Caritas Christi Urget Nos

Category: Liturgy

  • 30th Sunday of Ordinary Time: Take Courage!

    30th Sunday of Ordinary Time: Take Courage!

    “Take courage, get up, Jesus is calling you.”

    These would be wonderfully comforting words to hear in any situation. Who among us does not wish to be called to Jesus? But as joyful as we are to hear these words in good times, they are incredibly comforting in times of sickness and suffering.

    “Take courage, get up, Jesus is calling you.”

    About four years ago now, just weeks before Christmas, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. She was frightened, as you can imagine, and we all shared in her grief as she worked through all the details of surgery and treatment. But she came through it relatively well, and we celebrated Christmas with some relief. But just after I returned to the seminary from Christmas break, my sister called to tell me that my father was diagnosed with kidney cancer. It was barely a month later, and we were going through it all over again. He had surgery, and treatment which continues even until now.

    It was a difficult time certainly for my parents, but really for all of our family too. I myself was unable to even pray about it, because I just didn’t know what to say to God any more. I was blessed to be in a seminary community that reached out to me and prayed me through all of it. Fr. Kevin, our dean of formation, even drove out to Loyola in Maywood during Dad’s long stay there to pray with us. It was a difficult time: two illnesses right in a row really tested our faith, as any kind of ongoing suffering will often do. But the Church knows that, and that’s why we have the sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick. My parents were both anointed by their pastor before their surgery, and it gave them great comfort and strength to go through all that their illness demanded of them: surgery, chemotherapy, and all the related pain and suffering.

    The anointing of the sick is the Church’s way of saying to the sick, “Take courage; get up, Jesus is calling you.”

    Illness and suffering can lead a person to a place where faith, now tested, begins to fail, and the sick person can turn away from God and the Church. It can be easy to blame God for suffering, or at least for not delivering us from it. Illness and suffering are so hard to understand. The Church teaches that God does not will our suffering, not as a punishment or our fate or anything else. However, God does permit suffering and sickness and death in this broken world, where things are far from perfect and sin is always at work. God knows our grief when we cry out in pain, when we call to Jesus like Bartimaeus, “Son of David, have pity on me.”

    And so when we are in the midst of serious illness, or weakened by old age, or preparing for surgery because of serious illness, the Church offers us the Anointing of the Sick. The purpose of this great sacrament is to heal our spirits and our minds, and perhaps to heal our bodies too, if God in his providence sees that to be beneficial to our salvation. We should not wait until we are on our death-beds to come to the sacrament, but to ask to receive it whenever we are seriously ill. In the letter of St. James, we are told, “Is anyone among you sick? He should summon the presbyters of the church, and they should pray over him and anoint (him) with oil in the name of the Lord, and the prayer of faith will save the sick person, and the Lord will raise him up. If he has committed any sins, he will be forgiven.”

    At this point, I want to make an editorial comment. So often, in every parish where I’ve been, I have heard people complain that during their time in the hospital, no one came to visit them – not a priest or anyone else. And quite frankly, sometimes priests are guilty of neglecting that incredibly important part of their ministry. I know that I can’t get to the hospital every day, but I go when I can, and I go whenever anyone calls and asks me to go.

    That said, there was a time when we would just know that someone from our parish was in the hospital. Those days are gone. There are two of us here for 3800 families and that makes it hard for us to know everything we’d like to know in order to minister to you best. But there is also a law called the Health Insurance Privacy Protection Act, most often called “HIPPA.” You know about HIPPA if you have been to the doctor or hospital in the last few years, because you are given a brochure about your rights and have to sign a release that says you know them. But HIPPA also affects our right to know that you are in the hospital. And that may be okay, because sometimes when people are in the hospital for something routine, they don’t necessarily want everyone to know. But if you’re in for something serious, or things turn bad, we still might never know that. When you are admitted, you absolutely have to tell them – every time – that you are a St. Raphael parishioner and that you want us to visit. That will at least put you on the list that we get if we come by and make rounds. But if things are really serious, we ask that you have someone from your family call the office and tell us. Fr. Ted and I take this part of our ministry very seriously, and we want to offer you the help of the Church and the Sacraments in your time of need. But we can’t do that if we don’t know you need them. Please spread the word on that. End of editorial!

