Caritas Christi Urget Nos

Tag: faith

  • The Twenty-first Sunday of Ordinary Time [C]

    The Twenty-first Sunday of Ordinary Time [C]

    Today’s readings

    In my last assignment, at St. Raphael in Naperville, there was a huge football program for elementary school kids called St. Raphael Football.  It was not just a team, but a league, and lots of surrounding churches had teams in the league.  You couldn’t live in Naperville and not have heard of St. Raphael Football.  So once in a while, in a social setting, someone would ask me what church I was from, and I’d tell them, St. Raphael.  And they would say to me, “Oh yes, we go there, our son is in that football league.”  I always wanted to tell them, “How nice.  By the way, we also celebrate the Eucharist there.”  Maybe I should have.  Today’s gospel reading makes me think I should.

    We – as a society – have it all wrong.  Our priorities are all messed up.  I think we’re in real danger, and today’s Liturgy of the Word is a wake-up call for us to get it right.  So this homily is probably going to come off sounding kind of harsh to some of you, but if I don’t say what I have to say, I’m not doing my job as your priest.  And I know, really I know, most of you get this.  So please indulge me; if this doesn’t apply to you, please pray for someone who needs to hear it, because you know someone who does.

    When Jesus is asked whether only a few will be saved, he deflects the question.  His answer indicates that it’s not the number of those who will be saved – that’s not the issue.  The issue is that some people think they will be saved because they call themselves Christian, or religious, or spiritual, or whatever.  It’s kind of like the people I talked to who considered themselves practicing Catholics simply because their children played in a football league that was marginally affiliated with us.

    Jesus says that’s not how it works.  We have to strive to enter the narrow gate.  So what does that mean?  For Jesus, entering eternity through the narrow gate means not just calling yourself religious; that would be a pretty wide gate.  The narrow gate means actually practicing the faith: living the gospel, reaching out to the needy, showing love to your neighbor.  It means making one’s faith the first priority, loving God first, worshipping first, loving others first.

    And it’s hard to do that.  Saint Paul says today that we have to strengthen our drooping hands and weak knees; Jesus says that many will attempt to enter that narrow gate but won’t be strong enough to do it.  That narrow gate of love is hard to enter: it takes effort, it takes grace; it takes strength, and we can only get that grace and strength in one place, and that place is the Church.  That’s why Jesus gives us the Church: to strengthen us for eternal life.

    That’s not the best news, however, because so many people these days settle for simply calling themselves religious, or being “spiritual” – whatever that means.  They’ll play football on the team, but won’t make an effort to come to Church to receive the strength they need to live this life and to enter eternal life.  It is here, in the Eucharist, freely given by our gracious Lord, that we receive the strength we need to love, the strength necessary to live our faith and be united with our God.  But it’s hard to get to Church because Billy has a soccer game, or Sally has a dance recital, or because Mom and Dad just want to sleep in.

    But those decisions have eternal consequences.  So let me be clear: God is more important than soccer, God is more important than the dance recital, and as for sleeping in on Sunday, well, there’s time to sleep when we’re dead, right?  And it’s not like it’s an either/or proposition: people don’t have to choose between soccer and Mass or dance and Mass or even sleeping and Mass.  This parish has Mass on Saturday and at least four, sometimes five Masses on Sunday.  There’s probably a church within a few driving minutes of every football or soccer field in the western suburbs; I know a lot of families choose to take that option when schedules are hectic.

    The point is, we make time for what’s important to us.  And eternal life is the only thing that we have of lasting importance.  So we have to build up the strength to get through that narrow gate one day.  We’ve got to worship God with consistency; we have to live the gospel with consistency.

    We’re not going to be able to say one day: “We ate and drank in your company and you taught in our streets and we played football on your team.”  We can’t just call ourselves Catholic; we have to live our faith.  We have to reach out to the needy, stand up for truth and justice, make a real effort to love even when it’s not convenient to love, or even when the person who faces us is not as loveable as we’d like.

    All of this requires commitment and effort and real work from all of us. We have to strive to enter through that narrow gate, because we don’t want to ever hear those bone-chilling words from today’s Gospel, “I do not know where you are from. Depart from me, you evildoers!” The good news is we don’t ever have to hear those words: all we have to do is nourish our relationship with Jesus that will give us strength to enter the narrow gate.  After all, the narrow gate is love, and the love of God in Jesus is more than enough to get us through it.

