Catholic Preaching

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Wednesday of the Third Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

Memorial of St. Angela Merici

January 27, 2021

Heb 10:11-18, Ps 110, Mk 4:1-20

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/1.27.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Three days ago the Church celebrated Sunday of the Word of God. Today Jesus gives us one of his most important parables about how we are to receive the gift of that word and what to expect when we seek to share that word with others. He calls the word a seed, he describes how he, and later his followers, sow that word, and then he talks about four different types of response to it in four different types of soil. Today is an opportunity for us to take a soil sample of our receptivity to God’s word in our life and more broadly our openness to God’s action.

* Jesus uses not just this parable but every parable to bring into the light the receptivity of those who hear him. When he was asked by those with the apostles why he spoke in parables, he said, quoting the Prophet Isaiah, “The mystery of the Kingdom of God has been granted to you. But to those outside everything comes in parables, so that ‘they may look and see but not perceive, and hear and listen but not understand, in order that they may not be converted and be forgiven.’” Jesus uses parables because it exposes whether those listening are hungry to grow in truth. The parables require some work to understand them and especially to understand their application by analogy to the things of the life of faith. There are some — we could say, some with the first three types of soil Jesus will say later in the Parable — who won’t really put in the work to grasp them. They’ll look and see but not perceive, hear and listen but not understand precisely because they don’t think they really need the truth of the parable at all or enough to justify the effort. They don’t really think they need conversion, need saving, and need that word. It’s only those with good soil, who hunger for the truth, who will put in the effort to decipher the meaning of the parable and live by it. They’re the ones who will struggle, together with God’s grace, to hear and listen in order to understand, to see and perceive.

* To understand the meaning of the parable, we first need to grasp how farming was done in Jesus’ day. Farm plots were long and thin and there were paths between them on which the farmers and all pedestrians would walk. Sowers would just scatter seed everywhere and it would land in various places. Then the farmers would go and try to turn over the soil — rather than turning over the soil and then planting, as we do today.

* Jesus describes four types of earth that the seed of his Word and work falls upon. The first is soil along the path. Over time, the dirt would be packed down, the seed couldn’t penetrate it, and the birds would come and eat the seeds that had fallen upon it. This refers to those with stubborn soil, who are not receptive to God’s word, either because they’re inveterate sinners or because they think they already know what they need to know. Jesus says, “As soon as they hear, Satan comes at once and takes away the word sown in them.”

* The second type of soil is “rocky ground,” where there is “little soil.” These refer to those who are superficial. In the Holy Land, many areas have a thick layer of limestone a few inches beneath the surface. It keeps most the water within those three inches and so at first a seed will sprout up immediately, but because of the limestone, the roots can’t go very deep and when the not Middle Eastern sun arises,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Tuesday of the Third Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

Memorial of SS. Timothy and Titus

January 26, 2021

2 Tim 1:1-8, Ps 96, Mk 3:31-36

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/1.26.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Two days ago we celebrated Sunday of the Word of God dedicated to helping us grow in our love for, knowledge of and living of what God has revealed. In today’s Gospel, Jesus reveals to us that he has come to found a family and his family — as shown so eminently in the life of his mother whose whole life can be summarized by her fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum — are distinguished by doing the will of God that he reveals. This isn’t about sometime of cold, extrinsic obedience to arbitrary commands, but a loving, faithful adhesion to God and with trust and affection seeking to do what pleases him. It’s not a clash of wills but a concordance, in which we want to accomplish what God wants, knowing that what he wants and commands is out of love for us.

