33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C
Previous Years: [None]
Preached at Church of the Assumption in Bellingham, WA
Part of our series on the Next Step program from the Evangelical Catholic. Information can be found here: https://www.ecnextstep.com/
Recording
https://moorejesus.podbean.com/e/next-step-getting-more-out-of-mass/
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5gqJh9Ha_o
Transcript
We have our fifth next step card today, called “Getting More Out of Mass.” And with all of the cards, I’ve tried my best to pair them with the readings so that we can still talk about the Scriptures, but this is the week where I failed to do so. So, we are only talking about the Mass. My apologies to Saint Luke.
We have to start with the foundational idea of Christianity, that our salvation comes through Jesus Christ. But specifically our salvation comes through the self-offering of Jesus Christ. As we’ve been talking about these last couple of weeks, God always acts first and we respond to His action. He loves us first, and we respond in love to Him. The problem is that our response to Him, our desire to love Him in return, is always imperfect. It’s always flawed because we ourselves are flawed and imperfect. And so, humanity, since the beginning, even before Judaism and Christianity, even before the revelation of God, from the beginning has had an impulse to give itself to the Lord. And in that giving we always fall flat. Our sacrifices were never good enough.
Until Jesus came. Because Jesus became the one true and perfect sacrifice. In His self-offering, He is offering to the Father Himself, who is divine. Jesus is perfect. He is infinite. He is complete. And so, in Jesus we finally see, after so many millennia, we finally see the perfect offering and the perfect sacrifice. And it brings humanity salvation because that offering and that sacrifice is by one who is divine, but also by one who is human. Because of His humanity, Jesus takes all of humanity up with Him in His offering. And so, we finally, our race finally is able to offer itself in a way that is worthy, in and through Jesus Christ.
Now, we have in the front of most of our churches today an image of a crucifix to represent that. But Jesus’ self-offering begins not at the crucifixion, but at the Last Supper. Remember, Jesus was killed by the government, and so it’s easy to criticize, a non-Christian could easily criticize, and say “Jesus didn’t offer himself, the government killed Him. That wasn’t a free offering, that was a compelled, forced offering.” So, in order for us to say that Jesus made a free offering, He has to have given Himself before the crucifixion. And that’s at the Last Supper. At the Last Supper, He offers His body and blood freely to His apostles as a representation of humanity. He offers Himself freely to the Father in the Garden of Gethsemane, and then, following that free offering the compelled death follows. Jesus had already given Himself to the Father, knowing that that would entail His death at the hands of the Roman government. So, we have Jesus’s self-offering at the Last Supper, His offering at the crucifixion, and then the fulfillment of all of these offerings at the resurrection.
God confirms the self-offering of Jesus. The Father receives the perfect offering on behalf of humanity and confirms that offering by showing that Jesus now has power over life and death, by giving Him perfect resurrection, perfect and eternal life. This is our salvation. And so, the deepest desire of our hearts as Christians is to participate in our salvation, to join in this offering. Like I said, Jesus takes up in Himself all of humanity into this offering. And so, our desire in this generation is to be received into that moment, to be received into that offering, to be offered up with Jesus to the Father for all eternity. The Mass is how we do that. It is in the Mass that we join ourselves to the Last Supper, to the passion, death and resurrection of the Lord.
So, for the rest of this homily, as I walk you through how we do that in the Mass, I need you to imagine the Mass not as it’s celebrated today, facing the people, that’s called versus populo, and there are sociological reasons why we began doing that in the 60s and 70s. But I need you to imagine the Mass instead, offered ad orientem, which is to say with the priest facing the same direction as the people. It’s something that many priests in my generation have talked about bringing back as something that would help people understand the Mass better. Our Archbishop has said for the unity of the diocese there are no lone rangers, so we don’t do it here. Understood. But for the rest of the homily, I’m going to preach that way because I think conceptually it’s going to help you imagine, and I’m going to do so in front of the altar.
So when I talk about us participating in the sacrifice of Jesus being offered up with the Lord to the Father, we need to remember that the people of God is often referred to, beginning in the scriptures, as the Body of Christ. The Body of Christ isn’t just an analogy. Saint Paul does give us an analogy of “we’re like a body.” But when we talk about the people assembled here, the people of God being the Body of Christ, we mean that actually. We mean that you’re not like the Body of Christ, you are the Body of Christ. And so, this offering of the Lord that we participate in is the offering of Christ Himself assembled in His people. You are here as Jesus, and every body has a head. So, Jesus is the head of His Body, the Church. In our local parishes the priest, particularly during the Mass, stands in the place of Jesus, the head of the body. So, we have the assembled Body of Christ and the head of the Body, Jesus Christ, the priest standing in His place, assembled to offer Himself. Again, it’s Jesus, Jesus’ body, Jesus’ head, offering Himself to the Father for all eternity.
