Homily for Twenty-ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time - Year C

The readings for Twenty-ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time may be found at:  

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/101622.cfm

We live in a world of immediate gratification.

We want what we want and we want it now.

A few years ago, researchers studied how long people would wait on a web page for a video to start playing.  

The study was of 67 million people over a 10 day period.  

Researchers found that people started leaving a web page after having to wait for two seconds for a video to start.  Two seconds!  

By the 8 second mark, 90% of people had given up and moved on to another page.

Raise your hand if you are one of those 2 second people.  

I might be guilty of that one.  

The fact is that we are super impatient as a culture.  

We don’t like waiting for websites, food to come or traffic lights to turn green.

But what happens when this impatience spills over into our spiritual lives?  

When we go to God in prayer but don’t get what we asked for?  

It may not be a big deal if we are praying for something small - but what if it’s something big? 

What if we or someone we know are really struggling and we are asking God to answer our prayer to help? 

We’re tempted to give up if we feel like God doesn’t answer our prayers.

Jesus understood that when our prayers go unanswered we can become discouraged and give up hope. 

In today’s gospel passage by St. Luke, Jesus is telling us to always pray and to never lose heart.

He tells us that being consistent and persistent in prayer is one way we show the strength of our faith in God.

He tells us not to give up.   Especially when things get hard.

Maybe our prayers don’t get answered because we’re not reconciled to God or we need to pray more.

Maybe it’s not the right time - Abraham was told God would give him a child - and it took 25 years for that to happen!  

Maybe it’s not the right thing - Sometimes what we pray for is selfish, like winning the lottery, so God doesn’t answer that prayer.  

Maybe, God answers our prayers, but maybe not exactly the way we wanted. 

Maybe what we prayed for is just not part of God’s plan.  

The reality is that our faith is tested as we struggle to accept the answer God does give us.

Prayer is about trusting God. 

It is an act of faith and that’s why it’s important.

Today, Jesus tells us not to give up because God is not like the dishonest judge. 

God is not indifferent to our needs.

In fact, God is far more ready to hear our prayers than we are ready to pray them.

We must not give up.  

We must continue to pray because when we pray we express our faith in God’s inherent justness.  It also helps us to build spiritual endurance.

God is not like the dishonest judge...He is just and gracious and He dearly loves us.

We are supposed to be like the widow, to persist, to not give up.

Despite no answer, she didn’t lose hope and kept at it until the judge answered her. 

When we lose hope, our prayers stop.

When we feel the weight of daily life it can sometimes feel like God isn’t even listening.

But Jesus encourages us to persevere in prayer.  

If this dishonest judge ended up answering this helpless widow because she kept asking, how much more will God answer us as His children?

And even if we don’t always get the answer we want, keep at it and trust God because God has a plan.

This week, I ask you to consider.

The night before Jesus was killed, before he prayed “Not my will but your will be done”, 

He first prayed to God to “Let this cup pass from me.” 

Essentially, he prayed to be spared.

The next day Jesus was killed.  And in the process, He reconciled the human race to God, saved us from our sins, and gave us a shot at everlasting life.

Think about that for a bit.

The greatest victory ever achieved in the history of the world happened in a moment when our own Savior didn’t get the answer he wanted to His prayer.

And where would we all be if He had.

Homily for Twenty-fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time - Year C

The readings for Twenty-fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time may be found at:  

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/091822.cfm

So many things compete for our attention, don’t they?

So we do what humans do.  We adapt, multitask, doing multiple things at the same time.

And we think we’re pretty good at this, by the way.

But, neuroscientists have done extensive studies on multitasking.

And these studies show that multitasking is not something anyone does well. 

Overwhelmingly, they show people don’t really do multiple things at the same time at all.

Instead our brains just move quickly from one task to another to another to another.

We’ve seen this, right?  Just watch someone driving a car and paying attention to their cell phone at the same time.  Looking up, down, up, down, up, down, but never both at the same time.

Science confirms what we already know.  

If we are doing one thing, we are not doing the other.

So while we think we are good at doing multiple things at the same time, science says - not quite.

Jesus says as much in this week’s gospel from Saint Luke, when He says no servant can serve two masters.

