Caritas Christi Urget Nos

Category: Preaching, Homiletics & Scripture

  • The Thirty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time

    The Thirty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings
    Lectio Brevis because of a seminarian speaker at Mass.

    Today in our Liturgy of the Word we have an urgent call for us all to let go of the paltry things we are holding onto and go all-in for the kingdom of God.

    Look at what he said the widow did. She put into the treasury a small amount, but it was all she had: Jesus says, “but she, from her poverty, has contributed all she had, her whole livelihood.” Not so different from that is the sacrifice of the widow of Zarephath in the first reading. Elijah had prophesied a drought over all of the Land, God’s punishment for the wicked acts of their kings. And so water and food were in scarce supply, and God sends Elijah to the widow. She’s just about to use up the last of her flour and oil to cook a final meal for herself and her son, when Elijah meets her and asks her to make him some food. He encourages her to trust God, and when she does by giving all that she has, she finds God faithful to feed all of them for some time.

    So I’d like to suggest that both of these widows had given everything for their relationship with God. They trusted Him with their very lives by giving everything had to give. It’s a super-scary thing to do, isn’t it? We are people who love to be in control of our lives and of our situations, and so giving up all of that gives us more than a little pause. But honestly, it takes that kind of a leap of faith to get into heaven. If we still are grasping onto stuff, then our hands are full, and we cannot receive from God the gifts and the grace he wants to give us.

    Look at the cross. That, friends, is the prime example of giving everything. And our God did that for us. Jesus gave everything he had by giving his life, suffering the pain of death that we might be forgiven of our sins and attain the blessings of heaven. God is faithful and so he will not leave us in our poverty when we give everything for him.

    But here’s an important message: the time is short. The Church gives us this reading very purposely on the third-to-last Sunday of the Church year for a reason. Because if we’re still hanging onto the stuff that keeps us bound to this life, we are going to miss our invitation to eternal life in the kingdom of heaven. To get to heaven, we have to choose our relationship with God over everything else in our lives. Everything. We have to empty our hands of all this earthly wealth so that we might obtain heavenly wealth. We have to give everything we have for our God who gave everything to us and for us, or we’ll be left out. Hell is truly having nothing, not even Christ, and that’s real poverty. So we need to model our lives after the example of the widows in our readings today, giving everything, so that we might have Christ who is everything we need.





  • Friday of the Thirty-first Week in Ordinary Time

    Friday of the Thirty-first Week in Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings
    Mass for the School Children.

    There’s an old joke that one day, Jesus returned to earth, and was walking around the Vatican square talking to people. Some of the Cardinals noticed and they got together and decided they should probably tell the Pope what was going on. So they went to the Pope’s office in the Vatican and said to him, “Your holiness! Our Lord has returned to earth and he is walking around Saint Peter’s square talking to people! What should we do?” Without even thinking, the Pope said, “Look busy!”

    That joke came to mind when I was thinking about today’s readings. In our first reading, Saint Paul is talking about the people in the Christian community who aren’t living as Christians. They are doing whatever they want, getting right at other people’s expense, and doing all sorts of immoral, earthly things. He tells them the need to get busy about remembering that their true home is in heaven and that they need to live in such a way as to get there.

    In the parable that Jesus tells in the Gospel reading today, the steward thinks that he’s busy about all the right things, making money for himself, until the day he finds out he’s about to be fired because someone has reported him for squandering the rich man’s property. It’s a confusing parable, but we have to remember that in the parable, God is the rich man, and we are the steward who is about to be fired. We need to be smart about remembering that we are children of light, and that light is God. We have to be smart about remembering where we are truly going, and that is to the joy of heaven. We have to be smart about what giving ourselves fully to the right person is all about, and that person is to Jesus.

    And we have to get busy about doing all this because it’s urgent. Time is running short. The days are shorter now and the end of the year is coming. This reminds us that time as a whole is always running shorter, and the time for Jesus to really return and take us with him is getting nearer all the time. We want to go with Jesus, so we don’t dare squander our time doing all the wrong things and being loyal to the wrong sort of people who don’t care anything about our spiritual well-being. We have to do the things that get us closer to Jesus: taking up our crosses, spending time with him in prayer, reading about him in Scripture, serving him by serving others, loving him by loving all the people he puts in our lives.

    When Jesus finds us busy doing all the right things, he can lead us to the place we all want to go one day, and that is to the kingdom of his Heavenly Father. We can’t be distracted though, we need to be focused on where he is taking us.

