Tonight, we celebrate the Mass of the Lord’s Supper, the first Mass in the upper room where Christ instituted the sacrament of the Eucharist.  That same night, he instituted the sacrament of Holy Orders.  Later, the Holy Spirit was to descend upon the apostles in that same room and the sacrament of confirmation was instituted.  When Jesus appeared to the apostles after his resurrection, he instituted the sacrament of confession or reconciliation.  I’ve been in the upper room.  How many of you have visited the upper room?  Below that, of course, is King David’s tomb.  I don’t believe that they knew that King David’s tomb was there until relatively recently.  It’s kind of miraculous if I have that right.  It is amazing that the room is above King David’s tomb.  Tonight, we celebrate that first Mass.  I want to talk about the Mass, also known as the Eucharist or the Liturgy.

 

Have you ever heard someone say, “I get nothing out of Mass.  It’s boring.”  Have you ever felt that way?  Many, many people have said that.  “I get nothing out of Mass.”  I am convinced the reason they say it is they have no idea of what they are doing here and if you don’t know what we’re doing here, it’s not going to be fruitful.  What we are doing here, every time we celebrate Mass, is so big; it is so huge that perhaps we have grown familiar with it.  Familiarity breeds contempt or at least it can breed something less than contempt.  We become so familiar with it that we forget the great thing that we’re participating in. 

 

Now whose fault is it that we don’t know what the Mass is?  We can blame everyone.  To make a long story short in the blame game, I went to Catholic grammar school, high school and college and I had virtually no appreciation of the fullness of this Holy Mass until I studied it in seminary.  Somehow, in all those years of Catholic education, I didn’t get it and perhaps I’m not the only one who didn’t get it.  I want to talk about the Mass tonight but I don’t want to call it the Mass.  It has many names.  I think a better term for it is the Eucharist but even that’s not quite right.  I think the best term for what we are doing here tonight is celebrating the Sacred Liturgy.  That’s what they say in the east, the Greek Catholics, Greek Orthodox and Russian Orthodox talk about the Sacred Liturgy.

 

The word “liturgy” is a Greek word.  It means, “work of the people”, the work that God has given us to do but work in the most beautiful sense.  The Eucharist is a good term also but it is only part of the liturgy.  It is the greatest part but it’s still a part of the liturgy.  The word Mass has been used since about the sixth century.  The word Mass comes from the ending of the Mass in Latin “Ite missa est”.  The priest used to say, if some of you remember that, “The Mass is ended.”  Then he’d say, “Ite missa est” which means, “Go, you are sent.”  Get out of here.  Go and change that world.  You’ve been fed.  You’ve been nourished.  You’ve been enlightened with God’s word.  Now that should have changed you so go out there and fix that mess out there and leave the priest alone.

 

From, “Ite missa est”, ite means go, missa is missal, to send like a missive, you’d send a letter, a missive we call those.  Est is you.  So literally, translated into the Latin, it means, “Go, sent are you so go you are sent.”  From missa came the word Mass for some I think very strange reasons.  That’s what it is in Latin.  That’s what it is in Spanish.  That’s what it is in French.  However, the better term is the Sacred Liturgy and that is what we are doing here tonight to celebrate, to participate in that same Sacred Liturgy that Jesus instituted over 2000 years ago.

 

Now much of this liturgy comes from our Jewish roots.  I mean of all the Christian denominations, certainly the Catholic or Orthodox tradition, the original Christian church, the Catholic Church is closest to its Jewish roots.  You cannot understand Jesus unless you understand he is a Jew and he worships as a Jew.  Therefore, we are very Jewish in our worship experience.

 

You heard the first reading tonight.  It was the story of the Passover which is tightly connected to what we do here, the new covenant in his blood not the blood of the sacrificial lamb but the blood of Jesus, the Christ, the true sacrificial victim who reconciled us to God and opened the gates of heaven for us.  In the first reading you heard, “Do this as a perpetual remembrance or perpetual sacrifice”.  What does perpetual mean?  Ongoing, continuous and we’ll talk about that more in just a moment. 

