I continued more positively: "But Holy Family Parish fascinates me. It is a progressive parish, which is none the less respectful of Catholic tradition. It is a parish dedicated to Evangelization, small Christian communities, and the re-imagining of parish systems. I spent a good part of my priesthood directing such efforts for the Archdiocese, as well as teaching in these areas. So, the parish and I seem to be in a good marriage."

I say to all of you today, being pastor is contributing toward my growth, conversion and healing. And I hope, believe that my presence at the parish is helping the parish and parishioners also. I hope, believe that there is some mutuality of benefit happening.

For followers of Jesus, the gentleman’s question needs some expanding and deepening. Some expanded, deepened questions would sound like this: as a pastor, am I a servant? Am I a servant leader? Do I lead by serving? Do I seek to serve God’s people? Do I seek to serve God? Is service my motivation in living out my role?

Let me expand the field of focus. Jesus does not just call male, celibate priests to service. Jesus calls all of us to service, to be servants—whether we teach or drive a truck, whether we pick up garbage or do brain surgery—in all that we do, we are to be servants. The goal of our lives can not be to just pick up a pay check.

A doctor friend of mine was telling me recently that he has become concerned about a peer of his, another doctor. This other doctor’s number of patients has risen exponentially. But as patients have increased in number, the doctor’s bedside manner, and style of inter-acting with patients have deteriorated. My doctor friend’s concern about his colleague is this: something seems to have become more important to him that the purity of the Hippocratic oath, and his original commitment to service. That "something else" seems to be money or profit.

Archbishop Rembart Weakland of Milwaukee once said that the most important role of the laity is not to spend a lot of time doing Church work, but rather, in whatever role they play in the work would to, give witness to Christ alive in them. The real challenge of being a disciple of Jesus is to be a servant, as Jesus was, in whatever work that we do.

My dad, who is deceased, was a wonderful example of service to me. He did not make a lot of money. He did not have a lot of education. He worked for the city for many years at a water pumping station. He monitored the working of pumps making sure that people had water in their homes on the southwest side of the city of Chicago. The job would seem to be meager, not all that important to many people. But my dad had a great sense of service and responsibility about his job. He was serving the people of Chicago as he monitored those pumps. Similarly, I had an uncle, John, who several times as a fireman had to be hospitalized for injuries incurred trying to rescue people from burning buildings. He also was a model of service to me.

But I also saw another side in my family. A couple of relatives started out in service professions, but then something went wrong. Their lives ended in public scrutiny regarding possible misuse of office or position. Some things became more important to them than service, things like money, homes, cars.

Service as motivation for our lives brings us into close personal contact with brothers and sisters in the human family. Its antithesis, power, on the other hand distances us from one another; it causes disconnection. A life of power often also disconnects us from God.

In the 10th Chapter of Mark, verse 35 and following, James and John ask Jesus for power places in His future, coming Kingdom. This sets off some arguing with the other apostles. Here and elsewhere in the gospels, the apostles, while good people, are portrayed as ambitious, concerned about power. The encounter gives Jesus the opportunity to teach to us how true greatness is found in service, how one ranks first in the Reign of God by serving the needs of all. He explains that He has come, not to be served, but to serve, to actually give His life as a ransom for all of us.

Ambition, grabbing for power, can manifest itself in the Church also. Some men begin as fine priests, but as they progress upwardly, on a hierarchical-career track, it becomes difficult to discern what they believe in—God? or their role? or power? Similarly, in this age of lay ministry, the laity need to beware that they do not take on the errors of clericalism, namely using what should be a role of "servant" for one’s own needs for importance and power.

Relative to those of us who are clergy, the venerable Msgr. Jack Egan used to tell us as younger priests: "you have to make a decision—do you want to be a bishop or a priest?—and that decision will influence the rest of your life." He was not criticizing all bishops, for obviously there are many fine ones—historically and in our midst today. I do think Msgr. Egan was saying, in your priesthood, you need to decide whether you are going to be a careerist or a servant and that decision will influence the rest of a clergyman’s life, like the rest of anyone’s life.

Jesus’ warning against power needs to be connected to another warning He gives in Mark 10, verse 17 and following—a warning against stockpiling wealth. This is the exchange He has with a rich man, challenging him to sell all that he has, give to the poor, and come follow Him. Stockpiled money and things, like power, can disconnect us from brothers and sisters in the human family. Because of wealth and possessions, people can develop a pretense that somehow they are better than, ahead of, different from others—when, in fact, we are all pretty much the same, and we will all leave this world the same way—through the passage way of death. Elsewhere in Scripture, Jesus, Paul and others warn us about another spiritual landmine—self-focused pleasure. Take, for example, the gift of human sexuality. It has been given to us for connection, commitment, communication. If used in an immature, irresponsible, or immoral way, sexuality—or any pleasure—can disconnect us, cause alienation among and between us. So often in marriage counseling people will report feeling great "loneliness" after moments of so called "intimacy". In such cases, people or a person have been self-focused in using a gift that should bring people into greater unity or communion with each other.

Power, wealth, pleasure—they are goods in themselves, given to us to bring us into closer connection with God and each other. Misused, they cause distance and divisiveness.