  • The Nineteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time

    The Nineteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    I had supper with a friend this week.  During the course of our conversation over dinner, he explained his conviction that most people, perhaps even some people who come to Mass every Sunday, don’t really have faith anymore.  He thinks our society has lost the conviction that our faith is radical, real, and life-changing.  And that is because, he says, if we really did believe that the bread and wine became the body and blood of Christ, we wouldn’t have a vocations crisis, because parents would be eager to encourage their sons to become priests so that we would never go without the Eucharist.  I’m still mulling over the implications of what he said.

    But whether he’s right or not, today’s Scriptures speak to exactly what he was saying.  In these summer days of the Church’s Ordinary Time, we have been exploring the meaning of discipleship.  Each Sunday, I think, we are given a tool for living our discipleship.  The tool we get today is that of faith.  And faith is a word that we toss around kind of carelessly in these days.  We talk about having faith in someone, having faith in ourselves, being people of faith.  But what does that even mean?  What does faith look like?  Well, today’s Liturgy of the Word helps us to paint that picture.

    The author of the letter to the Hebrews lays down the definition of faith for us: “Faith is the realization of what is hoped for and evidence of things not seen.” Faith is something we all strive to have, but faith is really a gift. We long to be people of faith because it is faith that gives peace in the midst of uncertainty. Faith, as the author points out, is not the same thing as proof. Proof requires evidence, and faith usually provides none of that. Faith, perhaps, is not knowing what will happen, but instead knowing the one in whom we trust. If we know our God is trustworthy, then we don’t need to know all the details of what is ahead of us; instead, we can trust in the One who leads us. The more that we exercise that faith, the more our faith grows.

    The author speaks about Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Jacob.  They were heirs of the promise God made, a real covenant with his people.  Abraham and Sarah should never even have given birth to Isaac and Jacob – they were too old.  But they did, and Isaac and Jacob were but the beginning of “descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as countless as the sands on the seashore.”  Even then, they didn’t see the fulfillment of the promise.  That would only come about in the Paschal Mystery of Christ our God, but they had the glimpse of it from afar.

    The parable in our Gospel today tells us what living the faith looks like: “You also must be prepared, for at an hour you do not expect, the Son of Man will come.” Faith requires waiting, and we do all sorts of waiting. We wait in the grocery line and in the doctor’s office. We wait for friends or family to join us at the dinner table. We wait for job offers, for the right person in our relationships, and we wait for the right direction in our lives. In all of our waiting, Jesus tells us today, we must be prepared for the outpouring of God’s grace. If we are distracted by worldly things and worldly activities, we may miss that grace as it is poured out right before us. If we are caught up in things that have no permanence, we may miss our opportunity to follow Christ to our salvation. We must always be prepared for the Son of Man to come into our lives.

    The parable gives us some wonderful images.  Those faithful servants, whom the Master finds busy doing their jobs when he returns, are not just given a pat on the back.  No, they are seated at table, and the Master himself begins to wait on them!  That image had to be astonishing to those servants of Jesus’ day.  But it is none the less real for us.  We come here to Mass today expecting that very same thing to happen.  We come to the table, and we are fed by our Master in a way that we could never feed ourselves on our own.  The grace poured out on us as people of faith is incredible, if we have the faith to notice it.

    The second wonderful image in this parable is what happens at the end: “if the master of the house had known the hour when the thief was coming, he would not have let his house be broken into.”  But when you think about it, that has already happened: Jesus  has returned in his Spirit and has “broken into” our house.  Jesus’ return is unexpected: he is like a sneaky thief.  And so, we need to be vigilant, we need to be aware of the return of Jesus.

    But again, what does that look like?  For what should we keep vigil?  This is where faith comes in to play.  It might be strength in the midst of crisis, or maybe a deep-down joy underneath the same old daily routine. It could be an unexpected treat, like a visit with an old friend. Sometimes it looks like a reassuring presence during a quiet moment of prayer. Or perhaps even a renewed commitment to keep on doing what we know we are called to do.

    Faith can be nebulous, but in today’s Liturgy, we are taught that faith looks like something.  Faith means living the Gospel with urgency every day, as though Jesus were going to return tomorrow, even if that return is many years in the future.  Faith means looking for the blessing in every day, even when cares and concerns and sadness threaten to swallow us up.  Faith means standing up for the truth, reaching out to those in need, preaching the Gospel in our words and in our deeds.

    The protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr spoke of the notion of faith in his famous “Serenity Prayer.”  You’ve probably heard the first part, but I think the last part is that prayer for faith that we all pray today:

    God,

    Grant me the serenity

    To accept the things I cannot change;

    The courage to change the things I can;

    And the wisdom to know the difference.

