Fr. Roger J. Landry

Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Thursday of the Eleventh Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

June 17, 2021

2 Cor 11:1-11, Ps 111, Mt 6:7-15

 

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

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The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Throughout the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus shows us how to become “perfect as [our] heavenly Father is perfect,” how to fulfill the law, how to have our righteousness surpass that of the Scribes and the Pharisees, how to seek first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness, how to build our life on the rock. The main point of it all is our relationship with God the Father. Yesterday he told us to pray, fast and give alms not to win acclaim but out of love for the Father, seeking what he seeks, hungering for what he hungers, sharing the providential care he has placed into our hands. On Saturday we will ponder Jesus’ words about how we should not worry about what we are to eat, drink, or wear or where we are to sleep because our Heavenly Father loves us more than the sparrows and lilies and will care for us. He’ll tell us elsewhere that he will never give us a stone when we ask for bread. The Sermon on the Mount, which is a compendium of the Christian life, is geared to Jesus’ helping us learn how to relate to God the Father. The pinnacle of that instruction is, of course, the way he teaches us to enter into the total exchange of persons that is faithful prayer. He does so by his own example of prayer, by his testimony of the proper dispositions we need to pray well, by his letting us eavesdrop on his own prayers — all of which begin with “Abba” — but most of all through the Lord’s Prayer, or Our Father, he gives us today in the Gospel.

* For us as Christians, prayer is to be an intimate conversation with a Father who loves us and already knows what we need. The first word Jesus teaches us is “Abba!” We’re to pray to a loving “daddy.” That word already sums up to a large degree who he is, who we are, and how we’re supposed to relate to him. And when we’re relating to him in love, then we begin to focus on him. The first petition is that his name be hallowed rather than ours, and the way is name is hallowed is not just in our prayer but particularly through the Christian life of Christ-like love when others “seeing [our] good deeds glorify [our] Father in heaven” (Mt 5:16). We beg that his kingdom come and his will be done, rather than our own. We begin, in short, by asking for everything related to God’s glory, kingdom and will.  A loving son or daughter wants what’s best for a parent — just like a parent wants what’s best for a child — and we begin praying not for ourselves and our needs but for God and his desires, knowing that God’s desires are for us to be holy by hallowing his name (the path to our own happiness!), for us to enter his kingdom fully as heirs, and for us to do his will on earth so that we may do it forever in heaven.

* From there Jesus teaches us to turn to our own needs. The first thing we ask the Father is each day to give us our “supersubstantial” (epiousios) bread. This refers not just to the material sustenance we need for the day but also for what goes beyond our material substance, a reference that many of the early saints — and St. Cyprian in today’s Office of Readings — interpreted as a clear reference to Jesus in the Eucharist, the true Manna whom God the Father rains down each day to help us to hallow his name, enter and proclaim his kingdom and do his will. Jesus opens us up to the Father’s providence. Next we ask the Father for mercy, of which we’re always in need,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

St. Mary of the Lake Seminary, Mundelein, Illinois

Catholic Medical Association Boot Camp for Medical Students and Residents

June 14, 2021

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/6.14.21_Forms_Fonts_Guides_and_Expressions_of_Prayer_1.mp3

Fr. Roger J. Landry

St. Mary of the Lake Seminary, Mundelein, Illinois

Catholic Medical Association Boot Camp for Medical Students and Residents

June 14, 2021

 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/6.14.21_Lord_Teach_Me_To_Pray_1.mp3

Fr. Roger J. Landry

St. Mary of the Lake Seminary, Mundelein, Illinois

Catholic Medical Association Boot Camp for

Medical Students and Residents

June 14, 2021

 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/6.14.21_Necessity_of_Prayer_1.mp3

 

 

Fr. Roger J. Landry

St. Mary of the Lake Seminary, Mundelein, Illinois

Catholic Medical Association Boot Camp for Medical Students and Residents

Monday of the Eleventh Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

June 14, 2021

2 Cor 6:1-10, Ps 98, Mt 5:38-42

 

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/6.14.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today we’re one week into our annual 16-day meditation on Jesus’ words to us in the Sermon on the Mount, in which Jesus gives us an image of how he lives and how we’re supposed to live as his disciples. He explicitly calls us with him to fulfill the law, to surpass the standards of righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees, to surpass the standards of the pagans who love those who love them, but to live by Jesus’ own standards, encouraging us to make his words and his example the rock on which we build our life.

