Caritas Christi Urget Nos

Category: Preaching, Homiletics & Scripture

  • The Twenty-second Sunday of Ordinary Time

    The Twenty-second Sunday of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    So often, when someone thanks us for something, we might say, “It’s the least I could do.”  As if it were some kind of badge of achievement to do the least thing possible.  I think it’s human nature to try to do as little as possible, without being perceived as lazy or something.  Sometimes we want to do as little as possible, and have others feeling good about it.  Or even worse, and we have seen this throughout the sadness of this pandemic, we want to do what we want to do, no matter how it affects others.  That too, is pretty typical human nature.  I have a right to do whatever is best for me, and if that affects your rights, well, then, too bad.  None of this, friends, is praiseworthy.

    And I think this is what is behind today’s Liturgy of the Word.  Certain things are expected of believers, and over the course of history, people have tried to get away with doing as few of those things as they absolutely need to do.  The first reading sets the stage: Moses places the law before the people and tells them that they are a great nation, because they have a God so close to them, and who loves them enough to give them the whole law that they have received.

    Now, for the Jews, the whole law is more than we might think.  Perhaps when we hear that, we think of the Ten Commandments, to which we also are bound in our discipleship.  But for the Jewish community back then, there were a total of over six hundred laws and precepts that made up the law.  Because of that, there was always this constant discussion over which of the laws was most important, and often people would be concerned more about a tiny little precept than about the whole big picture that God was trying to accomplish.

    This is the attitude Jesus came to address with the Gospel.  He wanted the people to get it right.  He wanted them to have concern for people more than for semantics in the law.  He wanted them to love as God loves, because if we do that, we’ll be keeping the law anyway.  But people didn’t always accept that teaching. If they did, Jesus wouldn’t have had to go to the Cross, and there would have been no need to preach the Gospel, because we’d just always live it to perfection.

    So in today’s Gospel reading, Jesus makes a major correction.  There was this law of purifying vessels before festivals, which is not unlike the way the priest washes his hands before the Eucharistic Prayer or the way that the vessels for Mass are purified after Communion.  But somewhere along the way, the precept got mangled, and everyone was bound to scrupulously wash themselves and every vessel they owned before a feast.  And Jesus chastises them for having more concern about a human tradition than about the real intent of the law.

    The real intent of the law was obviously something way more important, way more personal.  The real intent of that purification was the purification of our hearts.  Jesus gives a rather horrifying list of sins at the end of the Gospel reading and notes that these are the things that defile; not some dirt on the outside of a cup or hands that had not been scrupulously cleaned.  If we want to really purify ourselves for the festival, which is to say the Eucharist, then we have to be cleansed of our sins.  That’s why we have the Sacrament of Penance, right?

    James, in the second reading, picks up on the theme.  If we really want to be thought to be wise in regard to keeping the law, then we have to keep ourselves unstained by the world, which would be the same thing as Jesus was saying, but also to care for those in need, with which Jesus would certainly not disagree!  Indeed, that’s what was really at stake in the Gospel reading: people were more concerned about the minutiae of the Law than they were for securing justice for all God’s people.

    The thing is, we are hearers of the Word.  We have experienced the love of our Lord in so many ways.  Everything that we have is a gift to us.  We have to be wise in regard to all that, and to be certain that we keep the whole of the law.  Not just those little minutiae, but the very spirit of the law, the law of love which binds all disciples and all people of good will.  Because when we lose sight of that, the whole Church and all of society can go off the rails.

    So our reflection in these days has to be on where and how we need to realign ourselves with the Law of love and resolve to live it more faithfully.  Because, as the Psalmist says today, it is they who do justice who will live in the presence of the Lord.  And that’s just where we all want to be.

  • Saint Monica

    Saint Monica

    Today’s readings

    We need prayer warriors in our lives.  Maybe you’re even the prayer warrior among your friends and family, if they know you are up at 6:30 in the morning to come to Church on a regular basis!  For all the prayer warriors out there, today is the memorial of their patron saint, Saint Monica.  Saint Monica was a woman in love with God and the Church, and her family, although the latter was pretty difficult for her.  But her persistent prayer won them for Christ and the Church.

    Although she was a Christian, her parents gave her in marriage to a pagan, Patricius, who lived in her hometown of Tagaste in North Africa.  Patricius had some redeeming features, but he had a violent temper.  Monica also had to bear with a cantankerous mother-in-law who lived in her home.  Monica’s prayers and example finally won her husband and mother-in-law to Christianity.  Her husband died in 371, one year after having been baptized.

