Ordinary Time 27 - Increase Our Faith

 

Homily for Ordinary Time 27

October 5, 2025

Increase Our Faith

 

            People will say to me all the time, “I love my faith.” What do they mean by that? Do they mean that they love hearing “Ave Maria” at funerals and getting ashes on Ash Wednesday and lighting a candle at church? Signs and symbols, sentiment and rituals, are not the same as faith.

            Rather, according to the Catechism, there are three elements of faith. First, faith means believing that God exists. This is something that we take for granted, but how do we know? St. Thomas Aquinas gave us five proofs for God’s existence, but I’d like to share two of them with you.

            First, consider anything material that exists – this church building, your clothes, the donut you ate for breakfast. Everything was caused by something else – this roof came from trees, which came from seeds, which came from other trees, all the way back. Nothing material simply exists without being caused by something outside of itself. But the entire universe is a material thing – hence, it needs to have a cause outside of itself. We call God, then, the Uncaused Cause. But wait – who caused God to exist? The answer is that causality requires time – there was a time when this roof didn’t exist, and even when those timbers and logs didn’t exist, but they do exist now, and someday they may stop existing. But outside of time, there is no before or after, no beginning or end, so speaking about “causing” outside of time doesn’t make sense. God dwells in the eternal “now” – so there was not a time when He did not exist, because time itself does not exist in eternity. Thus, God is the Uncaused Cause.

            A second clear argument is very simple: anything that has a design needs a designer. If I see a painting, I can assume there is an artist, even if I don’t see the artist herself. The universe clearly has a very specific design – for example, our DNA acts as a computer code, containing upon the amino acids information that tells our cells what to do. But information that is intelligible (aka, able to be understood) requires an intelligence to both inscribe it there and for another intelligence to decode it. It is our human intelligences that decoded much of our DNA to understand the genetic code, which means that there must be an Intelligence at least as smart as ours to have written it there in the first place.

            A very brilliant man named Avery Dulles was converted through this argument. He was an atheist in law school in Harvard when one day he went for a walk along the Charles River, just as the trees were in their spring bloom. It struck him that all the trees knew when to bloom, and they did it in unison and at the same time every year. How would they know when to do it? It was as if some vast intelligence had programmed these insentient trees to have a genetic knowledge…who could this vast intelligence be except God? He began to believe, converted to Catholicism, and became a Jesuit priest and a Cardinal.

            The second element of faith, according to the Catechism, is that after we believe that God exists, we believe in His promises. Many people lose their Faith in God because they don’t understand what He promised…and what He didn’t. Did He promise that life would be easy? Did He promise that if we prayed, all our problems would go away? Nothing of the sort. However, He did promise that all things work for good for those who love Him. He promised that He would be with us always, until the end of the age. He promised that those who believe in Him will have eternal life.

            As Pastor Rick Warren likes to say, “God cares more about your character than your comfort.” He wants you to be holy and filled with Heavenly joys, not necessarily happy with earthly pleasures. Bl. Alexandra da Costa was a Portuguese young woman who tragically fell out of a second-story window and became paralyzed. She prayed and prayed that God would heal her, even promising that she would become a missionary if God would let her walk again. But to her prayers, God was seemingly silent. However, gradually, she began to realize that her mission was to offer her sufferings to God as a living sacrifice – and she began to find joy in the Cross. God began to grant her miracles – she consumed nothing but the Holy Eucharist for the final 13 years of her life, and God gave her the gift of healing others, even though she herself was never healed. But now she’s a saint in Heaven, where I am confident she can walk again! So God had a different plan for her life than she wanted, but He was faithful to what He promised – all things work for good! He would never abandon! Everlasting life comes to those with faith!

            Finally, the third aspect of faith is to believe everything that God has revealed. We can never be “Cafeteria Catholics” who pick-and-choose what to believe based upon our own preferences. Our Catholic Faith is much like Jenga – all of the parts fit together into a coherent whole, and removing one part would weaken the rest, and pretty soon the whole tower will fall down. Likewise, if a person disagrees with one part of our Catholic Faith, their entire faith is weakened, and it may soon crumble, because all pieces fit together into what theologians call the “economy of salvation” – the comprehensive plan of what God has revealed.

            For example, we believe that the Eucharist is the Body and Blood of the Lord, given to us as spiritual food – which leads us into the belief in the soul – but what kind of soul do we have? One in the image and likeness of God – but what is God like? He is a Trinity, which is a life-giving community of love – and He created marriage and the family to be the perfect image of the Trinity – which is why the moral teachings of faithfulness to our spouse and openness to life are related to the Trinity – but the moral teachings of the Church are directed to our belief about everlasting life…and so forth. The “economy of salvation” is the giant web of our Catholic Faith and how all doctrines and teachings of God’s revelation are interconnected, and we can’t doubt one item without weakening or even destroying our faith as a whole.

