Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Mass for December 21

Memorial of St. Peter Canisius

December 21, 2019

Song 2:8-14, Ps 33, Lk 1:39-45

 

To listen to an audio recording of this homily, please click here: 

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The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* There’s a great irony of proclaiming in today’s first reading from the Song of Songs, “The winter is past,” on the day winter begins, with the winter solstice occurring at 5:02 am Eastern time this morning. But the connection will make far greater sense if we understand these words from the Song of Songs from the perspective of today’s O Antiphon* (see explanation below): O Oriens, splendor lucis aeternae et sol iustitiae: veni et illumina sedentes in tenebris et umbra mortis. “O Rising Sun in the East, splendor of eternal light and sun of justice, come, illumine those sitting in darkness and the shadow of death.” Jesus is the Rising Sun and his light — his eternal “Light from Light” — shines in the midst of the greatest darkness and makes the darkest day of the year radiant. Even when we’re walking through the dark valley of the shadow of death, Jesus comes to bring us into the kingdom of light.

* We see this happen in the Gospel. Even though John the Baptist is in the darkness of Elizabeth’s womb, Jesus comes in the womb of Mary and irradiates that darkness with his light and joy. We see the same dynamism in the first reading, the Song of Songs, which is an allegory of the dramatic loving dialogue that’s supposed to happen between God and each one of our souls. Much more than a husband and wife who have been apart for a year run across airports to embrace each other, so our longing is meant to be even greater for God because his longing is greater for us. There’s darkness in separation, but the hope of reunion shines in the midst of that darkness, and when the encounter happens, the long night is forgotten.

* Throughout Advent our desire is supposed to be growing like we see in the Song of Songs. The main purpose of the Advent wreath is to indicate what’s supposed to be happening within us, that week by week, the flame of our intense desire is meant to be doubling, tripling and quadrupling. And that’s what we see in the relationship between Bridegroom and Bride in this passage, which has inspired so many mystics, like St. Bernard and St. John of the Cross, to use it as a paradigm for the loving relationship we’re supposed to have with God. Jesus is coming as a Lover “springing across the mountains, leaping across the hills, … like a gazelle or a young stag.” He was doing that in the Gospel within Mary’s womb before he had even the tiniest of feet. He speaks, continually saying, “Arise, my beloved, my dove, my beautiful one and come!” He wants to raise us from sitting in darkness and the shadow of death, and come to him who loves us, who finds us beautiful and pure. He wants to see us, to hear our voice, to have us “sing a new song” (today’s Responsorial Psalm, literally the “song of the dove,” the song inspired by the Holy Spirit that we’re called to sing to our Emmanuel. This is the whole essence of Advent. Jesus is coming out of love for us because he seeks to espouse us to him forever. He’s coming because he loves us, because he finds us beautiful, and wants, by water and the word,  to make us like a dove, “pure and immaculate in his sight” (Eph 5:25-27).

* In our world, in our souls, the darkness that Christ wants to heal is wherever Christ doesn’t shine. St. John tells us in his Gospel about Jesus, “The light came into the world, but people preferred darkness to light, because their works were evil” (Jn 3:19). Jesus is coming into the world precisely to bring us in...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

St. Agnes Church, Manhattan

Fourth Sunday of Advent, Extraordinary Form

December 20, 2020

1 Cor 4:1-5, Lk 3:1-6

 

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

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The following text guided today’s homily: 

At daily Masses this Tuesday (in the Ordinary Form), the Church pondered Jesus’ parable of the two sons whom the Father asked to go out and work in his vineyard. The first son said “No,” but afterward had a change of heart and went. The other son said, “Yes, Sir!” but did not go. Jesus asked the chief priests and the elders of the people who were surrounding him which of the two did the Father’s will. And they replied, “The first,” to which he said, to their shocked ears in application of the Parable: “Amen, I say to you, tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the Kingdom of God before you! When John [the Baptist] came to you in the way of righteousness, you did not believe him, but tax collectors and prostitutes did. Yet even when you saw that, you did not later convert and believe him!”