* Today we enter into the heart of the contrast between Jesus’ standards and those of the pagans, the Scribes and the Pharisees. Jesus talks about the Law of Talion, which antedates the Old Testament, but was included in the law of Moses, which sought to limit vengeance by saying, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” Merely limiting retaliation, however, wasn’t enough for Jesus. He wanted us to stand up for our dignity while, as he would say later, loving even those who are making themselves our enemies. To turn the other cheek as someone was seeking to backhand us was not principally to be beaten on the other cheek with a forehand but to stand for one’s dignity not to be slapped by preventing one from backhanding us again. It was a means to prevent our being eaten away by resentment by affirming that we’re not resisting but we’re also not giving the other person an opportunity to offend our dignity and his own. Jesus would build on this in the other examples he gives. If someone wants to have our tunic or inner garment, he tells us to give our cloak or jacket, and if he wants us to be pressed into service to deliver something for one mile, that we should go for two. The lesson in all of the examples is the same. It’s the lesson Jesus himself taught in his Good Shepherd Discourse: “No one takes my life from me. I freely lay it down” (Jn 10:18). Rather than being victimized, we willingly participate with love. He wants us to triumph over evil not by allowing it to triumph over us but by responding with love to others’ hatred. Far more courage and virtue are required to be a disciple than to fight evil with more evil. These are Jesus’ standards, to give to the one who asks rather than worrying about the quid pro quo, not to turn our back to someone in need no matter how many times others — or even that person — have turned backs on us. This is the way our righteousness will surpass the scribes and pharisees. This is the way we will love not only those who love us but love like Jesus. This is super challenging teaching but it is part of the truth that sets us free. As Christians we always fight back with love, for if we don’t, to paraphrase St. Paul, we’re nothing more than noisy gongs and clashing cymbals and will gain nothing (1 Cor 13:1-8).

* St. Paul is someone who certainly lived and loved by Jesus’ standards. In the first reading he calls the Corinthians and us urgently to let our lives be transformed by them as well. He reminds us that God gives us his grace today — that now is the acceptable time and the day of salvation — and prays that we will not waste that grace. These worldly hardships and annoyances Jesus describes in the Sermon are all graces to sculpt us more and more in his divine image. St. Paul himself suffered all of the indignities to w...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Eleventh Sunday in Ordinary Time (B), Vigil

June 12, 2021

 

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/6.12.21_Landry_ConCon_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday as we enter anew into the Sundays of Ordinary Time. Over the last three weeks, we have celebrated the birthday of the Church on Pentecost, the feast of the Holy Trinity, which is the model of the communion of the Church, and Corpus Christi and pondered how the Church draws her life from Jesus in the Eucharist. This Sunday, with two parables on the Kingdom of God, Jesus speaks to us about the way the Church grows.

* The first image is of a farmer who scatters seed on his farmland. Without his knowing how and without effort on his part, day and night, the seed begins to grow, yielding the blade, the ear, and the grain until harvest time. The seed does this, Jesus notes, “of its own accord.” This teaches us that the growth of the kingdom, the growth of the Church as a spiritual reality, is not fundamentally our work, but God’s. Imperceptibly, patiently, constantly, it grows. The second image is the more well-known one of the mustard seed, which is very tiny as it is sown in the ground, but through that process of growth Jesus mentions in the first parable, springs up and can become one of the largest of plants where the birds can come to dwell. The kingdom can be at times very small, seemingly insignificant, but Jesus says, it contains within the power of God to grow to be enormous.

* Taken together these images convey to us a sense of the wonder we should have with regard to the Church as a spiritual reality and God’s role in its growth. We’re tempted to look at the Church sometimes too much as an institution, as a human organization, that we must build, like entrepreneurs build a business. We sing songs like, “Let us build the City of God,” which, materially, is similar to the ancients’ saying, “Let us build the Tower of Babel.” Jesus is saying by these images that we don’t build it; he does. The farmer certainly does a little of the work, sowing the seed and tilling the soil, but most of the work happens by what is contained in the seed, what is contained in the soil, and the water and sunshine that God provides. So it is with growth in the Church. God gives the seed of faith, he provides the water of the sacraments, the sunshine of various blessings, the nutrients in the soil like teaching and formation necessary. And because God is involved, we should have confidence in every age.

