Homily for the Week of August 25, 2013

TWENTY-FIRST SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME: CYCLE C, 2013 Isaiah 66:18-21;Psalm 117:1, 2; Hebrews 12:5-7, 11-13; Luke 13:22-30 You just heard the question put to Jesus by one of the people who came to hear him talk: Lord, will only a few people be saved? These are probably the scariest words in the entire Bible. Within that questions is the fear that many will not be saved--will end up in hell. It is only reasonable that this question has some appeal to Satan and his fellow devils. And so at the annual convention of devils the focus was on the dropping number of persons entering hell. The purpose was to get the devils talking about new and inventive ways to gain people for hell. As good administrators they formed focus groups to discuss and debate ways to trick more souls into hell. Finally, in a formal session, the groups presented their various ideas. A very young devil took the floor first. His group thought that, if they could get more people addicted to social media, those people would lose a sense of relationships. Without a sense of proper relationships, the people would quit caring about everyone but themselves. Those addicted to social media would become the center of their own universe. Satan thought the idea showed promise but said that, as people caught on that they were losing their souls to social media, they would abandon it for real relationships Another group reported that, given the way the world was going, they could convince people that moral values were shifting things. The world was already headed toward abandoning moral values and religious practice, and people were already letting secularism guide them. But Satan also knew from history that a world without values leads to a world with a lot of pain. A world with a lot of pain always went running back to God. The idea would work for a while, but it might not be effective for as long as he hoped. The meeting dragged on, and Satan kept finding some fault with almost every idea for leading more souls to hell. The assembly was becoming restless. Finally, in the back of the convention hall, the second oldest devil in hell rose to speak. The hall grew silent to hear what the old devil had to offer. The old devil said that bringing more people to hell would really be very easy. All the devils would have to do is to whisper into each person’s ear that there was plenty of time in their lives for them to turn to God. The fact is that we are sometimes just too casual about our salvation. We know of Jesus Christ, we hear the sermons, we go to Church more often than not, but concern for God gets only passing attention. There are many options for how to spend our time, and too often spending time on our relationship with God becomes just one of the many. Like talking about losing weight or getting in shape but not dieting or exercising, we talk about developing a deep and abiding relationship with God, yet live as if time is on our side. Two weeks ago, the Gospel told us not to live in fear, but at the same time it also said we do not know when the master of the house will be returning. How will he find us when he returns? It might seem inconceivable, but time is not on our side when it comes to salvation. We presume so much on God’s love, compassion and mercy that it doesn’t occur to us that we let ourselves grow lazy with our faith and religion because of our presumption. Too many times we think, “I’m a good person. I treat people right. I’m not too worried about getting into heaven.” Those of us who have ever thought this way need to hear the words of today’s Gospel again: “Many, I tell you, will try to enter and be unable.” Eventually God will shut the door, and many of us will be caught standing outside. The question put to Jesus was, “Will only a few be saved?” This question had to have been asked by someone who had been faithfully following Jesus and listening closely to Jesus’ ever-more-difficult sayings. While saying that the invitation to live in God’s kingdom is extended to everyone, Jesus also said that the way is narrow and demands more than a casual interest. Jesus demands more than admiration. Jesus demands love. Jesus demands more than being merely good. He demands holiness. Jesus added a further alarming and frightening note. He said that our deepest pain will be to sit in front of a closed door within sight of large numbers of people who have been admitted. Real hell is not fire and flame. Real hell is realizing what was within our grasp that we failed to reach. In answering the question Jesus is not interested in giving population statistics of heaven and hell. Instead he says that every person should do everything possible to make sure that she or he is among the “Saved.” Then he gives us how: Strive to enter through the narrow door. We are saved by our faith, but our faith must be backed by our actions. We still need to try to enter heaven. It is not necessarily a given. Trying is not wishful thinking. It is not a vague hope. It is not something we take care of in our spare time. Trying to enter heaven at the end of our life must be a top priorit of our daily lives. It must be what we seek first above everything else. A person who is trying starts not at the time of death but by living a faith filled life day after day. That means taking time to pray each day, staying focused on our time at Mass, taking care of the needy. We say that God does not want anyone to be lost. This is true. Isaiah says this. The book of Hebrews says this. God does not want any of his children to be left outside, but God cannot force us to walk through the door. He leaves the choice to enter the door up to us. Today let each of us promise to PUT GOD FIRST! We should not listen to the whispers of the devil.