Today is the third consecutive Sunday in which John the Baptist comes to us in the “way of righteousness” calling us to a particular form of hard work in the vineyard of our soul. Two weeks ago we heard his appeal in St. Matthew’s Gospel, last week in St. John’s, and today in St. Luke’s, and while there are slightly different emphases and nuances in the different accounts, what unites them is the un-nuanced priority given to his central summons, the message God sent him to announce at the Jordan 2000 years ago and sends him to reiterate every Advent. John the Baptist calls us, as a voice of Jesus crying out in the desert, to “prepare the way of the Lord,” to “make straight his paths,” to fill in the “valleys” of a shallow prayer or moral life, to lower the “mountains and hills” of our pride and vanity, to straighten the “winding roads” that distract and delay us from growth in holiness and to smooth those paths that are rough, inconsistent, coarse and unfit for encountering the Lord and following him fully.

Two weeks ago when he called us to conversion, we said, “Laus tibi, Christe!” after his words were proclaimed. Last week, we repeated that praise to Christ for the summons of his precursor. Just minutes ago, we shot for the spiritual hat trick. But the question for us is whether we’ve really followed through. Have we just said “Yes, sir!” like the second son in Jesus’ parable or have we acted on that commitment? Have we, like road construction workers and civil engineers, done the hard work of conversion to which the Baptist calls us or are the same mountains and valleys, the identical winding roads and rough ways still there?

In his parable, Jesus told the chief priests and elders of the people that the publicans and prostitutes were entering God’s kingdom before they were, because when these notorious classes of sinners heard the Baptist, they were repenting, whereas the religious leaders of the people were just giving lip service to the divine call John was announcing. When God through his Church sends us St. John the Baptist for three consecutive Sundays in Advent, he is basically saying to us, “I’ve called you not once, not twice, but three times to conversion!” Would he be able to say to us now that we’ve responded to that call the way the known sinners of John’s days did or the way the so-called more religious people did?

One of the most obvious applications of this summons to prepare the way of the Lord is to make a really good confession in Advent, what we’d like to be the best confession of our life, the confession we would make if it were our last. If you have not yet had the chance to do so,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Fourth Sunday of Advent (B)

December 19, 2020

 

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

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The text that guided the homily is: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy to have a chance to ponder with you the consequential conversation God wants to have with us this Sunday, when, we have the chance to ponder how to prepare well for the celebration of the Lord’s birth by focusing on the lessons we can learn from the Blessed Virgin Mary.

* On the Fourth Sunday of Advent each year, as we draw closer to Christmas, the Church has us ponder either Mary, as we do this year with her Annunciation and next year with the Visitation, or St. Joseph, upon whom the Church meditated last year with the Angel’s words to him in a dream. Mary always leads to Christ, St. Louis de Montfort taught in a phrase St. John Paul II loved, provided that we “live her mystery in Christ.” We climb within her womb, so to speak, to draw close to the Blessed Fruit of that womb as he is silently growing, and we listen to her contemplative heartbeat as it seeks to synchronize our heart to hers and Jesus’.

* This need to take on this Marian perspective is always important, because so many of us struggle to live Advent well. We spend more time shopping, or at the post office, or watching programs on Frosty or Rudolf than we do together with the Lord. Without even knowing it, we become immersed in a secular way of living December, watering Christmas down to “season’s greetings,” listening for jingling bells, and focused more on whether there will be a white Christmas than a holy one. Our souls can be touched, as they should be, by the stories of Secret Santas who go out of their way to be good to others, but we don’t spend time on how God by coming into the world to save us has given us the greatest and most generous of all time. Even this year when because of the pandemic, there will be far less time walking in malls or traveling to parties or, sadly, getting together with family members, many people are struggling to put God first. Earlier this week, too religious sisters in a convent told me that they were really struggling in Advent because they were spending so much of their days baking gifts or preparing for volunteers for their convents and apostolates that their souls were becoming dissipated.

* That’s why we all, always, need Mary’s help, especially in Advent. She is, in some sense, Advent personified. She was the one God prepared himself, through her Immaculate Conception, for the incarnation and birth of the Word of God. She wants to help us relive her mystery. What lessons do we learn from her, especially as we ponder the scene of the Archangel Gabriel’s visit to her asking if she would become the mother of the Son of God?

* The first thing is that we need to allow God to clean our interior abode.

* God did so with Mary through her Immaculate Conception. He does so with us through baptism and confession.

* Mary continues the work of St. John the Baptist, gently, maternally, calling us to be free from sin so that, like her, we may welcome God within.

