Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the First Sunday of Advent (A), Vigil

November 30, 2019

 

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The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry. I hope that you have had a wonderful Thanksgiving. We give thanks today to have the chance to get ready together for the consequential conversation Jesus wants to have with us this Sunday.

* This Sunday, as you know, we will begin a new liturgical year, which is meant to give us a totally new spiritual start. The liturgical year — in which we retrace all of the events of salvation history from the long wait for a Messiah to the crowning of that crucified and risen long-awaited One as the King of the Universe — is not meant to be a liturgical cycle but a liturgical spiral, not a “same old, same old,” but something that helps us to enter into the mysteries we celebrate far more profoundly than the last time. Like re-reading a great book or watching anew a classic movie, each pass along the liturgical spiral that begins Sunday is supposed to reveal to us elements we haven’t seen before and remind us of important things that we once knew but have forgotten about the mystery of God, his love for us, and his hopes and plans for us.

* The proper attitude God wants us to have as we begin with this season of Advent the new liturgical year is given to us by St. Paul in Sunday’s second reading. “What time is it?,” we could ask. St. Paul replies: “You know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep, for salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers.”

* Advent, he tells us, is first meant to be a time of spiritual reawakening, of spiritual rebirth, as we return to what should be the proper foundation of our life — Christ himself — and build our life on him.

* Second, it’s a time of excitement. Salvation is nearer to us that when we became believers. It’s nearer to us because we’re a full-year closer to meeting Christ face-to-face. Advent is a time when we not only look to the past, to Jesus’ coming in Bethlehem; it’s not merely a time when we look toward Jesus in the present, as he comes to us to teach us by his Word, feed us with his body and blood, forgive us in the Sacrament of Penance, and guide us each day through prayer; it’s also a time when we look ahead with joy to Christ’s coming at the end of our or at the end of time, whichever comes first. And we look forward not with anti-Christian, spiritually-worldly dread, but with truly Christian hope. Salvation is nearer to us now than last first Sunday of Advent, than two years ago, than the day of our confirmation and first communion, that the day of our of our baptism, than the day when we first became believers! That’s something that should get us excited.

* Third, Advent is a time of journeying. Christ is coming — that is what the term Advent means — and we are called not to stay where we are, but to journey toward him and journey with him. In Sunday’s opening prayer, we will turn to God the Father and ask him to grant us “the resolve to run forth to meet” Christ “with righteous deeds at his coming.” Advent is the gun at the beginning of a race that gets us to begin a spiritual sprint, to go with haste, to meet Christ as he comes. Isaiah on Sunday will compare Advent to a hike: “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob, that he may teach us his ways and we may walk in his paths.” Advent is a time for climbing up a mountain to meet the Lord,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Solemnity of Christ the King (C), Vigil

November 23, 2019

 

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The following text guided today’s homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy to have a chance to ponder with you the consequential conversation Jesus wants to have with us this Sunday, on which the Church celebrates the Solemnity of Christ the King.

* The dialogue we’ll enter is the one that took place on Calvary. The first dialogue was provocative. Soldiers, the chief priests, passers-by all cried out, “If you are the king of the Jews, save yourself!” The thief on his left reviled him saying, “Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us.” But Jesus didn’t respond to their derision with a direct response in words, but with silence, prayer and mercy — “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” But then there was another conversation with the thief crucified on his right. He turned to the one being crucified in the middle, and said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” And Jesus replied to him, “Truly I tell you today, you will be with me in paradise!”

* The latter is one of the most incredible dialogues of all time, one in which we’re called to echo the prayer of the good thief. Thousands of times a year, we Christians pray, “Thy kingdom come!” As we prepare for the Solemnity of Christ the King, it’s important for us to ponder what type of kingdom we’re praying will come so that we may enter, dwell and rejoice in it.

* When Jesus inaugurated his kingdom, it had nothing to do with the expectations of almost anyone at the time. The last thing Jesus looked like as he hung upon the Cross on Good Friday was a king. He was bathed in blood, not clothed with royal purple. He was hammered to a Cross, not seated on a throne. He was crowned with thorns, not with gold and diadems. To ridicule him and Jews in general, Pilate had ordered that an inscription in three languages be placed above his head: “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.” Rather than pay him homage, most just mocked him to put on a show and come down from the cross, as if he were a professional wrestler about to make a dramatic comeback. Such visible force was the only demonstration of kingly power that they could comprehend.