            So, how do we increase our faith? Faith is a living thing, and like all living things, it needs to be fed. If it’s fed, it grows; if it withers, it dies. That’s why Jesus concludes with this parable about these servants who only do what’s required of them – when we just do what we have to do, the bare minimum obligation of going to Mass weekly and Confessing annually – if that’s it, then we are “unprofitable servants,” in Jesus’ terms. Our faith will never grow. It’s like if we only ate oatmeal at every meal – it might keep us alive but it wouldn’t lead to our flourishing. Yes, weekly Mass is the bare-minimum to keep your faith from dying, but if we desire, like the Apostles, “Lord, increase our faith!”, then we need to feed it more, and feed it a variety of spiritual food – daily reading the Bible, going on retreats, frequent Confession, spiritual reading, fellowship with other fervent Catholics. Do we really want our faith to be increased? If so, feed it!

            My friends, it is faith that saves us – the first person in Heaven, according to the Bible, was the good thief crucified with Christ, who had no good works but only a last-ditch Hail-Mary-pass act of faith – and it was enough to be promised paradise. As Pope Leo the Great said: “If we are steadfast in our faith in Christ and in our love for Him, we will win the victory He has won, and receive what He has promised.”

Ordinary Time 26 - Outrageous

 

Homily for Ordinary Time 26

September 28, 2025

Outrageous

 

            So much that passes for news is actually just outrage, usually over the smallest stuff – what this politician said on Twitter, what scandal that celebrity has fallen into. Our principal at Cardinal Kung jokingly calls it “pearl-clutching” – “Gasp, I can’t believe that person did that!”

            But anger and outrage can actually be quite virtuous and positive, if we’re angry about the right things. In Catholic theology, our emotions are actually called “passions” and St. Thomas Aquinas lists eleven basic passions, such as desire, fear, and anger. But he says that passions are morally neutral in themselves – whether or not they are justified depends upon the object of our passion. If we are afraid of our shadow, we’d say that fear is not good. But if we’re afraid of the bear in our backyard, that fear is quite justified!

            So, likewise, anger and outrage should occur when we see a real injustice in front of us (not an imagined injustice like getting cut off in traffic). In the first reading, God is complaining that the Israelite leaders are complacent and apathetic when a real threat was attacking their people: due to Israel’s sinfulness, God was allowing the nation of Assyria to march upon Israel and take them into captivity, which did occur about twenty years after the prophet Amos penned those words. But the leaders were unconcerned about this brewing threat to their people, because they were living comfortable lives with plenty of food, and couldn’t be bothered with the sufferings of the “little people”. Likewise in the Gospels, this rich man should have been outraged at the sufferings of this poor man Lazarus, but was complacent and ignored this problem.

            As long as we live in this fallen world, evil and injustice will be with us – and we should never grow complacent with it! We should be angry that over a million unborn children are killed each year in abortion. We should be angry that there is an epidemic of drug addiction in our culture. We should be angry that man-made famines and wars are causing untold suffering in many places in our world.

            But that justified outrage must then lead us to action. As Edmund Burke famously said, “The only thing necessary for evil to triumph in the world is that good men do nothing.” This is where our media-outrage-machine stops short – they proffer outrage but then don’t move on to action. God does not merely want us to wring our hands and say, “Oh, what a shame,” and then move on to Candy Crush. But what can we do?

            First, we can pray. Prayer has the power to move mountains. Back in the 400s, the barbarian Attila the Hun was rampaging his way across the crumbling Roman Empire. The last man standing in his way was a little old weak Pope, Leo the Great. Knowing that he was the last chance to save the city of Rome, Leo went out by himself to meet the mighty conqueror – his only weapon was prayer, as he and the entire city were praying to be saved. Leo met Attila on the road just outside the city, and no one knows what conversation passed in between the two – but in the end, Attila turned away and left the city untouched. Leo was victorious, not with weapons and armies, but with prayer.

            Some politicians will have us believe that prayer is ineffective in the face of tragedy. But prayer is incredibly effective – it can change hearts, move mountains, heal the sick, and bring Christ into a time of pain. But it is true that prayer isn’t meant to be a substitute for action. There is a beautiful quote attributed to Mother Teresa: “I used to pray that God would feed the hungry, or do this or that, but now I pray that he will guide me to do whatever I'm supposed to do, what I can do. I used to pray for answers, but now I'm praying for strength. I used to believe that prayer changes things, but now I know that prayer changes us and we change things.”

