Caritas Christi Urget Nos

Category: Homilies

  • Saturday of the Twenty-ninth Week of Ordinary Time

    Saturday of the Twenty-ninth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    Have you ever seen a fig tree?  I haven’t.  But I can tell you I’d be pretty frustrated if I had cared for a fig tree for three years and never saw one bit of fruit.  I think we could all understand the man wanting his gardener to cut the tree down and give the good soil to some other plant.  Having nourished the plant and watered it and put in hours pruning it and doing all the things it takes to care for a tree, nothing has come of it.  Time to get rid of it and move on.

    And so, one could certainly understand if God would turn out to be just like that frustrated man.  Having cared for, fed, nurtured, guided and corrected us sinners, when we don’t bear fruit, certainly in his frustration, God would be justified in blotting us out and never giving us a second thought.

    But God is not the frustrated man in the parable, is he?  No, God is the gardener, the one who has really done all the work of nurturing, and he is amazingly patient.  The gardener says of the tree, “leave it for this year also, and I shall cultivate the ground around it and fertilize it; it may bear fruit in the future.  If not you can cut it down.”  And so God is with all of us.  God gives us another chance, even when we’ve had so many chances before, even when it seems like we just aren’t worth the trouble.  But God is patient.

    And we are better than fig trees.  We know enough to respond to the nurturing of our God.  Our prayer today leads us to reflect on those ways in which we have borne fruit, and those times that we have been fruitless.  We are being cultivated and fertilized yet again at this Mass, so may we be fruitful in the days and years to come.

  • Thursday of the Twenty-ninth Week of Ordinary Time

    Thursday of the Twenty-ninth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    Some people would say that Jesus was a peaceful man.  Saying that is really misunderstanding Jesus and who he was.  Because peace wasn’t necessarily his primary interest, at least not peace in the way that we often see it.

    Because sometimes I think we misread what peace is supposed to be.  We might sell peace short and settle for the absence of conflict.  Or even worse, we may settle for peace at any price, swallowing our disagreements and never coming close to true healing in our relationships.  There are families in which never a harsh word would be said, but the underlying hostility is palpable.  There are workplaces in which there are never any arguments, but there is also never any cooperative work done.  Sometimes there are relationships where fear replaces love and respect.

    And this is not the kind of peace that Jesus would bring us today.  This is the One who came to set the earth on fire, and his methods for bringing us to peace might well cause division in the here and now.  But there is never any resurrection if we don’t have the cross.  And so there will never be any peace if we don’t confront what’s really happening.  The fire has to be red hot and blazing if there is ever to be any regrowth.

    And so today we have to stop settling for a peace that really isn’t so peaceful.  We may just have to have that hard conversation we’ve been trying to avoid.  Of course, we do it with love for our brothers and sisters, but out of love we also don’t avoid it.  Our words and actions must always be guided by the fire of the Holy Spirit, but we must never choose to neglect the Spirit’s guidance and instead just settle for something that is really not peace.  We have to work for true healing in all of our relationships.

    The Psalmist tells us today that “the earth is full of the goodness of the Lord.”  That goodness resides in all those people God has given us in our lives.  This day, we are called to relish their goodness and work for lasting peace with all of them.

  • Monday of the Twenty-ninth Week of Ordinary Time

    Monday of the Twenty-ninth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    It has often struck me when hearing the news the last several months that being rich in what matters to God is more important than ever.  With banks failing, Wall Street needing a huge bailout, and a 700 billion dollar economic recovery transfusion coming from the government, who among us hasn’t had the sinking feeling that this world’s riches are nothing at time but straw?

    So you’d think that in this time of uncertainty, and on the brink of a pivotal election, people would be coming to Church, reconnecting with their God, and drawing strength from their faith, building up those riches that are from God.  But you’d be wrong.  Right now, we’re taking the annual “October Count” – a yearly mass-by-mass attendance count.  The attendance counts as compared to registered parishioners this year are running 2-3% lower than last year, and 6-7% lower than this time in 2004.