 

The structure of the Sacred Liturgy comes from the structure of, to some degree, synagogue worship.  In the days of Jesus, anytime there were ten Jewish families in any place and the Jews were all over the world, there was and is a Jewish Diaspora.  Anytime ten Jewish families said, “Okay, there’s ten of us we need to start a synagogue” To start a synagogue there would be an opening hymn and then there would be a Liturgy of the Word and then there would be a homily and then, of course, a collection.  Then there would be intercessory prayers, a blessing and a sending forth.  That is somewhat the structure we have when we attend the Sacred Liturgy with one great big addition and I’ll talk about that in just a minute. 

 

In the very early church, the Sacred Liturgy was held in people’s homes or places where they can get together but they experienced some problems.  The scriptures tell us in the Acts of the Apostles, some people were getting drunk and that’s not the intent.  Some people were excluding others, “Excuse me, this is our Sacred Liturgy not yours.  You’re not welcome here.”  People do that.  Any time people get together there’s going been division and fighting.  With the exception perhaps of Los Alamos, we see this throughout the world.

 

That’s one of the great blessings of being Catholic, you don’t have to like it but you’re staying here.  In other churches they have big fights.  You don’t like your new pastor, so then there’s two churches.  Within twenty years they don’t like the pastor, then there’s four churches.  But you’re stuck with us.  As it developed over time, the Mass became a little bit or the Eucharist, the Sacred Liturgy became a little it more formalized until we have what we have today.  As a matter of fact, one of the documents that outlines the Sacred Liturgy is called the Didache.  It was written in the year 110.   I believe it’s the oldest extant document that outlines essentially the same thing we’re doing here tonight, some 19 centuries later. 

 

Now there are four parts of the Sacred Liturgy.  The first part is the gathering.  We sing a gathering song.  It’s also known as the introductory rite but I think gathering is more appropriate.  We come together and we sing because when we sing we pray twice as St. Augustine says.  We sing and then we have the penitential rite.  That’s the first thing we do and this is very Jewish too.  You can almost hear the Jews worship.  The first thing before they worship God, they go, “Lord, we are a mess.  We are such sinners “Oy vey”.  “Ah” what are you going to do with us?”  This is what they do.  If you read the psalms you’ll see this a lot.  They say, “We’re terrible.”  “You, you are so great” That’s the Gloria; it follows the introductory, it follows the penitential rite.  “What a God you are.  We got the best God.  No one’s got a God like we got a God.”  That’s the introductory rite.  That’s what they did in the synagogue.  They came together.  They sang hymns.  All of the hymns, the psalms of David are meant to be sung.  They were never intended to be read.  They were intended always to be sung accompanied by instruments.  Then we sing the Gloria, we praise, we “kiss up to God big time” because we’re going to ask him for something in a little while.  We want to get on His right side.  Then we have the opening prayer, which used to call the “collecta”, the collect.  The purpose of the opening prayer is to get us all together.  We tell Him we’re sorry.  We tell Him how good He is.  Now we’re going to set this, what we’re going to do in the Sacred Liturgy.  We have the opening prayer, the collect. 

 

That’s the first part.  The second part of the Mass is the Liturgy of the Word.  I’m talking about primarily Sunday worship which is the highlight of our week; it consists of the readings generally from the Old Testament or the Hebrew scripture and then a psalm; then a reading generally from the Christian scriptures, or the new Testament, and then the Gospel.  If you look at the structure of the Liturgy of the Word, you’ll see that the first reading, generally the Old Testament reading is connected to the Gospel as it was tonight and they are bridged by the psalm.  That’s a related whole. 

 

Now, the second reading oftentimes is not related.  If you are out there scratching your head saying, “I don’t get the connection,” sometimes there isn’t any.  Tonight, of course, there is.  The second reading was from Paul’s letter that talked about the institution of the Eucharist.  “He took wine, he took bread”, etcetera.  Now in our church, we have three cycles of readings, A, B, and C for the Sunday Gospel.  “A” is Matthew, Mark is “B”, Luke is “C” and John is used for special times, especially at Christmas and Easter.

