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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