            So prayer then must move us to do what we can. Not all of us are called to end world hunger in Malawi or solve the injustices of the world, but all of us can and should do our part. We may be grieved about abortion – but how many of us have ever gone to pray in front of Planned Parenthood in Bridgeport, which our parish is doing next Sunday? We may tsk-tsk when we pass by a drug addict beneath a bridge, but would we ever take five minutes to meet him and hear his story? We may wring our hands about how young people aren’t going to church, but have we volunteered to teach religious education?

            A dear friend of mine, a priest in Baltimore, got one of the worst assignments as pastor of the Basilica of the Assumption in one of the worst neighborhoods in town. Homeless people would sleep in the back pews of his church, and gunshots would ring out at all hours of the night. He knew that his city needed Jesus Christ – but how to bring Him to them? Around the same time he was assigned there, he met a young man named Colin who felt God calling him to serve the poor, but he didn’t know how. Together, with the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, Fr. James and Colin were led to start a twofold ministry called “Source of All Hope”. They found passionate young Catholics who would give up a year of their life to do two things: adore our Eucharistic Lord in the Basilica (Adoration is now 24/7 in one of the roughest ‘hoods in the city) and then take Jesus to the streets by loving and serving the homeless. Now, dozens of young adults give up a summer or a year of their lives to serve as missionaries, dedicated to loving Jesus in the Eucharist and loving Jesus in the poor. Has it ended poverty and homelessness? No. But has it changed lives, one at a time? Absolutely. Fr. James could have wrung his hands and said, “Oh, what a shame this city has come to.” Instead, he was motivated by love to do something about it.

            The world and the media get outraged about a lot. Most of it is silly, but some of it actually matters. As a Christian, we ought to be outraged by the real injustices and offenses against human dignity that are so prevalent in our world. But what if our outrage leads us to actually do something about it? That would be outrageous!

Triumph of the Cross

 

Feast of the Triumph of the Cross

September 14, 2025

The Meaning of the Cross

 

            Today’s Feast celebrates the day that the Cross of Christ was found. After Jesus’ death, the Romans threw His cross into a giant pit with hundreds of other crosses, and then filled in the pit with dirt. When Christianity became legal under Emperor Constantine in 313 AD, Constantine’s mother, St. Helen, traveled to Jerusalem to search for relics of Christ’s Passion. Her excavations uncovered the pit, but no one knew which was the Cross of Christ until they found a man with leprosy and had him touch each beam of wood. When he touched one specific cross, he was miraculously cured, showing this was the Cross of Christ. Today’s feast celebrates that great finding.

            But more than a dusty relic from the past, the Cross of Jesus Christ is the very cornerstone of our Faith. Without the Cross, there is no Savior, no mercy, no Eucharist. Without the Cross, Heaven remains closed, our lives remain meaningless, we die in our sin. The Cross is the meeting-place between God and humanity; between His love and our misery; a stark visual of the horror of sin and the unfathomable depths of mercy.

            Today I want to mention four effects of the Cross, and why it is truly the central piece of Christianity.

            First, the Cross paid back the debt that we owed God, but could not pay. The story goes that a dying man saw the devil holding a list of all his sins. What a list it was – listing each sin in lurid, graphic detail! The devil said, “Ah, what good deeds can undo all of this? Where are your virtues? You are mine forever!” But the man, a believer in Christ, replied, “Ah, you have shown me only one side of the page – the side with the debts. But turn the page over and you will see the credits – the Cross of Christ, which more than paid for all my sins.” At the mention of the Cross, the Evil One vanished.

            Something similar actually happened to a saint. St. Genesius, a Roman actor who had a conversion on his deathbed, had a vision of an angel holding a book of his sins. What a tremendous book it was! But as he was baptized, he saw the angel erasing the sins, as the water of baptism, given cleansing power through the Cross, was able to erase all the evil he had done!

            Firefighters out West will often prevent forest fires by actually burning part of the ground in a controlled way. They say that “fire cannot come where fire has already been.” A perfect analogy of the Cross – God’s judgment cannot come where His judgment has already been. And since God has seen it fit to enact His punishment upon His Son, then those who live in the shadow of the Cross have confidence that His punishment will not fall upon us, but only mercy!

            Second, the Cross showed us the depths of God’s love for us. One time several drunk college students were stumbling across their campus when they came across the chapel. One student, seeing the cross on the top, cried out, “Look, O mathematicians, at God’s plus sign!” This comment lodged in the mind of one of the other students, who was troubled by it for days. God’s plus sign – God plus us – the unity between two variables – God and us together. He was converted when he realized that the Cross is indeed the plus sign of God – it is the meeting place of the vertical (reaching out to God) and the horizontal (our humanity). There, the two lines converge, and there, God and humanity converge.

            In every ancient world religion, priests spent centuries spilling animal blood in the hope of appeasing Almighty God. But at the Cross, God spills His own Blood, in the hopes of winning our hearts and purchasing our salvation. Can there be any greater love? If you wonder if God loves you, if your life has any value, if you are precious in His sight, look at the Cross and behold a God who would rather die than spend eternity without you.