    The Sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick is not the only way that the Church ministers to the sick. Priests are not the only ones responsible for caring for the sick. The entire community bears responsibility in reaching out to the sick, and their loved ones, in time of need. We all must visit the sick and pray for them, easing their burdens in whatever way we can. Every pot of soup brought to a sick member of our community, every ride to the doctor’s office that we offer them, every card sent to the sick is a special act of charity. To reach out to the sick and encourage them with our prayers is one of the corporal works of mercy.

    When we reach out to the sick as a community, we are saying, “Take courage; get up, Jesus is calling you.”

    It comes down to this: We stand near the end of another Church year. This is a good time to ask ourselves what this year has been like for us. Have we heard the Scriptures all year long as just some nice stories, or have we really been changed by them? Is our relationship with Jesus merely academic, or simply relegated to Sunday, or have we really grown in our friendship with the Lord?

    If this Church year has made any difference to us at all, perhaps we will be more willing to seek out the help of the Church in our times of illness and suffering – because we know that Christ longs to reach out to us through the Church in order to carry on his ministry of healing. If we have come closer to Christ this Church year, we should be now be more willing and able to reach out to the sick through simple acts of kindness, and by encouraging them to receive the sacraments, offering to make the arrangements ourselves if need be.

    This Church year we’ve seen Christ over and over again heal the sick and reach out to those in need. Those aren’t meant to be stories we just read or proclaim; they are meant to be an example of how to reach out to our brothers and sisters, encouraging them in the name of the Lord. Because Christ longs to continue his healing ministry in our own day and age, but he needs us to be the agents of that ministry. He needs the clergy to celebrate the sacraments of the sick for those in need. He needs committed lay people to visit the sick and encourage them, reminding them that the community cares for them and seeks their well-being. And he needs the sick to be well-disposed to receive his grace, especially in their time of need.

    Unlike those who rebuked Bartimaeus for calling out to the Son of David, we must be a community that encourages one another in our suffering, and brings the sick among us to the Lord for comfort and healing. This community needs to be a place where the sick can hear those wonderful words of comfort:

    “Take courage; get up, Jesus is calling you.”

  • Thursday of the 29th Week of Ordinary Time

    Thursday of the 29th Week of Ordinary Time

    I don’t remember exactly when, but sometime during my time in seminary, I realized following God’s call was not guaranteed to be easy, all full of sweetness and light. Yes, there is sweetness, there is light, and there is also sadness, pain and persecution. Jesus was always very clear about that. And I don’t think we could find a passage in which he was clearer about it than in today’s Gospel. Living the Gospel, Jesus tells us, could well put us in the middle of all kinds of unpleasantness, including family discord. You know yourselves that doing the right thing isn’t always a universally accepted value. People disagree – sometimes vehemently – about what God would have us do.

    But the answer to the question is simple enough: live the Gospel. Even doing that, though, does not guarantee that life will be uncomplicated. Think of the many persecuted Christians, currently and throughout history; think of all those who have died for the faith. So many have to witness to the Gospel at great cost, even including their very lives. We too may have to witness to the Gospel at great cost, even including relationships that may be important to us. But Jesus never said it was going to be easy.

    This is kind of the Gospel version of “Mama Said There’d be Days Like This.” Jesus makes it clear that there is cost to discipleship. But if we truly wish to set the earth on fire with the compassion of Jesus, we must be willing to suffer division and persecution. We have to be willing to pay the price, because the price of not being a disciple is so much more. May we never give away the Kingdom to save ourselves from discomfort.

    Back in seminary, I realized that Jesus never said to me “hey, here’s something easy you could do for me…” So every day I am learning how much more important it is to pay whatever the price may be. May we all set the earth ablaze by living the Gospel with integrity.

  • Monday of the 29th Week of Ordinary Time: Being rich in what matters to God

    Monday of the 29th Week of Ordinary Time: Being rich in what matters to God

    Today’s readings

    I don’t know about you, but it’s getting harder and harder to get out of bed these days. I always find that in these waning days of the year, when the mornings are cooler (dare I say “colder?”), and there is less sunshine in the morning, I just want to pull up the covers and go back to bed when the alarm rings. That’s kind of how the year ebbs and flows. So in these days toward the end of the year, our thoughts naturally think of life and death, and the life to come. We approach All Soul’s Day, and Thanksgiving – which is the end of the harvest, – and Christmastime and New Year’s Eve, which makes us think about the end of the year.