    In some ways it strikes me that we are quickly losing our faith, or even worse, that we as a society are becoming indifferent to faith, seeing it as irrelevant or ultimately meaningless.  At a time in our nation’s history when we should be returning to God in droves, people instead are staying away in droves.

    And it’s hard to live through uncertain times without faith.  How can we ride the ups and downs of life with anything close to tranquility without the rock that is our faith?  Instead we as a society seem content to place our faith in government bailouts, while we continue to practice unprecedented greed.  And to all of that God tells us today, what will happen if we hear “You fool, this very night your life will be demanded of you?”  The time to store up treasure in what matters to God is clearly here.  How will we people of faith give witness to that?

  • St. Ignatius of Antioch, bishop and martyr

    St. Ignatius of Antioch, bishop and martyr

    Today’s readings | Today’s saint

    [Mass for the junior high school children.]

    Of all birds, sparrows are probably the most insignificant.  They are small in size and dull in color.  They undertake no great flights.  They live in bushes rather than in trees.  Though they are found in vast numbers all over the world, we take them completely for granted.  They so blend in with the earth and their surroundings that we hardly ever notice them.

    In today’s Gospel, Jesus wants us to know how far God’s love for us and care for us and knowledge of us goes.  In doing that, he didn’t talk about swans or eagles, even though these birds make a much more splendid appearance as opposed to the humble sparrow.  But listen again to what he says about them: “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny?  Yet not one of them will fall to the ground without your Father knowing.”

    By this he means that everything that happens to any of his creatures, whether they are roaring lions or tiny sparrows, whether they are world leaders, or little children, whether they are great or insignificant, God still cares for them – they are still important to God.  He notices what happens to us, no matter who we are, he cares for us and wants us to be with him forever.

    In our day, there are lots of things to worry about.  Many people right now are worrying about the economy.  Will we be able to stay in our homes or will we lose them?  Will we be able to pay our bills?  Can we still afford to live in a safe place?  And there are lots of other things we worry about too.  We worry about people we love when they are sick.  We worry about passing tests, whether they are tests in school or medical tests.  We worry about our family and friends who are off in foreign lands fighting difficult wars.  There is no shortage of things to worry about.

    But Jesus reminds us today that we are in God’s hands.  The hairs of our head have been counted.  We are worth more than millions of sparrows, and God notices every single one of them.

    St. Ignatius of Antioch was a bishop at the end of the first and beginning of the second century.  At that time, Christians were often persecuted, this time under the Emperor Trajan.  Christians were being forced to deny Christ or lose their lives.  Many of them chose to give their lives for Christ, and Ignatius was one of them.

    When he was in prison, Ignatius wrote to the people in the churches he led.  He told them not to worry about him.  In fact, he told them not to try to intervene for him, not to try to stop what was going to happen.  He knew he would die for his faith, but he didn’t want them to try and stop it.  He was not worried about his life, because he knew that God would take care of him.  He wrote:  “No earthly pleasures, no kingdoms of this world can benefit me in any way. I prefer death in Christ Jesus to power over the farthest limits of the earth. He who died in place of us is the one object of my quest. He who rose for our sakes is my one desire.”

    He was killed for his faith and became a martyr.  We celebrate his courage on this feast day for him.  We celebrate his faith in Jesus, that faith that told him there was nothing to worry about because God loved him and valued him more than many sparrows.

    What we need to do today is to give our worries back to Jesus, to remember that we are in his hands, and to tell him that we trust in him.  After our prayers of the faithful, we are all going to come forward and offer our worries back to Jesus so that we can put them in his hands as we celebrate the Eucharist today.  After you come forward to give your worries to one of our students who will place them before the altar, I want you to return to your seat and imagine yourself giving that worry to Jesus.  Imagine him taking it from you, reassuring you that you are worth more than many sparrows, and imagine him embracing you and reassuring you that you will be cared for.

