Fr. Bryan Howard
25th Sunday in Ordinary Time – Year C – 22 September 2019 Have you ever heard the saying, “The more things change, the more they stay the same?” A few days ago I was watching a history show about Victorian London. In the 1880s and 1890s the population of London skyrocketed; it grew so fast that they had trouble getting in enough food to feed everyone, and many of the merchants saw an opportunity in that. For many working men bread was the main part of their diet, and they would eat up to two pounds of bread per day. However, most of the bread they were getting was only about 2/3 flour. Either the farmer, or the flour seller, or the baker, or sometimes all three, would add other white powders to the flour to make it go further, like chalk or plaster. This lead to health problems which could lead to death. In our first reading the prophet Amos is talking about different ways the merchants are cheating people, especially the poor. He wrote, “We will diminish the Ephah, add to the shekel, and fix our scales for cheating! We will buy the lowly for silver, and the poor for a pair of sandals; even the refuse of the wheat we will sell!” But I’m sure that today stores would never do things like raise prices right before a sale or design products to break after a certain amount of time, or charge higher prices when they know people have no choice but to pay it. The more things change, the more they stay the same. In today’s Gospel, Jesus challenges us to a new way of thinking and acting, a new way of treating our neighbor. Instead of using people to gain wealth, we should use wealth to gain people. He says, “I tell you, make friends for yourselves with dishonest wealth, so that when it fails, you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings.” In the parable the steward is going to be fired for wasting his Lord’s property. Knowing that he doesn’t have the skills to do any other sort of work, and not wanting to do manual labor, he basically commits fraud. He tells his master’s debtors to write out new IOUs and destroys the old records of their debts. The master grudgingly commends him for being clever and making sure that all of those people are now in his debt. So, what do you want out of life? Is your goal to get to heaven? Then use everything at your disposal to achieve that goal. Jesus also says, “The person who is trustworthy in very small matters is also trustworthy in great ones; and the person who is dishonest in very small matters is also dishonest in great ones.” Compared to heaven, money and wealth are small matters, but are we trustworthy in the way that we deal with them? As Jesus said, “You cannot serve both God and mammon” (which is the love of money). Are you a trustworthy steward of the gifts that God has given you? God has given you these things for the good of others. In the old mafia movies, right before killing someone the boss always says, “It’s not personal, it’s just business.” Then they would show him in Church, like nothing had happened. They thought they could separate their “business” lives and their faith in God, but you can’t. Doing that is putting money ahead of God, and ahead of other people. It’s basically just an excuse for selfishness and greed. So, how can we learn to be trustworthy in small matter? How can we build up our treasures in heaven? By fulfilling our responsibilities faithfully. First, we have a responsibility to worship God, recognizing that our lives and everything good in them is from Him. In the first reading the first thing they complain about is that they’re not allowed to sell on the sabbath, because the second commandment is to keep holy the sabbath, which includes going to Church and abstaining from servile labor. What is servile labor? Well, if gardening is your job, then it’s servile labor, but if gardening is your hobby, then it’s not. 50 or 60 years ago stores didn’t open on Sundays, but today that’s just not the way it is anymore. If you have to work on Sundays, take some other day of the week to dedicate to what is truly important, building up your relationships with God and with your family. Loving God doesn’t take away from our ability to love other people, as if it’s some sort of competition. When we allow God to take His proper place in our lives we find that we love our families and the people around us more and better. In fact, that’s the test of true religion. If it doesn’t help you to grow in love, then you’re not doing it right. May God help all of us to faithfully fulfill our responsibilities to Him and to our families, jobs, and communities, that, proven trustworthy on the day of our judgement, we may be welcomed into heaven by God and all the angels and saints.
I deviated quite a bit from my text this weekend, and I think the recorded version was better.