    We’ll notice, too, that the readings toward the end of the year start to make us look toward the end. The rich man in today’s Gospel parable would have done well to think of the end of things and to get his affairs in order. But he foolishly thought he would live forever, and prepared to enjoy his riches for years to com. Only those years were cut short and his life was required of him that very evening.

    The moral of the story, so to speak, is the message we need to hear. We never know how many days will be given us, and so we must always be ready to meet our Lord and Savior. And what we have to be storing up is the riches that will endure in heaven. We must attend to our spiritual life, taking time for prayer and worship. We must attend to the needs of others, serving them as if they were Christ himself. We must live our days in joyful praise of the One who created us. We must be truly rich in what matters to God.

  • 29th Sunday of Ordinary Time: Much will be expected!

    29th Sunday of Ordinary Time: Much will be expected!

    Today’s readings

    Of those to whom much has been given, much will be expected.

    These words, spoken by Jesus in another place in the Gospels, are very related to the words we hear him speak to us today:

    Whoever wishes to be great among you will be your servant;
    whoever wishes to be first among you will be the slave of all.
    For the Son of Man did not come to be served,
    but to serve, and give his life as a ransom for many.

    The message of the whole of the Gospel is that simple, and the message of the whole of the Gospel is that difficult. We are all called to enter the kingdom of God, but much as James and John, and later all the rest of the Twelve, missed, that kingdom is not one of personal glory but rather of the glory of God, which is accomplished through service and through pouring out our lives for the good of others. There is no other way to enter the kingdom of God. Jesus was very clear about that to his disciples, and that includes all of us, brothers and sisters in Christ. This Sunday’s readings, then, provide a kind of examination of conscience for all of us who would be disciples of Jesus. Each of us has to do that according to his or her own station in life.

    A little more than a year ago, I sat down in my room at the seminary and picked up a piece of the school’s stationery and a pen and began to write a letter that I knew would change my life forever. “Dear Bishop Imesch,” I began, “I ask that you would ordain me to the Order of Deacon for service in the diocese of Joliet.” Canon Law requires that this letter be written to the Bishop in the days before Ordination, asking for permission to be ordained, and pledging a life of service and obedience to the bishop and the diocese. Apparently my request was granted, because on November 4th, of 2005, Bishop Kaffer ordained me to the transitional diaconate.

    And it has changed my life forever. When I preach the words I just quoted, it is with a sense of fear and trepidation. Because the Greek word diakonia, from which we derive our word “deacon,” means service. Even though I was ordained a priest in June, I don’t stop being a deacon. That level of ordination underlies my service as a priest, and I am bound by my promises to live the life I promised to live last November. And quite honestly, my salvation depends on doing just that.

    In the homily of that Ordination Mass, Bishop Kaffer proclaimed the following words, which are part of the Ordination Rite:

    This man, our brother, is now to be raised to the order of deacon …By consecration deacons preach the Gospel, sustain God’s people and assist in the Liturgy…From the way he goes about these duties, may you recognize him as a disciple of Jesus, who came to serve, not to be served…

    Then he addressed some specific words to me, including these:

    As a deacon you will serve Jesus Christ, who was known among his disciples as the one who served others. Do the will of God generously. Serve God and humankind in love and joy…

     

    Express in action what you proclaim by word of mouth. Then the people of Christ, brought to life by the Spirit, will be an offering God accepts. Finally, on the last day, when you go to meet the Lord, you will hear him say: “Well done, good and faithful servant, enter into the joy of your Lord.”

    You can hear, in all these words, how much today’s readings remind me of the commitment I made almost a year ago. Once again, of those to whom much has been given, much will be expected. I have been given the wonderful grace of Ordination to the diaconate, and to the priesthood. I have the opportunity to minister in a community that has welcomed me and accepted me as part of the parish. I have a good place to live, and am taken care of in many ways. I have been given much.

    So the question is, of course, how have I lived up to what is expected of me? Have I given of myself unselfishly? Do I sacrifice my own needs and desires for the good of those I serve? Do I remain joyful in service even when the task is hard or the hours long? Am I so addicted to good feelings that I shy away from preaching what needs to be said? Have I reached out to the poor? Have I been dedicated to standing with the sick and the suffering, and those who grieve the loss of loved ones? Is prayer for all of those I serve constantly on my lips? Has love and service been the way in which I approach every situation, meeting, or occasion?