* We had a chance, yesterday, to ponder St. Paul’s doing the will of God. He sought to do it, erroneously, prior to his conversion, when out of zeal for God’s law he was persecuting Jesus in his Mystical Body, the Church. After the Lord met him outside the gates of Damascus, he asked, “What do you want me to do, Lord?,” and then not only did what Jesus asked, but spent the rest of his life preaching and exemplifying the loving, trusting obedience of faith. SS. Timothy and Titus, whom we celebrate today, were those who learned from St. Paul this lesson and in turn sought to proclaim and model this faithful fulfillment of God’s word and will and thereby build up the family of God. St. Paul praises St. Timothy for having been acquainted with the Scriptures since childhood (2 Tim 1:5) and he stresses with him in his letter to have greater confidence still. “Remain faithful to what you have learned and believed, because you know from whom you learned it and that from infancy you have known the sacred Scriptures, which are capable of giving you wisdom for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for refutation, for correction and for training in righteousness so that one who belongs to God may be competent, equipped for every good work” (2 Tim 3:14-16). When in today’s passage St. Paul urges him to “stir into a flame the gift of God” Timothy had received, a key part of that gift was love for God and his holy word. We are all called to have our love for knowing God’s word and doing it grow into a bonfire.

* Likewise St. Paul communicated that same holy desire to do God’s will to his collaborator St. Titus. In the passage the Church proposes today as an alternate first reading, St. Paul described how God “at the proper time revealed his word in the proclamation with which I was entrusted.” He heard the Word of God, meditated upon it and had an inner woe until he shared it as of the first importance with others. He knew that Titus, too, had been entrusted with the proclamation of that word and throughout his letter he urged Titus to “say what is consistent with sound doctrine (Tit 2:1), saying that the way that he would be able to exhort in that way would be by “holding fast to the true message as taught” (Tit 1:9).

* As we, like Paul, Timothy and Titus, seek to “proclaim God’s marvelous deeds to all the nations,” to “sing to the Lord a new song,” to “bless his name,” to “announce his salvation day after day,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Third Sunday in Ordinary Time (B)

January 23, 2021

 

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. Last week we examined the type of growth in faith that is meant to happen in the life of every Christian. We did so, we can say, from the subjective perspective, from the experience of St. Andrew and St. John, passing from fascination and curiosity about Jesus, to the trust that characterizes following him as disciples, to the enthusiastic sharing of the faith that marks the apostolate. This Sunday we have a chance to examine the type of growth that is meant to characterize our Christian life from Jesus’ own perspective with the help of Jesus’ words and actions at the beginning of his public ministry. In Jesus’ inaugural 18-word homily (16 words in St. Mark’s Greek) and in his conversations with his first followers after, we see four different elements that are key for our spiritual growth. This is what Jesus had waited his entire hidden life in Nazareth to announce and do. It’s also what he, as God, had been waiting since the Fall to establish: “The time is fulfilled,” he said, “and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent and believe in the Gospel!”

* Jesus announces first two essential facts: The first is, “The time is fulfilled.” Jesus proclaims an urgency. He says that the time of waiting is over. The time to act is now. The second fact is, “The kingdom of God is at hand.” Jesus declares that God’s kingdom is here. God’s presence is erupting, and the time to enter his kingdom, to share in his reign, is now. After the two facts, Jesus turns to four ways we’re supposed to respond to this reality. These are the four conditions for entering and living in his kingdom. These are the four ways we won’t waste the time God has given us but make the most of it. The first is “Repent.” The second is “Believe.” The third is “Follow.” And the fourth is “Fish.” Let’s examine each of these realities and ask ourselves whether we’ve heeded Jesus message

* The first is “repent.” In Greek, this word ismetanoete, which etymologically means a total revolution of our mind, of the way we look at things. It’s a call to conversion, to no longer think as everyone else thinks, to no longer do as everyone else does, but to put on the mind of God, to align our heart and our actions to him. It means to compare ourselves to God rather than to everyone else and to recognize we’re not yet living enough as the image and likeness of God. For some people this will mean a 180-degree turn. For others it might mean a 50-degree turn or a 10-degree turn. But all of us need this conversion and we will always need it. The Christian life is one of continual conversion, in which we literally learn how fully to “turn with” Jesus (con-vert) in all parts of our life. As he turns in prayer to the Father, we turn with him; as he turns with charity to our neighbor, we turn with him; as he turns with mercy to a family member who has sinned against him and against us, we, too turn with mercy. This call to continual metanoia means that we’re incessantly seeking to change for the better to become more and more like the Lord who calls us to that penance and renewal.