Fr. Bryan Howard 23rdSunday in Ordinary Time – Cycle C – 8 September 2019 What makes you happy? The way that we answer that question has a huge impact on the choices that we make in our lives. St. Thomas Aquinas wrote that everyone chooses what they think will make them happy, what they think is good, although they sometimes overlook a greater evil in their choices. The addict chooses to do drugs because they think it will make them happy; they choose the good of the pleasure they receive from the drug while overlooking the greater evil of the pain it causes them and others. If we can figure out what really makes us happy, what can bring lasting happiness, then we can train ourselves to choose the rights things and avoid the wrong things, i.e. to choose good and to avoid evil. We must see that happiness is more than merely physical pleasure but is, as the Bible puts it, blessedness, or closeness to God. So, what makes you happy? The contentment that we get from good food and drink fades after the meal. The joy we get from being well thought of and honored by others sours with time. Power over others is temporary, and those who hold on to power constantly fear losing it. Even money is simply a means to acquiring other things, and those things eventually turn boring. All of those things can only bring temporary happiness in our lives and ultimately leave us wanting something more. Only God can give us lasting and eternal happiness. In today’s Gospel, Jesus sees the great crowds that are travelling with Him and turns to them, saying, “If anyone comes to me without hating his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.”If we think of life as the pursuit of pleasure then these words of Jesus don’t make any sense. We may think of the Cross as a Christian symbol representing God’s love for us, but for the Jews of Jesus’ day, the cross was the ultimate symbol of Roman power and a cruel and painful form of execution. Criminals and rebels were forced to carry their own crosses to the place of their execution. If we think of life as the pursuit of personal happiness, or the pursuit of pleasure, then these words of Jesus don’t make any sense. Jesus is challenging us to see that we can only be truly happy by putting God first in our lives, ahead of our family, ahead of our own lives, and even ahead of our own desire for happiness. Why would Jesus say this in such a blunt way? Have you ever thought about the fact that Jesus is traveling with a great crowd following Him, but at the foot of the Cross there will only be a handful of people, Mary, His mother, St. John, and a few others. I think Jesus knew that many of those people were only following Him because of the miracles that He performed, and He wanted them to understand the cost of being His disciple. We must give ourselves totally to Jesus. St. Paul calls Himself a slave of Christ Jesus in His letter to the Romans, even as He tells the Corinthians, “For he who was called in the Lord as a slave is a freedman of the Lord. Likewise he who was free when called is a slave of Christ”(1 Cor 7:22). In today’s second reading one of the Christian communities sent a slave, Onesimus, to tend to St. Paul while he’s in prison, and St. Paul is sending Onesimus back having baptized Him and is asking them to free him, “That you might have him back forever, no longer as a slave but more than a slave, a brother.”So which is it, or we slaves of Christ or are we free? Both, when we make ourselves slaves of Christ, giving ourselves completely to God, then Christ makes us free by giving us the Holy Spirit and making us children of God. The paradox of the Gospel is that true and lasting happiness only comes when we set aside our own desire for happiness, or pleasure, power, money, and fame, and put other people ahead of ourselves. This is what Jesus did when He became one of us, “Jesus, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God something to be grasped. Rather, he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness; and found human in appearance, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross. Because of this, God greatly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, of those in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father”(Phil 2:6-11). Jesus emptied Himself, took on our human condition, and willingly bore the Cross and was crucified for us. We must now do what Jesus did. Married people, put your husband or wife ahead of yourself. Parents, put your children ahead of yourselves. Young people, strive to grow in virtue and holiness, to become ready to accept your full responsibility as a Christian. We must all strive to love as Christ loved, and especially those who are most in need. True happiness is not found in pleasure, which is only temporary; it is found in being close to God. In the same way, true love is not found in warm and fuzzy feelings, which come and go out of our control; true love is found in doing what Jesus did for us and putting the needs of others ahead of our own. As we celebrate the Eucharist, the memorial of Christ Cross and Resurrection, let us ask God to fill us with the love of Jesus and draw us ever closer to His Most Sacred Heart.