Jesus is saying that true disciples can’t do the things of heaven and the things of this world both at the same time.

Instead we need to change our approach so that everything we do becomes a type of service to God and our neighbor.

When we work, we need to work like we are working for Christ.

And we need to remove things from our lives that get in between us and God.  

Whatever they are.

It’s been said that opposites attract, but Jesus says it quite clearly - 

Our mind can’t be devoted to heaven and earth at the same time.

Our heart can’t love both God and the world fully. 

It’s one or the other.

Let’s be clear - God wants all of us.  He made us in his likeness and image.

The world wants all of us too and it doesn’t want us to have even the slightest relationship with God.  

And it gives us a million reasons not to have one.

God calls us to love every person like ourselves, to love even our enemies and to do good to those who hurt us. 

The world teaches us it’s ok to hate and to get back at those who hurt us.  It encourages us to make everything about us.

God commands us to speak the truth. 

The world hates nothing more than the truth. Instead it wants to flatter us, gossip, criticize and defame us. 

God wants us to be humble.  To trust and hope in Him.  To live simply.  To dress modestly.  To be patient and give thanks.  To deny ourselves.  To fast and to pray. 

The world tells us to be self-confident and trust in ourselves.  To celebrate our appearance.  To do what we feel.  To complain.  To demand our rights.  To blame others for our problems.  To take all life has to offer. 

When we pray, if we pray - twice as many competing thoughts flood our brain as when we’re watching tv or at a sporting event or out to dinner.

At Holy Mass, our mind wanders to what we have to do later or how we can leave the Church quickly, so we can move on to the next thing on our list.

Do we make time for confession?  This is when the world really kicks it up a notch, stacking so many things in our way that for one reason or another, we don’t ever seem to make one.

And as a result, we can go days without prayer, weeks without mass and years without repentance and absolution.

Heaven and earth.

What person can serve them both?

Jesus tells us.  No one can serve two masters.

There is no middle ground. 

This week, I ask you to consider.

This life is a dress rehearsal for eternity.

What matters most is how we use our time and our things in this life.

While we still have time.

When death comes it will be too late. 

In our day to day choices…

Do we glorify God or do we glorify ourselves?

In our quiet moments, let us pray to God for the strength to live honorably.  To give generously. To seek good for others.  To remain faithful to Him and to obey His Word.  To go to confession when we know we’ve fallen short.

Let us be reminded that we are all servants.

And no servant can serve two masters.

Homily for Twenty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time - Year C

The readings for Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time may be found at:  

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/082122.cfm

We think about lots of questions in our lives, don’t we?  

What should I do with my life?

Will I have enough money to live?  

Will my family be ok?  

Have I saved enough for retirement?  The answer is probably no to that one, by the way. 

But, one of the most important questions any of us can think about is “Will I go to heaven?”  

It’s not a comfortable or easy question for any of us to ask, but we need to think about it.

Our eternal life is literally forever and this life we are in right now, the one we ask all these other questions about, by comparison, lasts for about a second.

In today’s Gospel from Saint Luke, we hear someone ask Jesus - “Will only a few people be saved?”

And Jesus gives us an interesting answer - 

“Strive to enter through the narrow door, for many will try to enter but will not be able.”  

That’s a bit scary if you think about it.

I think most of us believe we'll go to heaven because God is love and he wants us to be with Him.

Hell is something they taught us growing up to scare us into staying in line.

I’ll go to heaven because I believe in God.  I’m a good person.  I don’t go out of my way to hurt anyone. 

I’ll go to heaven because all the good I do far outweighs the bad.

I’ve never murdered anyone so….

I’ll go to heaven because my family is Catholic and I never miss Mass - well mostly I never miss it.

That door might be narrow, but I’m good - God loves me and is merciful - He’ll let me in.

But Jesus tells us we need to strive to enter through the narrow door because salvation is not guaranteed.  

Not everyone gets in. 

The Oxford dictionary defines “strive” as to make great efforts to achieve or obtain something, to struggle or to fight vigorously.

Great efforts.  Struggle.  Vigorous fighting.

Can we pass the red face test if someone asks if we are doing those things to get into heaven?