* For most Jews at the time, Jesus’ crucifixion was the proof that he was precisely not the long awaited Messiah-king for whom they had been waiting for centuries. The Jews anticipated that the descendent of King David would use his power to subjugate all those who made themselves his adversaries, not take their abuse and die a horrible death to save his abusers. They were totally unprepared for a king who would serve at all, not to mention to the point of death.

* The Romans were likewise unprepared for a king like Jesus. When Pontius Pilate interrogated Jesus, he asked him, “Are you the King of the Jews?” Jesus answered, “My kingship is not of this world; if my kingship were of this world, my servants would be fighting that I not be handed over to the Jews; but my kingship is not of this world.” Then Pilate retorted, “So you are a king?” Jesus replied by describing more specifically what type of king he was and what type of kingdom he was establishing. “You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Every one who is of the truth hears my voice.” The Romans thought that kingship meant having the power to crucify or pardon. They thought it was associated with force.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the 33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time (C), Vigil

November 16, 2019

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/11.15.19_Landry_Con_Con_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy to have a chance to ponder with you the consequential conversation Jesus wants to have with us this Sunday, … when people will ask Jesus about when the end of the world will happen and what the signs will be given before it will take place.

* They asked, presumably so that they could be prepared. Jesus didn’t answer their question directly, not only because the time of the second coming was known, he said, only to God the Father, but also, and perhaps more importantly, because he wanted them to be prepared for it always. If he had given some date weeks, decades or centuries later, the temptation would have been just to go on with life as normal. But Jesus had come to establish a totally new normal, a norm of faith, a norm of vigilant expectation, a norm of full-time Christian behavior. He wanted the day of the Lord to be a perpetual state, so that each day would be the Lord’s day, a day in which we exclaim, “This is the day the Lord has made!”

* The signs of the day of the Lord he gives us help us to maintain this awareness are in fact events we see in every age. Jesus describes how the house of God will be attacked, how there will be imposters claiming to be speaking for God and asking us to follow them, how there will be wars, insurrections, earthquakes, famines, plagues, persecutions, hatred, betrayals by family members and friends, and how even some of his disciples will be put to death.

* But at the same time Jesus says something seemingly contradictory. He assures us that not a hair on their head will be destroyed. He describes God’s protection at the same time he mentions martyrdom. We’re not dealing with a contradiction, but it’s a hard truth all the same, one that we must view with faith. God permits these evils in order to help us become better disciples and better apostles, more fervent followers of him and more passionate proclaimers of his salvation, so that we might come to eternity with every follicle in tact. God permits what we have to endure so to help us become more faithful and bring other people to faith. He tells us in the Gospel that all of these things “will lead to your giving testimony” — and not just any testimony. He tells us that he will give us the grace of “a wisdom in speaking that all your adversaries will be powerless to resist or refute.” Such adversities are occasions for witness. Rather than distance us from the Lord, they rather impel us to abandon ourselves even more to Him.

* Jesus says at the end of the passage, “By your perseverance you will secure your lives.” Our salvation will come up not principally by surviving these frightening occurrences, but through growing our Christian character by means of them, through placing our faith, hope and love in God through all of all of them. When we’re brought to our knees by natural disasters or man-made hatred, it provides the opportunity for us to pray far more devoutly, to grow in faith, and to be proven like gold in a crucible. When we’re tested more severely in the faith, God always comes to our aid, he always sends us himself, to help us pass those tests, provided that we open ourselves up to his presence during trial and respond to him. And that type of faith is the greatest means to bring others to faith.

* We’ve seen since the early days of the Church that the blood of the martyrs is the...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the 32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time (C), Vigil

November 9, 2019

 

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

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The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege to have a chance to ponder with you the consequential conversation Jesus wants to have with us this Sunday.