Fr. Bryan Howard
22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time – Year C – 1 September 2019 Today’s second reading ends with the lines, “You have approached Mount Zion… and Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and the sprinkled blood that speaks more eloquently than that of Abel.” You might remember the story of Cain and Abel from grade school religion classes. They were two brothers, the children of Adam and Eve. They both made offerings to God, but only Abel’s offering was accepted. Cain, in a jealous rage, kills his brother Abel. God tells Cain, “Listen! Your brothers blood cries out to me from the soil” (Gn 4:10). Whereas Abel’s blood cries out for punishment, the blood of Christ was shed for the salvation of the world and the forgiveness of sins. That is why the blood of Christ “speaks more eloquently than that of Abel.” When Christ was hanging from the Cross, even as His blood was still dripping to the ground, He turned to the men who had nailed Him to the Cross and prayed for them, “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do” (Lk 23:34). If Christ can pray for the forgiveness of the greatest sin ever committed, His own murder, then He can certainly forgive our sins., if we repent of them, so that we may be transformed in the love of God. Imagine if your neighbor knocks on your door and tells you, “I forgive you for washing your own car.” Well, there’s nothing there to forgive, because it’s your car, so you can wash it whenever you want to. Now, imagine if he says to you, “I forgive you for stealing the tools I let you borrow,” and you respond, “Well, I don’t believe in private property, so it was my right to take those tools.” Now you have a real problem. How can there be forgiveness if there’s no repentance? How can you forgive someone who neither recognizes the wrong they’ve done nor wants to be forgiven? God respects our freedom and won’t force His mercy and forgiveness on us. Imagine a second scenario. Adolf Hitler has just died and is standing at the Pearly Gates with St. Peter. Looking in, he sees people of all races and groups centered around God, and many people who were killed because of his orders and policies. Would he want to go in, or would he instead think that this cannot be paradise and, instead, choose the alternative. To him, the reality of heaven would be hell, unless he repents and allows himself to be truly transformed in the love of God. Of course, the sin that we should be most concerned with is our own. Hitler’s sins can’t keep me out of heaven, only my own sins can do that. A lot of people don’t like to talk about forgiveness of sins, because that would be to admit that sin is a real thing. To truly ask for forgiveness and receive it, we must first admit that what we’ve done is wrong, that we’ve offended God and hurt others and ourselves, and that our sins have separated us from God and God’s love. That takes humility. Humility means to recognize the truth about myself and others, so that I recognize that God is God, that I’m not, and that I need His mercy and forgiveness. Now read today’s Gospel again. Jesus says, “When you are invited by someone to a wedding banquet, do not recline at table in the place of honor. A more distinguished guest than you may have been invited by him, and the host who invited both of you may approach you and say, ‘Give your place to this man,’… Rather, when you are invited, go and take the lowest place so that when the host comes to you he may say, ‘My friend, move up to a higher position.’” Jesus isn’t teaching people a trick to make themselves look good in front of other people. He’s teaching a spiritual lesson about our relationship with God. Lower yourself and recognize that you aren’t that important and don’t deserve the place of honor. As Jesus says in another place, “When you have done all you have been commanded, say, ‘We are unprofitable servants; we have done what we were obliged to do’” (Lk 17:10). Then, God will come and move you to a higher place in heaven. Humility isn’t the most important virtue, that would be love, but it is the foundation of all the other virtues. Without humility we can’t grow in virtue because we don’t recognize our faults, we don’t recognize our need for help from both God and other people, and so we don’t repent and pray for God’s help to grow in holiness. So, how do we grow in humility? I’ll give you three things you can start doing today. First, practice gratitude. Find at least three things every day to thank God for. This reminds us that we rely on God and on His grace in our lives and that we can’t do it all by ourselves. Second, practice listening. humility makes us try to find the wisdom in what other people are saying, instead of always trying to our own wisdom. There is a great danger for those who teach others, like priests. You can’t truly listen to someone else without valuing there opinion and thinking that they might say something worth hearing. Third, make a good confession. When we go to the Sacrament of Confession we have to bear our soul to God and let His light and life in. When we make a good confession by focusing on our own sins and not on someone else’s, don’t make excuses, and confess all of our sins that we can remember, it’s a humbling experience to receive forgiveness from our God who loves us more than we love ourselves. Christ shed His blood for our sins, not to force us to do things His way, but to truly transform us in the power of the Holy Spirit. In the spirit of humility, I want to end with the words of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, who says it much more eloquently than I can, “Of all the movements, sensations and feelings of the soul, love is the only one in which the creature can respond to the Creator and make some sort of similar return however unequal though it be. For when God loves, all he desires is to be loved in return…The Bridegroom’s love… asks in return nothing but faithful love.”