    This can be hard work sometimes, I know. And that reminds me of a real story about a real pope that I once heard. This is about Pope Saint John XXIII. He was an old man when he was elected pope, but he didn’t waste any time getting things done for the Lord. He was always busy about making the Church better so that people could come to know the Lord. And, at the end of the day, when he was very tired, he would say to Jesus: “Okay Lord. I’m tired and it’s your Church. Take care of it while I sleep.” And Jesus did.

    So, today, let’s all look busy. Knowing that Jesus wants to take us to his Heavenly Father, and it could be time to do that any time. We don’t want to waste our time: we want to be ready.

  • The Thirty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time

    The Thirty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    When I was in seminary, I had a Scripture professor who, when someone would make an insightful comment or answer a question correctly, would exclaim, quoting Jesus in today’s Gospel reading, “You are not far from the kingdom of God!” That comment, made to the scribe at the end of the reading, is an amazing thing to hear Jesus say, because he was always berating the scribes and Pharisees for not getting it, for being so concerned about dotting every “i” and crossing every “t” of the law, that they totally missed the spirit of the law. Jesus always maintained that they were going to completely miss out on the kingdom of God because of this blindness. So here is a scribe who actually gets it, who knows what the first of all of the commandments is. But somehow, in the tone of his congratulatory statement, I think Jesus is throwing in a bit of a challenge to the scribe: now that you know it, it’s time to live it.

    The way it plays out, of course, is typical of the way we see the religious establishment interacting with Jesus in the Gospel narratives. One of them approaches Jesus, most likely not out of an interest in actual dialogue or even to learn something, and asks a question to which they already know the right answer. The question “Which is the first of all the commandments?” is one that scholars had long debated, because there were so many commandments. Not, of course, just the ten that we are familiar with, but, throughout all of the Hebrew Scriptures, more than six hundred! But the answer that Jesus gives is one that is well-accepted. In fact, it is a part of scripture that Jews memorized and taught their children to memorize. One that boiled it down to what worshiping One God meant:

    Hear, O Israel!
    The Lord our God is Lord alone!
    You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,
    with all your soul,
    with all your mind,
    and with all your strength.

    But here’s the point where it really gets interesting: Jesus goes him one better, saying:

    The second is this:
    You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
    There is no other commandment greater than these.

    The scribe hadn’t asked for two greatest commandments, but if he had, he probably would have picked that second one too. These two commandments boiled down all of the teaching of the law and the prophets into a neat, concise package: love of God and love of neighbor. This was foundational to the Jewish way of life, and having been quoted so quickly, without thinking, by Jesus, no one was brave enough to ask him any more questions. The scribe goes away close to the kingdom of God, if he will stop asking questions and start actually living the law and the prophets.

    That challenge is there for us, too, of course. Love of God and love of neighbor, loving the way God has loved us, this is the heart not just of the Old Testament law and the prophets, but also of the Gospel itself. God, who loved us enough to send his only Son, so that we might believe in him and have eternal life, also sent that Son to show us the way. So this Gospel interaction is foundational to our call as disciples. In order to be on course for the kingdom of God, a place we all want to be, we have to love God and love our neighbor. The kingdom of God is not a far-off distant thing or place to be achieved in the afterlife, but is in fact here among us, as Jesus proclaimed all through his time on earth. One gets to that kingdom by love of God and love of neighbor, by living the love that God has so freely given us. That is why living these commandments from our hearts is worth more than all burnt offerings and sacrifices. So love of God and love of neighbor, the heart of the Judaeo-Christian life, needs to be the center of everything we think or say or do. Love of God and love of neighbor needs to be the lens through which we see everything.

    So, friends, that means that we have to bring that lens with us to see the way through every interaction of our lives. Not just the ones that are easy and joyful, but also the interactions that are frustrating and painful. We have to love God and neighbor when the guy cuts us off on the highway; when the customer service agent puts us on hold for the fourth or fifth time; when we or a loved one get a frightening diagnosis and we have to navigate the healthcare system; when our coworkers drop the ball and make us look bad; when our children make poor decisions; when we disagree with a spouse or loved one; when a government official makes a terrible decision; and all the rest. Then it’s time, not just to say “okay, whatever, that’s fine” but instead to make decisions and corrections and advocate for the truth and do what is right, but do it all with love and grace, and with trust in God’s love and mercy. I recently saw a meme on social media that said: “You are made in the image of God. So is the idiot you’re arguing with.” That should give us pause to think and to love.