 

In the course of three years, we hear the Bible.  The fact that some people accuse us Catholics of not being Biblically literate is not true.  You are if you listen to these readings.  We cover an awful lot of the scriptures, certainly the most important, essential scriptures in both the Hebrew Scriptures and the Christian scriptures, over the course of that three-year period.  If that’s not enough for you, come to daily Mass where we have two cycles, cycle one and two and we fill in the rest of the scriptures.

 

There is the Liturgy of the Word that is then followed by the homily and hopefully the purpose of the homily is to break open the Word of God.  The scriptures were written at a different time, and a different culture and some of the images that are presented to us don’t come to us automatically.  We’re not shepherds.  We’re not farmers for the most part.  The responsibility of the priest or deacon is to break open the Word and make it mean something to us today, in the year 2008, here in Los Alamos, New Mexico, United States.

 

A big part of the homily is not only the scriptures; it’s the people listening to them because they’re an integral part of the homily itself.  Now of course, that’s one of the complaints Catholics have about preaching, is that, you know sometimes, we’re not that good.  You probably never heard a priest repeat himself over and over.  “When is this going to end?  What is this man talking about?”  My friend Father Ray Hannigan has a couple of great preaching messages.  He had a parishioner by the name of Rader Johnson.  He was kind of that parish’s John Buchen, always helping the pastor be a better priest.  I love John.  One time after Mass, Rader Johnson was talking to Father Hannigan.  He said, “You know you gave a good message Father.”  Father Ray said, “I need to put more fire in my homilies though. I’m a little flat.”  Rader Johnson said, “With all due respect Father, you need to put a few more of your homilies in the fire.” 

 

Another time Father Ray came out of Mass and a woman came up to him and she said, “Father, that was a wonderful homily.”  Father Ray said, “It was the Holy Spirit.”  She said, “It wasn’t that good.” 

 

I‘ll tell you an interesting thing about homilies; the people are nice to you even if you give a terrible homily.  About half of them will say, “Good homily Father.”  Many times people will say, “You know Father, you were speaking to me today.  You were talking to me.”  Sometimes I say, “In what respect?”  They’ll say, “Well, you brought out this point.”  I don’t remember bringing out that point.  Someone else will say, “You spoke right to my heart.”  I’ll say, “How?”  “Well, you said this today in your homily.”  I didn’t say that either.  So something happens between this mouth and your ears.  That’s called inspiration and that’s where the Holy Spirit gets involved in the homily.

 

Now at the end of the homily, we have the Creed.  The Creed which is our profession of faith, that’s what makes us Catholic Christians, that Creed.  It was hammered out over the course of three centuries.  Matthew, Mark, Luke and John didn’t have the Creed.  It took centuries of argument on who Christ was, who Mary was, what we believe.  How about the Trinity?  That wasn’t defined in the first century.  It took a couple of hundred years.  The sacred tradition of the church, which is as sacred as sacred scripture, gave us the Creed.  I love to listen to the Creed.  I love when I’m out there with you.  When I was in San Diego a couple of weeks ago, I went to Mass.  I love to go to Mass when I’m not working.  I’m always moved when everyone stands, when everyone knows the Creed by heart.  You don’t have to read it, you know it.  It’s on your heart and that impresses people who aren’t part of our Catholic family.  They come to church and say, “All these people, gee whiz, they all know the same words and they speak them from their heart.” It’s a beautiful thing.

 

Then we do the intercessions, the intercessory prayers.  We pray for the world, we pray for the church, we pray for the local community; we pray for the sick; we pray for those who have died and those who are grieving the dead, we pray for peace; we pray for our soldiers.  That again is part of the Liturgy of the Word.  That’s the end of the liturgy, the second part, the Liturgy of the Word. 