* The second word is “believe.” To believe means not just to accept somethingas true. To believe means totally to submit oneself to a reality on the basis of a trust in the one testifying to the reality. To believe means to entrust ourselves completely to Jes...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Saturday of the Second Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

Memorial of St. Marianne Cope

January 23, 2021

Heb 9:2-3.11-14, Ps 47, Mk 3:20-21

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/1.23.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today Jesus’ relatives — likely his cousins from the Nazareth area — came to seize him in Capernaum because they said, “He is out of his mind.” They thought he was crazy. After all, according to worldly standards, he certainly seemed to be. He had given up a good job as a carpenter in his hometown to adopt a lifestyle in which he, by his own admission, didn’t even have a place to lay his head. Rather than being respected, he was preaching in a way that got even Pharisees and Herodians — two groups of people who were inimical to each other — to conspire together to kill him, homicidal provocations that Jesus would incite even in his hometown when his neighbors for most of his life would as a mob try to throw him off the cliff on which Nazareth had been built. And he had surrounded himself by a curious group of followers — fishermen, a loathsome tax collector, even a zealot who wanted to kick out the Romans at all costs. He had turned his back on worldly security, on personal safety, on the wisdom of most in society. His cousins thought that they needed to come to rescue him from himself.

* Jesus is clearly crazy according to worldly standards. The world proclaims that to be happy you need to be rich; Jesus says you need to be poor in spirit. The world says you need to be strong and finish fights others begin; Jesus says you need to be meek and a peacemaker. The world says you need to be sexy and sexually active lest you shrivel up and die; Jesus says you need to be pure of heart. The world dictates you need to be the life of the party; Jesus says you need to mourn. The world says you can’t have a care in the world; Jesus says you need to be starving for holiness. The world says you need to be popular, liked and admired; Jesus says you need to be reviled and persecuted. Jesus clearly is crazy. He’ll go on to say that we need to turn the other cheek, to pray for our persecutors, to love even our enemies, to deny ourselves, pick up our Cross each day to Crucifixion, and to follow him. We should be clear that by worldly standards, Christ is crazy. What he asks of us is crazy. And those who follow him are called to be “fools for Christ” (1 Cor 4:10). Real Catholics, according to worldly standards, are part of a world-wide insane asylum. We believe, after all, that here at Mass we consume not bread and wine but God himself under the appearance of bread and wine. We believe that if we have faith the size of a mustard seed, we can move mountains. We believe that we’re more related to each other by baptism than identical twins are by genes.

* What’s the source of Jesus’ insanity? It’s contained in the Greek expression that is translated “out of his mind.” It means “out of himself,” out of “his wits.” It means that Jesus wasn’t concerned fundamentally with self-preservation. He was concerned fundamentally with his Father’s glory and our salvation. He lived, he thought, he acted for the Father and for others. He lived outside of himself. The Letter to the Hebrews, focusing on Jesus’ high priesthood, makes this point today, saying, “through the eternal [Holy] Spirit he offered himself unblemished to God.” His whole existence was this unblemished self-offering, giving his life to save ours and to please his Father. And that Jesus who lived that way turns to each of us and says, “Follow me!”

* The saints are the ones who have,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Friday of the Second Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

Day of Prayer for the Legal Protection of Unborn Children

January 22, 2021

Heb 8:6-13, Ps 85, Mk 3:13-19

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/1.22.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today in the Gospel, we see the calling of the twelve apostles and the reason behind it: so that they might “be with” Jesus and so that he might “send them out” with his authority to preach, teach, exorcise, heal and help others enter into his kingdom. On this day on which we mark the horrible 48th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton decisions that permitted the legal killing of children in the womb, and the Church in the US has a Day of Prayer for the Legal Protection of Unborn Children, it is an opportunity for each of us to remember and give thanks to God for our vocation to be heralds of the Gospel of Life, to be with Jesus not only in prayer but in special solidarity with him in his image in the womb, and to be sent out by him to help expunge the diabolical practice of the slaughter of innocents in the womb and to help people, especially vulnerable mothers and fathers to choose the path of life and love. Just as Jesus called Simon Peter; James, John, Andrew, Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew, Thomas, James, Thaddeus, and Simon the Cananean by name to announce his Gospel 2,000 years ago, so the Lord has called each of us by name for the vocation of love in the heart of the world.