So, the priest emerges from the congregation. In the old Mass he would say prayers at the foot of the altar, basically declaring how unworthy he is to approach the altar in the name of the people. And I continue to be equally unworthy even if we don’t say those prayers anymore. And then the priest stands here at the altar with the Body, the assembled Christ, offering Christ, offering Jesus Himself to the Father. The entire Mass is this offering. If you want to understand the Mass, you have to understand it as the offering of Jesus to His Father for all eternity. Jesus is present in His people. Jesus is present in His priest. Jesus is present in the Word of God, which we’ll talk about, and the Eucharist, which we will talk about.
Throughout the Mass, there are invitations to the people to enter more deeply into that offering. And so, if the priest could celebrate on this side of the altar, most of the time he’s talking to God, not you. And so, that’s represented by the priest facing the same direction as you guys, as we all talk to God. But the invitations are a little more clear because he turns around and when he invites you to do something.
So, the first time that the priest invites the people to do something is when he says:
“Brothers and sisters, let us acknowledge our sins and so prepare ourselves to celebrate the sacred mysteries.”
The first invitation is to purify ourselves. We want to make a pure offering to the Lord. And so, we lay down our sins and we beg for His forgiveness. I am trying to make a better effort to leave space after I say that, so that we can all internally offer those sins to the Lord, apologizing for any sins we might have committed in the last week. We pray, we offer that, and then together, as the assembled Body, we beg His forgiveness.
“Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Lord, have mercy.”
And after that, now we’re prepared to enter into and make the offering as Jesus to the Father. The second invitation to the people to pray is when the priest turns around and says: “Let us pray.”
That’s an invitation. He wants you to pray. And so, we begin by making individual prayers, internally. Again, I’m trying to remember to leave more space here so we can make those prayers. But this is where we make that initial offering to God, where we offer Him all of our successes, all of the ways in which we’ve loved Him, all of our prayers, all of our service, all of the ways in which we’ve loved our neighbors. Everything that’s on our heart. All of our petitions, all of our needs. Everything that we’re coming into this church with. Everything that’s on our heart and on our minds. We take that and we offer it to God, and we ask that it might be offered to Him in the course of this Mass.
Having prayed individually, then we’re called back together as a body because we are the assembled Body of Christ, praying together. And so, the priest, as the head of the Body, prays on behalf of the Body a prayer called the Collect, which collects all of the prayers that we’ve just made individually into one prayer on behalf of the Body. And he stands here and he offers that prayer to the Father, giving that prayer, everything that’s on the hearts and minds of the entire assembled Body of Christ, giving that prayer here to the Father.
Those prayers, by the way, annoyingly generic. They try to say something profound in very few words, it’s just very general. But it’s because we’re trying to summarize every prayer on every heart and every mind in this church. So, the Church does her best to try to summarize all of that in one quick prayer. If you listen carefully, though, you’ll see over time how she begins to pray for all of the little things that people might ask over the course of weeks and months.
Following this we have the liturgy of the word. Like I mentioned, God acts first, God loves us first, and we respond to that love. And so, the Liturgy of the Word is us receiving once again God’s involvement in humanity. He couldn’t let us be alone. After the fall, He kept pursuing us over and over and over again, bringing us closer and closer to salvation. And so, we read the revelation of God. We read the scriptures. We hear about how He is constantly loving us and seeking us and pursuing us. And, having received all of that, having reminded ourselves of all of the ways in which God has acted in our midst and, when we read the New Testament, is acting in our midst, that prepares us to make that offering again back to the Lord. Prepares us to say, “oh, the Lord has loved us so much that now I’m ready to give myself back to Him in love as Christ assembled here in this church.”
I intentionally leave silence after the homily because it’s another place of individual prayer. Whatever the Lord speaks to you in the homily, and a lot of times people hear things that I didn’t intend to say because the Holy Spirit jumps around my weaknesses and inabilities, but whatever you have heard during the homily, however God is trying to speak to you, that period of silence is a time to make a resolution to say, “okay, Lord, this is how I’m going to act from now on” or to respond in love and say, “Lord, I am so thankful for the ways that you love me, the ways in which you act in our world.”
It’s a time to say, okay, we’ve just received all of the love of God, how am I going to respond to that love? And I try to give us a moment to make a resolution so that we don’t forget we leave this church.