            Third, the Cross teaches us how to love. The world says that love is shaped like a heart; Jesus shows us that love is shaped like the Cross. He says we must love one another as He has loved us. So when we’re struggling to love our difficult spouse, the Cross is our answer. When our child is getting on our last nerve, we take strength in the Cross. When we are at our wits end taking care of our elderly parents, we see that Christ loved to the end and beyond. Not only is the Cross our example, the Cross is our strength – Crucified Lord, make my heart like unto Thine!

            Finally, the Cross redeems suffering and death. We can run from it, take medicine to avoid it, or try to mask it with pleasures, but all of us will encounter suffering and death. The Cross, however, has the power to redeem it and sanctify it. When we unite our sufferings to those of the Cross, we become privileged to participate in Christ’s saving action, and our sufferings become acts of love. Many great saints were made by embracing suffering!

            For a recent example, consider Bl. Benedetta Porro. She was an Italian saint born in the 1930s, who seemed destined for suffering. She contracted polio at only three months old, had recurring bronchitis, and was crippled. As a teen, she began to lose her hearing, and was soon diagnosed with a rare disease where she would lose all five senses and become paralyzed. You’d think that someone like this would give up, retreat to her room and watch TV all day, and maybe grow bitter and angry at fate, but not Benedetta. She was a voracious reader, enrolled in medical school (although unable to finish due to her illness), kept up many correspondences with people, and took several pilgrimages to holy sites. Even as her illness got so progressively bad that she was unable to move and could only move one hand, she kept her spirit of joy and peace.

            Toward the end of her life she said, “I do not lack hope. I know that at the end of the road, Jesus is waiting for me … I have discovered that God exists, that He is love, faithfulness, joy, certitude, to the end of the ages. My days are not easy. They are hard. But sweet because Jesus is with me.” This incredible hope is only possible because of the Cross – her sufferings could be offered to Jesus as a sweet gift of love, since she was following a Savior who suffered first out of love for her.

            My friends, the Cross is everything. I hope that the Cross hangs in your homes and your bedrooms; that you perhaps wear a Cross around your neck; and that you look upon it often. For there, upon the Cross, hangs our Love, our Hope, and our Salvation.

Ordinary Time 23 - Modern-Day Slavery

 

Ordinary Time 23

September 7, 2025

Modern-Day Slavery

 

            Today’s second reading is from one of the shortest books in the Bible: Paul’s letter to Philemon. Philemon was a Christian man who had a slave named Onesimus. Onesimus ran away and encountered Paul, and through him became a baptized Christian. Paul is then sending Onesimus back to Philemon, but this time asking that Onesimus be treated like a brother, not a slave.

            The Church has always been against slavery. Yes, it’s true that at times churchmen held slaves (such as the Jesuit priests in southern Maryland, who held 300 slaves on their tobacco plantation), but that was against the direct prohibition of the Vatican. In fact, all the way back in 1537, Pope Paul III declared that it was immoral to enslave another human being. There are even two religious orders whose entire mission was to rescue slaves: the Trinitarians and Mercedarians. They would beg to raise money to purchase slaves and then set them free, and there were even occasions where these brothers and priests would actually exchange places with the slaves!

            Sadly, slavery still exists in today’s world – and quite often, we enable it without even knowing it. First, physical slavery still exists. All of us purchase goods made in sweatshops and through slavery. The US Department of Labor puts out a document annually detailing which countries and products are made as a result of slavery – it’s worth a read, and sobering in its content. We know about companies such as Forever 21 and Adidas which use garments made in sweatshops, but a lot of the food we eat too: some coffees from Brazil, rice from India, or sugar from the Dominican Republic. It’s hard in today’s world to avoid these things, as everything is so global, but as far as we are able we should be aware, make our voices heard in objection to these things, and put our dollars where our beliefs are.

            More concerning is the reality of human trafficking, which is still immensely prevalent. The UN detects, on average, about 51,000 victims of human trafficking worldwide each year, the majority of which are used for sins of lust. It’s a tragedy that we must pray to end.

            But there is one major way that we might actually participate in human trafficking. If someone regularly views lustful content on the internet, there is a very good chance that they might be seeing someone who is a victim of trafficking. My friends, the sin of lustful content must stop among Christians. Every human being has dignity and deserves to be treated with love, not used for pleasure. John Paul II had a brilliant insight when he said that the problem with lustful content is not that it shows too much, but that it shows too little, since it shows only the body but not the person. It reduces a person to nothing more than a body, thereby making them an object.

