all of you have gone to confession, if you ever need to go to confession, you hear the most healing words, the most comforting words you'll ever hear in your life. The words the priest speaks when he says, I absolve you from all your sins. I absolve you from all your sins. You are cleaned. You are purified. You are restored to grace. You are reconciled to God. These are the words of absolution through our Catholic faith, the most consoling religion in the world, that proclaims and lives the forgiveness of sin. Now, just one brief thing on that. Since sins are forgiven, you don't have to beat up on yourself. You don't have to punish yourself. You don't have to prove anything to God. You don't have to prove anything to me. You don't have to prove anything to each other. We're forgiven. And we're forgiven because we need to be forgiven. We need to be forgiven because we're sinners. Very human, very profound, very healing. Now, the second part of this is the challenge. The first part is the gift. You've been forgiven. Nothing you achieved, simply given to you. Here it is. Your choice is not to win it, but to receive it, to accept it, to embrace it. And then the challenge is to share it. The Holy Father Benedict just wrote an encyclical on love. And we all know that the characteristic of every Christian is that we love one another, that we have love for one another. Love is the mark of a Christian. We all know that. But we think about that, and what the Holy Father said in his encyclical is that in our age, it's almost like we have to restate that because love has become a cheap word. You love your wife, you love your children. You love ice cream, you love golf. You love Notre Dame. But that's not all the same. Well, maybe Notre Dame, but not a... It's different when we say love. What do we really mean by love? And how is love expressed? And how do we prove that love is real? And my answer is, after having that experience in the Holy Land, that the only way you know you love is if you know how to forgive. Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount, it's a whole series of things, he says, be compassionate as your Father was compassionate. Be merciful as your Father was merciful. And he ends it by saying, what you have received as a gift, now give it as a gift. And what did you receive as a gift? Forgiveness. And what is the challenge that you now need to give as a gift? You need to give forgiveness. What about people who don't deserve it? Well, you didn't deserve it when you were forgiven. That doesn't come into play. What you have received as a gift, now give it as a gift. You have been forgiven, and now forgive. And I think anyone, when you think about love, knows how love and forgiveness are basically the same thing, except forgiveness is love put into action. Love can become a very romantic thing. Love can become very just ethereal, just beautiful, wonderful romance, until you actually start to live love. So, on the wedding day, it was all about love. On the honeymoon, it was all about love. On the first anniversary, it's all about forgiveness. And if you don't learn to translate love into forgiveness, the marriage has no future. The relationship has no future. Forgiveness is the word that love speaks. Love is the ideal, forgiveness is the reality. They're not far from one another. You forgive in love, and love forgives. And that's what God did. Because he loved, God so loved the world, that he said there's only the God inside, to bring forgiveness for sin and reconciliation to the sinner. God's love, the gift of forgiveness. Now, I'm going to give four, I call these my ring cycles, to understand some of this, and how it's very practical when God talks about forgiveness and love. Scripture is the church. The first is the cycle of revenge and retaliation. It's the negative cycle, the destructive cycle. And you probably have lived it out in relationships and in marriage. That's when someone is hurt. It could be real or intentional, but it's a hurt. And the response is retaliation, strike back. Then the response is retaliation, strike back to having been struck. So you do something wrong, and next thing you know, you get in a cold shoulder. The cold shoulder then leads to passive aggression. And passive aggression leads to distance between two people, and something gets in between them, and then people become strangers to each other, and there's no turning back after a certain point, or it wouldn't seem to be. In the Middle East, I lived with the Israelis, and I lived with the Palestinians, and that would be in a political area. But why are there bombings, and why won't the bombings stop? Because if you talk to the Israelis, they blow up the Palestinians because the Palestinians blew up the bus. And the Palestinians blow up the bus because the Israelis blew up them. And the Israelis blew up them because they blew up the bus. And it goes on and on and on. And nobody can decide who started it, because then nobody can decide who should end it. And it's an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. And the Old Testament, and I learned this in school, in seminary, when God says an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, that was mercy. That was mercy of the Old Testament. An eye for an eye, and that's enough. A tooth for a tooth, and that's it. But the cycle seems to just perpetuate itself and continue on, and it goes on for generations. That's kind of in the political area. But also, as you know, in families and in relationships, once that cycle of being hurt and hurting back, of being hurt and striking out, of retaliation