* Jesus will speak to us about the reality of heaven. His affirmation happens in conversation with a group called the Saduccees, who were mainly members of the high priestly elites, who didn’t believe in the Resurrection. They only accepted the first five books of the Bible — Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy and Numbers — and thought that there was no reference there at all to resurrection from the dead. So to try to test Jesus they brought to him the invented example of a woman who married successively seven different brothers after each previous brother had died. If she had become one flesh with seven different men until death did they part, they asked, then with whom would she be on flesh at the resurrection, if they were now all alive? Because she couldn’t be, they supposed, one flesh with all of them, there couldn’t be a resurrection.

* Jesus’ answer highlighted things.

* First, he said that it’s only the children of this age who marry and remarry. In heaven, he states, there will be no marrying or giving in marriage because there will only be one wedding, the wedding feast of the Lamb and his Bride the Church. The institution and sacrament of marriage, Jesus implies is a reality for this world. The reason for this is pretty clear: Marriage has a two-fold purpose, LOVE and LIFE, or, in more traditional terminology, the mutual sanctification of the spouses and the procreation and education of children. In heaven, there’s no purpose to marriage because men and women no longer need to be sanctified since they’re already saints; and there will be no new children because saints aren’t having babies in the afterlife! But while there will be no marriage and conjugal sexual activity in heaven, there will certainly be love! Marriage in this world is meant to prepare spouses and children to enter into that love, the perfect love of God and the love of the communion of saints. And marriage is particularly well-suited to achieve this purpose.

* The second thing he says is that, contrary to Sadducees’ idea, the Pentateuch does speak about marriage. Jesus says that God revealed this when he spoke to Moses out of the burning bush and called himself the “God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.” He’s the God not of the dead but of the living,” and hence Abraham, Isaac and Jacob couldn’t be truly dead. Eternal life, therefore, is real.

* November is the time in which the Church always has us focus on the four last things — death, judgment, heaven and hell. At the beginning of the month, we celebrate All Saints’ Day, in which we remember and ask the intercession of all those who have arrived at the place to which we aspire. The next day we mark All Souls’ Day, and remember and pray for all the dead, especially those who are in need of our prayers and sacrifices to enter into paradise. And throughout the month, the Church keeps the four last things in front of us. First, the fact that each of us will die, some of us by surprise, much earlier than we think. Second, as soon as we die, we will be judged. Jesus gives us the criteria of that final exam of life, but we need to be ready for it, by a life of Christian faith, hope and love.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the 31st Sunday in Ordinary Time (C), Vigil

November 2, 2019

 

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

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The following text guided the homily:

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy to have a chance to ponder with you the consequential conversation Jesus wants to have with us this Sunday.

* Last week, you remember, Jesus presented us the parable contrasting the prayer of the Pharisee and the Publican. Both went up to the temple to pray. Both left. And only one’s prayer was heard. The one who left justified was notthe outwardly devout Pharisee who fasted twice a week, gave ten percent of his income back to God, and rejoiced that he was not a thief, rogue, adulterer or tax collector. The one who left with a right relationship toward God was a humble tax collector, who stood at the back, beat his breast and begged, “God, be merciful to me a sinner!” In today’s Gospel, we encounter those characters from the parable — self-righteous “good people” who complain that Jesus actually interacts with sinners and a notorious, humble “tax collector” — in real life. And we see how the God-man responds when such a sinner calls out to him for such mercy.

* Jesus called himself the “Good Shepherd” and said that he would leave the ninety-nine to go in search of one sheep who was lost (John 10:11; Lk 15:4). Before that Good Shepherd headed up to Jerusalem to lay down his life for his sheep (John 10:15), he first wanted to hunt down one who was lost. He went to literally the nethermost place on earth in search of perhaps the greatest public sinner of that city, to bring him back to his fold. He went to Jericho, the lowest city on the planet — 853 feet below sea level — to find Zacchaeus, who was not just one of a bunch of despised and excommunicated tax-collectors loathsome to the Jewish authorities, but the chief tax collector of the whole region. Jesus left the crowds behind and entered alone with the tax collector into his home and into his life. He called Zacchaeus, his lost sheep, by name (Is 43:1; John 10:3). The very name Zacchaeus means “God remembers,” and God had never forgotten him. Heaven rejoiced on that day more for his return than for those who had never wandered (Lk 15:7). So, too, Jesus takes the initiative of knocking at the door of our souls, asking for entry, coming to us wherever we are, no matter the depths to which we’ve sunk, no matter the fact that perhaps everyone else around us might despise us. To the extent that we repent of whatever sins we’ve committed and accept Jesus’ gracious invitation by “welcoming him with delight,” we, too, like Zacchaeus, can have salvation come to us.