    I have to confess that in this year of ordained service, I have not always done what has been expected of me. Sometimes I have failed in these ways and have made my ministry more about me than about Christ. I pray that the year ahead will be a better one, and that I will continue to grow in ministry and most of all in service to Christ and to every person.

    What about all of you? Have you received much? We live in one of the most affluent areas of the world. Not negating the fact that we all have difficulties in life, still what we have could be envied by most of the world’s population. We have all received much, and from us, much is expected. As members of the Body of Christ, we have received God’s grace through Baptism and the other Sacraments, and we are called to share that grace with others, according to the example of Christ, who came not to be served but to serve. Listen to these words of instruction from the Rite of Confirmation:

    The promised strength of the Holy Spirit, which you are to receive, will make you more like Christ and help you to be witnesses to his suffering, death, and resurrection. It will strengthen you to be active members of the Church and to build up the Body of Christ in faith and love.

    The call is there for all of us, and we are to follow it. We have received much, and much will be expected of all of us. So, reflecting on these readings, let us ask ourselves: Have we striven to make Christ present in every place where we are by our thoughts, words and actions? Have we been ministers of the Lord to those who are in need, to the sick and the aged, to those who have no one to care for them? Have we made the present the love of Christ in our workplaces, classrooms, communities and homes? Have we made worship a priority, and have we always gone forth in peace to love and serve the Lord?

    Maybe, like me, you would have to confess that all of your life has not been lived that way. Maybe you have had some particularly un-Christ-like moments this past year. Maybe you have been more about being served than about serving others. Maybe you have made it all about you. Join me in repenting of that, and in seeking forgiveness from those you have not served as you should. Join me in praying that the year ahead will find us giving our lives as a ransom for many.

    As we approach the Eucharistic table with our gifts today, let us also bring forward our better moments of diakonia, and leave behind the moments where that has not been a priority for us. As we reach out to receive the precious Body and Blood of our Lord who gave his very life for us, let us also receive his strength and Spirit that we may go forth to be the Body of Christ to everyone in our lives and in our communities. Let us repent of our selfishness and greed and reach out to others in generosity and charity. Let us be the servants of all and the slaves of all, so that we might paint our world with the compassion of our Lord. Let us stop trying to get into the kingdom of God like James and John and the others in today’s Gospel, and remember that the kingdom of God is not about us. As Christ gave his very life for us, so let us too give our lives in service to others, that we might be a ransom for many who would otherwise not know the Lord. Let us all raise the bar of our stewardship of time, talent and treasure to the level that Jesus did in giving his life for us. May we all stop making our ministries about us rather than about Christ and those we serve. May we all be renewed in the commitment we made at Baptism, and the commitments we have made to service. Let us proclaim Christ in every thought and deed.

    Because … of those to whom much has been given, much will be expected.

  • Saturday of the 28th Week of Ordinary Time

    Saturday of the 28th Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    The greatest prayer of the homilist is that the Spirit will give him the words that God wants his people to hear. That is the prayer that hopefully all of us pray before we sit down to write or plan our words. Then, we do our homework, praying over and studying the words of Scripture. Then comes the scary part: this prayer makes a certain leap of faith necessary. At some point, we have to trust that the words we have are actually the answer to that prayer and then deliver them with confidence.

    The same is true on a day-in, day-out level for all Christians. We should all be praying that the Spirit will help us to answer the questions that we sometimes get about our faith. Why does the Church teach some particular thing? Why do you Catholics pray to Mary and the Saints? You could probably fill out the list of questions that you have received all through your life. And each of us is actually on for answering these questions. When you get these questions, you are the homilist! You must pray that the words you use to answer the questions will be helpful to the person asking. You must do your homework, growing in your faith through adult enrichment of some kind. And then you must trust that the words you speak will actually be the words that person needs to hear.

    This is the reality that Jesus is teaching his disciples in today’s Gospel. The Spirit is trustworthy. We can trust that we will have the words to answer those who question us, whether they be accusers or people genuinely interested in our faith. For the Holy Spirit will teach you at that moment what you should say. It couldn’t be clearer.

    Today we are celebrating a Mass of Mary, Help of Christians. This Mass commemorates the freeing of Pope Pius VII on May 24, 1814. Having been driven from Rome by force of arms, the Church prayed through the intercession of Mary for his deliverance, and that deliverance came to pass. Mary continues to intercede for the Church in all kinds of persecution. We can rely on her help to answer those questions of the faith and know that through her intercession, the Holy Spirit will never leave the Church without the words we should say.