Fr. Bryan Howard
20th Sunday in Ordinary Time – Year C – 18 August 2019 In the 19th century atheism became very popular among intellectuals. Many of them thought that God and religion were basically created by people to give them comfort in their terrible lives. Some of them, like Nietzsche, recognized that life is ultimately meaningless if there is no God, because, eventually, everything would be dead. Others, like Ludwig Feuerbach, thought that religion was holding people back from attaining their true potential. He saw religion as something to comfort people with the thought of a merciful God and eternal happiness in heaven. As Karl Marx, the founder of Communism, said, “Religion is the opium of the people.” Marx, pointing out that the word feuerbach means “stream of fire” in German, said that people need to be baptized in the stream of fire of Feuerbach’s atheism. Today, the Lord speaks of another fire with which He wants to baptize the world, but He means the fire of the Holy Spirit. Fire can be comforting, like sitting around a campfire or a fireplace, but it’s only comforting if it’s under our control. What those intellectuals don’t understand about religion is that, if God is real, then we aren’t the ones in control, HE IS. We like to think of God as someone quite distant from our lives, Who just sort of lets us get on with things. It’s even better if we see Him as an impersonal force. We believe in a God who is closer to us than we are to ourselves, a God who loves us and calls us to love Him in return, and a God who, when we were lost in sin, came down to find us and bring us back to Him. There’s no where in the Bible where Jesus tells us to just keep living our lives however we want and we’ll be fine. Instead, we are told, “Let us rid ourself of every burden and sin that clings to us and persevere in running the race,” “Take up your Cross daily and follow me,” “In your struggle against sin you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding blood,” and to “enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is broad and the road narrow that leads to destruction, and those who enter through it are many. How narrow the gate and constricted the road that leads to life. And those who find it are few.” They don’t crucify people who keep the status quo, they crucify people who challenge the authorities, call people to conversion, and who won’t compromise what is right for temporary gain or personal comfort. It’s true that God is merciful, but in His mercy He doesn’t just want to forgive our sins but to help us to cast them from our lives. God is real. If we were inventing a God for ourselves, we wouldn’t invent a God who challenges us. We do sometimes project human emotions and traits onto God, but in faith we recognize that God is far beyond us. He is eternal, without beginning or end, and He is the Creator of the universe, and we know from logic that there must be a Creator. Every that exists was caused by something else, but if you follow the train of causes all the way back, you have to come to a first cause. That’s why many atheists thought that the universe was eternal, that it was never created but just was always there. Now we know that the universe as we know it came to exist in the Big Bang, but what caused the Big Bang? If they eventually find a cause for the Big Bang, then we’d have to ask what caused that. There must be a First Cause that doesn’t depend on anything else to exist, and we call this First Cause, God. God is infinitely beyond us, but He came to be with us, and to be one of us, so that we can be with Him, and be like Him. “I have come to set the earth on fire, and how I wish it were already blazing!” When you receive the Eucharist today, know that you are receiving into your body the very Creator of the Universe, He Who Is, the Source of all life, God Himself. Ask Him to fill you with the fire of His Spirit, to walk the narrow way, to not be satisfied with mediocrity but to strive for perfection, the perfection which only Christ can give.
