Fr. Roger J. Landry
St. Francis de Sales Chapel
Archdiocese of Oklahoma City Pastoral Center
Retreat for the Sovereign Order of Malta
Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C
June 26, 2022
1 Kings 19:16,19-21, Ps 16, Gal 5:1.13-18, Lk 9:51-62
To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/6.26.22_Homily_1.mp3
The text that guided the homily was:
* In just over a week, we will celebrate Independence Day, which is perhaps our country’s most notable national holiday, and gives us an annual opportunity to focus on the meaning of freedom and to recognize what is required to remain free. That consideration is all the more relevant after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson decision on Friday to overturn Roe v. Wade and Casey v. Planned Parenthood. Those overturned decisions had established, or reinforced, a notion of freedom that asserted that older, stronger, more politically influential people should have the right to choose even to kill smaller, totally vulnerable, voiceless human beings at the same stage of development each of us once was in our mother’s wombs. Casey had even asserted, “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life,” an understanding of freedom that we now see harming individuals and our society as, for example, some think we are free to redefine our sex and have everyone else in society support that decision. That’s why it’s so providential that today that we are able, with the help of the readings the Church gives us on this 13th Sunday in Ordinary Time, to consider what freedom truly is. This consideration of freedom is also essential for us to learn how to live a truly Eucharistic life as we finish this retreat and enter more deeply into the Church’s Eucharistic Revival.
* “For freedom, Christ has set us free,” St. Paul emphasizes in the second reading from his letter to the Galatians. With those few words, the apostle points to two of the most crucial truths for us to grasp in the Christian life: what Christ gained for us and what our freedom is for. All that Jesus has done for us — by entering the human race as an embryo, by his life, his teaching, the sacraments he instituted, his enormous suffering, gruesome death and glorious resurrection — was to set us free, free from the power of sin and from the death to which sin always leads. But that liberation by Christ has a purpose: Christ has set us free “for freedom,” so that we might live in the “glorious freedom of the children of God” (8:21), so that we might love others as he has loved us, fulfill our vocation to become holy as he is holy, merciful as he is merciful, and perfect as he is perfect, growing fully into his image and likeness. He has liberated us in order that we may truly be free, but remaining free and growing in freedom are not a given. Many misuse their freedom to enslave themselves, by becoming addicts, for example, to drugs, or to pornography, or even to getting our own way all the time. That’s why St. Paul tells us, “So stand firm [in freedom] and do not submit again to the yoke of slavery.” Christ has opened up the prison cell and led us out into the light, but now we need to use that great gift of freedom to continue to follow him more and more into the light rather than to return to the self-imposed darkness of the servitude of sin and egocentrism.
* Several years ago when I was pastor of St. Anthony’s in New Bedford, MA, one Sunday there was a new parishioner sitting all alone in the front pew. He was a short guy wearing a tank top with huge muscles and tattoos all over his arms. You could tell readily that he really hadn’t been to Mass in a while; he was c...