* The Letter to the Hebrews cites the Prophet Jeremiah in describing the “new and improved” Covenant that Jesus, the eternal High Priest, would inaugurate. We remember Jeremiah’s call, “The word of the Lord came to me: ‘Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I dedicated you, a prophet to the nations I appointed you'” (Jer 1:4-5). So, too, we have been formed in the womb for our Christian vocation, a central part of which is to help everyone learn how to reverence other human beings made in God’s image and likeness similarly being formed, dedicated and appointed in utero to God’s glory through the love of God and others.

* The Letter to the Hebrews quotes God’s words through the Prophet Jeremiah in order to drive home the point of the Covenant Jesus himself would make, one not indicated by a rainbow like Noah, or sealed through circumcision like Abraham, or written on stone like the Decalogue, but sealed in his blood and written on our minds and hearts. This new Covenant would be the means by which we — from the least to the greatest — would “know the Lord.” The reason that this covenant would be “better” would be because in it God through the incarnation would help all of us keep our end of the covenant with him. He would keep it for and with us on behalf of the human race. He would literally enter into us, bringing his “kindness and truth, … justice and peace” to meet within us. He would set up himself, with his law of love, in our interior so that we could align our entire existence to him whispering to us in the inner organ of sensitivity we call the conscience.

* Every Covenant is a covenant of life. St. John Paul II in Evangelium Vitae wrote extensively about how the Covenant is in its core a Covenant of life and love. The Covenant made with Abraham, he said, is a covenant of life in which Abraham’s children would numbered like the starts in the heavens (EV 44). The Decalogue, he added, focuses on “the inviolability of human life reverberates at the heart of the ‘ten words’ ...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Sacred Heart Chapel of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Thursday of the Second Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

Memorial of St. Agnes, Virgin and Martyr

January 21, 2021

Heb 7:25-8:6, Ps 40, Mk 3:7-12

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/1.21.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today in the Gospel we see something on which we can never focus enough: the great attractiveness of the Lord Jesus. St. Mark tells us that such a large crowd of people were following Jesus that he needed to have a boat ready to push a little bit away from the shore so that the people wouldn’t crush him. They were coming from Galilee, Judea, Jerusalem, Idumea, the Transjordan, Tyre and Sidon. For those who don’t know the geography of the Holy Land very well, those locations might just be names. But Galilee was in the north and Judea in the south of the Holy Land. Idumea was even further to the South. The Transjordan was the pagan inhabited region on the eastern side of the Jordan River and Sea of Galilee. Tyre and Sidon were pagan cities way to the north along the Mediterranean. To get a sense of the message St. Mark was communicating it would be as if Jesus were here in Manhattan and that people were walking to see him from Maine, Connecticut and as far away as Washington, North Carolina, Portland, Maine and the Outer Long Island, and it wasn’t just Catholics coming but also atheists, secularists, and those of other religions. They were all pressing upon Jesus, who was curing and teaching. Even the demons couldn’t resist. When they saw him, they fell down before him — in other words, in begrudging adoration — and shouted, “You are the Son of God.”