Fr. Bryan Howard
19th Sunday in Ordinary Time – Year C – 11 August 2019 When I was growing up I used to either walk home from school or ride my bike. I would come in through the back door, into the kitchen, where Maw Maw would usually already be getting dinner ready. We had a sort of tradition where I would try to guess what she was making just from the smell, without actually looking at the pots. To this day I can still imagine the smell of port chops in gravy with baked beans, but then I’d have to wait sometimes for as much as two hours until dinner. Paw Paw would always have to go and “test” the food before dinner time. Waiting is a part of life that we experience every day and that we try to reduce as much as possible. We’ve invented telephones for instant communication, self-checkout lanes at stores, and next day shipping. Our readings today are all about waiting, but active waiting, making themselves ready to receive what they’re waiting for. We, like them, are always waiting for God. We wait for Him to tell us what He wants us to do, we wait for Him to speak to us and give us grace, and we wait for heaven, but how do we make ourselves ready to receive what He wants to give us? The Letter to the Hebrews gives us Abraham as an example of faith. God promised to give Abraham the land that He would lead him to, but Abraham had to set out on his journey without knowing where He was going, and even when He got there he didn’t possess the land. He lived in a tent as a nomad, and his descendants wouldn’t take possession of the land until hundreds of years later. God also promised to give Abraham descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and the sand on the shore of the sea. The name Abram actually means “exalted father,” but Abraham didn’t actually have any children at all until he was almost 90 years old, then God changed his name to “Abraham,” which means “father of a multitude.” This is ridiculous, he had one change, that’s not exactly a multitude. Why would God choose a man named Exalted Father as the father of his chosen people and then not give him a son until he was almost 90 years old? It’s because Abraham is to be the Father of Faith. As the Bible says, “Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness” (Gn 15:6). Hebrews says about Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, “All these died in faith. They did not receive what had been promised but saw it and greeted it from afar and acknowledged themselves to be strangers and aliens on earth, for those who speak thus show that they are seeking a homeland.” In his journey with God, Abraham learns to trust the Lord. At times he stumbles and falls, but he always turns back to God. He learns to trust that God will keep His promises, will keep His word, even though the promises are never fulfilled in his lifetime. We are Abraham’s children through faith, not by blood. We are called to follow his example of faith. Just like Abraham, God made promises to us when Jesus says, “Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved; whoever does not believe will be condemned” (Mk 16:16). Just like Abraham we have a journey ahead of us, a pilgrimage or religious journey, before we can receive the promise. Just like Abraham, we won’t reach our destination until after we’ve died, as St. Paul said, “If, then, we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him” (Rm 6:8). That’s why, in the Gospel, Jesus says, “Be sure of this: if the master of the house had known the hour when the thief was coming, he would not have let his house be broken into. You also must be prepared, for at an hour you do not expect, the Son of Man will come.” We aren’t called to just sit around waiting for God to do all the work; we are called to prepare for the Day of the Lord by cooperating with God’s grace working in our lives. In today’s Gospel, Jesus tells His disciples to gird their loins and light their lamps, to care for their fellow servants, and not to mistreat them. Just like Abraham obeyed God, even when it was difficult, so our faith should lead to obedience of the commandments. As Jesus said, “But if that servant says to himself, ‘My master is delayed in coming,’ and begins to beat the menservants and the maidservants, to eat and drink and get drunk, then that servant’s master will come on an unexpected day and at an unknown hour and will punish the servant severely and assign him a place with the unfaithful.” The end of today’s Gospel should be especially concerning to those who teach the faith, like myself, “That servant who knew his master’s will but did not make preparations nor act in accord with his will shall be beaten severely; and the servant who was ignorant of his master’s will but acted in a way deserving of a severe beating shall be beaten only lightly. Much will be required of the person entrusted with much, and still more will be demanded of the person entrusted with more.” So can we just claim ignorance as an excuse for our sins? No, because we are morally required to seek the truth and live it. Deliberate ignorance is itself a sin. Only genuine ignorance, or, as the Church calls us, invincible ignorance, is an excuse. Finally, I want to talk about judging others. We try to justify ourselves by pointing at others. “Well, at least I’m not as bad as that.” We shouldn’t compare ourselves to other people, but to God. Don’t try to be better than someone else, but to be the person that God is calling you to be, and always be harder on your own sins than on someone else’s. Hypocrisy is the sin of being harder on others than on yourselves, and Jesus is constantly calling out the Pharisees for their hypocrisy, like when he told His disciples to do what they say, but not what they do. They teach the truth, but they don’t follow it themselves. At the beginning of Mass I mentioned that yesterday was the Feast of St. Lawrence. When the Roman’s came to arrest Pope St. Sixtus and the oath six deacons of the Church of Rome, the spared St. Lawrence the Deacon and told him that he had 4 days to gather the treasury of the Church of Rome and turn it over, or else. He did gather the treasury, and he gave it to the needy. He went to the Roman officials with a group of the poor, indigent, sick, widows, and orphans, and told them, “Here is the treasure of the Church.” They martyred Him by roasting him on a gridiron, but he went to his death with good humor, telling the executioners, “Flip me over, I’m done on this side.” He could go to his death with joy, because he had faith in the promise of eternal life. Every time we approach this altar to receive the Eucharist we are given a taste, or a promise, as it were, of what awaits us in heaven. Prepare yourself every day so that, when that day comes, you can receive what was promised with joy.