            But of course lustful content also leads to another kind of slavery: spiritual slavery, which is far more common than physical slavery in today’s world. Oh how many of us struggle with real addictions! Whether it be to lust, or to our phones, or to drugs or alcohol, or to online gaming, or anything else that hampers our freedom in Christ! This is why in today’s Gospel, Jesus commands us to give up anything that hinders us from following Him in freedom: whether it be possessions that consume our time and energy, family members or friends who lead us into sin, any hobby that prevents us from giving time to Christ, anything. We can only truly follow Him in complete freedom – using the things of this earth rightly and in their proper context.

            So how can we find this complete freedom in Christ? Again, the tools are simple: Confession (which is available after Mass today), the Eucharist, the Rosary, the Scriptures. But the first step is that we have to want it – not just, “Oh, yes, I’d like to be free of my addiction if it’s not too hard.” No, rather we should say, “I will do whatever it takes to have freedom in Christ.” Jesus Christ is stronger than any spiritual slavery. His Cross is the key that unlocks our chains. We might want to even meet with a priest to pray some prayers called Deliverance Prayers, which are powerful prayers that any priest can pray, which ask God to deliver you from any chains of Satan that may hold you bound. A layperson can pray certain deliverance prayers yourself – just Google “Catholic Deliverance Prayers” or “The St. Michael Center for Spiritual Renewal” to find some excellent ones that you can pray on your own.

            But if you find yourself in spiritual slavery, do not despair – God can even make you a saint. There was a wonderful story of St. Mark Tianxiang – I’ve told it before, but it was several years ago, so please forgive it if you’ve heard it before. He was a devout Catholic doctor in China before the Communist revolution. He had a reputation as a compassionate man, always ready to offer his services for free to the poor. But he began to have a stomach ailment, so he prescribed himself opium…and quickly became an addict.

            He would go to Confession weekly, but kept falling back into the addiction again and again. Eventually his parish priest refused him Absolution because he thought that Mark wasn’t truly sorry. Rather than leave the Church in a huff, he attended Mass for thirty years without receiving Communion, praying all the while that God would make him a saint.

            When the anti-Catholic Boxer Rebellion occurred in China, Mark was arrested with his whole family for their Catholic Faith. While in prison, he had no chance to obtain the drugs – so he began to experience a great freedom! He was finally martyred for his faith, giving the ultimate witness. It’s comforting to know that someone who struggled for thirty years as a drug addict can become a saint!

            My friends, St. Paul tells us that “it is for freedom that Christ set us free.” Our Lord created men and women to be free – so let us do our part to help end the physical slavery in today’s world, and also overcome spiritual slaveries through the power of God’s grace.

Ordinary Time 22 - Lessons of a Humble God

 

Ordinary Time 22

August 30, 2025

Humility and Love

 

            Have you ever heard the phrase, “Do as I say, not as I do”? Maybe we’ve said that ourselves. And we might be tempted to think that Jesus was thinking in that vein when He tells us to choose the lowest place. Easy for You to say, Jesus – You’re the King of the Universe, and You tell us to humble ourselves?

            But, as in all things, Jesus speaks with integrity. He instructs us to humble ourselves because He humbled Himself first – and infinitely moreso! We speak of Jesus’ kenosis – a Greek word meaning “self-emptying”. He laid aside His glory to be born in a dirty cave, in a feeding trough for animals. Even though He gave the Jewish Law to Moses, He still submitted to it and followed it perfectly. Although John’s baptism was for sinners, the Perfect One consented to be baptized. He even took on the appearance of a slave when He washed the feet of His Disciples. But His kenosis, His self-emptying, was not complete until He died the death of a criminal.

            If we see the doctor drinking the bitter medicine, we are unafraid to drink it ourselves. If we see Christ humbling Himself first, then we gain courage to do the same. Humility makes us able to accept a humble God. After all, as St. Padre Pio said, “Humility and purity are the wings that carry us to God and make us almost divine.”

            But the second half of the Gospel is also something that Jesus has already done, when He instructs us to hold banquets where we invite those who are blind, lame, and cannot repay. Because He has set a banquet feast for us – Heaven, which in Scripture is called the Banquet Feast of the Lamb, which is open to us who are blind, lame, and cannot repay. CS Lewis in his famous book “Mere Christianity”, says the following: “Everything you have, your power of thinking or of moving, is given you by God. If you devoted every moment of your whole life exclusively to His service you could not give Him anything that was not in a sense His own already. So that when we talk of a man doing anything for God or giving anything to God, it is like a small child going to his father and saying, ‘Daddy, give me five dollars to buy you a birthday present.’ Of course, the father does, and he is pleased with the child’s present. It is all very nice and proper, but only a fool would think that the father is five dollars richer on the transaction. When a man has made this discovery God can really get to work. It is after this that real life begins.”