    The Liturgy of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the King of the Universe, which we will celebrate in just a few weeks, calls on us to work with God to put forward, here on earth, a kingdom of love and peace, a kingdom of justice and truth. You’ll hear that quote in the preface to the Eucharistic Prayer that day. That’s what our life on earth is all about. We truly are not far from the kingdom of God. All we have to do is to love God, love neighbor, and enter in.

  • All Souls Remembrance Mass

    All Souls Remembrance Mass

    On the Sunday closest to All Souls Day (November 2), we offer a remembrance Mass for those who have died during the past year.

    The souls of the just are in the hands of God. His care is with his elect. We shall also be united with him in the resurrection. Death no longer has power over him. Inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. Today’s Liturgy of the Word has good news for those of us who have lost loved ones, whether it be in the past year, or even the more distant past. The passing of time doesn’t take all the sorrow away, we know that, but it does give God a chance to bring us healing and grace and fond memories.

    We have come here today to do just that: to remember our loved ones who have passed away and now have hope of immortality. We pray for their souls and commend them to our loving God that he might, in his great mercy, open the gates of the heavenly kingdom for them and give them the eternal reward for which they have long hoped.

    This morning’s Gospel reading presents us with perhaps the foundational principal of living the Christian life: love of God and love of neighbor. We love God with great fervor because he loved us into existence. And God teaches us how to love: to love him and to love others; in fact we manifest our love of God in very real ways by loving others. Loving others is what brings us here together this morning as we celebrate our annual Mass of Remembrance for those who have gone before us, marked with the sign of faith. Our love of them doesn’t end when they leave us; and it is that love that intensifies our grief. And so we gather this morning to remember and to take solace in God’s love for us, knowing that the grave is no obstacle to love, and that death has been defeated by our Savior who loves us more than anything.

    Here at Saint Mary’s, we celebrate a good many funerals every year. So, as your pastor, I’m acutely aware of the grieving of our community. And I can relate to it: in the past few years, I celebrated the funeral of my mother, two of my uncles on my Dad’s side of the family as well as an uncle on Mom’s side; a stark reminder that as I get older, we are losing that previous generation, and I am missing their presence in our lives.

    I want to pause here and speak a little about the reality of grief. Because, if there is one thing that we as a society do extremely poorly, it’s grieving. It seems like we rush through it and hope it’s all done before we have a chance to feel any kind of pain. We want to get this thing done with, check the boxes, and move on. That’s part and parcel of how things work in our world: we have a pill for every malady and a quick remedy for every pain, plagued with a whole host of horrifying side effects. And what’s important to know is that this is not how the Church teaches us to grieve. One of the most important reasons that we have All Souls Day each year is to give us the experience of remembering and grieving and healing. If you truly love, you will truly grieve, and not turn away from it.

    The Church’s Catechism (989) teaches us: “We firmly believe, and hence we hope that, just as Christ is truly risen from the dead and lives for ever, so after death the righteous will live for ever with the risen Christ and he will raise them up on the last day.” And so we Christians never grieve as if we have no hope. The Church’s Liturgy echoes this hope in the third Eucharistic Prayer: “There we hope to enjoy for ever the fullness of your glory, when you will wipe away every tear from our eyes. For seeing you, our God, as you are, we shall be like you for all the ages and praise you without end, through Christ our Lord, through whom you bestow on the world all that is good.” One of the Prefaces to the Eucharistic Prayers for the Dead makes it very clear that this hope touches our experience of grieving: “In him the hope of blessed resurrection has dawned, that those saddened by the certainty of dying might be consoled by the promise of immortality to come (Preface I for the Dead).”

    And so I have some tips on grieving that I hope you will find helpful:

    • First, don’t rush into the funeral. It’s hard to make all those difficult decisions at a moment’s notice. It’s great if you’ve talked about your wishes with your family, because it makes things easier. But if that hasn’t happened, the family would do well to take its time and avail itself of the resources of the funeral director and the church staff so that a funeral that adequately honors the deceased and comforts the living can be prepared.
    • Parents: please talk to your children about your funeral. Yes, that’s going to be a hard conversation. But these days, too many young people are so disconnected from the Church and so averse to any kind of unhappiness, that they really don’t know how to grieve. You have to help them with that.
    • Let other people help you. Even if you can do all the preparations, you don’t have to, and you probably shouldn’t. Let the Church and others help you and minister to you in your time of grief. As a priest, I presided at my father’s funeral, but one of the priests who knew him preached the homily. At both of my parents’ funerals, I availed myself of the presence of a bereavement minister to help me plan the funeral. Did I know how to plan a funeral? Of course. But I found that I needed to be ministered to in my own grieving. On those days, I wasn’t only the priest celebrant, I was also a son grieving the death of his parent, and that was important.
    • Have a wake. A lot of people try to short-cut this one because they think it will be too painful. It will hurt a little, yes, but the comfort of others expressing their love for the deceased and for you will do so much to heal you in the time to come.
    • Don’t be afraid to shed tears. Anyone who has ever seen me preach at some funerals of people I’ve known especially well has seen me get choked up. Or they have seen me shed a tear when I’ve talked about my parents or my grandparents in a homily. Tears heal us, and it’s good for other people, especially your children, to see you cry. They need to know that pain and sorrow are part of life so that they don’t feel like they’ve gone nuts when it happens to them. You aren’t doing anyone any favors by not allowing them to see you grieve.
    • Understand that grief doesn’t just “go away.” Feelings soften with time, yes, but you will grieve your loved ones for many years to come, perhaps your whole life long. I still grieve for my grandparents who have been gone from my life for many, many years now. Sometimes those waves of grief will come up all of a sudden, without warning, kind of out of the blue. And that’s okay. Remember grief is a sign that we have loved, and loving is the most important thing we will ever do.

    Friends, praying for the dead recognizes that all of our lives here on earth are not perfect, and the only way that we can attain the saving grace necessary for life in heaven is by turning to our Savior who gave his life for us. Our second reading today gives us confidence that we can do this, and that his sacrifice on behalf of our loved ones, and of us, is sufficient, because his is a priesthood that never passes away. He offered himself once for all, and that is enough, if we turn to him and ask his mercy.

    In a few moments, I will sing words that have comforted me so many times in my sorrow. They are the words of the preface to the Eucharistic Prayer: “Indeed, for your faithful, Lord, life is changed, not ended, and when this earthly dwelling turns to dust, an eternal dwelling is made ready for them in heaven.” This echoes the words of the Prophet Isaiah who confidently proclaims: “The Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces; The reproach of his people he will remove from the whole earth; for the Lord has spoken.”

    During November, the Church continues to remember those we prayed for on the second day of this month, the Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed. For this remembrance, I have chosen to reflect on our experience of grief, and I’ve done that because it’s an experience we all have, on some level, at some time in our lives. I want you to know how very natural grief is, and how very blessed an experience it is. We must always remember that blessed experiences aren’t always pain-free. Our God never flees from our brokenness, instead he has chosen to redeem it. That is why he offered himself on the cross, willingly, for us.

    And so we are confident, because we know that death only separates us from those we love for a short time, and that death never has the last word because Christ has triumphed over death. The beginning and end of everything is Christ, and Christ is with us in our first moments, and also in our last. He is with us in our pain and with us in our joy. He helps us to remember our loved ones with love that continues beyond our death and beyond the grave. Grief and loss and pain, and even the grave, are temporary things for us. Love is eternal, love never ends, love can never be destroyed by death, love leads us all to the great glory of the resurrection and eternal light in that kingdom where Christ has conquered everything, even death itself.

    Therefore, it is with profound sadness, but also with ultimate trust in Almighty God that we commend our loved ones to the Lord, knowing that his mercy is great and that his love will keep us united at the Eucharistic banquet until that day when death is conquered and sadness is banished and we are all caught up in God’s life forever.

    Eternal rest grant unto all of our loved ones, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him. May the souls of all the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen.

  • The Solemnity of All Saints

    The Solemnity of All Saints

    Today’s readings

    I think we all bristle, unfortunately and mistakenly, at the idea of being a saint. Saints are those super-holy folks who are depicted in artwork and glorified in amazing stories. We are just ordinary people who struggle with our holiness, at best. But today, the Church is asking us to think about saints in a broader way. Yes, we include all those “official” saints that have been canonized through the ages. The Church rejoices in the saints because when someone becomes a saint, the Church recognizes that he or she is definitely in heaven, the goal of all our lives. That’s what the process of canonization is all about. And bringing people to heaven is the whole point of the Church. So, from the many saints of every time and place, we know of thousands of people that are certainly in heaven. This illustrates that God’s will is done, doesn’t it?

    But, as I said, I think the Church wants us to think about saints in a broader way. There is the story of a schoolteacher who asked her children what a saint was. One little girl thought about the saints she saw in stained glass windows, and said “Saints are people the light shines through.” Think about that for a minute – that little girl isn’t far from the kingdom of God there. Because all people are called to let the light of Christ shine through them, and saints are those people who have made that the business of their lives.