I can tell you that doesn’t describe me on most days.  

Now, Jesus is incredibly patient, leaving the door open for us, but one day He promises He will close it.

And it’s up to us and God’s grace whether we will be on the right side of that door when it closes.

In this life, it’s been said that it doesn’t matter what you know, it matters who you know.

The way to get in through that narrow door is all about who we know - it’s all about our relationship with Jesus.  

Whether we know him and whether he knows us.

Knowing Jesus means praying to Him, and not just when we want something.  

It means knowing and listening to His Word.

It means we must go to confession.  

This is part of that striving - that strenuous part.  

It’s not easy, but we have to do it.  

Open your heart to Christ.  Confess your sins.  Receive His grace and mercy.  Receive His love.  

Especially if we want to be properly disposed to receive Holy Communion we have to go to confession - otherwise we sin again, our sins compound and the more baggage we carry.  

If that door is so narrow, no way we get through it carrying baggage with us.

In a few minutes, when we celebrate the Lord’s Supper, remember we are doing more than memorializing something that Jesus did two thousand years ago.

Remember that He is still living and breathing and that we can be in relationship with Him today.  

Don’t just go through the motions.

Open your heart to Him, pray to Him, talk to Him.  Express your love for Him.

The Word of God is meant to inspire us.

The incredible grace of a good confession is meant to make us more humble and merciful.

The grace of the Eucharist is meant to nourish and sustain us.

Being baptized, being a good person, going to mass is not enough.

If we want to pass through that narrow door we need to have a relationship with Christ and strive to conform ourselves to Him every day of our lives.

That door is narrow, but it’s open.  

The real question we should be asking ourselves is “How badly do we want to get through it?”

Homily for Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time - Year C

The readings for Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time may be found at:  

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/072422.cfm

When we want to learn something, where do we go?  

Do we ask Siri, Google, Alexa or our friends?

Do we learn it on TikTok, like I keep hearing everywhere?

Do we read a book? I see some eyes rolling, you know who you are.

Imagine we want to learn how to pray.  Where would we go?

In this passage from Saint Luke, the disciples ask Jesus to teach them how to pray. 

Now these 12 disciples had already been with Jesus for about 2 years.  

And in that time, they had seen Jesus bring a dead person back to life, they saw Him calm a huge storm using only words and they even saw Him feed over 5,000 people with 5 regular loaves of bread and 2 fish. 

Try learning how to do that on TikTok.

And as far as we know, the disciples never came asking, “Lord, the way you calmed that storm was awesome, teach us how to do that.”  

We never heard them say, “Feeding 5,000 people could come in pretty handy in a pinch, can you show us how to do that?” 

No.  Of all the important things they had seen Jesus do, the disciples asked Him to teach them how to pray.  

Now Jesus prayed all the time.  Maybe they noticed that if Jesus needed to pray so regularly, how much more did they need to pray?

The good news is that prayer is a discipline that can be learned. 

So we pray because Jesus prayed. 

And Jesus gives us a model prayer and expects that we will pray.

We pray because we need to know God. 

Jesus wants to show us who God is and what God is like. 

Jesus also makes prayer intimate.  We call God, Father because Jesus did. 

We pray because Jesus wants us to be close to Him and oriented towards heaven.

Given how hot it is today, I’m sure few of us could tolerate Hell very well.

We pray to focus on God and what He calls us to. 

We pray because we trust God to provide what we need. 

We pray because we need to forgive and be forgiven.  

This also means we need to be honest about our sin and to repent regularly with a sacramental confession.

We pray because we need help dealing with temptations and testing.  

Every day we need God’s help to live the way He wants us to.

But we all pray, right?  

I mean, we say The Our Father, The Hail Mary, The Glory Be.  

We say them the same way we have since we were eight years old.

But imagine how our relationships in life would be if we treated them the same way we did when we were eight years old or all we said and did were the same rushed words over and over again for the rest of our lives.

We’d probably end up alone.

So we need to pray more, but also be more intentional in our prayer.

Does this mean that we are all praying rosaries every day and the Liturgy of The Hours and the Angelus?

Maybe.  But what are some simple ways we can pray more in our daily lives?