* This is the first of three lessons we learn from the story of Zacchaeus and Jesus, that Jesus wants to take us apart from the crowd and bring us the salvation of his mercy. The place where Jesus ordinarily does this is where Saint Pope John Paul II used to say Jesus and the whole Church exist solely for each of us alone — the confessional. In the Sacrament of Confession, Jesus ministers to us individually, just as he interacted individually with Zacchaeus. But like Zacchaeus, we need to come down, to leave the perches of our pride and allow Jesus to go to work through his priestly ministers.

* The second thing we learn from this encounter of Zacchaeus and Jesus is about the diminutive tax collector’s hunger to see Jesus. Zacchaeus’ climbing of the sycamore tree is more than an interesting detail. The text tells us that he was trying to see Jesus,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the 30th Sunday in Ordinary Time (C), Vigil

October 26, 2019

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/10.25.19_Landry_Con_Con_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy to have a chance to ponder with you the consequential conversation Jesus wants to have with us this Sunday.

* Jesus will give us the parable of the two men who went up to the temple to pray.

* The first man was a Pharisee. He prayed, “Thank you, God, that I am not like the rest of humanity — greedy, dishonest, adulterous — or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week, and I pay tithes on my whole income.” The man was what most people would call today a good religious man. Like his fellow Pharisees, he never sought to do the minimum in the practice of the faith but as much as he could can. Whereas Jews were required to fast only once a year on the Day of Atonement, the Pharisees fasted twice a week. Whereas Jews needed to tithe only certain things, he tithed on his whole income. He was outwardly a role model. But there was something drastically wrong in his conception of God, his conception of the faith, and his conception of others. The first clue is that Jesus says, “He spoke this prayer to himself.” That doesn’t mean that he simply said it quietly so that he alone could hear, but, in a sense, he was praying that prayer to himself, that he was something special. Second, he thanked God that he was not like so many others, who were thieves, rogues, adulterers and publicans. He rejoiced in what he saw was his virtue, but failed to recognize was that he was proud, judgmental, vain, boastful and uncharitable. He didn’t see his own sinfulness and failed to ask God for mercy, because he didn’t think he needed it. Compared to so many around him, and the other person praying in the temple, he considered himself a saint among sinners.

* Jesus contrasts him with a tax-collector who had also gone up to the temple to pray. Tax collectors were hated by his fellow Jews not only because they were collaborating with the Romans who were subjugating the Jewish people, but because in the carrying out of his duty, tax collectors would routinely rip off their people for greed. They were assessed a certain amount that needed to be collected; whatever they could get beyond that was theirs to keep. Many of the tax collectors were corrupt Mafiosi ripping off the poor precisely in order to live well. One would think that someone in such circumstances wouldn’t pray at all. To do so, some might say, was hypocritical. But he knew that even if others might never forgive him, God could, and he knew he needed God’s forgiveness. With no arrogance at all, no self-importance, and great humility, he remained in the back, beat his breast and say, “O God, be merciful to me a sinner.” As the first reading from Sirach will tell us, “The prayer of the humble pierces the clouds!” His prayer did.

* Jesus gives a startling conclusion to the parable. He told his listeners that of the two, the good man who fasts, tithes and lives outwardly by the mosaic law, and the detested one who rips off his own people and conspires with the pagan authorities, only one of them had their prayer heard and left the temple in a right relationship with God. It was the publican! To understand the surprise, it would have been like Jesus substituted a religious sister for the Pharisee and a drug pusher for the publican and said that when the two left the Church only the drug dealer was justified, was truly on good terms with God.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the 29th Sunday in Ordinary Time (C), Vigil

October 19, 2019

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/10.18.19_Landry_Con_Con_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy to have a chance to ponder with you the consequential conversation Jesus wants to have with us this Sunday.