* In the first reading on Sunday, we will see how David wanted to build a house for the Ark of the Covenant, for God’s presence, but God instead told David he would build him a house. We know that this promise was fulfilled in David’s descendant according to the flesh, Jesus. And when the Son of God took flesh and dwelled among us he took up his first abode, his first tabernacle, in Mary’s womb, living there for the first nine months of his human life.

* Sometimes, like David,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Mass for December 19

December 19, 2020

Jdg 13:2-7.24-25, Ps 71, Lk 1:5-25

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/12.19.20_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today’s readings and O Antiphon help us to enter more deeply into the dynamism of God’s interaction with us as Christians, how he seeks to transform what seems lifeless into something fruitful and sacred and how we need silence to approach these mysteries with a proper sense of wonder.

* The O Antiphon that the Church has us ponder in the Gospel Verse and at Vespers today is O radix Jesse, qui stas in signum populorum, super quem continebunt reges os suum, quem gentes deprecabuntur: veni ad liberandum nos, iam noli tardare, “O root of Jesse, who stand as a sign for the people about whom kings stay silent and before whom all the nations pray: come to free us, do not delay.” These sacred fourth-century words come from two parts of the famous passage from the Book of Isaiah that we heard back on Tuesday of the first week of Advent: “A shoot shall sprout from the stump of Jesse, and from his roots a bud shall blossom. On that day, the root of Jesse, set up as a signal for the nations, the Gentiles shall seek out for his dwelling shall be glorious” (Is 11:1,10).  The other part of the Antiphon comes from the passage about the Suffering Servant later, when Isaiah, speaking about what he would suffer for us, prophesies, “Even as many were amazed at him — so marred was his look beyond that of man, and his appearance beyond that of mortals —  so shall he startle many nations, because of him kings shall stand speechless; for those who have not been told shall see, those who have not heard shall ponder it” (Is 52:14-15). Together they reveal to us the shocking surprise of the rise of the shoot from Jesse’s stump. From a stump — which seems sterile, cut down — we don’t expect much growth, but we see that the shoot would eventually reach across the globe and into eternity. Isaiah was referring not to King David’s descendant Jesus, who was set up as a sign to the nations of the presence of God. And that leads us to the response before this wondrous transformation: Before him, the O Antiphon based on Isaiah continues, kings stayed silent, as we see with the three kings at his birth, blown away by his humility, resting not in silk garments in a palace but wrapped in swaddling clothes in a manger. We see it before King Herod on Good Friday. We see it still as the kings and leaders or the earth look at Jesus on the Cross. God’s love, his willingness to become so small and humble, his willingness to suffer and die to save us, ought to make us speechless with amazement. Likewise before him all the nations come to pray, as we saw once again in the coming of the Magi, in the Centurion, Syro-Phoenician woman, the Greeks and so many others during his lifetime, and still today. His dwelling turned out out to be even more glorious than the Temple in Jerusalem in all its splendor: his very body became the refulgence of the glory of God.

* We can enter more deeply into this exodus from barrenness into fruitfulness, from silence to the fullness of wonder, in today’s readings, both of which feature sterile women. In something as wondrous as a shoot sprouting from a stump that didn’t seem capable of generating a whole forest that would never be cut down, we see two women whose wombs were barren, who after much prayer and longing finally conceived a son. In the first reading, we have the wife of Manoah (who unfortunately is never named!), who hadn’t been able to conceive. The angel appears to her doubtless as a response to her prayer and say...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

December 18 Mass

December 18, 2020

Jer 23:5-8, Ps 72, Mt 1:18-25

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/12.18.20_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* “This is the name they give him,” the Prophet Jeremiah says today. A name is essential for us to enter into interpersonal dialogue. Today we encounter five different names, names God gives to himself, names we use to refer to God. Each of them helps us to relate to God more deeply as the names complement and deepen our understanding of God, how he wishes us to interact with him and how he wishes to have us grow in his image and likeness.

