Twenty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time - August 31, 2014

Homily for August 31, 2014

Twenty-Second Sunday in Ordinary time

Don’t Waste Your Life

 

            St. Charles Borromeo, a sixteenth-century Italian bishop, had a great fondness for playing pool. One day he was playing a pleasant billiards game with a couple of his priests when one asked him, “Bishop, what would you do if you knew that you were going to die in five minutes? Would you drop to your knees asking for God’s mercy, would you run off to confession? Would you say your final goodbyes to your family?”

            The bishop calmly responded as he lined up for a shot, “I would continue playing pool. I began this game with the intention of giving glory to God, so why should I stop it?”

            Here’s someone who knew why he was put on this earth – to become holy. If our goal isn’t to glorify God and get to Heaven, then we’re just wasting our time.

            Consider this: if the Lord Jesus appeared to you at this very moment and said to you, “Tell me why I should give you another day of life.” What would you say in response? Will we be honest and say to the Lord, “Well, Lord, honestly I’m probably going to waste it.”

            The only true waste of time is to go through life without intending to please the Lord.

            The second reading is my favorite passage of St. Paul’s. Listen to the impact of his words: “Offer your bodies to God as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing.” This means that everything we do in this bodily life must be directed towards Him. He goes on to say: “Do not conform yourself to this age, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind.”

            Let’s take a look at that. Don’t conform yourself to this age: what are the negative values that this twenty-first century American culture espouses? Things like self-centeredness and narcissism. Just look at the recent phenomenon of the “Ice Bucket Challenge” – for those who don’t know what that is, it’s where people challenge other people to take videos of themselves dousing themselves with ice water to raise money for Lou Gehrig’s Disease research. While I’m all for raising money for a good cause, this has been a perfect example of our “look-at-me” culture. People try to outdo one another online as they post videos that are all about how generous they are. Jesus instead said, “When you give, don’t let your right hand know what your left is doing” – a far cry from, “Take a video of yourself being generous and post it online!”

            Other values our culture espouses are things like idolizing physical perfection – just look at all of the media attention given to LeBron James when he switched teams. Somehow I doubt a computer programmer taking a new job would garner such excitement. Our culture promotes physical pleasure as something to worship – I mean, this is the culture that produced Fifty Shades of Grey, for goodness sake! It’s also a culture that focuses on political correctness and tolerance instead of right and wrong.

            So St. Paul tells us not to conform to this age. Jesus says likewise to Peter: He criticizes Peter for thinking, not as God does, but as human beings do. If we want to know God’s thoughts for us, it’s very simple. God is passionately, personally in love with us and wants us to spend eternity with Him. Do we think the same way about God – that we are passionately in love with Him and desire, more than anything else, to spend eternity with Him? Or have we bought into the values that our culture espouses? What is the driving force of your life – Heaven, or the things of the world?

            At the end of our lives, we will have to give an account to God of how we’ve used this precious gift of time we’ve been given. How much of it will we have to admit we wasted because we used the time to serve ourselves instead of trying to get us to Heaven?

            Now, don’t get me wrong. To be “a living sacrifice” like St. Paul says does not mean that we have to pray all day. Continue going to work – but do your best in your work, because you are pleasing the Lord, not man. Continue going to the store – but smile at the checkout girl and be gracious when the person with 16 items gets into the 15 and under line. Continue playing sports – but learn how to be a good sport, to play fairly and with charity. Continue doing what you enjoy – so long as it isn’t sinful – as long as you take time out of your busy day to read Scripture or pray the Rosary.

            Don’t buy into our culture that says that your life is all about you. It’s not about us, it’s about giving our lives away to others, and ultimately about getting to Heaven. If that’s not our main goal, then we’re wasting our life.