    Her oldest son was famously an even greater challenge.  That would be tomorrow’s saint, Saint Augustine.  After his father’s death, Augustine had embraced a heresy, and was living a rather immoral life.  For a while, Saint Monica refused to let him eat or sleep in her house.  Then one night she had a vision that assured her Augustine would return to the faith. From that time on she stayed close to her son, praying and fasting for him. 

    So, spoiler alert for tomorrow, Monica’s fervent prayers brought that vision to fulfillment, and Augustine not only became a faithful Catholic, but also a bishop.  Not long after that, Monica knew her life was near the end.   She told Augustine, “Son, nothing in this world now affords me delight. I do not know what there is now left for me to do or why I am still here, all my hopes in this world being now fulfilled.” She became ill shortly after and suffered severely for nine days before her death.

    Monica was a woman who accomplished much by her persistent prayer. It might be well for us today to ask for a portion of her spirit of prayer that we might accomplish God’s glory in our own time and place.

  • Thursday of the Twenty-first Week of Ordinary Time

    Thursday of the Twenty-first Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    When I was little, I often remember my grandmother saying “thank God for small favors!” Now that’s a holy and pious thought, and I’ll have you know my grandmother was certainly holy and pious. But when she said it, it was usually because someone had just done the least they could possibly do, or something they should have done long ago. So the sense of the saying was more like, “could you spare it?” or “well, finally!” Still, I love that phrase, “thank God for small favors” because it reminds us that everything, no matter how big or small, is God’s gift to us, and we should be grateful for it.

    One of the most important marks of the Christian disciple is thankfulness. St. Paul was a man of thanksgiving, and we see that theme often in his letters. He may berate his communities when they were missing the point, but he would always also praise them for their goodness, and see that as an opportunity to thank God for giving the community grace. Today, it’s the Thessalonian Church for whom he is grateful. He praises them for their great faith and then says, “What thanksgiving, then, can we render to God for you, for all the joy we feel on your account before our God?” Because it’s always God at work in the believer and never the believer all on his or her own. It’s grace, and we are thankful for grace.

    God continues to work his grace in our community as well. We are a community of faith, and we see that faith in action in the many ministries of the parish, especially now as many of them are coming back after the pandemic. But even more than that, we see that faith in action in our workplaces, communities, schools and homes. There is never a time when we are not disciples. We are grateful for God’s grace working in and through us in every situation. The word “Eucharist” means thanksgiving, as we have often been taught, and so the heart of even the most basic and solemn parts of our worship is thanksgiving. We are thankful for all favors, big and small!

  • Saint Bartholomew, Apostle

    Saint Bartholomew, Apostle

    Today’s readings

    Saint Bartholomew was one of Jesus’ apostles, but it’s hard to get a handle on him.  That’s because he is often identified as Nathanael in the Gospel.  So today’s Gospel reading gives us a little insight about Saint Bartholomew, or Nathanael, take your pick!

    Nathanel is picked out of the crowd by Jesus and he is surprised at what Jesus says about him: “Here is a true child of Israel.  There is no duplicity in him.”  We should recall that Jesus considered it his primary mission to seek out the lost children of Israel, so seeing Nathanael as a “true child of Israel” with “no duplicity in him” means that Jesus considered Nathanael a role model for his people.  He was one whose faith reached beyond mere observance of the Law or the Torah, and extended into the realm of living the Gospel.

    In honor of the one in whom as no duplicity, we are called to rout out any traces of duplicity in our own lives.  We are called to go beyond mere observance of the rules of our faith and really live the Gospel authentically.  For followers of Jesus, there was and still is nothing more important than living the Gospel, and every one of us is called to do it.  If our spiritual life is not our primary concern, then we have nothing to look forward to.  But the good news is that, by the intercession and example and preaching of the Apostles and especially Saint Bartholomew today, we can get rid of our duplicity and embrace the Gospel with authenticity.

  • Monday of the Twenty-first Week of Ordinary Time

    Monday of the Twenty-first Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    What is truly holy?  What makes a thing or a person holy?  Or, more precisely, who does those things?  Well, God, of course. 

    Today’s gospel has Jesus taking the Scribes and Pharisees to task for forgetting what is really holy and treating things as sacred while ignoring God who is holiness itself.  Apparently, they thought that swearing an oath by the gold of the temple was more binding than an oath simply sworn on the temple itself: but, Jesus asks, isn’t the temple what makes the gold holy?  And they confused swearing an oath by the altar and by the gift on the altar.  They had forgotten that the altar is what makes the gift holy.  But even more than that, they had been so caught up in details, that they forgot that God is holy, and makes holy whatever can be called holy.