* The first two names come from today’s O Antiphon, which influences how we’re supposed to live this day of Advent longing and how we’re supposed to hear and receive the Word of God announced to us in Mass. The Latin is O Adonai et Dux domus Israel, qui Moysi in igne flammae rubi apparuisti, et ei in Sina legem dedisti: veni ad redimendum nos in brachio extento, which is literally translated, “O Lord and Leader of the House of Israel, who appeared to Moses in the burning bush and gave him the law on Sinai: come to redeem us with outstretched arm!” We refer to God today as both  “leader of the house of Israel” and “Adonai” (Lord), the latter meaning not leader not just of Israel but of everyone, pointing to how Jesus came to redeem not merely the Jews but all nations. We remember how this God revealed himself as Lord of all to Moses in the burning bush, identifying himself as “I am who am” (Yahweh in Hebrew), the one gives existence to every creature. This name was so holy that only the high priest would utter it only once a year in the Holy of Holies. The Jews would substitute “Adonai” for it, “Lord,” but use it to refer to the same reality as Creator and life-giver. But the long-awaited One was also the leader of the house of Israel, the “God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob,” who specially blessed the Jews with the Covenant on Mt. Sinai featuring the commandments. Therefore, we, both Jews and non-Jews, turn to the Messiah and ask him to redeem us with his outstretched arm. The image is of someone saving us from falling off a cliff, or reaching in to the water to pull us up as we’re drowning. And the three-fold way the antiphon implies he will save us is through prayer (dialogue with God as seen in the burning bush), the moral life (shown in the commandments which train us to love), and ultimately the Cross (when Jesus stretched forth his arms to save us).

* These thoughts help us to approach the real drama contained in the readings where we find the other three titles. In the Gospel, we get both “Emmanuel” and “Jesus.” Emmanuel means “God-with-us” and Jesus means, “Yahweh saves.” The Lord and leader of the House of Israel comes to be with us in the incarnation precisely in order to save us. We see this salvation depicted in the first reading. The prophet Jeremiah describes how, in the days of the  “righteous shoot” to David,  “Judah will be saved.” Just as God redeemed Israel from slavery in Egypt, so he would redeem Israel again from the “lands of the north,” which refers not only to Assyria and Babylon to which many of the Jews were forcibly brought after conquering Israel, but much more broadly to those in other lands, since with the exception of Egypt, most of the other known inhabitants were located north of the Holy Land. The Lord would save them from them all. In the Gospel, when the Angel reveals what St. Joseph is to call Mary’s son, he says that the child will be called “Jesus,” “God saves,” precisely because “he will save his people fr...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Mass of December 17

December 17, 2020

Is 49:2.8-10, Ps 72, Mt 1:1-17

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/12.17.20_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today we begin the second phase of Advent dedicated to the proximate preparation for the celebration of the Lord’s birth. In the first phase of Advent, which runs from the first Sunday of Advent through December 16, we focus on the Lord’s “triple-coming” in history (Bethlehem), mystery (the sacraments and prayer), and majesty (on the clouds of heaven for the second coming), with a special accent on the third and, based on it, the second and how we’re called to run out to embrace him in each of these three ways that, transformed by him, we begin to journey with him. Now we shift gears and we will begin traversing the events that happened just before our Savior’s birth.

* To accompany us each day, the Church gives us the ancient “O Antiphons,” called “O” because they all start with a vocative, calling the Lord Jesus by a specific title, and then asking him under that title to do something specific for us so that we may become more like him. These antiphons were already in use in the 700s in Rome but may have their origin a few hundred years earlier than that. In them, we’ll address Jesus in Latin, O Sapientia (O Wisdom), O Adonai (O Lord), O Radix Jesse (O Root of Jesse), O Clavis David (O Key of David), O Oriens (O Rising Sun), O Rex Gentium (O King of the Nations), and finally O Emmanuel (O God-with-us). These Antiphons are prayed by the Church twice a day, originally and principally during Vespers before and after the Magnificat canticle and then  during the Alleluia verse to prepare us for the Gospel at Mass. They influence the way we’re supposed to relate to Jesus as he comes into our world, the way we’re supposed to respond with joy to the reception of God’s word. The beautiful Advent hymn we sing “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel,” is based on the O Antiphons, but the translation is a little loose and they’ve changed the traditional order. Regardless, it is a beautiful hymn not just to sing but upon which to meditate during this proximate preparation for Christmas.