            We literally can’t give God anything that isn’t His already. Our very lives are gifts from Him to begin with. So we are those lame beggars who can’t repay – and that’s the beginning of our humility. We needn’t despair of our inability to repay, though – as St. Bernard says, “Where everything is given, nothing is lacking.” All God asks of us is to give back to Him everything He’s already given us – and in exchange, He gives us His very self!

            Humility, then, is necessary to welcome the Humble One. See how humbly He comes in the Second Reading. We see this stark contrast between two mountains: Mount Sinai, where Moses received the 10 Commandments and where God officially adopted the Jews as His Chosen People. This was a terrifying encounter with God: thunder, darkness, storm, blazing fire, earthquake. It was so terrifying that the people of Israel asked God never to speak directly to them again. And in the Old Testament, it was necessary to instill fear in the people, so that they would be afraid to offend Him and break the Covenant. But this is contrasted with another mountain: Mount Zion, which literally is the mountain on which Jerusalem was built, but is a symbol of Heaven. And encountering God here is a much more consoling image: surrounded by angels and the saints, drawing close to Jesus our Friend, as one already redeemed by His Blood. He does not wish to instill fear, but love.

            What a contrast to how the world views power! Machiavelli once wrote, “It is better to be feared than loved” – and how many dictators and tyrants throughout history lived that out! But by contrast, St. John Bosco said, “Get them to love you and they’ll follow you anywhere” – and this is the method preferred by God. He could certainly force us to obey Him, but He would prefer to entice us to love Him instead, by becoming small and humble and vulnerable.

            Consider how many times Jesus in the Eucharist is received unworthily by those who don’t care, who are in mortal sin, or who purposely want to mock Him – yet He remains here and suffers such abuse because He wants to draw us to Himself through love. We have a particularly devout young soul named Andre at the school where I teach, who has such a burning love for the Eucharist that he gets up early to serve our optional before-school Mass – at only eleven years old. One day I was celebrating a funeral here at St. Jude’s, and was so disheartened by the way everyone was receiving Communion – coming up as if they were receiving a snack, greeting other people in line, talking all the way up to Communion. My heart was breaking and I prayed as I distributed, “Lord, why do you stay with us in the Eucharist? You are treated so poorly.” I felt the Lord say clearly to my soul, “I stay because I love to be received by souls like Andre.” Would He say the same about you?

            The Lord became humble in the Eucharist so that He could lift up the humble. A Father can only lift up a small child – he doesn’t usually lift up a grown adult! So, to be united to the Divinely Humble One, we too must become little – not worrying about our own ego or what others think of us, not trying to get attention, allowing others to shine as long as we do our best, not thinking ourselves better than others. Chesterton once said, “Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly” – we too can soar up to the highest Heaven if we are not weighed down by our ego.

            Pride says, “I want to be loved, so I’m going to get it myself – by being praised, by winning every contest, by being the top dog, by being the center of attention.” Humility says, “I want love, so I’m going to turn to God and allow Him to quench my insatiable thirst for love.” One grasps desperately, one receives gratefully.

            St. Augustine said, “It was pride that made angels into devils, and it is humility that makes men like the angels.” Humility – we are who we are before God, and nothing more – just beggars, really, receiving all things from Him – this Humility is the only way to draw near to a God Who humbled Himself first.

Homily for Ordinary Time 21 - Discipline to Discipleship

 

Homily for Ordinary Time 21

August 24, 2025

Discipline to Discipleship

 

            The word “discipline” gets a bad rap. Sometimes we associate it with punishment, or we imagine rigorous asceticism like a thousand push-ups or sleeping on the floor. But discipline comes from discipulus, meaning “follower, pupil, student” – from which we also get disciple. And the two ideas are closely connected: if we wish to be a disciple (a follower) of Jesus Christ, then we must engage in the disciplines that make us one. The Christian life here is training for Heaven!

            Before Original Sin, all of us were naturally inclined to Heaven. Our first parents enjoyed prayer. They loved to make sacrifices. It was easy for them to resist temptation. But one of the most far-reaching results of original sin is called concupiscence – the weakness of will by which our desires are disordered. So now we love watching TV more than prayer, even though intellectually we understand that prayer is better for us. Now we love donuts more than broccoli, we love getting our own way more than sacrificing for others, we love ourselves more than God.

            So, with God’s grace, we must use discipline to bring our unruly desires back into their proper order. Since it is no longer natural for us to love God, we must learn to do so: by prayer. We no longer automatically choose God over physical pleasure – we have to practice fasting and sacrifice. We are often drawn to fame and fortune over God, so we must retrain ourselves by almsgiving and generosity to the poor.