Homily for the Week of August 18, 2013

20th Sunday, Cycle C. 2013 Jeremiah 38:4-6, 8-10 Psalm 40:2, 3, 4, 18 Hebrews 12:1-4 Luke 12:49-53 Today we hear five of the toughest and possibly the most unsettling verses of Luke’s Gospel. Over the past weeks in our continuous reading of Luke, we have gotten used to a few different images of Jesus. Four chapters ago we heard of the kindly carpenter who healed a man possessed by many demons. Two chapters ago Jesus enjoyed a meal at the home of Martha and Mary. Three weeks ago Jesus taught his friends how to pray and taught us to ask and we shall receive. Last week Jesus assured us that faithful followers will be rewarded. Today, however, everything changes. Today we learn kindly Jesus has come to set the status quo on its ear and set the world on fire. Today we learn Jesus intends to destroy the world as people knew it. Today we are told that Jesus is not about bringing a peaceful life. His message instead will cause division. We learn today that Jesus did not come to endorse human institutions and their values. He did not endorse the values society taught in His own day, and by extension, He does not uphold or endorse the values of our institutions either. Jesus came to teach us that we must support His values, and His values are very different from what we might experience today. Listening to Jesus today may not be very appealing. Who would want to follow someone like him - unless we could imagine ourselves like an an old apple tree that needs a good pruning? Jesus and the writers of the holy books are telling us today that we too as human beings, as apple tress, do at times refuse to give up our dead branches or to let go of our excess baggage. Or as Jeremiah says in our first reading, we must try to get out of the cistern. We must not allow ourselves to sink deeper and deeper into the mud. All of us are weighted down by selfish habits which prevent us from being the person that God wants us to be, or even the person we may want to be. Like the apple tree we need pruning in our life. We must take time to take an inward look at ourselves. We refer to this type of pruning by name and action of discipline. Jesus mentions that discipline can be painful, but that if we are to honestly call ourselves His followers, then suffering is a necessary part. We must come to admit that by ourselves we are powerless over a bad habit, but we also believe that we can some day obtain power over it if we trust someone enough to talk about it, and that God can save. In so doing we allow the dead branches or the bad habits to become known, at least to us, and to another, and then be confident that we can change it. Why is this needed? Jesus answers: so that we can set the whole world on fire with the ways and teachings of God. At our Baptism, when we first became a Catholic, our parents and godparents promised for us that we would reject Satan, we would reject sin and the glamour of evil, and refuse to be mastered by sin. We were asked to chose between slavery to sin and the freedom of being a child of God. When we were created God placed in us the ability to reason and to make decisions. By the time we were a teenager we received enough information to good and bad decisions by ourselves from the limited information which we had stored in our memory and imagination. Our senses have taken in all kinds of information some of which we accept, some we throw away and much we are not aware of. Our reason then moves us to say yes or no to a particular action. Our spiritual and religious faith also help us to reason that a particular decision is good or bad. The words of Jesus which I read today can make it seem as if Jesus enjoys abusing us or taking away our pleasures. But the opposite is true. Pain and suffering, of course, comes to everyone, whether we are good, bad or indifferent. If we do not live good lives we often suffer, but at times even those who are perfectly faithful to the teachings of Jesus also suffer as we heard in our first reading today. Jesus knows what we know -- that unless we do live up to high expectations, we can never be happy. As human beings Jesus knows that we might not be perfect, but that we can never be truly happy unless we struggle to be perfect. Jesus also knew very well that his preaching would mean death to him. He had had a choice: stick to the truth and endure the cost, or abandon the truth and live. The last choice was the easiest, but to chose the easy path would make him untruthful. Those are facts, and we all know it. Jesus asks of us nothing that he himself did not do. At times it is not the difficulties of our life or situation that cause us pain and suffering but the attitude we take toward them. I once read the story of newspaper writer who interviewed two bricklayers working on a construction site. He asked one man: What are you doing? He replied: I’m just an underpaid and overworked bricklayer wasting my time piling bricks on top of one another. He asked the other worker what he was doing. He replied: I’m the luckiest person in the world. I get to be part of great and important projects. I help turn single bricks into beautiful buildings. They both were right. We see in life what we want to see. If we want to find ugliness, we will find plenty of it. If we want to find fault with life we can find lots of reasons to do so. But the opposite is true. At times we can be thankful for what we have or do, but at times we can feel like Jeremiah at the bottom of a cistern sinking in mud. We believe that God will never leave us if we are faithful to God.But God does not always make things happen the way that we think he should. When God does not make things go our way, we have to trust that he has a better plan -- a plan we do not yet see. Our second reading reminds us that we must keep alive day after day the hope of joy that God has promised to those who are faithful to him. When we take our last breath that is what is really going to count.

