31st Sunday in Ordinary Time

In our Gospel this weekend Jesus sums up the entirety of the Scriptures with the simple teaching to “love God and love neighbor.”  Christianity IS that simple…but it’s not that easy!  Growing in love of God and others is painful: like the pain and frustration you see go across a child’s face when they have to learn how to share with someone else, we experience that same pain of transformation as we say goodbye to our selfish inclinations and learn to open ourselves up to love of God and others – which makes us become more of the person God created us to be!  Our belief in Purgatory (which separates us as Catholics from all other Christians) is rooted in this idea of transformation from the inside out.  Heaven is a place where every individual completely loves God and completely loves others…that transformation, those growing pains, have to take place at some point, whether during this life or after.

30th Sunday in Ordinary Time

When I was young, I didn’t like doing the dishes – it was an obligation, a duty, something I HAD to do.  When my parents came up to visit me the other week, I cooked them a nice meal, and then miracle of miracles…I wanted to do the dishes!  Out of thankfulness for all they’ve done for me, I WANTED to do that service for them.  In our Gospel today Jesus heals a blind man who then follows Him along the way.  This once blind man is not living his faith out of a sense of duty or obligation – he’s living his faith with enthusiasm because he’s thankful for what Jesus has done for him.  How do we live out our faith?  How do we live out our relationship with God?  Is it under a burdening sense of duty and obligation, or as an energizing, thankful and joyful response to what Jesus has done in our lives?  What has Jesus done for you recently?  Keeping that answer at the forefront of your mind will transform your faith!

29th Sunday in Ordinary Time

It’s a natural human tendency to make sense of things.  We ask the question “Why?” and we come up with an answer to appease our minds.  Our brains will even make up answers (even wrong ones, and totally believe them) just to satisfy this impulse to make sense of things.  When it comes to suffering, pain, difficulty, and even death, however, coming up with an answer for “Why?” often makes God into some kind of monster.  In the Scriptures God never gives an answer to “Why?” (I don’t think there is one), but what He does do is show us “where” He is when it comes to suffering, pain, difficulty, and even death: “I’m right there with you!  I walked that path already so that you would never have to walk it alone!  You’re never alone!”

28th Sunday in Ordinary Time

An enthusiastic young man comes to Jesus in our Gospel asking what he must do to inherit eternal life.  Having followed all the commandments from his youth, Jesus invites the young man to take a step in faith…but this young man is very wealthy.  At Jesus’ challenge to sell what he owns and follow Jesus alone, this good young man walks away – he isn’t willing to put something in his life down to take hold of Jesus.  We only have two hands, and this weekend Jesus is stretching out his hand asking us to take hold and be raised to another level of our relationship with him.  But we only have two hands, and keeping hold of Jesus often involves putting something else down in life – even good things.  We’ve only got two hands: what are you holding onto?

27th Sunday in Ordinary Time

I think the title speaks for itself…you’ll want to listen to this!

26th Sunday in Ordinary Time

How do we evaluate a day, a week, a month, a season in our life?  Is it by how little we’ve done wrong or sinned?  In the Gospel today Jesus comes down hard on sin: “If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off!  If your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out!”  While we may become complacent with our sins, Jesus never does.  And yet, if our goal is never to sin, that neither makes us holy nor prepares us for heaven! The Christian life isn’t about not sinning; heaven isn’t about not sinning.  Turning away from sin is only the first step of the Christian life.  Then we walk the path of the Gospel in a real and living relationship with Jesus!  So how do we evaluate a day, a week, a month, a season in our life?  A Christian would evaluate it based on how generously he or she lived, how many opportunities to help others were taken advantage of, how much more a man or woman of the Gospel they became during that time.

23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time

In our Gospel today a deaf man with a speech impediment is brought to Jesus.  Jesus takes him away from the crowd, touches his ears and tongue, prays, and cures both his deafness and speech impediment.  In our society it seems that many of us Catholics, like the man in our Gospel, have experienced what it feels like to be tongue-tied: we don’t always how to respond to people who are hostile to the Church (especially in light of the recent scandals) or how to answer difficult questions about what we believe clearly and concisely, and we’re not always comfortable telling other people what Jesus Christ has done in our lives.  Like He did the man in our Gospel today, Jesus wants to take us aside and cure our tongue-tied-ness…but like the man in the Gospel, the healing doesn’t begin with the tongue.

21st Sunday in Ordinary Time

Fr. Benedict Groeschel once told me, “The Church will get much smaller before it gets bigger.”  In our Gospel, Jesus’ teaching that his followers must eat his flesh and drink his blood (the Eucharist) to find eternal life turned many people away.  But the Church has to get smaller, and more genuine, before it can grow through authentic and powerful witness.  People get up in arms about Paul’s words in our second reading, “Wives, be subordinate to your husbands.”  They fail, however, to read the rest of that chapter, where Paul asks all Christians to be subordinate to one another, to put the wants and needs of others before your own, because that is true love, that is what Christ did for us.

Sadly, we see in the recent news from Pennsylvania and the numerous scandals in the Church that some, even the Church’s own ministers and leaders, have NOT chosen to follow this path that Paul (in following Jesus) laid out.  Rather, they have chosen their wants and needs at the expense of and to the harm of others.  Because of that bad example, many will leave the Church and even lose faith in God.  And for those who remain, there is now more ammunition to be hurled at us.  The Church will get smaller because of this, but it’s a time of purification. “The Church will get much smaller before it gets bigger.”  But it will get bigger…through GENUINE witness to Jesus Christ!

20th Sunday in Ordinary Time

In our Gospel this weekend, Jesus says that one must eat his flesh and drink his blood to have eternal life.  The people of his day and age are scandalized by that – “How can we possibly eat his flesh and drink his blood!  That’s preposterous!”  Does Jesus apologize?  Or soften his words?  Or say that he’s just speaking figuratively?  No.  In fact, he ups the ante.  We miss it in the English translation, but in the Greek, in response to their pushback, Jesus uses a different word for “eat”, a more vivid, primitive, and animalistic word, to make sure he clearly gets his point across.  Our belief in the Eucharist as the very Body and Blood of Jesus Christ is at the same time our belief that God wants to be intimately close to us: that He literally wants to just eat us up!