* For me, the Parable of the Mustard Seed is a great source of hope. Even though the kingdom begins very small, in the heart of one faithful person, over time, it can grow huge. This is, of course, what we see in how the Kingdom began in the Annunciation, when out of Mary’s yes, the Seed (with a capital S) conceived within her by the power of the Holy Spirit, began to grow and eventually all nations would be embraced in the branches of his arms on the Cross. We saw that this is what happened on Pentecost, when out of this small band of apostles, the Church started and experienced extraordinary growth. We’ve seen this happen in the founding of parishes out of a few committed families, of religious movements and orders that began only with the founder, and in families when one person’s conversion led to the conversion of so many other generations.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Thursday in the Tenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

Memorial of St. Landry, Bishop

June 10, 2021

2 Cor 3:15-4:1.3-6, Ps 85, Mt 5:20-26

 

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/6.10.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily:

Today in the Gospel, Jesus tells us something that should startle us, especially early in the morning: “Unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter into the Kingdom of heaven.” That’s a very tall order.  The Scribes were the experts of Sacred Scripture in its every detail. They consecrated their whole life to knowing the Word of God. The Pharisees were the ones who sought to live the Word of God expounded by the Scribes to the letter. Many of the Scribes were Pharisees and vice versa. They prayed three times a day. They fasted not just the one time prescribed per year but twice a week. They tithed not only the various items that God had instructed but the tithed their whole income. By worldly, even by classically religious standards, their righteousness seemed to be almost unsurpassable. But they were missing something. Their righteousness was fundamentally based on their own efforts, their own study, their own will-power, their own sacrifices. It also featured an extrinsic understanding of being right with God: as long as they did the right things, everything, they thought, was fine with God. As the converted Pharisee St. Paul would once say back to them, they thought that they were saved by their own works of the law, by their own external adhesion to the Mosaic law, and not by God, not by a faith-filled living relationship with God.

When Jesus calls us to surpass the righteousness of the Pharisees, he’s doing something shocking, similar today to saying that our holiness needs to surpass the Carthusians and the Poor Clares to enter the kingdom of heaven. What he was doing was not fundamentally calling us to surpass them in memorizing the New Testament along with the Old, in praying four times a day instead of three, in fasting three times a week instead of two, in giving twenty percent of all we have back to God instead of ten. He’s calling us, rather, to three things: first, to have his own relationship to the law in fulfilling the law; second, to grasp that it is all about loving God with everything we have and loving our neighbor as Christ has loved us (which is why we have today’s Alleluia verse, to help us remember this); and to interiorize the law so that our heart is changed, not just our outward behavior. He’s calling us to allow the Word of God, Love incarnate, to become enfleshed within. He’s summoning us to permit God to give us a new heart, to place his law within us as he pours Himself, the Holy Spirit, into our hearts. God had told us through the Prophet Jeremiah that one day he would write his law in our hearts, and that’s precisely what Jesus came to do. That’s what the Holy Spirit seeks to accomplish.

Today Jesus begins a series of powerful applications of what this looks like, because these are things on which everyone needs to surpass the Scribes and the Pharisees. The first is with regard to the fifth commandment. The Lord says, “You have heard that it was said to your ancestors, You shall not kill; and whoever kills will be liable to judgment. But I say to you, whoever is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment, and whoever says to his brother, ‘Raqa,’ will be answerable to the Sanhedrin, and whoever says, ‘You fool,’ will be liable to fiery Gehenna.” Jesus wants to transform the way we relate to others so that we will love them as he has loved us.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Wednesday of the Tenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

Memorial of St. Ephrem

June 9, 2021

2 Cor 3:4-11, Ps 99, Mt 5:17-19

 

