Catholic Preaching

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: 

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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.

* 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

 

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Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the 24th Sunday in Ordinary Time (C), Vigil

September 14, 2019

 

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Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the 23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time (C), Vigil

September 7, 2019

 

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Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the 22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time (C), Vigil

August 31, 2019

 

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Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the 21st Sunday in Ordinary Time (C), Vigil

August 24, 2019

 

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Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the 20th Sunday in Ordinary Time (C), Vigil

August 17, 2019

 

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