Fr. Bryan Howard
18th Sunday in Ordinary Time – Year C – 4 August 2019 Jesus says that the first and most important commandment is to Love the Lord Your God with all your heart, all your strength, all your mind, and all your soul, and that second commandment is to love your neighbor as yourself. God made us for love, and we naturally want to devote ourselves to another person or thing, like God, our spouse and children, or our country. Unfortunately, we often get the things that we love out of balance. When God is first in our lives, the One we are devoted to above everything else, then we have the help of God to love everyone else in our lives better, in the way that God loves us, by putting their needs ahead of our own. We are created for love, for devotion, but we sometimes devote ourselves to the wrong things, or to the right things in the wrong way, and this can lead us to neglect the things that ought to come first in our lives. We don’t worship statues anymore like our ancestors did, but the Bible calls those idols, “the work of our hands,” because people were worshiping something that they had created; we still struggle with worshiping the work of our own hands. We think that having more money will bring safety and happiness. Money can bring a certain amount of stability, safety, and happiness to our lives and allow us to take care of our families, but only temporarily. The book of Ecclesiastes says, “Vanity of vanities! All things are vanity! Here is one who has labored with wisdom and knowledge and skill, and yet to another who has not labored over it, he must leave property,” and in the Gospel, “You fool, this night your life will be demanded of you; and the things you have prepared, to whom will they belong?” Money is only helpful in this life; it is completely useless in the afterlife. Will you spend all of your time preparing for the trials of this life and neglect to prepare for the afterlife? As Christ said, “Take care to guard against all greed, for though one may be rich, one’s life does not consist of possessions.” Sometimes it’s not money in general, but certain things in particular that we become overly attached to. Is there anything in your life that you just can’t live without? Is there anything in your life that you wouldn’t want to leave even to go to heaven? When we become too attached to something, it’s starts to control us, to influence how we make decisions. Do you possess the things in your life, or do they possess you? Some people can get like that about their appearance, or their car, or football or other TV shows, or their pets. None of these things should come before God or before your family. Used properly, they can elevate our lives, but, used improperly, they can become like an anchor holding us down. Don’t let them bring you all the way down. When we neglect our relationship with God, these other things naturally fill up that space in our lives. However, if we give the type of devotion that should be reserved only for God to anything else, then we are com mitting idolatry. None of those thing can bring us fulfillment even in this life, much less in eternal life. We were created for something better, for something more, and when we give ourselves to something that is less, then we become less. We become more like what we worship. If we worship things, then we will become like those things, but if we worship God He will raise us up to be like Himself, even in this life, and for eternity in heaven. Worship never stops at just words; it is, as I said at the beginning, true devotion. When we are devoted to something we give it our time, our attention, and our respect. The best way to guard against making something an idol in your life is to be truly devoted to God, as St. Paul wrote, “If you were raised with Christ, seek what is above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Think of what is above, not of what is on earth.” Give Him your time, go to Mass on Sundays and Holy Days of Obligation. Give Him your attention. God has given us a great gift in the Bible; it teaches us about God, about God’s will for our lives, and about how to be saved. If you’re not sure how to get started, I think the best way is to read the readings for the next Sunday during the week and let them start to soak in throughout the week. You can find them by googling “Catholic Mass readings,” or by purchasing a Sunday Missal from any Catholic book store, like Pauline’s Books and Media in Metairie. Finally, give God respect. We disrespect God in so many ways, by taking His name in vain, by making promises to Him and not keeping them, by blaspheming Him and His mother. Disrespect for others is becoming more and more common in the United States. If we can’t respect God because He created us and sent His Son to redeem us, then we should at least learn to fear Him, as Jesus said, “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather, be afraid of the one who can destroy both soul and body in Gehenna.” This week, ask yourself what the idols in your life are and how they influence your life an decisions. Ask God to help you to dethrone those idols and crown Him as King in your life and in your family.