  • Thursday of the Twenty-eighth Week of Ordinary Time

    Thursday of the Twenty-eighth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    When I was in seminary, one of the big courses we had to pass with flying colors early on was called Christology.  As the name might suggest, Christology is the study of Jesus Christ, but perhaps more specifically a study of the Church’s theology about Jesus Christ.  That course covers what we believe about Christ, the history of the Church’s belief about Christ, and the history of the many schisms and heresies that developed around Christ through the early years of the Church.

    When I read this morning’s first reading, I was so taken by the feeling that it was a reading about Christology as a whole.  If you want to know what we believe about Jesus Christ, just reread this reading a few times and reflect on it.  That’s your homework, by the way!  So what I’d like to do is to point out as many of the beliefs covered in this reading as I can, to give you food for thought.

    The first part is the standard St. Paul kind of greeting in which he says “grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.”  Foundationally, this prayer says exactly what we believe: grace and peace come from the Father and the Son.  He goes on to say that we have all been blessed by the Father in the Son with every spiritual blessing.  God has chosen to send his grace, peace and blessing to us through Jesus, because it is Jesus who can relate to us in our human nature.  Through Jesus, he says, we have been chosen and called to holiness, loved and adopted as sons and daughters of God.

    Because of that love and adoption, God would not leave us in our sin.  No, through Christ we are also redeemed, forgiven and lavished with grace.  It is through Jesus also that God makes known all the mysteries of life and grace.  All of this had been set in motion before the world began, but given to us in time, here and now, through the One who was with him in the beginning and who stays with us until the end.  And at the end, everything in heaven and on earth will be summed up in Christ.

    As St. Paul says in another place, through Christ, with Christ and in him all things are.  Through Christ everything continues in being right up until the end.  And so thanks today go to St. Paul, the master theologian who reminds us of the great heritage and hope that we have in Christ.  And thanks be to God for the grace that is ours in every moment.

  • Tuesday of the Twenty-eighth Week of Ordinary Time: Let your mercy come to me, O Lord

    Tuesday of the Twenty-eighth Week of Ordinary Time: Let your mercy come to me, O Lord

    Today’s readings

    “Let your mercy come to me, O Lord.”

    I love that there were short verses for the psalm today, and we got to repeat this refrain from the Psalmist over and over.  If you think about it, and if you really enter into it, it becomes a kind of mantra, or Taize chant, or the Jesus Prayer, a way to center ourselves and open ourselves up to the Lord in this Eucharistic celebration.

    “Let your mercy come to me, O Lord.”

    Because we are all in need of the Lord’s mercy, aren’t we?  Whether it is sinfulness, addiction, illness or infirmity, anxiety, worry about a family member, uncertainty about a job or the economy as a whole, we all have to realize that so much of the time we are in desperate need of the Lord’s love and mercy.

    “Let your mercy come to me, O Lord.”

    And we come to the point that we know that the only thing that can help us is the Lord’s mercy.  We may have tried so many times on our own to cure ourselves or make the pain go away or focus on the positive or not cause waves, we know that of ourselves, ultimately, we are unable to fix the things that really vex us.  Sin takes hold, circumstances beyond our control confound us, powerlessness causes frustration.  And then, all of a sudden, we remember the One we were trying to hide from, or with whom we didn’t want to bother with our troubles.  But in the face of our own powerlessness, we must turn to the one whose power can overcome all.

    “Let your mercy come to me, O Lord.”

    And so that powerlessness eventually, inevitably intersects with the loving power of our merciful God, who desires so much more for us than we would settle for.  And then we really do let God’s mercy come to us.  Because it was always there in the first place; never withheld.  We had just to let it come to us, had to be open to it, had to be in the place where we could receive it and come to the point where we could acknowledge our need for it and our gratitude for receiving it.  And when we at last arrive there, and that mercy comes to us, how overwhelmed we can be, how transformed, how loved we can feel, how cared for.  God’s mercy is always there, we have just to let it come to us.

    “Let your mercy come to me, O Lord.”