    Living one day at a time;

    Enjoying one moment at a time;

    Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace;

    Taking, as Jesus did, this sinful world

    As it is, not as I would have it;

    Trusting that you will make all things right

    If I surrender to your will;

    So that I may be reasonably happy in this life

    And supremely happy with you

    Forever in the next.  Amen.

  • Tuesday of the Eighteenth Week of Ordinary Time

    Tuesday of the Eighteenth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    Today’s Gospel reading is one of my favorites.  Truthfully, though, it always makes me a little uncomfortable.  Which is what it’s supposed to do.  This Gospel wants us to get out of the boat, too.

    We can tend to give Saint Peter a lot of grief over this incident.  If he was able to walk on the water for a few steps, why couldn’t he finish the journey?  What we see happen here is that while he has his eyes on Jesus, he can accomplish what seems impossible: he walks on water.  But when he gets distracted by the storm and the wind and the waves, he begins to sink into the water.

    Our spiritual journeys are a lot like that, I think.  It takes courage to get out of the boat, but the boat is where Jesus is.  We won’t get to him unless we make that leap of faith and step out of the comfort of our boats – whatever those boats may be.  And we do fine while we have our eyes on Jesus, but the minute we get distracted by the storms raging all around us, we begin to sink into the ocean of despair that surrounds us.

    When that happens, we can be depressed about our progress.  We can be very hard on ourselves for falling yet again.  But we have to understand that Peter, and we, are not the biggest losers in this whole incident.  There were eleven guys who never had the courage or the faith to get out of the boat in the first place.  And so, like Peter, we can reach up to our Lord and let him pull us out of the swirling waters once again.

    For those of us who take the leap of faith with Peter today, we may be of “little faith,” we may even doubt sometimes, but our faith in Jesus will always keep us safe.

  • Monday of the Eighteenth Week of Ordinary Time

    Monday of the Eighteenth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    “Give them some food yourselves,” Jesus says to the disciples.  Yes, it would be easier to send the people away so they can fend for themselves.  But that’s not how God wants to feed them, and Jesus won’t hear of it.  “Give them some food yourselves.”  All they have are five loaves and couple of fish, hardly enough for the incredible crowd.  But, that sacrifice in the hands of Jesus is enough to feed all of them and then some.  What meager offering will you be called upon to sacrifice today so that others can be fed?  Our little service might not seem like much, but in Jesus’ hands it is more than enough.  “Give them some food yourselves.”

  • Friday of the Sixteenth Week of Ordinary Time

    Friday of the Sixteenth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    This morning’s Gospel passage is the explanation of the parable of the seed and the sower, which we heard on Wednesday morning.  What we quickly find out is that the parable is all about us.  Clearly the ideal is the good soil which produces much fruit, and just as clearly, we don’t want to be the soil on the path or the rocky soil, or even the soil with the thorny growth.  All those soils yield nothing but dead plants, hardly an offering to God or even anything that would be pleasing to us.

    When we allow ourselves to have a surface-level relationship with God, one that is not nourished by devotion and worship, we end up being easy picking for anything in the world that comes away and would snatch us out of the hands of God.  Just like the soil on the path, such as it is.

    When we think that we can live our faith without any kind of effort on our part, we end up with a very shallow basis for that faith.  We sometimes latch on to the joy of religion or religious experience, but when it becomes hard work, we let go and have no way to keep growing.  Just like the rocky soil.

    When we try to live our faith and still be people of the world, we find that the faith gets choked out as our desire for more riches, more things, more prestige – or more whatever – overshadows our desire for strong relationship with God.  We can’t serve two masters, and we soon take the path of least resistance, abandoning the faith for what we think will give us more happiness, at least right now.  And when that fails us, we wither up and have nowhere to turn.  Just like the soil with the thorny growth.

    But it can’t be that way for disciples of the Lord.  We have to have a faith that goes beyond the surface so that we can really know God.  We have to have a faith that is developed by embracing the hard work of repentance and devotion so that we can continue to dig deep into the life of God.  We have to have a faith that is single-minded and not subject to whatever ill-winds and thorns come along.  We have to be that rich soil which yields not only joy for ourselves, but grace for others.

  • Tuesday of the Fifteenth Week of Ordinary Time

    Tuesday of the Fifteenth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    Today’s scriptures are full of place-names.  The places seem meaningless to us so far away in both time and place.  But in those days, those places were extremely important.  Isaiah speaks of Jerusalem, Damascus, and Samaria, strategic places in the ancient near east.  The Old Testament of course places preeminence on Jerusalem, God’s dwelling-place.  God sent Isaiah to prophecy that all of these would be torn down unless the people’s faith was firm.