Fr. Bryan Howard
17th Sunday in Ordinary Time – Year C – 28 July 2019 The force of our readings today is that we have been made members of the family of God through the grace of the Holy Spirit which we have received by being baptized into the death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. We take it for granted that God is our Father and we are His children, adoptive brothers and sisters of Jesus, but that is actually a revolutionary idea. The Jewish people think of Israel as a whole as a child of God, but the only individual in the Old Testament to be called a Son of God was King Solomon. The Muslims consider it blasphemy to call God Father. They consider themselves servants or slaves of God. In most of our most common prayers we call God Father: I believe in God the Father Almighty, Glory be to the Father, and Our Father who art in heaven. We know that God is our Father and we are His children, but we don’t always act like it. We bargain with God, make deals with Him, we think that we need to buy our way into God’s family by being “good people,” You cannot earn heaven; there isn’t enough gold in the world to buy eternal life. You didn’t earn your place in your human family, you were born into it as a baby, and, no matter what you do, even if your actions cause you to be separated from the family, they are still your family, and, ideally, you can be forgiven if you truly repent and change your way of life. It’s the same with God’s family. You are born into it, often as a baby, through baptism, which Jesus calls being born from above. You can’t stop being a part of God’s family, the Church, but your actions can cause you to be separated from it, but forgiveness is always available for those who repent and pledge to change their lives. The “Our Father” isn’t just a prayer, it’s an expression of trust in “Our Father.” In the Mass, at the prayer of consecration over the chalice, the priest says, “Take this, all of you, and drink of it, for this is the chalice of my blood, the blood of the New and Eternal Covenant.” The covenant is one of the most important ideas for understanding what it means to be a Christian. A covenant is a holy, family bond that is sealed by making a sacrifice of blood and taking an oath. Unfortunately, we usually treat the New Covenant as a type of contract. They are both agreements between people which are sealed by a promise and have consequences if they’re broken. The most common covenant we enter is marriage, where two people who are unrelated go before God, take oaths, and become family and from that point on they share their lives with one another. So, a contract is about the exchange of goods and services; a covenant is about sharing life. A contract is for a limited time; a covenant is for an unlimited time, until death. A contract is sealed by invoking my own name; a covenant is sealed by invoking God’s name, because we recognize that we need God’s help to keep our promises. At our baptisms the Holy Spirit entered our souls, making us Temples of the Holy Trinity, because God Himself came to live in us. As we sang before reading the Gospel, “You have received a Spirit of adoption, through which we cry, Abba, Father.” There’s nothing we can do to buy our way into God’s family; it’s a totally free and unearned gift, a grace, as it were. However, now that we’re in God’s family, we are expected to live as members of God’s family. St. Paul writes earlier in the same letter that we just heard from, “So, as you received Christ Jesus the Lord, walk in him, rooted in him and built upon him and established in the faith as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving.” The Holy Spirit gives us the power that we need to keep God’s commandments, but we still need to actually walk in them, to walk in Christ. How do we know what we should do? Take Jesus Himself as your example. Form your conscience by studying the Word of God in the Bible and by keeping the traditions of the Church. In the traditions of the Church and the lives of the saints, we see the Wisdom of God as it has actually been lived out in real lives over the course of two millennia. There is a lot of wisdom there, and we can make it our own. Finally, what happens when we inevitably break God’s commandments and commit sins? We sometimes presume on God’s mercy by assuming that He will forgive us, which is disrespectful of God. We also sometimes underestimate God’s mercy and love, by thinking that our sins are too terrible or that we are unforgivable. Read our first reading again. God is eager to show mercy, but we have to want to be forgiven, and for that we need to admit that we’re wrong and that we’ve sinned. If Jesus could look down from the Cross at the very people who put Him there, the Roman legionaries, and pray for the Father to forgive them, then He can certainly forgive us. His heart was pierced on the Cross for our forgiveness, so let us not harden our hearts but break them open in the Confessional and allow God to remake them, to recreate us, in His compassion. The Most Holy Eucharist and the Sacrament of Confession are the Sacraments par excellence of God’s mercy, because it was through the shedding of His blood that the life of God was poured out for us, and through Confession the Divine life that was lost in sin is restored to our souls. Our Heavenly Father is a father who knows how to give good gifts to His children; let us learn to eagerly await those gifts.