    Heaven is that great multitude that John the Revelator tells us about in today’s first reading: that multitude “which no one could count, from every nation, race, people, and tongue.” They are wearing, he tells us, white robes, which have been washed in the blood of the lamb. That seems very counter-intuitive, doesn’t it? Everyone knows that blood stains like nobody’s business. But he’s speaking poetically here, and recognizes that nothing washes us sinners quite as clean as the saving blood of Jesus Christ.

    And that’s really the only way. Because we’re quite right when we bristle a bit at being called saints. We can’t be saints all on our own. We aren’t good enough, we can’t make up for our sins with any kind of completeness, and there’s basically no way that we can jump high enough to get to heaven. But this feast of All Saints recognizes that we don’t have to. We don’t have to because Christ has saved us through no merit of our own but based solely on God’s love for us. The fact that we can be called saints is a grace, and we dare not bristle so much that we turn away from that grace.

    It may help to know that most, if not all, of the saints struggled with holiness too. Think about Saint Paul himself: he began his career by persecuting Christians and we know that he had a hand in the stoning of Saint Stephen. Or think about Saint Augustine who was an intellectual man who disdained Christianity, until his mother’s prayers caught up with him. Or we might think even more recently of Saint Teresa of Calcutta who experienced a very dark time in her life when she could not even communicate with Jesus. But Jesus was still there and led her to heaven.

    We are all of us on a journey, and we know that our true home is not in this place, however good it may be. We are on a journey to heaven, and that means that we are in the process of becoming saints. That journey consists in following the Way who is Jesus the Christ, our Lord and Redeemer. He has commanded, “be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect” and there is no way to do that except to follow him.

    So, no, of course, not all of us will be canonized. Most of us will go to the Kingdom rather imperfect in many ways, and will have to work that out in the grace of Purgatory. But if we look to those canonized saints for inspiration, perhaps our relationship with the Lord will lead us and our brothers and sisters to that place where all the saints worship around the Throne of the Lamb.

    Today we, the Church militant, honor the Church triumphant: not only the great saints like Mary and Joseph, Patrick and Benedict, Michael and Gabriel, Francis and Dominic, but also those saints that God alone has known. We glory in their triumph that was made possible by them joining themselves to Christ. We take inspiration from their battles and from the faith that helped keep them in Christ when they could have turned away. If God could do that in their lives, he can certainly do that in ours too. Perhaps, if we are willing to accept it, he can fill us with saintly attributes: strength in weakness, compassion in the face of need, witness to faith in times when society lacks direction, and so much more.

    Those virtues are virtues that we think about when we call to mind those official, canonized saints. But they are virtues for which we can and should strive as well. The desire and the grace to attain those virtues comes from God himself, and the reward for receiving that grace and living those virtues is a heavenly relationship with God. What could be better than that?

    This is a lot of work, it may well go unrewarded this side of the Kingdom of God, and it’s not easy to live a saintly life, but Jesus makes a promise today to those who strive to do so: “Rejoice and be glad, for your reward will be great in heaven!”

  • Thursday of the Thirtieth Week in Ordinary Time

    Thursday of the Thirtieth Week in Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    I think today’s reading from St. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians is a good one for us to hear. Think about it – how often are we beset by all the frustrations of the world, and all of the sadness that our own lives can sometimes bring? I’m not saying that every day is horrible, but we all go through times when it seems like it’s too much, like one more phone call with bad news and we’ll explode.

    And to all of that today, St. Paul advises us to “put on the armor of God.” You see, when things go wrong, we really have two choices. We can go to pieces, wondering where is God when we really need him, getting angry with God, ourselves, and others, and lashing out at anyone and everyone in our lives. Or, we can realize that what God allows isn’t always his will for us. In those times, we can join ourselves to him, and draw our strength and courage from the Lord himself, knowing that he walks with us in good times and in bad.

    And I am sure we all know which choice the devil himself would make for us, right? That evil one wants to use the trying times of our lives – trying times that every one of us has at one time or another – to drive a wedge between God and us. We absolutely need the strength of God to guard against that “evil day.” And so, St. Paul tells us, “In all circumstances, hold faith as a shield, to quench all the flaming arrows of the Evil One.” And that shield, he says, is prayer: He writes, “With all prayer and supplication, pray at every opportunity in the Spirit.” Prayer and faith are the armor we need to get through the trying times of life without falling victim to the evil one.

    Sometimes life can feel like a war, but as the Psalmist says today, “Blessed be the LORD, my rock, who trains my hands for battle, my fingers for war.” Our stronghold is that whatever life throws at us, we are never alone. Never.