    In the Gospel, Jesus mentions Chorazin and Bethsaida, Tyre and Sidon, Capernaum, and even Sodom.  He says that unless Chorazin, Bethsaida and Capernaum learn the lessons of Tyre, Sidon and Sodom, their fate would be much worse than those condemned places.

    And so, what of Glen Ellyn, then?  Is our faith strong enough to pass the test of today’s Scriptures?  The only way we can be sure is through our faith and our witness.  We must be certain that each of us individually is living our faith to the fullest, so that our lives give witness to others.  Then, with the grace of God, we can convert our village, and our nation, and even our world.

    Our task on earth is to build, with God’s help, an earthly city that will lead all people to the Kingdom of God.  Our prayer of faith today is, in the words of the Psalmist, God upholds his city forever.

  • Friday of the Twelfth Week of Ordinary Time

    Friday of the Twelfth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    It might seem like the leper overstated the obvious: “Lord, if you wish, you can make me clean.”  Certainly the Lord can do whatever he wants whenever he wants.  But it is a statement that is well for us to hear, I think.  Our plans need to be centered around God’s will for us.  God wants the best for us, and has our welfare in mind.  But we have to give ourselves over to his plans for us if we want to experience the happiness we seek.  The Leper’s statement is an act of faith and perhaps it can also be our prayer today.  “Lord, if you wish, you can make me clean…” you can give me strength, you can lead me to true peace, you can make me whole.

  • Monday of the Eighth Week of Ordinary Time

    Monday of the Eighth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    It is imperative to our Spiritual lives that we learn to let go.  The problem is, though, that letting go is so counterintuitive for us.  We want to hold on to everything, control everything, because when we are in charge we can be sure everything will work out all right.  At least we think so.  The truth is that God is in control, and just like the rich young man in today’s Gospel reading, we have to learn to let go of everything that keeps us from letting God be God in our lives.  That is the only way that we can achieve faith’s goal, the salvation of our souls, as the first reading tells us.

  • Thursday of the Third Week of Easter

    Thursday of the Third Week of Easter

    Today’s readings

    Being in the right place at the right time isn’t usually a coincidence.  Far more often than we realize, I think it’s the work of the Holy Spirit.  Certainly that has to be the case in today’s first reading.  How else would we explain an angel directing Philip to be on a road at the very same time as the Ethiopian eunuch passed by, reading a passage from the prophet Isaiah that referred to Jesus?  Seizing the moment, Philip explains the Jesus event to him in a way that was powerful enough and moving enough that, on seeing some water as they continued on the journey, the eunuch begged to be baptized.  Then, as the Spirit whisks Philip off to Azotus, the eunuch continues on his way, rejoicing in his new life.

    The same is true for those who were fortunate enough to hear Jesus proclaim the Bread of Life discourse that we’ve been reading in our Gospel readings these past days.  Having been fed by a few loaves and fishes when they were physically hungry, they now come to find Jesus who longs to fill them up not just physically but also, and more importantly, spiritually.  Their hunger put them in the right place at the right time.

    Maybe what’s important for us to get today is that we are always in the right place at the right time, spiritually speaking.  Wherever we find ourselves is the place that we are directed by the Holy Spirit to find God.  Wherever we find ourselves is the place that we are directed by the Holy Spirit to proclaim God.  And so we may be called upon to find God in the midst of peace, or chaos, or any situation.  We never know how God may feed us in those situations.  And we may indeed be called upon to proclaim God in those same peaceful, or chaotic, situations.  Because we never know when there will be someone like an Ethiopian eunuch there, aching to be filled with Christ’s presence and called to a new life.

    It is no coincidence that we are where we are, when we are.  The Spirit always calls on us to find our God and proclaim him as Lord of every moment and every situation.

  • Wednesday of the Third Week of Easter

    Wednesday of the Third Week of Easter

    Today’s readings

    As Catholics, we believe that opposite things don’t necessarily cancel each other out.  For instance, we believe, as our first reading today illustrates, that we can have joy in the midst of sorrow.  The early Community found themselves severely persecuted.  Saul, for whom God had future plans, was currently doing his best to destroy the Christian Way, and he was not alone.  Many suffered and died as St. Stephen did in yesterday’s reading, and others were exiled from their homes.  But even in the midst of that, St. Philip was doing Christ’s work quite successfully in Samaria.  There was great joy in that city.  To some, that would seem so contradictory and out-of-whack.  But for us, we know that this is how life is.  There is sadness, and there is joy, and all of it is a gift in some way.  Even today, some of us may have sadness, and others joy.  May we experience it with peace as the early Community did.