* It’s a conversation that Jesus introduces with perhaps the most haunting question in the whole Gospel: “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” The question seems to be more than rhetorical. Jesus asks it, it seems, because he’s not convinced that when he comes he’s going to find the type of faith he wants to see. The test of faith, he indicates by the parable of the persistent widow, is whether when he comes he will find us persevering in prayer. Prayer is faith in action. If he’s going to find us faithful, he’s going to find us praying — obviously not necessarily on our knees, but seeking to unite our whole day and life, our mind, our heart and our soul to God. If he doesn’t find us praying and living in conscious communion with him, however, it’s likely that he’s not going to find us living by faith.

* And so, through the Gospel parable, Jesus wants to teach us about the “necessity” of “praying always without growing weary.” He wants to help us learn how to “cry out to God day and night.” He wants to train us to live that way so that no matter what time he comes we will be united to the Lord in a prayer not merely of our lips but of our lives.

* Jesus asks the haunting question at the end of the parable because he knows many do not pray like the inopportune woman. Many Catholics don’t persevere in prayer. We’re content on praying “a little,” saying a Hail Mary or two at the beginning or the end of the day. Others would like to pray more but they think they don’t have time to pray, because they’re prioritizing so many other things in life to a life-changing time with God. Others, because of a bad experience or other reasons, stop praying altogether as an ordinary activity of life, only turning to God in times of crisis. This Sunday Jesus will speak to all of us about the persevering faith he wishes to find in our prayer, hoping to open us up to receive his graces precisely so that we can pray in that way.

* But we can ask a prior question: Why does Jesus want us to pray with the type of heroic perseverance he describes? It’s not that he wants to hog all our attention. It’s not that he wants us to ask for something 70 times 7 times as a pointless exercise, especially given that God already knows what we need before we ask. It’s because we live as we pray and in order to help us learn to persevere in life, he wants us to learn first how to persevere in prayer. We’ll see in Sunday’s first reading that when Moses’ arms were lifted in prayer, the Israelites had the upper hand against the Amalekites; but when his hands fell because of fatigue, the Amalekites began to prevail. Likewise, when we persevere in prayer, then we open to receiving God’s strength to confront and overcome the challenges we face each day. When our hearts, however, grow weary and our hands fall, when we either try to do things on our own and lose heart and give up the good fight of faith altogether, that’s when we fall. To persevere faithfully in life we must learn how to persevere faithfully in prayer.

* Jesus tells us in the Gospel this Sunday, “He who endures to the end will be saved.” (Mt 24:13). Life is a marathon, but one in which God wants to run right alongside of us helping and ...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the 28th Sunday in Ordinary Time (C), Vigil

October 12, 2019

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/10.11.19_Landry_Con_Con_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy to have a chance to ponder with you the consequential conversation Jesus wants to have with us this Sunday.

* In the Gospel, Jesus will heal ten lepers of the dreadful disease of leprosy, but he had a far greater miracle in mind. Just as when Elisha heals Naaman the Syrian in the first reading, he received a greater gift: the recognition that there is no God in all the earth except the Lord and that he would no longer offer sacrifices or worship to false gods, but only to the true Lord.

* The Lord wanted to work a similar two-part miracle in the Gospel. All ten lepers were cured of a disease that had been eating away their flesh and bones, that had made them stink, that had made them the worst of outcasts and forced them to stay at least 50 feet away from any non-leper. It had compelled them at all times to yell out “unclean!, unclean!,” anytime someone was approaching. It had cut them off from their family members. It had also cut them off from the communal worship of God as they could never go to the Synagogue on Saturday or to the Temple on the major holy days. But at their cry for mercy, Jesus healed them all and sent them to the priests to verify that the disease had stopped growing and they were no longer contagious. As they were on their way, they were completely cured.

* After recognizing that the miracle for which they had prayed and long for had been granted, we would have expected that all of them would have been rejoicing almost as if they had been raised from the dead. But only one of the ten returned to thank the Lord Jesus who had given them this gift. Jesus poignantly asks, “Ten were cleansed, were they not? Where are the other nine?”