* The O Antiphon we have today orients our approach to today’s readings: O Sapientia, quae ex ore Altissimi prodisti, attingens a fine usque ad finem, fortiter sauviterque disponens omnia: veni ad docendum nos viam prudentiae. “O Wisdom, who have come from the mouth of God Most High, guiding all created things strongly and sweetly from end to end: come to teach us the way of prudence.” And Jesus, Wisdom incarnate, responds to that prayer by teaching us the way of wisdom that effuses his genealogy.

* The first reaction of most of us to the Lord’s genealogy is that it concerns anything but wisdom. Pope Francis, whose 84th birthday we mark today, said that when this passage is read, many comment it’s like reading straight out of the telephone book. But there’s something else going on. Just like today we celebrate not only Jorge Mario Bergoglio but also focus on his roots as the first of five children of Mario José Bergoglio and Regina Maria Sivori, so the genealogy of the Lord first shows us history: that the Word of God not only became man and dwelled among us but became “history.” He entered our history. Jews were focused on genealogies and it was highly significant for St. Matthew to show that Jesus was a descendent first of Abraham and then of David. This communicated, respectively, that he was a Jew and he was an appropriate candidate to be the Messiah as a descendant of King David. We can also comment, in this Year of St.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Wednesday of the Third Week of Advent

December 16, 2020

Is 45:6-8.18.21-25, Ps 85, Lk 7:18-23

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/12.16.20_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today we come to the end of the first part of Advent. Tomorrow, we begin our proximate preparation for Christmas with the genealogy of Christ. And on this last day of the first part, the Lord summarizes what the real theme has been, about that triple dynamism on which we’ve concentrating: God’s action, our reaction and going out to meet him, and the way that that’s supposed to transform us so that, together with him, we will walk together on the Christian journey into the future.

* This first part of Advent is summarized with a beautiful meteorological image from Isaiah, which has become over the course of time probably one of the most famous of all Advent hymns. Isaiah summarizes for us the type of longing for God we’re supposed to have in his words from today’s first reading that were repeated in our Responsorial Psalm: “Let the clouds rain down the Just One and the earth bring forth the Savior.” Rorate Caeli Desuper et Nubes Pluant Iustum. We turn to God and beg him to rain down his Son, the Just One, whose mission was to help make us just and holy.

* God reminds us through Isaiah today that he didn’t establish the earth for it to be a “waste,” or just to be inhabited, but to be “lived in.” Jesus came to restore that original plan, being born, living, dying and rising so that we might have life and have it to the full. But for this to occur, the rain of God’s grace coming from above must meet good soil thirsty for God. That’s what today’s Psalm is about as we pray, “I will hear what God proclaims… for he proclaims peace to his people. Near indeed is his salvation to those who fear him.” After God the Father rains down the Just One and the earth brings forth the Savior from the womb of the Virgin, we proclaim what’s God’s plans for us: “Justice shall walk before him and salvation along the way of his steps.” In other words, Jesus the Just One will walk before us bidding us to follow him along the path of holiness, and if we journey along those steps he will guide us all the way to eternal salvation. What consoling words these are! What a consoling reality God wants them to become! But the question for us is whether we have that soil that thirst for God to rain down his Son into our lives, whether we’re ready to receive God’s grace and allow salvation to spring up from God’s work within us. That’s why today’s Gospel is so important. The Church puts before us once again the figure of St. John the Baptist so that we might examine honestly whether we have been responding as we should this Advent to God’s holy action.

* John the Baptist sends the men and women who were clinging to him to Jesus with the question, “Are you the one who is to come or should we look for another?” He wanted his disciples then — and all of us now — to get off the fence and if we really believe Jesus is the One to act like it. If Jesus really is the one, if he really is the long-awaited Messiah and Son of God, then the logical result is to put Jesus absolutely front and center, first and supreme in our life. If he really is the One, then it’s time for us to follow him all the way, to live in his kingdom, to rejoice in his presence, and to share that great news with others. If Jesus really is that Just One poured down from heaven, then we shouldn’t be looking for anyone or anything else, we shouldn’t be hedging our bets on the way we live, but go all in. Faith, after all,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Monday of the Third Week of Advent

Memorial of St. John of the Cross, Doctor of the Church

December 14, 2020

Num 24:2-7.15-17, Ps 25, Mt 21:23-27

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/12.14.20_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* We can’t help but notice a huge contrast today between the first reading and the Gospel. In the Book of Numbers, we see this mysterious figure called Balaam, who was a pagan diviner whom the Moabite King Balac bribed to pronounce a curse over Israel. When Balaam tried to curse Israel on four separate occasions, however, he couldn’t. Instead he pronounced a blessing — and the greatest blessing of all, foretelling the coming of Jesus 1,300 year later: “I see him, though not now; I behold him, though not near: a star shall advance from Jacob and a [shepherd’s] staff shall rise from Israel.” Even though Balaam certainly didn’t start in the right place, he couldn’t help but acknowledge and announce the truth and the light that God revealed to him.