Homily for the Week of August 11, 2013

Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, 2013 Wisdom 18:6-9 Psalm 33:1, 12, 18-19, 20-22 Hebrew 11:1-2, 8-19 or 11:1-2, 8-12 Luke 12:32-48 or 12:35-40 The first person to walk across Niagara Falls on a tightrope was a French acrobat by the name of Charles Blondin. He actually crossed several times. He never used a harness and yet he walked backwards, on stilts, and blindfolded. But while spectators watched from land perhaps the most courageous thing that happened on the wire was that Harry Colcold, his manager, rode across the falls on Blondin’s shoulders. Colcold had complete faith in Blondin. That is what call faith or trust. Our Bible readings this weekend all refer to faith or trust in God in one way or other. We have been told by the author of Hebrews that faith is the realization of what is hope for and the evidence of things not seen. Everyone of us live by faith. Most times we do not realize it. We have faith that our doctors and medical staff are competent. That is why we let them prescribe medicines and operate on us. Every time a person gets on a plane we put our faith in the pilot whom we have never met. Without faith life would be difficult. We would not be able to trust anyone. Life without faith is a life of emptiness. However, many persons do not accept faith as part of who they are. Many people are proud of their “rationality” and open-mindedness, convinced that faith is not reasonable and that faith is an illusion. Without faith, life is reduced to isolated events, without real meaning and without hope. Without faith we live our life on things that come and go. Likewise faith on a spiritual level has to do with confidence and trust in a person named Jesus. During his life Jesus talked about faith many, many times. Once he told his closest friends that they had little faith. Nearly ever time that Jesus healed someone, Jesus would say: Go your way; your faith has made you well. The word Faith has several meanings. As I already mentioned it can mean trust or have faith in someone. It can also mean the religion to which a person belongs such as the Catholic faith or Protestant faith or Jewish faith. In that sense it means the various things in which we believe or accept as we will do in short time when we pray together our PROFESSION OF FAITH known as the Apostles Creed. Today St. Luke presents Jesus instructing His disciples on being prepared for their future. Jesus always taught that what we do today prepares us for our future. And that future, Jesus tells us, is to live happily in what he called everlasting life. How do we know if we have faith? It is plain and simple: we have faith if we trust the word of someone else. When we accept what someone says on faith, we believe in what the other person is telling us even if we have not personally witnessed or seen it. Faith means to trust. Having faith means being able to live with unanswered questions -- sometimes tough questions. Faith gives us the courage to endure and survive without having the answers. To Catholics, faith isn't something we find. Rather it is a gift from God. Faith in God is very much like the faith and trust that grows between two persons who start trusting each other, gradually form a relationship with each other, trust each other, love each other and then make this lifetime relationship in marriage. God offers faith freely to anyone and everyone, BUT IT MUST BE FREELY RECEIVED AS WELL. No one can be forced to have or to accept faith. And each person responds differently to his or her gift of faith - at different times, at different levels and in different ways. Some people reject the gift of faith, some ignore it, Others cherish their faith deeply. Faith is taking a step into the unknown and trusting God to work things out. Faith demands a way of thinking that is completely opposite to the expectations of people of the computer age. Faith says that we cannot find the answers ourselves. The faith that we read about in the Bible today is not the type of faith which we have in doctors and lawyers and bankers. Rather, it is a radical all including faith. It is a gift from God by which we trust in a God we have not seen and do not see; a faith in Jesus Christ who we have not seen. This was the faith that inspired Abraham in our first reading today. It is the faith that in which we believe that Jesus says who he says he is, and that you and I are able to place our trust in his words and his way of life. It is a faith in which we believe that our life is not the end of all things but the beginning of another life which we call everlasting. Let the gift of this faith move us today. Let it also help us to place our trust in the things that are today only a hope. There is an urgent need, then, to see once again that faith is a light, for once the flame of faith dies out, all other lights begin to dim. Since last October many of you have reflected on your faith and may have opened the door of faith to others. In October is when Catholics throughout the world began the YEAR OF FAITH which will end on November 24th. If perhaps some of you may have completely missed the YEAR OF FAITH, you still have 19 weeks before the end of November to rediscover your faith and become a joyful witness in your world, family, workplace as a person who believes in Jesus Christ. Remind yourself that those who believe are never alone. Living by faith, then, involves living in the moment while being rooted in the past and looking to the future. As each day we try to live our lives for God, we say to God, I believe. Help my unbelief.