  • The Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time

    The Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    An often told, and completely correct, preaching of today’s Gospel reading about the healing of Bartimeus’s blindness would say that this story isn’t about his blindness at all. Yes, it tells of his physical blindness and healing by Jesus, but the reason we have this story today isn’t just to make us feel happy for the blind man; instead it is to point out some kind of pervasive blindness that the man had, and truly, we all have, and the real miracle is that he was healed of that, and that we should reflect on what blindness we have and pray to be healed of that. That would be a perfectly acceptable reading of this Gospel story,

    But that there’s this really interesting detail that caught my attention right at the end of the story. It’s a throw-away detail, almost, but it changed what the message was for me. It’s a bit of a play on words that comes when Jesus tells the man, “Go your way; your faith has saved you.” And then it says that it the man received his sight and followed him on the way. So notice the difference: “Go your way” versus “followed him on the way.”

    If Bartimaeus had gone his way, as Jesus suggested, he would probably have returned to sitting on his cloak begging for alms. After all, that was all he knew, having done it his whole life. But he had cast that aside in the pursuit of Jesus, and having received sight, he clearly saw that that was the wrong way, and instead follows Jesus on “the way.” Now, it’s important to note here that “The Way” (capital “W”) was an early way that Christians, before they were called Christians, referred to themselves. They would be known as members of “The Way.” So here we see that the real miracle is that Bartimaeus clearly saw that his life lacked the meaning he needed and that the only cure was following Jesus.

    That coordinates well with the first reading today. The Israelites were in a bad situation: they had ignored God enough that he allowed their whole nation to fall and be taken into exile. Jeremiah’s message was that they had no one to blame but themselves; that God had punished them for turning aside from the faith, following false gods, ignoring the poor and the needy and the stranger in their midst, and allowing every kind of depravity in their lives. It’s not a very encouraging message, and one can see why Jeremiah was treated so poorly. In this reading, though, Jeremiah relates God’s promise that he would bring them back: back to Israel, back to the Temple, back to himself. Then, even though they departed in tears – as indeed they did – they would return shouting for joy.

    So the real miracle here is not one of blindness and seeing, at least not in the physical sense, but instead one of metanoia, which is the Greek word meaning a change in ones life – really a complete reversal – based on a spiritual interior conversion. The Israelites had been going the wrong way, so God gave them over to their persecutors, but because that penance produced conversion, he would bring them back. Bartimaeus had been going the wrong way living a perhaps-pointless life, but through giving himself over to Jesus and trusting in him, he found purpose in following him on The Way.

    So we need to come to see also. We have to see what’s going on in our own lives. Have we been going the wrong way? Have we paid little attention to our spiritual life? Have we chosen to live as though our spiritual lives didn’t matter? For me, it can be frighteningly easy to get distracted. It can be very easy to be so busy about the stuff of running a parish that I don’t see what God is doing in my life and in the life of this community. It was good for me to be on retreat this the week before last; in that precious time, I found much grace and rest and heard God’s call to make things new in me and in my ministry here. What is he doing in you right now? Have you been coasting in your spiritual life? Have you paid it little attention? If so, maybe God is calling you to forsake your own way, and give yourself over to following him on The Way.

  • Confirmation

    Confirmation

    My dear candidates for Confirmation, this is an amazing day. You come here today after a long period of growing in faith and preparing for this beautiful sacrament. You have completed many hours of service, you have learned a good deal about our faith and our church, and you have prayed and discerned this sacramental moment. So here we are, finally, and today you see the grace of all of that: you receive the sacrament for which you have worked so hard to prepare. I congratulate you for coming here today to choose yet again to be a follower of Christ in the Catholic Church. I thank you for making that difficult but important decision, a decision that no one should ever take lightly. I have more to say to you about that, but first I would like to speak briefly to your parents and sponsors.

    And so parents, I appreciate on behalf of the Church all that you have done to raise your children in the faith. A parent’s job is a difficult one, now and always. You know all too well that there are so many ways a young person can be distracted from their God, their faith, and even from their family. But you have persevered by bringing them for baptism, teaching them to pray, giving them the grace of continued religious instruction, and bringing them here today for Confirmation. A parent’s vocation is to bring children into the world and to teach them the faith, and lead them to heaven one day. This you have begun, but the job is never complete until that great day when we all meet in around the banquet table of God’s kingdom in heaven. And so I encourage you to continue this great work by seeing that your family comes to Mass every Sunday and Holy Day of Obligation, and that you all become life-long learners of our faith: that’s how we do it. Then on that great day when we do all come together to eternal life, you can hear your Lord say to you, “Well done, good and faithful servant, enter into the joy of your Lord!”