    Now, Jesus isn’t saying that people should disobey the first and third commandments, using God’s name as an assurance of an oath.  Swearing by the name of God isn’t to be taken lightly.  But what he is saying is that the Scribes and Pharisees needed to straighten out their flawed notion of holiness.  God is holy; and he alone makes holiness.

    So today might be a call for us to take a moral inventory of our own notion of holiness.  What have we been putting before God?  What do we hold sacred?  Do we have idolatry in our life?  Do we sometimes forget that, as we say in the Gloria: “you alone are the holy one, you alone are the Lord, you alone are the most high…”?  If we have been forgetting that, or taking it for granted, let’s put it high in our thoughts and reflections today.

  • Friday of the Twentieth Week of Ordinary Time [Mass of the Holy Spirit]

    Friday of the Twentieth Week of Ordinary Time [Mass of the Holy Spirit]

    Today’s readings (Mass for the school children.)

    I can’t think of any better way to celebrate the beginning of the school year than by giving a teacher a pop quiz!  You can all relax: I’m not really going to do that.  But that’s what is going on in the Gospel reading today.  The Pharisees are a group of the religious leaders in Jesus’ time who were very concerned that the law was being followed to the letter.  And today they approach Jesus, who they call “Teacher,” to ask him a question.  Now let’s be clear: the Pharisees didn’t like Jesus.  They call him “Teacher” in a kind of mocking sort of way because they had seen him teaching the crowds.  They were a little jealous, if they were honest, at how much the crowds were listening to him.

    Then they ask him what they think is a trick question.  “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?”  Now, I think it’s important for us to know that this scholar wasn’t really interested in Jesus’ point of view, nor did he expect to learn anything from Jesus.  Instead he was looking for a wrong answer, for Jesus to say something that was against their way of thinking so that they could brand him as a heretic and get rid of him.  That’s what those Pharisees were all about.

    It’s important for us to know that, in the Old Testament, which was the Bible in those days, there are over six hundred laws!  So the Pharisees and the teachers and the scribes were always arguing about which of the laws was the greatest.  This question that the Pharisee asked could easily have gotten Jesus into trouble.

    But Jesus is too good for that.  So what he gives this scholar, and all those who were listening in, was a very fair summary of the law and the prophets: love God and love your neighbor.  And he does it in a way that they can’t argue about.  He does it by quoting one of their most famous rules of life, one of their favorite laws from Holy Scripture: “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.”  Every Jew memorized that as the greatest and first commandment, so they couldn’t be uncomfortable with that answer.  And when he adds the commandment of loving your neighbor as yourself, well that wasn’t going that far beyond what they had been taught.  So now they have nothing to say to him.

    But what is important here is that these words are for us.  All of our life needs to be centered around love.  If love is what summed up the law and the prophets, then it is certainly what sums up the Gospel.  We too are called to love God who loved us first and loves us best.  We too are called to put that love into action by loving others, every person we come in contact with.  Some are easy to love, others not so much.  But we are called to love them anyway.

    And I really do think that’s a great thing to think about as we begin our school year.  We will all be friends with some people, and others might just be people we know when we see them.  Most of the time, I think we will all get along alright.  But sometimes, something might happen, or something might get said, and they we get hurt.  Then it’s important to remember what Jesus says in the Gospel today: “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.  This is the greatest and the first commandment.  The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.  The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.”

    We have to remember to love, because God loves us even when we aren’t so easy to love.  Even when we fall into sin, he loves us anyway.  So if God loves us that much, we need to love others just like that.  We need to love our neighbor, no matter who that neighbor is, no matter what race that neighbor is, no matter what part of town they come from or what their parents do for a living.  We have to love them when it’s easy to love them, and we have to love them when it’s not so easy.  Because our God loves us just like that.So think about this as you pray today: how will you love others today?  Who is hard to love?  What will you do to love them anyway?

  • Thursday of the Twentieth Week of Ordinary Time

    Thursday of the Twentieth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    I’m not going to sugar-coat this: the truth is that the story we have in our first reading is a horrible story.  Why  on earth would we worship a God who accept such a vow from Jephthah (or anyone else for that matter), or hold him to it? Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves: first, a bit of context.  The footnotes in the New American Bible remind us that this was a fairly common theme in ancient mythology.  When the topic of sacrificing children comes up in Scripture, it is usually strongly condemned.  Here, the writer simply records the story, probably to explain the tradition that is recorded in the next verse after our reading stops: “It became a custom in Israel for Israelite women to go yearly to mourn the daughter of Jephthah the Gileadite for four days of the year.”