* We need constantly to ask whether Jesus maintains this attraction for us and others. There are many today for whom Jesus has become a little like Abraham Lincoln, a revered figure of the past but not someone with whom one has a personal relationship. Just like many won’t make the sacrifice to go to Springfield, Illinois, or to the Lincoln Memorial in DC, so many won’t even make the effort to go to Church to spend an hour with him in adoration or, sometimes, even go to meet him at Mass. Many say they believe in him, but what they likely mean is that they believe he existed; they don’t really live by faith, committing themselves to him and being drawn fundamentally not by duty but by fascination, by love, by attraction. Those who are fascinated by Jesus will hunger for his word and become men and women whose lives are drenched by the daily dew of the Gospel. Those who are attracted by Jesus will come to him in adoration and say, as Samuel said on Sunday, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.” Those who truly believe in what Jesus has said and done and who love him will seek to come to meet him at Mass every day they can and in confession to say sorry as often as they sin. Those who take Jesus seriously will, in union with him, go out as Good Samaritans to care for a wounded world. Jesus has never lost his attractiveness. He’s as attractive today as ever. But many times our lives, our hearts, our minds, are so saturated with worldly cares and anxieties, with lesser hopes, with false gods that we place first in our lives, that the type of wonder, fascination, love and attraction we’re supposed to have toward Jesus is extinguished partially or fully. Today is a great day to ponder anew the real person of Jesus who is alive in the Sacraments, who speaks to us in his Word and in prayer, who is present in his image in others, especially in the needy, and to make the effort — even the crazy effort of walking from our own Tyre or Idumea to the Sea of Galilee — to draw close to him.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Second Sunday in Ordinary Time (B)

January 16, 2021

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/1.16.21_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, in which he will help us enter into the inner nature of the Christian calling. With the various convulsions and confusions happening in the United States, it is urgent for Christians in general, and Catholics in particular, to live out our Christian vocations to the full, and truly become the salt of the earth, the light of the world and the leaven our beloved country needs. And it’s crucial for us to ponder with Jesus today the three main stages of growth in any Christian vocation and to mature to full stature in him.

* The first stage of this divine drama is curiosity, wonder, and a eventually a certain amazement. When St. John the Baptist saw Jesus walking by and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God!,” two of those who had been following and helping John the Baptist — Andrew, and “another disciple” who very likely was John the Evangelist — were obviously intrigued. As good Jews, they knew the significance of the Paschal Lamb from the Passover rite to free the Jews from slavery in Egypt, which they reenacted each year. When John pointed out Jesus as the “Lamb of God,” they couldn’t help but be curious. So they did what curious people ordinarily do: they tried to find out more. Enquiring minds want to know. They began to follow Jesus, but they, being fishermen, were not particularly adept as private investigators. Jesus, aware that they were on his tail, turned around and asked them “What are you looking for?” Caught off guard, they asked, “Teacher, where are you staying?” Jesus didn’t respond with a direct answer to their small talk. He did not want to meet them at the level of curiosity; on the other hand, he didn’t want to kill that curiosity either, by admitting what he would say later, that “the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head” (Mt 8:20). So he responded by trying to bring them from their curiosity to something higher: “Come and see!,” he said. He invited them to follow him more closely and to spend time with him.

* That brings us to the second stage of the growth in vocation: to come to be with Jesus, to follow him to where he is. We call this stage discipleship. “Disciple” is the Greek word for “student.” We come to Jesus the Master to learn from him. We come not just to learn facts from him or other information that we then ignore or forget later. We come to him to learn how to live, how to die, and how to live forever. At Jesus’ invitation, Andrew and John came and saw his homeless mansion. St. John gives us a very interesting detail (which is one of the reasons why he was almost certainly the “other disciple” he names, because it would have been hard for him to know it otherwise): “It was about four o’clock in the afternoon.” This detail shows us first how much of an impression that meeting with Jesus had in his life that he would never forget the precise time he met Jesus for the first time. It also shows us that this meeting wasn’t brief. Scholars convincingly have shown, based on the text of St. John, that it was probably a Friday when this encounter happened, and once Jews reached about 4:00 pm, the Sabbath would begin and travel would be prohibited. So it’s likely that Andrew and John got to spend not just an hour or two with Jesus but a little more than a full day with Jesus, peppering him with questions, answering his questions, laughing, praying,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Baptism of the Lord (B)

January 9, 2021

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/1.9.21_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, as the Church celebrates the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord.