and revenge gets into a relationship or into a business, into marriage, into a family, it bears the fruit of utter destruction. And there will be no good that will ever come from it. And because people carry with them grudge, anger, need to revenge themselves, desire to retaliate, it is the cause of not just broken relationships and broken families and broken marriages and all that, but it's also the cause of sickness and illness, mental illness and physical illness, comes from anger that sticks in the heart and grows in the spirit and just turns you bitter. Because you'll never get your retaliation, and you'll never get your revenge, and you'll never get your satisfaction. It just continues to perpetuate itself. And that is kind of the cycle of darkness and viciousness that is out there in the world, small ways and in big ways. Now, Jesus brought us another cycle, and it's the cycle of mercy, the cycle of forgiveness. It's the cycle that God sets into motion. That God comes into a dark and sinful world and out of sheer grace proclaims the forgiveness of sin. Jesus dies so that sin may be forgiven so that we might be free. And then he gives us one rule. He says, what you have received as a gift, now give it as a gift. And what did you receive as a gift? You have received mercy from God. You didn't deserve it. You received it. It's God's gift to you. So what should you do with that mercy? Is you give it to someone who needs your forgiveness and who needs your mercy, which otherwise known in the scriptures is your enemy. Enemy is anybody who hurt you. It's not the Russians or the Arabs or Al-Qaeda. It's anyone who's ever hurt you. It becomes your enemy. So you take this mercy you've received and you give it to the deserving and to the undeserving. You give it to the ones who want it and the ones who haven't asked for it. You become a merciful person. Now what else does the scripture tell us? Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy. One of the attitudes. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy. So what have you received from God? Mercy. What do you then have to give away? Mercy. What happens when you give away mercy? You receive mercy. Having received mercy, you now have to give it away again. You give it away, you get it back. And that is the cycle of love and mercy, forgiveness, pardon and peace, reconciliation and unity, that if it was set into motion would encompass the whole world. Would change relationships, would redeem family life, would save marriages. Something is given. It's not deserved. It's given as gift. And once it is given, the person who gives it deserves and receives more mercy. The first is a cycle of never-ending, self-perpetuating violence, spiritual violence, emotional violence, physical violence. The other is a self-perpetuating cycle of love, reconciliation, pardon, forgiveness and mercy. The third one is what I call the broken cycle. Now in the broken cycle, those are the scriptures where Jesus says, when you stand in prayer, forgive one another from the heart or else the Father will not forgive you either. When he speaks to our Father and he gives seven petitions to our Father, give us this day our daily bread, in heaven it will be your name. Deliver us from evil. He repeats one of the seven. When he finishes teaching our Father, Jesus goes back and he wants to emphasize or point out one of those seven petitions which he thinks to be important to be remembered. One of them is, forgive us our sins. As we forgive those who sin against us. And he says, and therefore I tell you, unless you forgive one another from the heart, neither will the Father forgive you. Now, the question there is, we start out by saying, forgiveness is a gift from God. Forgiveness is undeserved and it says we receive mercy received from the Father. And now he's telling us if we don't forgive, we won't be forgiven. Which is true. Either we get forgiven or we don't. But what he's talking about is the fact that we are forgiven. It's a free gift. It's given as grace, undeserved, simply because the Father wants to forgive. And then he asks us to do one thing, is to share that with other people. If you refuse to share it, you won't get any more. You've broken the cycle. You've received mercy, you've refused to share mercy, to show mercy, to forgive someone else, and therefore the Lord says, it's cut off. The measure that you measure out will now be the measure that is measured back to you. And you don't want that. You want God's measure, which is infinite and abundant and indulgent in loving mercy and kindness. The broken cycle is when forgiveness is received but not shared and therefore not given back. The fourth cycle is the cycle, sort of like the first cycle, the revenge one, where how do you stop this cycle of you hurt me, so I hurt you, so you get revenge, so I seek retaliation, so you seek revenge and I hurt you back, and this goes on and on between families, the vendetta, if you're Italian. There's Italians over there. Or Spanish, or Corsican, or Croatian, or Serbian, or Israeli, or Palestinian. They all have this self-perpetuating violent cycle. How do you break it? Even families, marriage, how does it get broken? And in the history of the world, there's only one experience where violence happened and was not returned, but rather turned into love, mercy, and forgiveness. That was on Calvary, and there's the cross of Jesus Christ. Jesus was victimized. He was violated. He was unjustly accused, hurt, suffered, died. There was nothing right about it. It was pure injustice, hurt, humiliation. It was just plain wrong. You saw the movie