  • St. Isaac Jogues, John de Brébeuf and Companions, Martyrs

    St. Isaac Jogues, John de Brébeuf and Companions, Martyrs

    Today’s Feast | Today’s readings: 2 Corinthians 4:7-15; Matthew 28:16-20

    joguesbrebeuf

     

    St. Isaac and St. John were among eight missionaries who worked among the Huron and Iroquois Indians in the New World in the seventeenth century. They were devoted to their work and were accomplishing many conversions. The conversions, though, were not welcomed by the tribes, and eventually St. Isaac was captured and imprisoned by the Iroquois for months. He was moved from village to village and was tortured and beaten all along the way. Eventually he was able to escape and return to France. But zeal for his mission compelled him to return, and to resume his work among the Indians when a peace treaty was signed in 1646. His belief that the peace treaty would be observed turned out to be false hope, and he was captured by a Mohawk war party and beheaded.

    St. John worked among the Iroquois and ministered to them amid a smallpox epidemic. As a scholastic Jesuit, he was able to compose a catechism and write a dictionary in Huron, which made possible many conversions. He was eventually captured, tortured and killed by the Iroquois. These eight missionaries received the Great Commission that we heard in today’s Gospel: Go therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. (Matthew 28:18-19)

    St. John prayed for the grace to accept the martyrdom he knew he may one day have to suffer. He wrote about it in his diary:

    May I die only for you, if you will grant me this grace, since you willingly died for me. Let me so live that you may grant me the gift of such a happy death. In this way, my God and Savior, I will take from your hand the cup of your sufferings and call on your name: Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.

     

    My God, it grieves me greatly that you are not known, that in this savage wilderness all have not been converted to you, that sin has not been driven from it. My God, even if all the brutal tortures which prisoners in this region must endure should fall on me, I offer myself most willingly to them and I alone shall suffer them all.

    What we see in St. Isaac and St. John and their companions is that we can never relax our zeal for the mission. Whatever the costs to us, Christ must be made known, those who do not believe must be converted, and sin must be driven out of every time and place. That is the mission of disciples in this world, and sometimes the mission results in death. For us that probably isn’t true, but would that we would endure the sufferings of proclaiming an unpopular message to those who need to hear it. Would that we would endure those sufferings with the same zeal for the mission that these French Jesuits did. As I said on the memorial of St. Ignatius on Tuesday, our martyrdom may not be bloody, but it is none the less real. And our mission may not be to a culture so different to us as the Indian cultures were to the French, but that mission is none the less vital to the salvation of the world.

  • Ignatius of Antioch, Bishop and Martyr

    Ignatius of Antioch, Bishop and Martyr

    Today’s feast | Today’s readings: Philippians 3:17-4:1 / Psalm 34 / John 12:24-26

    St. Ignatius was a convert to Christianity who eventually became the bishop of Antioch. During his time in Antioch, the Emperor Trajan began persecuting the Church there and forced people to choose between death and denying the faith. Ignatius would have none of that, so he was placed in chains and brought to Rome for execution. During the long journey, he wrote to many of the churches. These letters famously encouraged the Christians there to remain faithful and to obey their superiors.

    Obedience was a strong theme for Ignatius, who was very concerned about Church unity. He felt that unity could best be achieved by all being obedient to the bishop and acting in harmony with one another, living the Gospel that had been proclaimed to them. Perhaps the most famous of his letters, though, was the final one in which he exhorted the Christians in Rome not to try to stop his execution. He said to them, “The only thing I ask of you is to allow me to offer the libation of my blood to God. I am the wheat of the Lord; may I be ground by the teeth of the beasts to become the immaculate bread of Christ.”

    How well Ignatius knew the writings of St. Paul as we heard from the letter to the Philippians today. Paul rightly reminds us that our citizenship is in heaven. Whatever we have to suffer in these days, we must remember that we are not home yet. We still have the Kingdom of God to look forward to, and we must never be deterred from our journey to get there. Ignatius knew that the way for him to be with Christ was through the martyrdom he would have to suffer, and he did not want to be deterred from going through it.