 

Then we begin the Liturgy of the Eucharist.  This is the part of the Sacred Liturgy that we celebrate tonight.  The Liturgy of the Eucharist, again, makes so much sense to anyone who understands Jewish theology because it is related to the Passover.  By the way, the Hebrew people weren’t called Jews until after they came back from Babylon in about the year 530 B.C.  They were known as Hebrews Israelites, before that.  For four hundred and fifty years, Pharaoh held the Hebrew people captive.  At first, things went very well.  Then after a century, things did not go so well and then they were slaves.  God sent Moses to lead them to freedom but Pharaoh wouldn’t let them go.  Therefore, God punished Egypt with a number of plagues.  He turned the water into blood, etc.  The final punishment that convinced Pharaoh to let the Hebrews go was that God sent an angel of death over Egypt.  The first-born of every man and beast died that night.  However, You heard from the first reading that God told the people, he said, “but you my Hebrew people, take a one year old lamb, sacrifice it, take the blood of the lamb and put it over the lintels of your door.  Then when the angel of death comes, it will pass over your house.” Thus, the term Passover.  “Celebrate this as a perpetual sacrifice”, or a perpetual celebration.  Even today, religious Jews when they celebrate the Passover this year, when they recall the exodus, they don’t say, “This happened to our Fathers.”  To this very day, when Jewish people celebrate the Passover, the youngest son asks the Father, the oldest man, “Why is this night different from any other night?”  The father responds, “Tonight is the night when we are saved from slavery in Egypt.” To remember makes present a past event.  This is a term called anamnesis.  It is a Greek word meaning a remembrance that actually makes present the past event. 

 

When I was newly ordained, I called the local Rabbi in Rio Rancho.  He said, “Yes that’s right.  You Catholics do that too?”  He was amazed that we have this concept of anamnesis. 

 

We know what happened after the Passover.  The Hebrew people messed up.  They turned their back on God.  They were made captive by the Assyrians, and then the Babylonians.  Things went from bad to worse.  The kings were awful.  They betrayed God.  They worshiped false Gods.  So it was like God, in the fullness of time, said, “You people will never get it right.  I give you every break and you cannot save yourself.  I’ll send you my son.”  In the fullness of time, the Father sent Jesus because in order for man to be redeemed, man has to do the redeeming, that’s justice.  The Son of God became man, one of us and he became the sacrificial victim.  He was slaughtered and his blood is the blood of the new covenant that delivers us from death to life, from slavery to freedom, from darkness to light.

 

See the connection.  It is so important.  Every time we celebrate the Sacred Liturgy here, we participate in the very liturgy that Jesus instituted 2000 years ago. How?  Anamnesis:  this concept that’s bigger than history, bigger than time.  It’s called God’s concept.  We actually participate in this same sacrifice in a bloodless manner tonight but nonetheless we enter into the perpetual sacrifice of Christ.

 

That’s pretty good.  That’s what we believe.  I have a friend and I’m going to start doing this, as a matter of fact, I’m going to do it right now.  He was always takes his watch off when he celebrates Mass.  He is a priest friend.  He says, “That reminds me that I’m entering into this timeless place.  I’m going there and there’s no time (tapping his wrist), it’s just timeless.  It’s really putting a foot in heaven to celebrate the Sacred Liturgy.”

 

Finally, after the great Eucharist, we have the last part, part IV, the sending forth, not the dismissal but the sending forth, the “Ita missa est”.  That was translated in a terrible way and now we say, “The Mass is over.  Go in peace.”  “The Mass is ended.  You are sent forth.  Get out of here and go change the world.”  Ita missa est, that’s a lot better.  I know sometimes that we were talking about being bored in church, sometimes the priest or deacon says, “The Mass is ended.  Go in peace.”  You say, “Thanks be to God.”  I thought that would never end.  I know what you’re thinking out there. 

 

Then we need to come back.  He sends us to go in peace.  He says, “Go, you are sent.”  But what happens out there?  We get hungry.  We get tired.  We get confused.  We need to come back here on Sunday to be fed again; to be enlightened with God’s Word again; to pray together again; to be recharged, reenergized so that we can again “Ita Missa Est.”  Go and change the world.  The longest we can handle that is seven days before we need to be plugged into Christ again, in his timeless sacrifice to be renewed, refreshed and strengthened once more.