Try throwing in an “Amen” into conversation every once in a while.

Try saying “Thank you, Jesus” whenever something good happens.  

Pray before and after meals, especially in public - maybe it’ll show someone else that it’s ok to do it too.  

Maybe it’s making the Sign of the Cross whenever you pass by a Catholic Church because you know Jesus is present in the tabernacle.  

Meet a friend for a prayer date and pray with one another.  

Scroll through the contacts on your phone and pray for each name you come across, especially the ones you may feel the urge to scroll past.

When you’re bored, rather than looking for a distraction, find a quiet place, sit in silence and listen for the voice of God. 

Offer your day for a specific intention, for a loved one, friend, or stranger.  

There are lots of ways to pray.   

And each one of them brings us closer to God.

What makes prayer good is not using this method or that, but praying in a way that expresses our faith, humble hope and real desire for closeness with God.

This week, let us ask Jesus to be better followers of Him and to join Him in more intentionally making our lives, lives filled with prayer.

Homily for Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time - Year C

The readings for Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time may be found at:  

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/062622.cfm

It’s the first weekend of Summer.

School’s out, the weather is good and lots of people get out, travel and go somewhere for a while.  

In today’s gospel, Jesus and his disciples are traveling at the front end of Luke’s ten chapter long “journey narrative”.

This journey and where it ends, in Jerusalem at the cross is about what it means to be a disciple of Christ.

What it means to follow Jesus.

As I reflected on this gospel this week, it’s probably no coincidence that I was also listening to songs from the Christian music group, Casting Crowns.  

Many of their songs are about what it means to follow Jesus.

And they boil it down to two things.

“To know Him and to make Him known”

Simple, but not easy.

Simple because “To Know Him” means we have the answers to the test. 

We already know how the journey ends - with vindication and glory in eternal life.

But not easy - because “To make Him known” often means misunderstanding, suffering and death to our own selfish desires.  

Following Jesus is hopefully why we are here in church today. 

But in each of our lives there will come moments, when Jesus calls us to follow Him more deeply, when He calls us to make Him known. 

Jesus meets three such people as he is traveling today.

Will we respond like the first person who at first says “I will follow you wherever you go” dreaming of the future, until Jesus reminds him of the true costs of discipleship.

We want a strong and vibrant parish community, but don’t always want to make the time to get involved or make the first move.  

We want events and outreach, but don’t want to give time to volunteer.

Following Jesus means a concrete commitment and Jesus asks this first person and us “What sacrifice are we willing to make to follow Him?

He then comes upon a second person who has things to take care of before he’s ready to follow Jesus.  

“Let me bury my father first”.

In other words, I’ll follow you when it’s more convenient for me, I’ll do that tomorrow, when I have more money, more time, more whatever, when things settle down a bit.

But, let’s be honest - to follow Jesus sometime in the future is to not follow Him at all.  

The world will never be perfect.  Things will never be exactly right. 

Jesus responds to the second person by telling Him to follow Him right now.

The third person Jesus meets is the one he tells not to “set a hand on the plow and look to what is left behind”.

He is saying that when we look back and not towards Him we are not fully invested.  We are not “all in”.  

When we don’t follow the Lord more faithfully because of something that happened years ago we only hurt ourselves.

None of us had a perfect childhood, perfect schooling or perfect families. 

Whatever our past, the Lord calls us to follow Him now and as we are. 

Jesus’ answer to this third person is to focus on what is ahead, not what is behind. 

Now what does this have to do with us?

In the life of every disciple, there is a critical moment when the Lord speaks to us personally and individually. 

What we do when that call comes is everything.

If we don’t act upon it when it comes, the less likely we are to act on it at all. 

It’s like receiving a gift and not writing a thank you note right away - it probably never gets written. 

The same thing happens with moments of special grace. 

This week, let us reflect on these moments.

When they come, do we recognize them?

Do we dismiss them because we are dreaming of a future that may never happen? 

Do we shrug them off because the timing is not quite right?

Do we use our troubled past as an excuse not to answer?

We are called to be disciples.

Let us ask Jesus to give each of us what He knows we need to better “Know Him and to make Him known”.