            All of this training is difficult – as it would be to learn any skill that did not come naturally, such as piano playing or lacrosse. This is why the second reading speaks of God disciplining us through suffering. Sometimes we think that we suffer because God rejects us, but Scripture makes it clear that we suffer because God loves us and desires, not our comfort, but our holiness. He is training us! Consider those great training scenes in those movies we love so much: how Mr. Miyagi treats the Karate Kid, or how Yoda treats Luke Skywalker. They are often tough with them, challenging them, looking none too loving. But it is loving to help them to become the best they could be. We, too, must be trained in the art of loving God – it does not come naturally to us.

            And what is the fruit of discipline? Our second reading makes clear: peace and holiness. It was said of St. John of the Desert, an early church hermit, that when he would go out to spend time with others, he would return home with his mind so full of chaotic thoughts that he would spend an hour of prayer to calm his mind and put his thoughts in their proper order. Don’t you ever feel that way – like our mind or spirit is just disquieted? If so, then the disciplines of prayer, fasting, almsgiving, and accepting the suffering God sends can restore peace and holiness to our souls.

            But not everyone wants to overcome concupiscence through discipline, which is why Our Lord says that it is a narrow gate, and that few are saved. Many like the idea of Heaven but not actually what Heaven is. It’s not clouds and harps and an endless party – it’s union with the One Who created us and loves us and gives us life. Such a mind-blowing gift – to be united to God – requires that we be prepared for it.

            A job that I very much admire, but couldn’t do, is being one of the linemen to fix power lines. Five hundred thousand volts coursing through those lines – I am very glad those men are well-trained on how to handle it! Something that powerful can do great damage if they do not practice the proper disciplines. They have to train for years. Likewise, being in the presence of the Living God would completely overwhelm us unless we have “trained” here on earth for years – prayer, fasting and sacrifice, almsgiving and generosity, giving our lives to the Lord. Increase your capacity for Him here and you will be prepared to receive Him in His fullness in Heaven.

            Our Lord’s injunction about the number of people saved is meant to help us avoid two dangerous extremes: presumption and despair. Despair is the belief that our sins are too big for God’s mercy, that we could never be saved. This, of course, is an error – no sin is bigger than the mercy of God. But the opposite is far more common these days: presumption, the belief that we’re going to Heaven no matter what. I hear that all the time at funerals: “Oh, we know Aunt Sally is in Heaven.” Actually, we don’t know that, and it is spiritually dangerous to think that way, for two reasons. First, if we assume our loved ones are in Heaven, then we don’t pray for them – and if they are in Purgatory (which is where most people probably go when they die), they need our prayers! Second, we will tend to overlook their sins. We no longer allow eulogies in the Church (I could tell horror stories) but one family really wanted to do one at the graveyard. So I allowed it, and he told a story about how his grandfather used to take him out to restaurants and tell the waitress that he was only twelve to get the child discount when he was really fourteen. And the man telling the story was saying, “Oh wasn’t Grandpa just so much fun!” Uh, that’s a lie and a sin – we should not admire that side of grandpa – and we should not assume that God will overlook those small sins!

            So what’s the middle ground between presumption and despair? Hope. Hope is the firm confidence that God alone can make us holy and save our souls. Not our own efforts, not just “being a good person”, but by His grace and mercy alone. But we receive that grace through those disciplines: prayer, sacrifice, generosity.

            One of my favorite saints – who lived a wild life – demonstrated this so well. His name was St. Moses the Black, and he was a gang leader from Ethiopia in the 400s. He led a gang of 75 men across the countryside, murdering, pillaging, burning down villages. After a while, the authorities were after him, so he decided to hide out at a local monastery of Catholic monks. He went up and banged on the door, preparing to break it down, when the abbot opened the door and did something surprising…he welcomed him in. Moses was shocked, and saw in the abbot’s face a joy and peace and love that he had never before experienced. He went in to speak with the abbot and came out two hours later, and dismissed his men, saying that he had decided to become a monk.

            But old habits die hard. He struggled mightily with lust and a terrible temper. It got so bad that he made up his mind to leave. But the wise abbot one morning took Moses to the roof of the monastery just as the sun was cresting the horizon and said, “See how the sky does not light up all at once, but only gradually. Thus it is with your soul – through persevering in discipline, the light of Christ will begin to dawn.” It took many more years of persevering in prayer, self-sacrifice, and charity, but he eventually experienced the freedom and peace of a well-ordered life. He became a priest and founded his own monastery with 75 men, figuring that since he led 75 men into sin, he must now lead 75 men into Heaven.

            Discipline is not something to be feared – it is a training in the ways of the Lord. Those whose souls have been prepared by the disciplines of daily prayer and frequent reception of the Sacraments, who are freed from slavery to physical pleasures through fasting and sacrifice, and who are not attached to material goods through generosity to the poor will be able to contain the fullness of God in Heaven.

            Let us be like those great, disciplined souls!