 

Now how can we say the Mass is boring unless we don’t understand what we’re doing here and that’s the problem.  We need, every one of us, to better appreciate what we do here.  In fact, this parish, Immaculate Heart of Mary Parish or any parish in the entire Catholic world and that is now 1.3 billion of us, the reason we exist is to celebrate the Sacred Liturgy.  Everything else we do comes from that.  The Church says this is the source and the summit of our life as Catholic Christians.  When we help the poor, when the Christian Concern goes and gets money and gives money to help, when we feed the poor, when we collect $35000 in Christmas gifts for poor kids, when we do all those great things, when we feed the homeless in Santa Fe once a month, that all flows from here.

 

This is why we’re here and if we get this right, we’ll do that other stuff brilliantly.  We’ll do it in Christ and you’ll see in the foot washing.   The reason the church gives us this Gospel from John tonight is that if we leave here and are not changed, if we leave here and we don’t wash each other’s feet, then we have betrayed the very essence of this Eucharist and one of Christ’s apostles did that that night, Judas.  We do the same thing if this is some kind of private devotion that doesn’t affect the rest of the world.  If we do or think that, then we are doing what Judas did.  We’re just here to eat with the Lord and go out and betray him by our actions.  St. John Chrysostom said, “Don’t come here all dressed up and worship me in your finest then pass by the Lord Jesus in the disguise of a poor man who needs your help.”

 

Study the Sacred Liturgy.  It’s who we are and read about it.  There’s a book by Father Jeremy Driscoll called The Mass.  I know Father Jeremy Driscoll.  He’s wonderful priest and the best professor I ever had in my life.  He’s a Benedictine monk of Mount Angel Abbey in Oregon.  But there’s lots of books.  “Google” Sacred Liturgy and you’ll get a couple thousand hits in .001 seconds and you can stay on that forever.  Make sure you get good websites.  As a matter of fact, go to our parish website, there are links there that you can trust and study what we’re doing here.  Make it a life’s passion.  I guarantee you, no matter how bad the homily, how many crying babies, how hot it is, how you can’t hear, you can’t see, the light’s not right, all of that stuff, won’t bother you a bit when you realize what you’re doing here, when you realize who’s here with us.  Christ is present tonight.  We say he’s present most perfectly in the Eucharist, body, soul, and Divinity.  Christ is present in the unworthy person of the priest.  When I was ordained there was an ontological change that occurred which means my very substance was changed to be an alter Christus, another Christ.  Show’s you how desperate God is.  I might have told you this story.  The day I was ordained there was a little lady who was the sacristan of the cathedral and she died.  She was there forever.  Right after Mass she took my hands, she kissed my hands and I pulled my hands back.  She grabbed my hands.  She said, “You don’t know who you are.”  She taught me more about the priesthood in five minutes.  I got chewed out within ten minutes of ordination.  She taught me more about what it is to be a priest than I learned in four years of seminary.  She says, “You don’t know who you are.  You are Christ.”  Wow, my hair is standing on edge now.  I’ll never forget that moment.  I’ve acted like I forgot it but I’ll ever forget her homily to me. 

 

Christ is present in the Eucharist, in the priest, and He’s present in the Word.  In fact, “In the beginning was the Word" is the beginning the Gospel of John.  Jesus has always been called the Word.  In the Jewish mindset or in the Hebrew mindset, Jesus has always been called the Word.  In the Jewish mindset or the Hebrew mindset, again the Word means not just a five-letter word, a noun, an adverb, the Word means it has power of its own.  When we say “He is the Word” or “This is the Word of the Lord,” it has power, it’s alive, it contains deity.  It is God. 

 

He is present lastly, in you.  You were baptized into Christ Jesus.  Christ lives in you so he’s present in you and in the Word and this unworthy priest and most perfectly in the Eucharist.  Wow, that’s what we’re doing here tonight.  That’s what we do here every Sunday.  Again, I encourage you to pray on this and read up on this because it will define just who you are as a Catholic Christian.  It will define who Christ is to you.  Please let us really try to live this Eucharist, this Sacred Liturgy all the days of our lives.