* The Advent Season, as you remember, always features John the Baptist at the Jordan calling us to conversion, to make straight the paths for Christ to come to us. The Christmas season finishes with the feast of the Lord’s baptism, in which Jesus, at the end of his hidden life, brings to fulfillment what John was prophesying by his deeds. John had foretold Jesus’ eventual coming, promising, as we will hear in the Gospel, “One mightier than I is coming after me. … I have baptized you with water; he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.” And so it happened that at the end of decades of hidden life, Jesus’ full identity was revealed at the Jordan when the Holy Spirit descended upon him and God the Father spoke from heaven saying, “You are my beloved Son, with you I am well pleased!” There, Jesus received a baptism and another baptism — and more significant and efficacious one — was announced. The baptism he received from John — like all of the other baptisms John was doing — was merely a sign of repentance as Jesus, who came to the world to take away the sins of the world, foreshadowed in the waters of the Jordan what he would later accomplish in the baptism of blood on Calvary. This is the baptism Jesus inaugurated at the Jordan, when he by his own baptism made the waters of baptism capable of delivering on what they signified: not just representing the need for the forgiveness of sins, but actually forgiving those sins. This is the baptism that Jesus, in his valedictory address immediately before ascending into heaven, gave as his “great commission” to the disciples, whom he entrusted with the completion of his own salvific mission: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you” (Mt 28:18-20).

* Countless generations before us put those words into action and eventually each one of us was brought to that saving stream of life-giving water, where Christ, through a minister, cleansed us of our sins and filled us with God’s own life. On the day of our baptism, God claimed us as his own; we were made members of Christ’s own body (1Cor 12:12ff) we entered into his death and own risen life (Rom 6:3-5); the Holy Spirit came down upon us and made us each a “temple of the Holy Spirit” (1Cor 6:19); God the Father lovingly adopted us as his beloved children and inaudibly but truly said of us what he said of Christ, “You are my beloved son, you are my much-loved daughter, with whom I am well-pleased.”

* The key for us, though, is not to forget who we truly are. Pope St. Leo the Great, in his 5th-century homily for the Christmas season that comes to a close on Sunday, exhorts us to live up to the identity we receive in baptism. St. Leo urges us: “Christian, remember your dignity! Now that you share in God’s own nature, do not return by sin to your former base condition. Bear in mind who is your head and of whose body you are a member. Do not forget that you have been rescued from the power of darkness and brought into the light of God’s kingdom. Through the Sacrament of Baptism you have become a temple of the Holy Spirit.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

St. Joseph Church, Farmington, Missouri

Nuptial Mass for Brent Cunningham and Emily Damba

January 2, 2021

Song of Songs 2:8-10.14.16; 8:6-7, Ps 34, Rom 12:1-2.9-18, Jn 17:20-26

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/1.2.21_Cunningham_Damba_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

A Marriage Not Just in Farmington, but in Bethlehem

Today we are marking the ninth day of Christmas and we cannot help but remember, as we look at the beautiful Christmas crèche, that when God took on our humanity so that we might participate in his divinity, when he came — as the first reading prophesied — “springing across the mountains, leaping across the hills” in order to say to the human race, “Arise, my beloved, my beautiful one and come!,” he deliberately chose to do so within a family. He was conceived and born within a family of an already committed husband and wife. He could have come as a 30-year-old adult, or a teenager, or a 90-year-old. He could have chosen to be born of a single mom, or raised by two bachelors or two girl friends, or some other arrangement. He chose, however, to be born within a family comprised by a marriage of a man and a woman. Why? Precisely in order to redeem the family and make the family an instrument of salvation and sanctification. The family, made in the image of God, is meant to be the world’s greatest sign of God as a communion of persons in love, a living representation of the loving union for which Jesus prayed in the Gospel we just heard, a tangible reminder of the love that exists between Christ and his Bride the Church.