    Why this comes up at all in the Sacred Liturgy is another matter.  Bad enough that this story is in the Bible, must we hear it every second year on this day?  Well, all we have to do is wait a minute to hear the Psalmist explain what’s really important:

    Sacrifice or oblation you wished not,
        but ears open to obedience you gave me.
    Burnt offerings or sin-offerings you sought not;
        then said I, “Behold I come.”

    So let’s let the horrible story remind us that the Psalmist directs us how to really pray and really live.  Leave behind the crazy sacrifices and unholy vows, and instead give ourselves completely to the Lord, and obey his commands.

  • Tuesday of the Twentieth Week of Ordinary Time

    Tuesday of the Twentieth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    Today’s Gospel reading follows picks up where yesterday’s reading left off.  As you remember, the rich young man went away sad, not knowing how he could attain eternal life, because he had many possessions.  Today, Jesus explains to his disciples what was going on.  

    “Amen, I say to you, it will be hard for one who is rich to enter the Kingdom of heaven.”  That was the sadness for the rich young man, right?  He went away sad because of his many possessions.  Now, it’s not going to be hard because God is setting up the obstacle; it will be hard because the rich young man was grieved at letting go of what he had.

    So it is with us sometimes.  Very often, we have placed an obstacle between ourselves and God.  Or we are holding on to so much other stuff that we can’t receive what God wants us to have.  Odds are one hundred percent that what God wants us to have will make us infinitely happier than the stuff currently in our hands.You see,  Jesus isn’t bashing rich people.  And it’s not just rich people who will have trouble going to the kingdom.  It’s going to be hard for anyone who has an obstacle between themselves and Jesus.  So whether that obstacle is riches, or our work, or our lifestyle, or our grudges, or our comfort zone, or whatever, we need to let go of all that.  It’s going to be hard for us to get into heaven with obstacles in our way, with stuff in our hands, “but for God all things are possible.”  If we let go of the garbage we are holding onto, if we make a real sacrifice for the kingdom, then the kingdom is ours.

  • The Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary

    The Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary

    Today’s readings

    In every age of the world, people have needed hope.  Because in every age of the world, there has been unbelievable hardship.  There has always been war, and disease, and poverty, and oppression, and alienation, and all the rest.  There has always been sin, and broken relationships, and impure desires and that feeling of emptiness that hardens our hearts.  Evil has run rampant from the fall of humanity and ever onward.  And the weight of all of that could be crushing – if we didn’t have hope.

    And I don’t need to be abstract about this.  We certainly have been and still are dealing with one of the most prolific pandemics of our time.  Just when we think things will go back to normal, a variant emerges that causes concern all over again.  No one can agree on what to do to keep people well, and an illness becomes even worse: a source of division, as if we needed another one.  Our pulling out of the endless conflict in Afghanistan causes renewed violence in the region.  Wildfires are destroying whole regions and are plaguing ever more locations of the earth, and violent weather batters many other places.  In our own lives we have the illness and death of loved ones; family members alienating one another; loss of employment; and that’s just to name a few.  There’s no way we could live with all that – if we didn’t have hope.

    And I don’t mean hope in the Pollyanna sense.  I’m not going to tell you, “don’t worry – everything will work out all right” because, honestly, some things just won’t.  The hope that I think we can find in today’s Liturgy is the theological virtue that reminds us that this is not all there is; this is not as good as it gets.  Our readings remind us that there has been and still is, and perhaps always will be incredible evil in this world, but evil doesn’t get the final say – not for Jesus, not for Mary, and not for us.  One look at the way things work in our world and in our lives could convince us that this has all been an unbelievable failure – if we didn’t have hope.

    Today, we joyfully celebrate the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which dates back to the very earliest days of the Church, all the way back to the days of the apostles. It was known that Mary had “fallen asleep” and that there is a “Tomb of Mary” close to Mount Zion, where the early Christian community had lived. The Council of Chalcedon in 451 tells us that, after Mary’s death, the apostles opened the tomb, finding it empty, and concluded that she had been taken bodily into heaven. The tradition was spoken about by the various fathers of the Church, and in the eighth century, St. John Damascene wrote, “Although the body was duly buried, it did not remain in the state of death, neither was it dissolved by decay … You were transferred to your heavenly home, O Lady, Queen and Mother of God in truth.” The current celebration of Mary’s Assumption has taken place since 1950, when Pope Pius XII proclaimed the dogma of the Assumption of Mary in his encyclical, Munificentissimus Deus, saying: “The Immaculate Mother of God, the ever-virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heaven.”