* Jesus wished them all to return not because he had worked the miracle with impure motives to get them to give him a thank you note, but so that he might grant them something even greater than a stupendous physical cure. He wanted to give them all what he gave one Samaritan who returned: the grace of salvation by faith. After the healed man fell down at his feet to thank him with all his heart, Jesus told him, “Stand up and go. Your faith has saved you!” Jesus came into the world not fundamentally to heal our bodies but to heal our souls. He came not to remedy our ills but to redeem our lives. In order to receive these greater gifts, however, we need gratefully to be in relationship with God. While all ten men were cured of the physical leprosy, nine retained leprosy of the soul, an ingratitude that took for granted the greatest gift they had received in life until then. Only the grateful leper would receive the gift of salvation because only he had a heart that was opened to receive it. The fact that he was a Samaritan prompted Jesus to ask, “Has none but this foreigner returned to give thanks to God?.” The other nine lepers were presumably Jews. Jesus was shocked because the Jews had been trained by God for centuries in the prayers of the Psalms and in the incredible events of salvation history to give thanks to the Lord. If anyone should have learned how to say thanks to God, it should have been the Jews. But many of them took God’s generosity, God’s goodness, for granted.

* The other nine likely looked at their disease with anger toward God, as if they had somehow sadistically chosen for unjust punishment such that when they wer...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the 27th Sunday in Ordinary Time (C), Vigil

October 5, 2019

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/10.4.19_Landry_Con_Con_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy to have a chance to ponder with you the consequential conversation Jesus wants to have with us this Sunday.

* In the Gospel, the apostles will not ask the Lord for money. They will not ask him for fame. They won’t ask him, like Solomon, for worldly wisdom and prudence. They won’t ask him for health or a long life. They will him for something they discovered was far more important than all of these things combined. They will beg him, “Increase our FAITH!”

* The first reading from the prophet Habucuc will tell us explicitly that “the just man lives by faith” and the apostles wanted to be such men. Their prayer for increased faith shows us their humble recognition that up until then they were not living enough by faith and that they needed the Lord’s help to do so.

* To ask for an increase in faith means to ask for two things, because faith means two things.

* Faith means first AN OBEDIENT TRUST IN GOD.

* We see this type of trust in Abraham, our father in faith, and in Mary, our mother in faith. When God asked seventy-five year-old Abraham to leave everything he had behind and journey to a far-away land, Abraham trusted in God and did so (Gen 12:1 ff). He trusted in God when God promised that he and Sarah in their old age would finally conceive a son (Gen 15:5; Gen 18:1 ff). He trusted in God even when was asking him to sacrifice son Son, Isaac, thirteen years later (Gen 22:1ff). Abraham trusted in the Lord so much that he would do anything God asked.

* Similarly, Mary trusted in God’s words through Gabriel that she would conceive a child without the help of a man and that child would be the Son of God (Gen 1:35). She trusted in God still when Simeon prophesied that her son the Messiah would be a “sign of contradiction” rather than a triumphant king and that her own soul would be pierced (Lk 2:34-35). She trusted when she saw her Son carry the wood of his sacrifice up the same mountain that Isaac ascended and no angel held back the hands of the Roman soldiers nailing him to the Cross. She trusted when she held her son’s bloody body in her arms. She trusted that God would bring great good, in fact our salvation, out of all of this evil.

* Likewise for us to ask God to “increase our faith!” is to ask Him to increase our trust in Him, so that we might confidently obey him in everything, but especially in the most difficult times and circumstances. Each of us knows, in our humble moments, how much we need to grow in the type of trust in God that we see in Abraham and Mary. But when we pray to God to increase our trust in him, how will he respond? The increase will not normally and entirely be an infusion from on high; most often God will answer our prayer by putting us in circumstances that require such real, deep trust in Him and then giving us his help to remain faithful. In each of those circumstances when we trust in Him rather than trust in worldly wisdom or the advice of human gurus, we will grow in faith.

* The second meaning of faith is the CONTENT OF WHAT WE BELIEVE on the basis of our trust in God who reveals those truths. This meaning refers to the various truths of the faith, found in the Creed we profess each Sunday, in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and embedded throughout the Church’s liturgy.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the 25th Sunday in Ordinary Time (C), Vigil

September 21, 2019

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/9.20.19_Landry_Con_Con_1.mp3