    Sponsors, you have undertaken a very important role in the life of the young person you are sponsoring. That young person is very special to you or you wouldn’t be their sponsor. Being a sponsor for Confirmation is not something simply ceremonial, and it’s not just a pat on the back for being a good person in their life. As a sponsor, it is your job to continue to witness to the faith and encourage your candidate to grow in that faith. This means that the Church expects that you are living lives of integrity, showing that you believe in Christ by your example, and to encourage and correct the person you are sponsoring so that they remain on the road they have chosen. You share with their parents in the role of bringing them to heaven.

    And now, candidates, I return to you. You have come here for many reasons this afternoon. Some of you have freely chosen to come to the sacrament of Confirmation to be sealed with the Gift of the Holy Spirit; it is a part of your faith and you have chosen to share in it; you may have been eagerly waiting for this moment all your lives. Others perhaps are doing this because a parent or grandparent or some other adult has urged you to do so. And that’s okay; they wouldn’t be doing their jobs if they didn’t insist that you do what is best for you or encourage you on a path that leads to happiness. Whatever the reason is that you’re here, the important thing is that you’re here. The Holy Spirit which you will receive in a sacramental way this morning will continue to work in your hearts and in your lives to guide you through the years ahead which will undoubtedly provide you with a multitude of challenges.

    In today’s world, you have a lot on your plate. High school demands much from you: academics, sports, extra-curricular activities: all of these take time and energy and attention. Then there are the pressures of growing up in this time in history. Your parents and teachers expect you to perform at your best, to get good grades and eventually to go to a good college and get a good job. That is a hard thing to accomplish for anyone and for some more than others. You also have the pressures to socialize with other young people. You have to have friends and be popular, and sometimes that is difficult to reconcile with your life of faith. You may be tempted to try alcohol and drugs and going too far in relationships, and all kinds of things that you know are wrong and that will lead you into sin and complicate your life. The cost of being a disciple of Jesus who follows the right path is pretty high.

    So we are here for all sorts of reasons, and we bring so much challenge in our lives to this sacramental moment. And the reason we celebrate Confirmation as a community is that we are saying to you that the pressures you experience are not pressures you need to experience alone. The Church offers you some wonderful gifts to help you on your journey.

    The first is the gift of the people in your life who want the best for you. Your parents, grandparents, sponsors and other adults in your family are there for you. You have teachers, the staff here at church, Father John, Father James, and me. You need to know that you can and should go to any of us when times are tough, when you have to make hard decisions and when you don’t know how to do the right thing. All of these folks have had to make hard decisions every day, and sometimes we do it well and sometimes we learn from our mistakes. But we want you to know that you can always come to us for help, to be a sounding board when you just need some advice or even just someone to listen.

    The second gift is the others receiving Confirmation here today. Look around: these are all people who have come here because they believe that there is something special, something important, about living in Christ and living their Catholic faith. Whatever the reason is for them being here, there is that part of them that knows that life in the Spirit is worthwhile. When peer pressure seems to make life so hard, know that there are peers here at Saint Mary’s who stand with you to walk down the right path.

    And the final gift is what we celebrate sacramentally today: the Gift of the Holy Spirit. And that Holy Spirit changes things, changes you. As the Holy Spirit is given to you sacramentally today, He will fill you with the power to make your life a living witness to others of God at work in the world. Now, it might not be as obvious as our readings make it sound. You might not see tongues of fire. You might not see the Holy Spirit help anyone to speak in tongues, and it might seem like nothing miraculous will happen as a result of this sacrament today. Unless maybe you look a little harder. Maybe that Holy Spirit will help you to make a decision that is very difficult to make, or to stand up for someone with strength you never knew you had. Maybe the Holy Spirit will enable you to say the right thing to someone at just the right time. Maybe the Holy Spirit will stir up a fire in your heart that gives you passion for a cause that really makes a difference in the world. Maybe the Holy Spirit will fill your heart with a love that leads you to a vocation as a priest, religious brother or sister, or a married person, sharing God’s love in the world according to your station in life. In little and big ways, the Spirit who changes everything will continue to change you and make you new, if you rely on Him. I pray for the Holy Spirit’s guidance every morning. And every morning I thank the Spirit for the graces I have been given. I know that can happen for you too.