We end the Liturgy of the Word with our prayers and petitions, with all the things that we ask God for. Again, reminding ourselves of all the things that we’re offering to God. Telling Him all of the things that we’re bringing to Him in this offering. At Assumption, we intentionally have that last petition encouraging people to offer their own silent prayers. Now, in an ideal world, you would already know to do that, we wouldn’t have to remind you, but we’re going to keep that in for a while because teaching takes time. But, you take those petitions and you’re praying your own individual petitions during that period. The Church petitions, again, stupidly general. We’re trying to take everything in all of the hearts here and offer it up in one corporate prayer as the Body.
After this, we move on to the Liturgy of the Eucharist. And this is where the offering itself becomes more mystical. It’s not just me trying to offer to God what’s on my heart and mind, but it becomes more tangible and more sacramental. The first thing that happens is that gifts are brought up from the people, and these gifts are bread and wine. These are the simplest possible foods. We think today about giving prisoners bread and water. But in the ancient world, water had too much bacteria in it. You had to cut it with alcohol to make it safe. So, bread and wine are the simplest food groups, the food of the poor. That is brought up to represent the poverty of our offering. We offer the simplest thing we possibly have. What does humanity have to offer to the Lord? Nothing. Nothing. Just bread and wine.
We also take up the monetary collection because today, in this world, the monetary usually represents the sacrifices that we’re making. And so, people make real and true sacrifices in the basket on their way to putting themselves on the altar. All of this, the bread and the wine being the primary representation, all of this is literally put on the altar. But when we literally put it on the altar, it represents everything that you are putting on the altar in your hearts and minds.
There was a period of time where the offertory was my favorite part of the mass, and it was particularly when I was discerning priesthood, because discerning priesthood I was thinking about giving my entire life to the church. And so, I had this image every time I was at Mass of laying myself on this altar as a sacrifice to the Lord. That’s what you do at every Mass. Whatever sacrifice you need to make, whatever you need to give to the Lord you put on this altar, picture it with the bread and the wine.
Our altar is built right. The rubrics require stone altars when at all possible. Why? Well, because every religious altar, up to and including ours, is made of stone. Because an altar is a place of sacrifice. All the pagan religions and also the Jewish religion, animal sacrifices. You have to have a stone altar because the altar is a place, it’s like a cutting board, it has to be made of stone. They didn’t have plastic. It’s a cutting board. And it’s also the place where you would burn the offerings to God, burn them so that they couldn’t be returned to profane use. If you’re going to give it to God, God gets the whole thing. And so, our altar is still made of stone because it is an altar of sacrifice. What we put on this altar, we give entirely to God, and then it is up to Him to return to us whatever He wishes to give us.
I gave my life to God by putting my life on this altar, and He gave me back the life that He wanted me to live. You do that every time you go to Mass. Whatever you put on this altar, you are giving to God and allowing Him to return it to you as He sees fit.
So, the priest receives the bread and wine, he thanks God for these gifts, and then he places them on the altar in a ritual manner. Having done so, he turns back to the people with another invitation to prayer:
“Pray, brothers and sisters, that my sacrifice and yours may be acceptable to God, the Almighty Father.”
My sacrifice and yours. These are words that were lost in the earlier translation of the mass that we got back in 2011. So important. My sacrifice and yours. This is not just the priest’s activity. This is your sacrifice. You are here as Christ, assembled as His Body. The priest stands at the head of the Body in the place of Jesus, but it is my sacrifice and yours. We are all placing everything that we have on this altar, so that we can offer it to the Father in incredible Thanksgiving.
And then the priest prays another very generic prayer, trying to summarize all of the offerings that you’ve been making during the offertory, all the prayers that you’ve been giving to the Lord. We thank God. We thank God for these gifts, and we ask that they would be sanctified and blessed in our sacrifice.
Following this, we get to the Eucharistic prayer, the great act of thanksgiving of the Church. We thank God for everything. We thank God for His son, Jesus Christ. We thank God for our salvation through the Lord. And in the course of this great prayer, Jesus becomes present in our midst in an even more excellent way. He’s already present in His people, He’s present in His priest, He’s present in His Word. And then He becomes present in the Eucharist, actually and truly present in the Eucharist.
There are three invitations to prayer in the Eucharistic prayer. Two of them are the reason I keep using Eucharistic prayer one every Sunday. But there is the memorial of the living and the memorial of the dead. So you’ll see me at the altar ask God to remember His family or His people, and then I will fold my hands and I will pause for prayer. The first time I do that, it’s where you insert into the prayer, in your own hearts and thoughts, the living people that you are praying for. And then after the consecration, is the memorial of the dead, and I will again fold my hands and pause. And that’s where you insert into the Eucharistic prayer the dead that you are praying for. Those are places for you to pray, for you to make that offering once again to the Father in the course of the Eucharistic prayer.