Homily for Ordinary Time 20 - Fire, Baptism, Contradiction

 

Ordinary Time 20

August 18, 2025

Fire, Baptism, Division

 

            Jesus shares with us three important elements of the Christian life, through three symbols: fire, baptism, and division. Let’s look at what He means.

            Fire has a way of making everything else into fire. If a fire touches a log, then the log becomes fire, even though it doesn’t stop being a log. Likewise, the goal of the Christian life is to be like Jesus. When we draw close to Him, we become like Him, even though we don’t stop being ourselves. I’ve often quoted the words of St. Gregory of Nyssa: “A Christian is another Christ.” This is the goal of the Christian life: as St. Athanasius put it, “God became man so that man may become God.”

            We do this through grace. Just like a piece of wood can’t light itself on fire, so we can’t become holy without God doing it in us. Grace is God’s fire lighting our soul on fire; we desire to burn for Him. Grace is given through the Sacraments, especially Confession and a worthy reception of Communion, and through our daily prayer. The closer we get to a fire, the more likely we will be set ablaze – the more time we spend with God through the Sacraments and daily prayer, the more likely we will “catch fire” with love for Him.

            Jesus then speaks about baptism – which is about cleansing and purification. Spiritual writers have identified three main stages in the spiritual life. The first stage is called the Purgative Way – that is, the goal of this stage is to eliminate sin. Certainly all mortal sin, which destroy the life of grace in our soul (sins such as intentionally missing Mass, drunkenness or drugs, dabbling in the occult, or any sexual activity outside of marriage), but even deliberate venial sin (a lesser kind of sin such as small lies, petty thefts, unkind words, impatience, saying God’s Name irreverently) and even accidental venial sins. Most Christians get stuck on this first stage of the spiritual life and don’t realize that they are called to full union with God! But to be like Jesus means to give up anything in your life that is not like Jesus.

            In pagan Roman times, it was customary for a father of a family to place a special amulet around the neck of their newborn children – a gold or metal one with the image of a pagan god on it for the boys, a gold one in the shape of a crescent moon for the girls. But when many of these pagans began converting to Christianity, they were instructed to throw them away. Even St. Gregory of Nazianzen wrote, “You have no need of amulets... with which the Evil One makes his way into the minds of simpler folks, stealing for himself the honor that belongs to God.” If they were unwilling to throw away the amulets, they were unworthy of the grace of baptism.

            Likewise, this baptism that Jesus refers to is not just the Sacrament that babies receive – He is referring to the complete cleansing of our souls from sin. We must be willing to throw away our “pagan amulets” – whatever sins we are clinging to, whatever bad habits we’ve developed – so that we are purged and purified for the grace of salvation.

            Finally, Jesus mentions that the consequence is division. Or rather, more broadly, that Christians are called to be a sign of contradiction. Jesus says in the Gospels that “the ruler of this world” is actually Satan – for two thousand years, it’s never been the “popular” thing to be a Christian, even sometimes within one’s own family. Thus could St. Francis stand in the town square and strip off all of his clothes, throwing them at his father and declaring that he would have no other Father than God. Thus could St. Thomas More declare, right before his martyrdom, that he was “the king’s good servant, but God’s first.” Thus could St. Edith Stein convert from Judaism to Catholicism, despite the fact that it meant her family would never speak with her again. Thus could St. Pier Giorgio Frassati continue to use his family’s wealth to serve the poor, while his family thought he was just a delusional religious fanatic. If we’re not a sign of contradiction, we’re not on-fire with the love of Jesus Christ!

            But all this is hard – to repent of sin, to pursue virtue, to cooperate with grace, to be a sign of contradiction. So our second reading gives us the strength: keep your eyes fixed on Jesus. He is worth it. He has endured it first. He has entered into Heaven and invites us to join Him. In fact, this reading is so jam-packed with strength that I want to quote it again: “[Let us keep] our eyes fixed on Jesus, the leader and perfecter of faith. For the sake of the joy that lay before him

he endured the cross, despising its shame, and has taken his seat at the right of the throne of God. Consider how he endured such opposition from sinners, in order that you may not grow weary and lose heart. In your struggle against sin you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding blood.” Notice we see all three elements: the fire of divine love (keep your eyes fixed on Jesus and what He did for us on the Cross). The baptism (we must struggle against sin). The contradiction (He already endured such opposition). And also – the hope (it was for the sake of the joy that lie before Him that He did all this).

            So – have you drawn near to the fire or do you need to make the Sacraments and daily prayer a more central part of your life? What sins are preventing you from the purification God desires to do in you? And do you need more courage to stand apart from this world for the sake of God?

            It’s all worth it. Jesus is worth it, and the hope found in Him is worth it. He’s offering us a better way to live – with fire, with purpose, cleansed from sin, made holy and righteous through His grace.