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/6.9.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* In today’s first reading, St. Paul focuses on the great gift of the new and eternal covenant made for us by Christ by contrasting it to the former covenant. He calls the first Covenant one “carved in letters on stone,” meaning the Covenant of Sinai, and described it as a “ministry of death” or “ministry of condemnation” because it was meant to help us to learn to die to ourselves, die to our own powers, die to our dream to save us by our own efforts, and open ourselves up to God’s power and his life. St. Paul in his letter to the Galatians would call it a pedagogue, a disciplinarian, a tutor, who, according to ancient custom, would drill us and even “kill us” in lessons so that we might be brought by him to the Master who would build on those foundations. It was to open us up to receive and respond to God’s covenant of salvation by grace received in faith. He says that if the first Covenant was “so glorious,” “how much more” will the new Covenant by the Spirit and the “ministry of righteousness … abound much more in glory.”

* Sometimes when we read such contrasts in St. Paul, who was battling against a tendency among the Pharisees and the “Judaizing Christians” to find salvation in the works of the law rather than by faith in Christ through grace, we can think that the Old Covenant was annulled or even, perhaps, a bad thing. No, it was a great thing and a preparation for the new! As one biblical scholar says, the Old Testament was like an unfinished symphony waiting for Christ to come and bring everything together. That’s what Jesus himself describes in the Gospel today, taken from the Sermon on the Mount. He says, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.” He was coming to respond to all of the Old Covenant hopes, to be the “Yes” as we heard yesterday to all God’s promises, even the littlest: “Amen, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away,” he continued, “not the smallest letter or the smallest part of a letter will pass from the law, until all things have taken place.” He was going to fulfill all of the typological signs of the Old Testament and bring the entire law to find its fulfillment in Christ’s two-fold command of love, on which all the law and the prophets he would say “hang.” He would do this not just by his words but also by his example. Some of the old forms of the “disciplinarian” would fall away in this fulfillment — like dietary laws, even circumcision! — as we received new wineskins for the new wine of the Covenant, but they would not be “abolished.” They would rather be brought to completion, be fulfilled, in a similar way to how a seed metamorphoses into a tree or an embryo into an infant into an adult.

* And he wants us to follow him, to be united to him, in this fulfillment of every letter, every smallest part of the letter, of the Law. He wants us, like him, not to live the letter by the “letter [that] brings death” but to live the smallest part of the letter by the “Spirit [who] gives life,” cooperating with God as he seeks to unite ourselves to him in love. That’s why Jesus pivots and begins to speak about how he wants us to be great by living by the Spirit in fulfilling the law of love. “Whoever obeys and teaches these commandments,” he said, “will be called greatest in the Kingdom of heaven.” And he wants each of us to be great in this way.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Tuesday of the Tenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

June 9, 2021

2 Cor 1:18-22, Ps 119, Mt 5:13-16

 

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/6.8.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in today’s homily: 

* There’s an important prehistory to today’s first reading, taken from St. Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians. Paul had promised to make a return visit to Corinth, but because of sufferings and hardship he had not yet been able to come. Those who were opposed to his message of conversion took upon themselves to try to persuade others that he was unreliable: if he couldn’t even be trusted to keep his word about whether he would be coming to Corinth, how could anything else he said — about God, for example — be reliable? Paul wrote that the source of his veracity is found in God. “As God is faithful,” he said, and then he gave a beautiful witness to how Jesus is the fulfillment, the definitive “yes” to all God’s promises. “For however many are the promises of God,” he wrote, “their Yes is in him.” And Jesus’ yes, he continues, is the source of our own. “The Amen from us also goes through him to God for glory.” God is the one, he asserts, “who gives us security with you in Christ” and “anointed us,” and “put his seal upon us” and “given the Spirit in our hearts.” God is faithful, God fulfills his promises, and our response to God is to reciprocate that fidelity but maintaining our fidelity to his covenants and imitating his yes. Jesus would say in the Sermon on the Mount, “Let your ‘Yes’ mean ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No’ mean ‘No.’ Anything more is from the evil one” (Mt 5:37). St. James himself would echo it: “But above all, my brothers, do not swear, either by heaven or by earth or with any other oath, but let your ‘Yes’ mean ‘Yes’ and your ‘No’ mean ‘No,’ that you may not incur condemnation” (James 5:12). As Christians we are not supposed to vacillate. Christ, Paul, James all want to help us imitate God’s fidelity, and when we say yes to God to persevere in it.