That’s why it’s so beautiful and important, Brent and Emily, that you chose to get married within the short Christmas season. Because of that decision, everyone of your anniversaries, like your wedding day, will be marked by poinsettias and Christmas lights, by praesepios and mistletoes, and perhaps, as we’ve experienced over the last couple of days, by snow, ice and cold. But much like Joseph, Mary and the infant Jesus huddled together in love in the cave of Bethlehem, all the elements of the Christmas season including the weather will be an opportunity for you and, we pray, the family with which God blessed you, to draw closer in the domestic Church the Lord is making of you here and now.

And so today in this beautiful Church of St. Joseph, within the Year of St. Joseph to mark the 150th anniversary of his being named patron of the universal Church, during a nuptial Mass in which after Holy Communion you will consecrate yourselves in a particular way to the Blessed Virgin Mary as Queen of the Family, and as Jesus is preparing to make of your love through the Sacrrament of Matrimony something sacred and sanctifying, it is fitting that we ponder a little the lessons you and every couple can learn from the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph.

Saint John Paul II wrote in his beautiful document on the family 40 years ago, “Through God’s mysterious design, it was in that family that the Son of God spent long years of a hidden life. It is therefore the prototype and example for all Christian families. … Its life was passed in anonymity and silence in a little town in Palestine. It underwent trials of poverty, persecution and exile. It glorified God in an incomparably exalted and pure way. And it will not fail to help Christian families-indeed, all the families in the world-to be faithful to their day-to-day duties, to bear the cares and tribulations of life, to be open and generous to the needs of others, and to fulfill with joy the plan of God in their regard” (Familiaris Consortio, 86). Thanks to the cooperation of Mary and Joseph,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Solemnity of the Epiphany (B)

January 2, 2021

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/1.2.21_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, as the Church celebrates the Feast of the Epiphany of the Lord, his “manifestation” to all the Gentiles in the persons of the Magi coming from afar.

* The Lord’s epiphany was also an epiphany of the men whom tradition has always called “wise,” as essential aspects of their true character was revealed. It’s key for us to ponder the response of the wise men, go on pilgrimage with them to Bethlehem, and learn from them invaluable lessons about how we’re called to relate to the coming of God into the world. As we are just after the first of the year, the lessons that we learn from this feast can easily turn into New Year’s Resolutions to help make this new year a true year of the Lord. This Sunday we can ponder seven lessons.

* The first thing we learn from the wise men is the importance of seeking God.

* When they saw the star at its rising, they not only interpreted that God was trying to communicate something to them in general, but that God was specifically heralding the birth of the newborn King in the east, who would be a universal king. The stars as we know were incredibly important to ancients. 2000 years ago, in the deserts of the Middle East and on the seas, people were highly dependent on the fixed stars in the sky as references for their direction. They firmly believed that God had made them this way for that reason. Whenever anything happened in the sky that was new — like the appearance of a comet, or meteor shower, or a planet’s or star’s shining more brightly — the ancients thought that it had to bear some message from God, the creator of the heavens and the earth. When they saw a star at its rising, they didn’t respond as curious astrologers but as those who hungered to find what they sought. Led by the star, and their simple faith in its meaning, the wise men went on a journey toward the Holy Land. We don’t know how long their pilgrimage took, but the Gospel gives us indications that it wasn’t brief. After Herod asked them the exact time of the appearance of the star, and then, a short time later, after they did not return to him, he proceeded to kill every boy in Bethlehem under two years of age. So the time of their preparation and the journey to get there probably took 18-24 months. Whether they walked or had the help of animals, we don’t know, but they came. The made a journey of many months each way because they believed God was speaking to them through the star.

* Do we search for God as ardently as they did? .

* The second thing the wise men show us is that the life of faith is a pilgrimage.

* The wise men were ready to move. Even though they must have had good lives where they were since they could afford a long journey and precious gifts at their arrival, they accounted being with the newborn universal king more important than staying where they were. They were willing to leave everything behind and make a long, difficult journey, following the star they had seen in the East.

* Are we ready to make the continuous journey of faith, a spiritual pilgrimage?

* Third, they show us that this pilgrimage of life is not one that we’re supposed to make alone.

* The wise men didn’t journey solo. They walked together. They knew that it order to make the destination they needed ea...