    Ignatius was that grain of wheat that fell to the ground and died, only to become a stalk that bore much fruit. We too must be willing to die to ourselves, letting go of hurts and the pains this life can bring us, so that we might merit the everlasting crown of heaven. Our martyrdom may not be bloody, but it is no less real, and we must be willing to suffer it in order to be with Christ. In today’s Eucharist, may we too be ready to offer the libation of pouring out our lives and being ground into the great wheat of the Body of Christ.

  • Don’t be afraid of the Light!

    Don’t be afraid of the Light!

    [Homily for our youth reconciliation service.]

    I confessed to the 3rd, 4th and 5th graders from our school on Friday that I used to be afraid of the dark. I asked them and all the adults present how many of them have ever been afraid of the dark, and – no surprise – almost everyone raised their hands. Don't worry, I'm not going to ask all of you to fess up on that and let all your friends know one of your childhood secrets! But I think we can all agree that at some point, most of us have been afraid of the dark.

    When we're in the dark, obviously there is danger. We don't know if there's something we can fall over, or if some other kind of danger is lurking in that darkness. In order to find our way in the dark, we need some source of light to pierce through it all. When I was going to bed when I was little, I used to make my parents leave the door open just a little bit, so that the light from the hall would scatter some of the darkness and some of my fear. For centuries, people navigating through the dark of night would use the light of the moon and the location of the stars to pierce the darkness and lead them safely to their destinations.

    For us Christians, too, we need a light to direct us, a light to scatter the darkness of a world steeped in sin, evil and despair. Many dangers lurk in that kind of darkness for us, and if we don't have a light, we could come to a very frightening end. If we were to admit that we were afraid of this kind of darkness, we'd be taking a step in the right direction.

    And you all know the kind of darkness I mean. Maybe it's the easy availability and lure of drugs or alcohol. Maybe it's the temptation to copy a paper off the internet, or let someone else do our school work for us. Maybe it's the deep desire to go too far in our relationships, or viewing others as mere objects of our passions. Maybe it's the tendency to judge other people by what they wear, where they live, or where they come from. Maybe it's getting caught up in gossip and idle talk, ruining others' reputations. Maybe it's getting wrapped up in ourselves and our own egos and selfishness, and not reaching out to others, or even putting them down. Maybe it's the times we are quick to argue or fight with parents, family or others. All of this darkness can swallow us up and lead us to very dangerous places indeed.

    We need a light to pierce through all of that darkness, if we're ever going to find our way out of it. We began to open up the light at the beginning of our service when we lit the Paschal Candle. That light that stands for Christ, and more importantly, Christ's victory over death through the Resurrection, that light will lead us out of the darkness of our sin. In the Confirmation Interviews I did this past week, many of you picked as a portion of the Gospel you'd like to use in your prayer the brief quote "Don't be afraid; just have faith." Jesus said this to Jairus, the man whose daughter had just died, just before Jesus raised her up. And this is what we want all of you to hear tonight.

    Don't be afraid; just have faith. It's easy for us to think our sins have made us rotten to the core, unworthy of God's love, but that's not true. It's easy to think Jesus would have no more time for us when we've turned away from him time and time again, but that's now how Jesus works. It's easy for us to feel unlovable when we've messed up our lives in so many ways, but God's love is different than that. God's love is enduring, reaching out to us through the darkness of sin and evil, and giving us the light that will lead us out toward God himself.

    Don't be afraid; just have faith. Maybe you haven't been to Confession since your first Confession years ago. Maybe you've forgotten how to do it. If that's true of you, then all of us priests here want to say "welcome back, and do not be afraid." We will help you to make a good Confession; we will help you to open yourself up to receive the light of Christ that will lead you back to God's love.

    Don't be afraid; just have faith. Maybe there's something that you've had on your conscience for a long time now, and you've been afraid to confess it. Maybe you haven't told anyone else about it. Maybe it's something you're confused about. Perhaps you're not even sure it's a sin and you just need to understand the situation better. Maybe you're worried that the priest you go to will think less of you when you confess that sin. Forget all that. Come to one of us and confess it. We've heard a lot of stuff in Confession before and what I can say for myself is that when someone confesses something that has obviously been dragging them down for a long time, I have great admiration for their courage and their desire to make things right with the Lord. Again, we are here to bring you back to Jesus, and if you've come here tonight and don't take advantage of that opportunity, we're going to be heartbroken.