Homily for the Week of August 4, 2013

18th Sunday in Ordinary Time 2013 Ecclesiastes 1:2; 2:21-23 Psalm 90:3-4, 5-6, 12-13, 14, 17 Colossians 3:1-5, 9-11 Luke 12:13-21 I once saw a sign outside a church that said: “Don’t wait for the hearse to take you to church.” Our Bible readings for this weekend point out that it is moe important to grow rich spiritually than getting rich with material possessions. Nowhere in our Bible is having riches called sinful. Rather it is what one does with money that determines virtue or vice. No passage is concerned with whether possessing wealth is good or evil. In our first reading we have a person who had pleasure, lots of money, and power but he was not happy. He was told to enjoy each day as it comes and not become too attached to anything this world has to offer. But Jesus has more to offer. Jesus tells us the story about a rich man. Though called a fool, the rich man is called neither good nor evil. The rich man has a very good harvest so he wants to tear down his old barns and build bigger ones. But he is shown to be isolated, oblivious of both God and his fellow human beings. He is self-centered. He is please with his accumulated wealth that he now can eat,drink and be merry. He was wealthy in worldly goods. But Jesus calls him a fool. Jesus tells him This night your soul is required of you and the things you have prepared, whose will they be? The rich man’s self-centered plan for stockpiling and spending for his own enjoyment is interrupted by a startling apparition by God. “You fool!” comes the accusation, with the notice that this very night his life will be demanded. We must remember that our passages were written in what were, for the most part, non-monetary societies. Unlike today wealth was not thought of in terms of money. Wealth was thought of in terms of two things: how many things did you possess (so that you could barter), or how much social standing did you possess? So, what the Bible ask us is our attitude toward possessions. Another way to ask the question of the Scriptures today is, “What is the purpose of our possessions?” Jesus is critical of the rich fool’s attitudes toward his possessions. God gave him all that he had, not that he might own them, but that he might be generous with his possessions. His wealth was his possession of vast amounts of grain — grain that would rot and spoil before he could ever use it. He thought only in terms of what his possessions could do for him. This is what God thinks of as being “rich.” Jesus is really talking about one of the more serious sins which is called greed. Greed is an intense desire for something -- usually money. Greed makes things more important than persons and relationships. Greed turns hunger into gluttony, honor into pride Greed gives rise to cheating, stealing, lying, quarreling, fighting and even war. The greedy person never has enough. The farmer in the Bible story did not make his money by any of these things. It seems that he got wealthy by good weather and good old fashion hard work. Jesus is not saying it is sinful to get rich and successful. He is saying that getting wealthy is bad if that is the only focus of your life and we forget where our blessings come from. The farmer forgot that he was not in control but that God was in control.Hiss priorities were wrong. What we have has been given to us by God in the first place. It is true that we earned it. But we must also realize that is God who helped us to get the talent, the energy and the opportunities to earn it. We must provide for ourself, our families,and must save for the proverbial rainy day, but we must not be totally selfish either. We have to keep things in balance. And loving God and loving our neighbor is part of the balance. The greedy person also does not trust God.The argument for the greedy person is this: I doubt that God will take care ofme,so I try to gather as much as possible now in case no more is left later. Generosity is the best weapon against greed. Freely giving some of our possessions away, especially to those less fortunate, is considered the perfect remedy to greed. Generosity promotes detachment from material things that come and go. How do we know when we are truly wealthy? When we are free enough to be generous, when the happiness of others is more important than our wealth. Putting God first is not about devaluing money and things. We are to see them as tools in our lives, not the point of our lives. Greed keeps us from being generous, and to be a Christian is to be generous. When we are greedy, we are choosing ourselves over God, and that is not a good choice. Jesus says: For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.