Saturday, October 4, 2025

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.”

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