And then the third invitation to prayer is new after Vatican two. So, in the ancient Church and in the Eastern Church, they have this idea of the whole Eucharistic prayer, this whole mystical thing, is what makes Jesus present in the Eucharist. We Western Catholics are incredibly annoying and we want to know the details of everything. And so we said, what’s the exact moment where Jesus is present? And over centuries, we identified the words of consecration. And that was identified in the 11th, 10th to 11th centuries.
Then we do the showing, and we show you the Body of Christ and the Blood of Christ immediately after the consecration. And because we do that now, at the end of that we invite you to prayer. We say, “the memorial of faith,” and in that you are invited to acclaim your thanksgiving to God for His presence in the Eucharist. Before Vatican two, a lot of people just said under their breath, “my Lord and my God.” Vatican two wanted to ritualize that, so now we have a corporate response where we all say it together.
The Eucharistic prayer ends with truly the highpoint of the Mass. Everything I’ve been saying so far, the Mass is an offering. It’s an offering. It is the offering of Jesus, the eternal offering of Jesus, Body and head united, to the Father. The priest will take the gifts, which are now the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, he will take the gifts and he will lift them to the Father, and he will say:
“Through Him, and with Him, and in Him, oh God Almighty Father, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, all glory and honor is yours forever and ever.”
In this prayer, we see the entire Mass summarized in one prayer. Through Him, and with Him, and in Him. Everything we do is through, in, and with Jesus Christ. The offering that we’re making is only the offering of Jesus, to which we have united ourselves as the assembled Body of Christ. And then, in that offering we give the eternal glory to the Father. The desire of our hearts. The participation in our salvation. The priest prays this as the head of the Body on behalf of the people, and at the end the people make what is called the “Great Amen” in the ancient documents, their assent to the entire Mass. Everything that we have done finds its fulfilment in that moment. And the people say, “yes, we believe, this is what we are doing. This is what we are united to.”
Following the Eucharistic prayer, we prepare ourselves for the reception of Communion. In the church’s documents there is still a very strong connection between the priest and the distribution of communion, and it is only because we have too many people relative to too few priests, that we use extraordinary ministers. The reason that connection is still there is because, again, we’re thinking, where is Jesus present in this? This whole thing is an offering. Well, the priest is standing in the place of Jesus. And so, it is Jesus offering Himself to His people. That’s what we see in the Eucharist. Jesus has already offered Himself to the Father. Those gifts have now become the presence of the Lord in the Eucharist. And so now Jesus wishes to offer Himself to His people, and He does so in the distribution of Communion, where Jesus Himself is offering Himself to His people.
After communion, the people go and they pray. Now this change was made during Covid, so many of you missed it and I’ll reiterate it, our diocese used to ask us to stand after the reception of communion. Our new archbishop has asked us to do what everybody else in the United States does, which is to sit or kneel after Communion. The idea being you are supposed to pray. Thank God for His gift of the Eucharist. Continue to make that offering to the Father, that offering of thanksgiving and praise. Having spent a substantial time in prayer after the reception of Communion, then the priest once again returns to the altar, turns to the people, and invites them to pray:
“Let us pray.”
And then he turns back to the altar, back to the Father, and he offers that prayer in thanksgiving. Again, a summary of all of the prayers that have already been made, annoyingly generic, because we have to summarize everything that everyone has offered to the Father in that moment. And then finally, at the end of this, the people receive a blessing from the hands of the priest, again standing in the place of Jesus. A blessing from the Lord to prepare them to go back into the world, where they will live their lives, where they will pray, where they will love, where they will serve. And then everything that they do over the course of that week, again, is brought back into this church the next Sunday, offered up to the Father once again the next Sunday. You live your lives so that you can offer those lives back to the Father.
The question on our next step card is how do we get more out of the Mass? The answer is to ask, what are we bringing into the Mass? Because the only way we’ll get anything out of the Mass is to enter into the offering of Jesus Christ. We have to come here with something to offer. What are we offering the Lord? What prayers and petitions do we have in our heart? What joys and thanksgiving do we wish to give Him? What contrition do we wish to show Him? Knowing that ahead of time, coming into this church and knowing what our offering is, what our petition is, what our prayer is, it will make the Mass come alive.
It is an incredible gift that we have, to be able to assemble in this church every Sunday, or every day if you’d like, and to turn to the Father and to say,
“Father, we offer ourselves with, in, and through your Son. We give you everything that we have, everything that we are. We ask you to receive us, to have mercy on us, and to bless us. Lord, you gave us salvation through your Son Jesus Christ. Please join us once again to that salvation every time we come to this altar and offer you our prayers.”
Fr. Moore 