* Jesus describes for us in today’s Gospel how he wishes for us to make our life an Amen to God. He wants us to live up to our vocation and commitment to be the Salt of the Earth and the Light of the World. What are we saying yes to in responding to these vocations?

* In calling us to be the Salt of the Earth, Jesus summons us to a three-fold fidelity.

* The first is as a preservative. Salt was used to preserve meat or fish from rotting. There was obviously no electricity and therefore refrigeration in the ancient world. If any fish or meat was going to last in the sweltering Middle Eastern climate, it needed to be salted. The salt was different than the meat or the fish, pointing to the fact that as Christians we’re supposed to be distinct from the world, in it but not of it. There was something more. There was an ancient saying that the animal and fish that were being preserved were already dead; salt would serve almost as a life-preserver, something that would keep the meat or fish filets from like likewise dying. It almost had a sense of the resurrection, giving them life whereas they, like the fish or animals from which they came, should be dead. All of this points to the fact that Jesus calls us to be his instrument to prevent the earth from going to corruption, from dying. We’re supposed to keep the world and others good. We all know that there are certain people who when they walk into a room keep others on their best behavior, not because others are afraid of them, but because they lift others to a higher standard by the way they themselves live. Jesus wants us to be like that person.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Monday of the Tenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

June 7, 2021

2 Cor 1:1-7, Ps 34, Mt 5:1-12

 

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/6.7.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* This Friday, June 11, is the feast of St. Barnabas, but because of the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, it will not be observed. Yet it’s important to focus on the nickname the members of the early Church gave him, “Son of Encouragement,” something we see in a particular way in his support for St. Paul, and a Christian virtue that is needed in every age. Today we can focus on the type of encouragement St. Paul received from God through him and then focus on the encouragement Jesus, through his Sacred Heart, gives us all.

* In today’s first reading, taken from the beginning of St. Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians, St. Paul uses the word “encourage” nine different times. He describes how God encourages us in our afflictions precisely so that, having received his strength at those times, we might credibly be able to encourage others with the same encouragement — namely God’s — we have received. St. Paul received this encouragement various times as we see in the Acts of the Apostles and his letters. Right after this passage, he describes how his afflictions were crushing him. But God came to his aid and helped him to see that “If we are afflicted, it is for your encouragement and salvation; if we are encouraged, it is for your encouragement, which enables you to endure the same sufferings that we suffer.” What we prayed in the Psalm happens often: “When the poor one called out, the Lord heard, and from all his distress he saved him.” God permits us to suffer partially so that we might in turn receive his encouragement and then be better equipped to share that blessing with others. That’s part of the good that God wants to bring out of the evil he permits us to endure (since to prevent absolutely our suffering evil would eliminate others’ free will). Most of us have had many examples of this pattern: if we’ve suffered, for example, a physical illness and recovered, we’re able to encourage those suffering the same illness; if we’re gone through a particularly grueling academic program, we can help those who are beginning;  if we’ve had to endure the dark night of the senses in prayer, we can help those who are now just entering into it. God encourages us in our circumstances and thereby equips us to encourage others. His encouragement is both a gift and a preparation.

* We see how Jesus similarly seeks to encourage others in today’s Gospel in sharing the Beatitudes. I normally prefer to preach on the Beatitudes in a straightforward way, contrasting Jesus’ notion of the path happiness from the world’s and using it as an introduction to the entire Sermon on the Mount on which we’ll be pondering for the next almost three weeks. But we can look at it under the aspect of Jesus’ encouragement from within the encouragement he has received from the Father. An important key that unlocks the Beatitudes comes at the very end. In many presentations of the Beatitudes, it’s listed that there are “eight” of them, and under this frame it seems as if Jesus is repeating numbers seven and eight with different words: “Blessed are they who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness” and “Blessed are you when they insult you and persecute you and utter every kind of evil against you falsely because of me.” But another way of looking at it is that in the last Beatitude, Jesus is summarizing what he said in all seven that came previously: when we live any of the Beatitudes,