    The hope that we find in the doctrine of the Assumption is summed up in the Preface to today’s Eucharistic Prayer, which I will sing in a few minutes.  Listen to the beautiful words of that prayer:

    For today the Virgin Mother of God
    was assumed into heaven
    as the beginning and image
    of your Church’s coming to perfection
    and a sign of sure hope and comfort to your pilgrim people…

    The Church knows well that our pilgrim way in this world would be filled with evil.  But the Church courageously believes that this world’s experience isn’t the be-all and end-all of our existence: we have much to look forward to in the life to come.  Our Savior himself foretold as much in John’s gospel when he said, “I have told you this so that you might have peace in me. In the world you will have trouble, but take courage, I have conquered the world.” (John 16:33)  This, brothers and sisters in Christ, is our hope, and this is the hope that we celebrate today.

    The reason the Church reveres Mary as much as she does, and celebrates this feast with so much joy, is because Mary’s life is the icon of the Church.  What is important for us to see in this feast is that it proclaims with all the joy the Church has at her disposal that what happened to Mary can happen and will happen for us who believe. We too have the promise of eternal life in heaven, where death and sin and pain will no longer have power over us. Because Christ caught his Blessed Mother back up into his life in heaven, we know that we too can be caught up with his life in heaven. On that great day, death, the last enemy, will be completely destroyed, as Saint Paul tells us today.  That is our hope: our unbelievably gracious, completely unmerited, lovingly-bestowed hope.

    Mary’s life wasn’t always easy, but Mary’s life was redeemed. That is good news for us who have difficult lives or fine it hard to live our faith. Because there are those among us too who have family lives that are made difficult by external circumstances.  There are those among us whose children go in directions that put them in danger.  There are those among us who have to watch a child die.  But because Mary suffered these sorrows too, and yet was exalted, we can hope for the day when that which she was given and which we have been promised will surely be ours.  We can and do hope in this salvation every day of our lives.  It’s what makes our lives livable; it’s what gives us the strength to keep going, in the midst of so much difficulty.

    Today’s readings can seem pretty fantastic, in the sense that we don’t know what to believe about them.  The reading from revelation has a dragon sweeping a third of the stars from the sky, and a child being caught up to heaven.  But really, I don’t think that’s too hard to grasp.  We have all been through things in our lives when it felt like a third of the stars had fallen out of the sky.  There is that evil dragon that seeks us out and wants to devour the hope that we have, but the child of that hope has been taken up to heaven, and we can go there one day too, if we believe, and repent, and cling to Christ who is our hope.

    Mary’s song of praise in today’s gospel reading, which the Church prays every evening in Vespers, echoes the hope we have in this feast of the Assumption:

    He has come to the help of his servant Israel
    for he has remembered his promise of mercy,
    the promise he made to our fathers,
    to Abraham and his children forever.

    Life is hard.  It always has been, and probably always will be.  But this life is not all there is.  As we walk through this life on our pilgrim way to God’s kingdom, we walk always in the presence of our God who sees us, who notices our pain and sorrow, who grieves with us and laughs with us, who never lets go of us, and who gives us hope beyond anything we deserve.  As we live our lives here on earth, we find ourselves straining toward heaven, looking up for our redemption, knowing that where Mary has gone, we hope to follow.

    Pray for us, O holy Mother of God, that we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.

  • Saint Maximilian Kolbe, Priest and Martyr

    Saint Maximilian Kolbe, Priest and Martyr

    Maximilian Kolbe became a Franciscan novice at the age of 16. Earlier in life he had a vision of the Blessed Virgin offering him two crowns, a white one of purity, and a red one of martyrdom. Maximilian said “I choose both.” The Blessed Virgin smiled and departed from him. Maximilian devoted his life to purity through the intercession of the Blessed Virgin. He founded the Mission of the Immaculata to combat religious indifference, which he saw as the greatest problem in society. By the time the Nazis overran Poland, the mission numbered as many as a million people.

    Maximilian was twice arrested by the Nazis and the second time taken to Auschwitz. One day a fellow prisoner escaped, and the commandant decided to put ten men to death, whom he chose by arbitrarily pointing men out as he walked among their ranks. Just after the tenth man was chosen, Maximilian stepped out of the ranks and asked to take the place of one man, who had a wife and children. The commandant asked “what about you?” to which Maximilian replied, “I am a priest.” Because the regime at the time was striving to eliminate all the leaders of the people, Maximilian’s request was granted, and he died in the starvation chamber some three months later.

    Saint Maximilian had a strong devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary, and so it is appropriate that we celebrate his feast on this day, the vigil of Mary’s Assumption.  Through the intercession of Saint Maximilian and our Blessed Mother, may we too combat religious indifference and give our lives in service to others.