Fr. Bryan Howard
16thSunday in Ordinary Time – Cycle C – 21 July 2019 Psalm 15, today’s Responsorial Psalm, begins by asking the question, “O Lord, who will dwell in your tabernacle? Who will rest on your holy mountain?” Which is another way of asking, “How do we grow closer to God? How do we get to heaven?” The answer, walk blamelessly, do justice, know the truth in your heart, do not slander or harm your neighbor, despise sin but honor those who fear the Lord. That is, the holy and righteous man who follows the Law of God in loving God and neighbor will be taken up to heaven. Jesus is the perfect fulfillment of Psalm 15, because He is the only perfectly righteous man who never sinned and always followed God’s will. We, on the other hand, often fall short of that ideal, but we should never give up. Instead, we should strive to grow closer to that ideal, the example that Jesus gives us, each day of our lives. To do that we need to train ourselves, as a craftsman has to train in their craft, or an artist at their art, or an athlete at their sport. Baseball players have to train not only to hit, catch, and throw, but to keep their bodies in good physical condition. We have to train ourselves spiritually to keep our souls in good spiritual condition so that we can more easily love God and neighbor in those challenging circumstances, like when we’re tempted to sin, stressed out and irritated, or enduring some form of suffering. Christian training comes in two forms: active and passive, prayers and works of charity. There are different religious orders in the Church which focus on one or the other of these. The Missionaries of Charity, founded by St. Teresa of Calcutta, focus on acts of charity by looking for the poorest of the poor, the most needy, and those who are very sick, and caring for their needs. They give up worldly pleasure and live lives of poverty so that they can better care for the poor. I saw a video once of Mother Teresa touring a building they were turning into a convent for her nuns, and she told them to take out the hot water heater because they wouldn’t be needing it. However, you can’t take it all the way to the extreme. Even the Missionaries of Charity begin every day with an hour of adoration of the Eucharist and pray throughout the day. On the other side there are cloistered orders of nuns and monks, like the Carthusian monks and the Carmelite nuns, who separate themselves from the world to dedicate themselves entirely to prayer. They take a vow of stability, meaning that they will stay in the monastery for the rest of their lives, leaving at the most once or twice a year, and some of them never leaving it at all. They dedicate many hours of their days to prayer, reading the Bible, and spiritual reading. Once again, though, there must be a balance, and they always have some kind of outreach to the surrounding community, often by leading retreats, running a school, or welcoming visitors. St. Joseph Abbey, a Benedictine monastery in Covington, has the Pennies for Bread program. The monks bake 2,000 loaves of homemade bread every week and some friends of the Abbey deliver it to charities who distribute it to the poor. These two aspects of spiritual training, prayer and works of charity, are seen in today’s Gospel through Martha and Mary. Martha gets upset with Mary because she’s not helping her with serving their guests and asks Jesus to tell her to help. Martha represents the active life of works of charity, while Mary represents the life of contemplative prayer. Jesus responds to Martha, “Martha, Martha, you are anxious and worried about many things. There is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part and it will not be taken from her.”The whole point is to grow closer to Jesus, and so the first, and only truly necessary thing is to keep our eyes fixed on Him. Prayer is the one thing that is necessary because, when it’s done right, prayer leads us closer to Jesus and causes us to grow in love. Prayer leads to charity. If we put the work first, then we’re bound to get it wrong, to mix up our priorities like Martha did. Prayer helps us to focus on Jesus, to keep our eyes fixed on Him and to listen to His words in the Bible. However, prayer that only stays in the mind isn’t really doing anything, is it? Our prayers should lead us to grow in love, which will make us want to help those around us who are in need, following the example that Jesus set for us. So, I want to challenge everyone to set aside some time every day, even just 15 minutes, as time dedicated to God. Pray the rosary, or read a passage of the Bible, or do some other devotion. For me, the best time to pray is in the morning before I’m distracted by all the business of the day. If I wait until the evening I usually don’t do it at all. However, I do know some people who just aren’t morning people and prefer to pray in the evening, but it does take more willpower to do it that way. But, whenever and however you pray, end your prayer by thinking of one, concrete thing you can do to put that prayer into action that day. In that way, through both prayer and acts of charity, we can climb the mountain of the Lord and come to rest in His heavenly Temple and, in the words of St. Paul from our second reading, may be presented to God “perfect in Christ Jesus.”
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AuthorFr. Bryan was pastor of Our Lady of Lourdes from July 3, 2017 to June 2022. Categories
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