  • Twenty-eighth Sunday of Ordinary Time

    Twenty-eighth Sunday of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    It was shortly after lunch that I finished this homily, and who could blame me?  With all this talk of “juicy, rich food” and wedding banquets, and even St. Paul saying that he knew what it was like to be well-fed and what it was like to be hungry, whose mind wouldn’t turn to food?  And that’s really okay, because all of us have come here [today / tonight] because we are hungry, but maybe hungry in a different way.

    Many people, when asked why they pick one church over another, say that they do it because it is at that church that they are “spiritually fed.”  And that is certainly one of the tasks of the church, to feed those who hunger with the spiritual food that comes from our Lord Jesus Christ.  And I think that’s the lens through which we have to see this rather curious Gospel parable today.

    When our modern ears hear this parable, there are surely things that seem odd about it, aren’t there?  First of all, as the wedding banquet is finished, the guests have to be summoned to the feast.  But in those days, they probably had received a formal invitation previously, and then had to be let know when the feast was ready.  But then we come to this very curious issue of the invited guests not wishing to attend.  What could possibly be keeping them away.  Even if they weren’t thrilled by the invitation and honored to attend, you’d think they would show up anyway because of who it is that is inviting them.  You would think they would want to keep the king happy.

    And many of us have been in the position of going to some social event because it is expected of us, I am sure.  I myself remember clearly attending events for work in my pre-priesthood days because clients or other VIPs were in the area.  Even in seminary, we were often “invited” to events that really were mandatory, which always used to drive me nuts.  But we can all relate in some way to attending some social event because it is expected of us, and not necessarily because we would choose to be there.

    And that makes what happens next even stranger.  Did they really think they could mistreat and kill the king’s messengers without any kind of consequences?  No king worth his salt would let such a disrespectful challenge to his authority go unpunished.

    But now the banquet is still ready and the guests are well, unavailable shall we say…  So the king sends the messengers out to all the public places in order to invite whomever they find.  And who are they going to find?  Well, probably pretty much what you’d expect: peddlers, butchers, beggars, prostitutes, tax collectors, shop lifters, the physically impaired and sick … in short, not the sort of people you’d expect to find at a king’s wedding banquet.

    So, to me, it’s not all that shocking that one of them is not appropriately dressed for the banquet.  What is shocking is that the rest of them are, right?  Some biblical scholars have suggested that perhaps the king, knowing who was going to show up, may have provided appropriate attire, and that one person refused to put it on.  Certainly if that were true, we could all understand the king throwing that person out.

    Putting the parable in context, the banquet is the kingdom of God.  The distinguished invited guests are the people to whom Jesus addressed the parable: the chief priests and the elders of the people.  These have all rejected the invitation numerous times, and would now make that rejection complete by murdering the messenger, the king’s son, Christ Jesus.  Because of this, God would take the kingdom from them, letting them go on to their destruction, and offer the kingdom to everyone that would come, possibly indicating the Gentiles, but certainly including everyone whose way of life would have been looked down upon by the chief priests and elders: prostitutes, criminals, beggars, the blind and lame.  All of these would be ushered in to the banquet, being given the new beautiful wedding garment which is baptism, of course, and treated to a wonderful banquet, which is the Eucharist.  Those who further reject the king by refusing to don that pristine garment may indeed be cast out, but to everyone who accepts the grace given them, a sumptuous banquet awaits.

    Can you imagine the hunger that those beggars, prostitutes, criminals, blind and lame people had?  Think about how filthy were the garments they had to be wearing.  Yet they are all washed clean in the waters of baptism, fed to satisfaction on the Bread of Life.

    If by now you’re thinking that the beggars, prostitutes, criminals, blind and lame are you and me, well, now you’re beginning to understand what Jesus is getting at.  Our sinfulness leaves us impoverished, and hardly worthy to attend the Banquet of the Lord.  It would only be just for our God to leave us off the invitation list.  But our God will do no such thing.  He washes us in the waters of baptism, clothing us in Christ, bringing us to the Banquet, and feeding us beyond our wildest imaginings.  We come here desiring to be spiritually fed, and our God offers us the very best: his own Son’s body and blood.