    In a few weeks, Bishop Imesch will be here to anoint you with Chrism and Confirm you. We hope that you will be able to do that with the blazing light of a clear conscience and a pure heart. That's probably not where you are right now, but it can be where you'll be in a few minutes. Don't be afraid; just have faith. Know that Jesus who could raise Jairus's daughter from the dead is the same Jesus who will raise you up from your sins. Know that the light you kindle tonight can become the blaze that takes you out of the dark places you might be in right now. If we were able to admit it, I think we'd all have to say that we are or have been afraid of the dark at some point in our lives. But there is no reason – no reason – that we should be afraid of the light.

  • 28th Sunday of Ordinary Time: Stewardship of God’s Gifts

    28th Sunday of Ordinary Time: Stewardship of God’s Gifts

    Today’s readings

    It’s a matter of hanging on to things that have no permanence. Those who have wealth will find it extremely difficult to enter the kingdom of God. You see, brothers and sisters in Christ, being wealthy is nice, but it is a lousy substitute for the enduring riches of entering the kingdom of God. Today we reflect on stewardship. Stewardship is a recognition that we do not have anything that is not a gift to us. Even if we feel we have worked hard for the things we own, we Christians must recognize that our ability to work that hard is itself a gift. We came into this world with nothing, and that’s exactly how we’ll leave it. We should therefore grasp onto nothing that will distract us from living our faith and being good stewards of what we have been given. Let us instead grasp on the enduring riches of our faith, that faith which brings us to Jesus Christ, who alone can gift us with the kingdom of God.

    At this point a speaker from our stewardship commission continued with a reflection on stewardship.

  • Friday of the 27th Week of Ordinary Time: The Light of Christ

    Friday of the 27th Week of Ordinary Time: The Light of Christ

    Today’s readings: Ephesians 1:15-16, 18-19a and Mark 5:21-24, 35-36, 38-42 [Mass for the school children]

    I have a confession to make: a long time ago when I was a little kid, I used to be afraid of the dark. When I would go to bed, I remember making my parents leave the door open just a little bit, so that I could get some of the light from the hallway while I was going to sleep. How many of you were ever afraid of the dark?

    The darkness can be a really scary place to be sometimes. In the dark, you can’t see who or what may be there with you, and it makes you feel sometimes like you’re all alone. If you’ve ever been outside lost in the dark, you know how scary that can be.

    In today’s Gospel, the daughter of Jairus was in a very deep kind of darkness: the darkness of death. Lots of times we are afraid of death because we don’t know what it is like when we die. Ever since Jesus died and rose, we know that we can go to heaven, but back before that, they didn’t think that would happen at all. So it was scary for Jairus’s daughter to be dead.

    Darkness can be a symbol of evil, of very bad stuff. Because darkness is so scary, it reminds us of our sins. Remember that I said when you’re in the dark it can feel like you’re all alone? Well, the darkness of our sins is exactly like that. Our sins make us all alone in the world, and we feel abandoned.

    I know some of you have done projects about darkness … would you share them with us?

    When we’re in the dark we need some kind of light to show us the way. I found this flashlight finally in all the stuff I packed when I moved here to St. Raphael’s. I’ve had this flashlight forever, and it has helped a lot of times when the lights went out, or when I had to look for something in a dark corner of a room. A flashlight can help us see in the dark. What else can help us see in the dark?

    Even in the night sky, which is really dark, there is some light. What kinds of things in the night sky give us light?

    This star is one that I keep in my prayer book all the time. Most of the time I forget about it, but it actually fell out of the book just this morning. I think God was trying to tell me something. About four years ago now, one of my classmates from the seminary gave us these stars at a prayer service. These stars were supposed to remind us of the God, so that we would let God light our way.

    In the darkness of sin and evil, God is the light that we need. In our Church, we have the Paschal Candle that reminds us of Jesus, the light of the world. We light the Paschal Candle at Easter time, for baptisms and for funerals. Let’s light the Paschal candle now to remind us that Jesus is the light of the world.

    When we light a candle or turn on a light, the darkness vanishes and we’re not so scared. When we let God come into our lives, the darkness of evil and sin vanishes, and we can rejoice. I know some of you have done projects about light … would you share them with us?

    Jesus is the light of the world. In our first reading today, St. Paul prayed that light would flood the hearts of the Ephesians. When the light of God floods our hearts, all the evil and sin can’t have a place to live. Let’s all try to put the light of God’s love in each other’s hearts today.