* In the Gospel we see something totally different. The chief priests and elders of the people, who had started with God’s revelation, who had prayed since their youth the words of today’s Psalm, “Teach me your ways, O Lord!,” ended up rejecting God’s ways, spurning Jesus’ fulfillment of all the Old Testament Messianic prophecies as well as the prophetic announcement of John the Baptist. For them, they were no longer interested in the truth. They were not hungry to learn and follow God’s paths. They thought they already had all the answers they needed. They thought that they were firmly on the path. They were interested only in authority, and, frankly, not God’s authority but their own. They asked Jesus, “By whose authority are you doing these things?,” because they knew Jesus didn’t have their authority, and likely, they thought, hadn’t received a mission from anyone else who could give it in categories they would acknowledge. The fact that God had given him authority — or even more, that he was God and was speaking on his own authority — hadn’t even crossed their mind because it was a category they did not want to acknowledge even existed. Jesus knew this and for that reason asked a question not to trip them up but to bring them conversion, seeking to have them acknowledge God’s authority. That’s why he asked, “Where was John’s baptism from? Was it of heavenly or of human origin?” It was designed to open them up to the fact that God, as the Source of all authority, could have sent John. But they didn’t respond with a desire for the truth of things, just with a political calculation: “If we say, ‘Of heavenly origin,’ he will say to us, ‘Then why did you not believe him?’ But if we say, ‘Of human origin,’ we fear the crowd, for they all regard John as a prophet.’ So they said to Jesus in reply, ‘We do not know.’” Even though they supposedly “didn’t know” and didn’t really care to know, they were not agnostic in their approach to Jesus. They did not treat John as a prophet. They didn’t heed John’s message. They didn’t make straight the paths. And they didn’t heed John’s indication of Jesus as the Lamb of God who had come into the world to fulfill all the prophecies of the sacrificial lambs in the temple.

* We see in the Psalm the attitude each of us should have toward God’s word announced to us with God’s authority through St. John the Baptist and announced to us by the Author himself: “Guide me in your truth and teach me!” There’s supposed to be not only an openness but an active, hungry docility. God always wants to respond to that prayer, but we need to be open to how he responds.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Third Sunday of Advent (B)

December 12, 2020

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/12.12.20_Landry_ConCon.m4a

 

The text that guided the homily is: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy to have a chance to ponder with you the consequential conversation God wants to have with us this Sunday, when, for the second Sunday in a row, we encounter St. John the Baptist who proclaims to us, “I am the voice of one crying out in the desert, “Make straight the way of the Lord.” The Old Testament priests and Levites from Jerusalem who came to him at the Jordan were trying to figure him out. “Who are you?,” they asked. He wasn’t the Messiah. He wasn’t Elijah come to life again. He wasn’t the Prophet Moses. So they asked him again, “Who are you, so we can give an answer to those who sent us? What do you have to say for yourself?” That’s when he announced he was the forerunner of another, the voice of the one calling all of us to conversion, of the one who was coming after him who would baptize with the Holy Spirit and whose sandal strap he was not worthy to untie. Church tradition has always referred to John the Baptist as the precursor of the Lord, because as his father Zechariah said at his birth, he would “go before the Lord to prepare his ways, to give his people knowledge of salvation through the forgiveness of sins.”

* In the ancient world, before Twitter and Facebook, before text messages and the internet, before televisions and radios, before newspapers and posters, how would people be informed that a dignitary was coming to their town? Heralds would be sent out to alert everyone, to call them to attention, so that the one who is coming might be expected, desired and welcomed, so that they could repair the roads and the bridges or make new ones, so that they could clean everything up, and so that the people may notice and greet the one who was coming when he arrived. This is the service that John the Baptist fulfilled for the Lord’s coming 2000 years ago and the Church has him do for us still.