    [Today we join with our RCIA candidates for full communion, who are themselves answering the king’s invitation tonight.  They are one with us in baptism already, and in the days to come will complete the formation that will bring them along with us to the table of the Lord.  Their presence here stirs our own hearts, reminding us to keep that wedding garment pristine, and approach the Lord’s table with renewed love and devotion.]

    As we come to the Banquet today, we must certainly be overjoyed that our names are on the list.  We have been summoned and the banquet is prepared.  Now we approach the Banquet of the Lord with gratitude for the invitation, which is certainly undeserved, but just as certainly the cause of all our joy.  We sing this joy with our Psalmist today: “Only goodness and kindness follow me all the days of my life; and I shall dwell in the house of the LORD for years to come.”

  • Wednesday of the Twenty-seventh Week of Ordinary Time

    Wednesday of the Twenty-seventh Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    Today’s homily is a bit of a mystagogy on this familiar experience we have of praying the Lord’s Prayer.  Mystagogy is a kind of reflecting back on the mysteries.  Once we have experienced the mysteries and practices and rituals of our faith, it is important for us to reflect back on them, to see what they mean, and how they have changed us.  We have all prayed the Lord’s Prayer thousands of times, and we continue to do so not because we delight in the multiplicity of words, but instead because we have been changed by our praying, as the disciples were changed when they were given this beautiful prayer for the first time.

    The opening of the prayer – “Our Father” – has in its time moved us into relationship with the One who made us.  We were created for God, and God earnestly desires us to be one with him.  Acknowledging this relationship by proclaiming “Our Father” tells us that we have come from God, will one day return to God, and that we daily exist in God.  It also reminds us that, by using the word “our”, the faith we have is one that is corporate.  We can only come to God together, because we were made to be in community every bit as much as the Holy Trinity is a community.

    The middle of the prayer has helped us to rely on God.  “Give us this day our daily bread.”  We accept what we need – not necessarily what we want – from God who is able and willing to provide for our sustenance day in and day out.  It might be a difficult road and daily we may desire much more than we need, but as we reflect on our past, we may in fact see the hand of God holding us up through bad times, and helping us dance through the good times.

    And finally we come to know the healing power of our God.  “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.  And lead us not into temptation.”  When we let go of the things that have a hold on us, we can experience the loving embrace of Our Father.  When we release our hold on others, we find ourselves open to the grace of God.

    As we offer this beautiful prayer later in this Liturgy, may we all open our minds and hearts to reflect with joy on the Lord’s Prayer and its effect on our spiritual lives.

  • Friday of the Twenty-sixth Week of Ordinary Time

    Friday of the Twenty-sixth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    I reflect often these days on how much less I seem to know compared to what I thought I knew as a young adult.  In those late-teen and early-twenties years, I think so many of us think we have life all figured out and we know how things should be run.  Certainly, there is much to be said about the idealism of youth.  But that idealism can quickly turn to cynicism, and it’s amazing how much more clarity we gain with the passing of the years.  Yet the conflicts between idealistic, even cynical young adults and those wizened by the experience of years can reveal a less-than-healthy generation gap.

    So if you identify with that experience, multiply it by millions and you’ll know the gap in the knowledge between God and humanity.  But as certainly as we must know that, we humans tend to approach our relationship with God as if we had all the answers.  That’s what Job is being chastised for in today’s first reading.  Job is understandably upset by all that has befallen him, but God reminds him that God is in control and that God alone has the big picture.

    The Psalmist tells us that God’s knowledge even extends to how much he knows about us:

    O LORD, you have probed me and you know me;
    you know when I sit and when I stand;
    you understand my thoughts from afar.
    My journeys and my rest you scrutinize,
    with all my ways you are familiar.

    And so, when we are frustrated by the way our life is going, and when we are angry that we cannot see the big picture, perhaps the best prayer is again from our psalmist: “Guide me, Lord, along the everlasting way.”