The Passion of Christ. It's only the beginning of it. The cruelty that was involved and the injustice that was involved pales. Anybody's suffering or any humiliation or any injustice or any hurt you've ever received pales in comparison to what Christ received on the cross, because ours are the sufferings that he bore. Ours are the burdens that he carried. He took it all upon himself. He was humiliated. He was victim. He was violated, and it all came in, but only one thing went back out. Father, forgive them. They know not what they do. Father, forgive them. And actually, for the first time in human history, violence was replaced by forgiveness. Injustice encountered mercy, and as a whole new cycle happened, and this is the light that shines from Jesus on the cross, the light of his love, the light of his power, the light of forgiveness, the light that lights up the whole world, the light of the cross. Now, we have stepped into that cycle. By your baptism, you have stepped into the cycle of the cross where all the injustice and violence is received, but only love and forgiveness goes out. That's called redemption. That's called salvation, and we have stepped into that circle of light. Now, the Eucharist is the light of Christ that shines on in the darkness. The light, this is John's Gospel, chapter 1, the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness cannot overpower the light. The light is never snuffed out. It's never extinguished. No matter how dark the darkness, no matter how violent the violence, no matter how unjust the injustice, no matter how deep the pain, no matter how wrong the experience, the light of Christ just shines. In the Eucharist, when we eat the bread and drink the cup, we proclaim the death of the Lord. That's a very important phrase in the Scriptures. We proclaim the death of the Lord. What are we looking to at the Eucharist? It's Jesus who laid down his life for us. When the priest holds up the bread and wine, first you look at this as a symbol. I don't think it's overly profound, but it's very simple for all of us to hear and understand. The bread is brought up for the offertory. The wine is brought up for the offertory. The bread and wine have something in common. The way you get bread is you take grains of wheat and you crush them pretty good, and then you heat them in the fire, make bread. And the way you get wine is you take a lot of grapes and you crush them pretty good, and it becomes wine. Now, what that represents for me, and I say that, and if I'm thinking of it, I look out at the community, and all the people who've come here, as I said at the beginning, aren't coming here because you're holy or perfect or even necessarily full of joy. But the common denominator to any group is the sin, the failure, the heartache, the struggle, the heart's pain that is common to any group. The wine represents your life in the sense that everyone is sort of made up of a lot of broken, bruised, and crushed grapes. Experiences of your life just crush you and squeeze you and squeeze the life out of your soul. You know, that's where the wine came from. Life was squeezed out of the grapes. And here it is presented before the Lord now. Now, when the wine comes on the altar, two things can happen. If you have a cup of wine, you can leave it alone, and it will become vinegar. It will become bitter and sour, be vinegar. Or it could be brought to the cross, it could be claimed by Jesus, it can be incorporated into his suffering and death, and it can become the rich blood of forgiveness of sin that redeems and saves and heals the human heart. That's the transformation that we proclaim every time we have Mass, that all the broken, bruised pieces of the body of Christ that come together are claimed by Jesus, and he says, this is my body. That's not just you, this is me suffering. This is me who's been broken and bruised, and I proclaim that to be healing, not destruction. It's transforming you, because you have risen above what could be the destruction of relationships and the destruction of your own soul, which is unforgiveness, resentment, bitterness, retaliation, and revenge, and you rise above it, and you stretch yourself and speak the words that Jesus spoke, his Father, forgive. Father, forgive. She, he, they do not know what they are doing. And I am not going to stand in a place of hurt and lash out at the world or anyone else, but I will stretch, grow, deepen my spirit to the point where I can be like Jesus, at least try, and forgive and let go and love, not because they deserve it, but because it's a gift, a gift I receive and a gift I give. So when you celebrate Eucharist, you step out of the darkness, you step into the light, that light where Christ is on the cross and all of the darkness is around him, but the light shines in the middle of the darkness, transforms the darkness, and you stand in the light and you say with Jesus, I forgive. And suddenly your Christianity is not a theory, it's not book knowledge, it becomes the very deepest part of your being when you become like God, because God has found a home in you in the deepest part of your being. And Jesus looks down from the cross and hears you speak forgiveness, open yourself at least to desire to show mercy, and he says to you, well done, good and faithful servant. You will know the joy of the Lord. It's a joy known only to those who know how to love and who know that love translates into forgiveness and shows mercy as God does. Amen. Amen. Amen. Thank you, Father, for your insights. We'd like to get into our final sharing segment now. The three points Father Michael...