    Today’s Gospel makes the Holy Spirit very tangible in our lives through the reality of truth. Truth is a word that, in our culture, is often misused. People think they can come up with their own truth, that as long as something seems right for them, then it has to be the truth. But truth doesn’t work that way. In another place in the Gospel, Jesus says that he is the Truth, and that there is no other way to the Father than through him. And today’s Gospel promises, that if we are people of faith, the Holy Spirit will lead us to that truth, and that having received it, we will testify to the truth. We become living witnesses of the truth who can then be a light in the world to draw others to Christ. We do that by living in the truth, and by loving others as Christ, the Truth, has loved us.

    So I encourage you to continue to be active members of the Church. Today is not the end of your faith journey: in some ways, it’s just the beginning. Continue to come here every Sunday and Holy Day of Obligation for Mass so that you can receive the grace of the Eucharist to strengthen you, and the grace of the Holy Spirit to guide you. Continue to be of service to those in need so that those you serve, who have very hard lives, can help you to become strong people of faith. Continue to learn about your faith so that on that great day when you are called to heaven, you’ll know where you are and will recognize your Lord.

    Come Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful, and kindle in them the fire of your love. Send forth your Spirit and they shall be created, and you shall renew the face of the earth.

  • Friday of the Twenty-ninth Week in Ordinary Time

    Friday of the Twenty-ninth Week in Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    Pay attention! Listen to me when I’m talking to you! Look where you’re going! Be careful; you’re going to fall! How many times do you hear things like this? I know my parents used to say those things to me pretty often when I was growing up. I think if I could hear my guardian angel out loud, he would be screaming these things at me all the time even now!

    I think all of us – young people and older people alike – find ourselves distracted a lot of the time. The biggest culprit that causes this distraction, I think, are the screens we have in our field of vision. It used to be that the television at home was the thing that was a distraction for us, but now we can add our phones, computers, and tablets. Most of us have our eyes on screens all the time. Ask the adults here who go to daily Mass how often I have to remind them to turn off their phones. We are all caught up in what’s going on on our screens, that we miss what’s right in front of us.

    But even if we didn’t have screens, my guess is that human nature would find something to distract us. That’s kind of what Jesus is getting at in today’s gospel reading. He takes the people to task because he knows they get caught up in talking about the weather. They were agricultural people, so they all knew how to look up at the sky and predict what was going to happen. They knew when rain was coming, or when it was going to get hotter.

    But the problem was, they could see what was up in the sky, coming a day or two down the road, but they couldn’t see things that were happening right here, right now. They couldn’t see that it was a real problem when they had disagreements with other people that they refused to settle. They couldn’t see that forgiveness and mercy were vital to their survival and salvation. Jesus wanted them to stop getting caught up in the distractions of their lives and take care of the things that really mattered, things that were really important.

    As I pointed out, we are a lot like that too. We know who posted what and when and on what social media platform. We know what so-called celebrity went out with whom and where. We let our relationships boil down to emojis and lols and idks and don’t take time to really see the people in our lives. We let the ringing of phones and pinging of instant messaging distract us from prayer, life, and the people all around us.

    When my mom was sick, my sisters and I used to text every single morning so that we would all know how mom was doing that day and how we were handling it. We liked that, so we continue that every day even now. Now, we just tell each other what’s going on in our lives and how we are feeling, and telling each other we love them. That’s nice. But we have also found out that it is no substitute for actually seeing each other, and spending time together. So now we make it a point to do that too.

    There are all sorts of things in our world and in our lives that distract us from God, prayer, the people in our lives, and our relationships. We can’t let that cloud our ability to really see the people in our lives and to see what’s going on around us. We have to pay attention, to listen, to really see, and to love as God loves us. Anything else is just a distraction, and it’s not worthy of us, of our loved ones, or of our God.

    Pay attention.

  • Thursday of the Twenty-ninth Week in Ordinary Time

    Thursday of the Twenty-ninth Week in Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    I think sometimes, we don’t really get who Jesus was and what he came to do. So many people think it’s the “kumbaya” kind of love and harmony. They would assert that Jesus was all about being peaceful and accepting. But saying that is really misunderstanding Jesus and who he was and what he came to accomplish. Because peace wasn’t necessarily his primary interest, at least not peace in the way that we would probably define it.

    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 so 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. Frankly, this isn’t the kind of peace he even came to bring us: that kind of peace isn’t worthy of dying on a cross, is it? No, our Jesus 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. Just so, there will never be any peace if we don’t confront what’s really happening. The fire may need 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. We have to work for true healing in all of our relationships. May all of our divisions lead to real peace!