* As Catholics, however, we’re called not merely to receive and be grateful for the work of the Lord’s forerunner, but we’re also called to become precursors in our own right. Jesus constantly has need of heralds to announce his presence and coming. And all of us, by our baptism and strengthened by our confirmation, have been consecrated to carry out this role. Jesus went to John and sanctified him from the beginning in the womb of his mother Elizabeth, because he would later be his indomitable herald. The same Lord has chosen us, has redeemed and sanctified us, at the beginning of our lives in the womb of our mother, the Church, (which is the baptismal font), so that we might be his witnesses in the world, so that we might smooth out his paths and prepare others for his coming. We are called, as John the Baptist said in today’s Gospel, to be a voice for Christ, to announce to others, “‘In your midst there is one whom you do not know,’ one for whom you are searching, who can make you happy, one who will never deceive you, the only one who has the words of eternal life.”

* The renewal that is meant to take place in us each Advent begins with our receiving John the Baptist’s call and making straight the paths for Christ to come to us, but it doesn’t stop there. The fruit is for us to echo John the Baptist’s call and help others likewise to prepare the way for the Lord. This is the greatest gift we could give to anyone at Christmas.

* We’re now living in a world in which so many of the baptized are living day-to-day and even on Sunday’s as if God doesn’t exist,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe

December 12, 2020

Rev 11:19.12:1-6.10, Judith 13:18-19, Lk 1:39-47

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/12.12.20_Visitation_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in this homily: 

* “How does this happen to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” This question asked by St. Elizabeth in the Visitation ought to be asked by each of us today on this great feast of the Patroness of America, Our Lady of Guadalupe. Mary identified herself to St. Juan Diego in Tepeyac as the “Mother of God” and then later as our “Merciful Mother” and she came there as a woman on a mission. A specific type of mission. She’s pregnant with Jesus seeking to bring him to others. In the Gospel, we see what she does as soon as she became pregnant by the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit: she went with haste to care for her cousin Elizabeth, forming her embryonic son to be the itinerant missionary he would become before he even had developed the tiniest of feet. And when she arrived in Ein Karim, Jesus blessed his in utero cousin John the Baptist in the womb, preparing him for his own mission as the precursor of the Messiah. Likewise in the first reading from the Book of Revelation, we see Mary pregnant once again, this time with the Church — we know it’s the Church because she “wailed aloud in pain as she labored to give birth,” something that didn’t happen in Bethlehem, but certainly happened on Calvary as Jesus announced to her that she was to be the mother of the human race — seeking to help bring to birth in all of God’s children the image and likeness of her Son Jesus. Mary seeks to do for us what Jesus entrusted her to do as he was dying on the Cross: to help bring her Son to birth in us. When Mary appeared to St. Juan Diego 489 years ago, when she imprinted her image in his tilma, she did so as a pregnant Aztec princess, a symbol that she was about to give birth to her son here in our continent, in our hemisphere. Christianity had arrived in Mexico just a short ten years before but there were relatively few converts because most of the indigenous people were turned off by the conquistadors rather than turned on by the Franciscan missionaries to the Lord both groups claimed to believe in. But after her appearance and seeing the image of this mestiza woman — which was an harmoniously beautiful mix between Indian and Spanish features, showing the compatibility of the Gospel being announced by the Spanish Franciscans and the Indian nature — there started to be converts by the millions. Ten million came to the faith in just the next decade.

* The mission Our Lady of Guadalupe gave to St. Juan Diego shows us how Mary sought to give birth to her Son in his hemisphere. It wasn’t merely bringing people to baptism and the sacraments. It was incorporating them into her Son’s saving mission. It was helping them to continue her own work of bringing Christ to birth in others. When she identified herself to St. Juan Diego, she said, “Am I not here who am your Mother?” She identified herself as his merciful Mother and told him she wanted a place built where she could “hear [her sons’ and daughters’] weeping, their complaints and heal all their sorrows, hardships and sufferings.” In this kairos of Mercy in which we’re living in the Church and the world, Mary wants to show herself to be our merciful Mother, to hear our sorrows, hardships and sufferings, and to help us to become like Juan Diego’s, facilitating her doing that for so many others. St. Juan Diego’s vocation story shows us all how each of us, no matter how unworthy we think we are, are asked to cooperate in this missionary work of C...