I was thinking about hell recently. What might the experience of hell be like. I think at root, hell must be isolation from brothers and sisters and God, an isolation that begins during this life through a self-deceiving misuse of power, wealth, or pleasure, and then continued after death for eternity. Isolated eternally: that must be what hell is like.

If someone asks you if you are happy with your career, answer honestly. But then, ask yourself more important questions:

            Am I serving?
            Am I connecting with brothers and sisters, my fellow human beings?
            Am I, more and more, trying to place God at the center of my life?

Floyd Brown: It’s always a delight to hear you talk. Your sermon today was so close to something that has troubled me over the years in interpretation. I’m going to ask to you to elaborate on it a little bit. First, you talked about evangelizing and re-evangelizing the church. What is happening there? What are you finding out there with people today as you go to them again and challenge them?

Patrick Brennan: I’m sensing in our culture a great spiritual awakening, especially among "baby boomers" and what we typically call the "Generation Xers"—people that are awakening to deep spiritual hungers and thirsts. I sense that some people that have basically been on a career track, as I was talking about in the presentation, are waking up to the fact that sometimes career has damaged their relationships, damaged them morally, damaged them spiritually. I think they are waking up to their need for connection with their fellow human beings. And that really is the essence of the kingdom of God. Connection with each other and connection and communion with God. So when we speak of evangelization, we’re not just talking about trying to get pews filled, we’re talking about trying to introduce people to a relationship with Jesus Christ, and then this marvelous new vision for life that he offers us, which is centered on connection, communion and love.

So to get back to your question, I sense that more and more people are awakening to their need for this kind of experience of community in and through some higher power. Our Pope, John Paul II, has asked that we use 1997, 1998, and 1999 as special years of evangelization and re-evangelization as we prepare for the Millennium. We are at work in that here in the archdiocese of Chicago, also in my parish. We’re focusing on the re-evangelization of leaders, like myself, bishops, priests, lay leaders. The re-evangelization of folks that come to church. I think, more and more we need to break out of maintenance operations of churches and develop much more of this missionary spirit. There are people out there in our world, in our neighborhoods, in our culture that need connection, need community, need God.

Brown: Talk to us a little bit about connection. How-to programs are the best programs in the world. How do we connect with people in the community? How do we connect more with our family?

Brennan: Well, what we have done at Holy Family parish is a real typical practice in Catholic and Protestant churches, to evangelize the child. What we say at our parish is we will no longer do that. We will evangelize the social context. We will evangelize the home. We will evangelize mom and dad, or mom or dad or guardian or grandparent, with child. We’ve started a young adult ministry to reach out to people in their twenties and thirties. We’ve begun a foundations series which is an attempt to offer weekly, year around, some basic evangelization and catechisms for those who been pretty far from the church. We have a process in our parish, as many parishes do, that welcomes in new members. We have one of our masses on cable TV that plays in sixty-one neighborhoods. We send 41,000 newspapers out quarterly to everyone living within our boundaries. We are on the radio three times a week. We are using the Internet to explore religion chat rooms. I just think that we have to realize, Floyd, that the clientele, if you will excuse the term, for churches out there are not the same. They are not fifty plus. They are younger people in their twenties and thirties, early forties, that want something innovative and imaginative to happen at their churches.

Brown: I sense that movement very strongly, too, in the churches that I have visited recently. I felt almost our of place there because the congregation seemed to be growing younger and younger. Let’s touch on another area, though. I mentioned this to you earlier in our conversation. We’ve just had a couple of billionaires give a billion dollars to charity. A couple of them have been in the news a great deal lately. I shared with you that I had always had concern that a rich man couldn’t go to heaven. Now, I know they can’t buy their way into heaven, but is there a new social conscience or something? The billion dollars won’t keep them out of heaven either if they are using it properly, right?

Brennan: I didn’t want to come down hard on power, wealth, and pleasure or sound like I’m a Jansonist or something. I think power, wealth, and pleasure are good, but the issue is: what are you going to use this good thing for? For example, wealth. Are you going to use it to isolate yourself, to live this life of pretense, or are you going to use your wealth for the common good and the glory of God while also taking care of yourself and talking care of your loved ones? Steven Covey is writing and speaking a great deal these days about how Americans have made the mistake of thinking that maturity is independence. I will be mature when I am wealthy enough to be isolated. And what Covey is trying to teach in his seminars is that maturity is interdependence. I think that is what Jesus means with the kingdom of God and my explanation of the kingdom as connection and communion. If people have means, I think those means ought to be used to foster independence. At our parish we have become a tithing parish. We take ten percent of everything we collect and invest in the works of mercy, outreach and social justice. We have five hundred people in small communities and what we are trying to encourage those small communities is not just to gather to make themselves feel good psychologically and spiritually, but almost like Jimmy Carter’s efforts, what are you going to do in public mission now to change the world, to transform society, to confront some of the institutionalized sin in our culture.

Brown: Give me a three or four word challenge as we go off the air. What should I do when I leave this program today to make life better?

Brennan: Be loving, be kind, be charitable. Connect, serve, and place God at the center of your life, as I know you do.