Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Monday of the Second Week of Lent

March 6, 2023

Dan 9:4-10, Ps 79, Lk 6:36-38

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/3.6.23_Homily.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* As we’ve been pondering for the last 12 days, the whole purpose of Lent is to become like God the Father. Today Jesus begins the Gospel by encouraging and commanding us to be merciful as God the Father is merciful. God is merciful love (hesed) and he who is rich in mercy wants to help us to become not only rich through our receiving that mercy but richer still in our sharing it. But the path God chooses to help us to become rich in mercy is at first glance surprising and paradoxical. Right after Jesus tells us to be merciful like his Father, he says, “Stop judging and you will not be judged. Stop condemning and you will not be condemned. Forgive and you will be forgiven,” before proceeding to summarize everything by saying, “For the measure with which you measure will in return be measured out to you.” If we’re merciful, most people interpret the text to say, we won’t judge other people. Mercy and judging seem to be polar opposites. But they’re not. The key is to understand whom we should be judging, because it is precisely through judging that we open ourselves up to God’s mercy and the transformation that always accompanies that gift.

* Pope Francis, the tenth anniversary of whose pontificate we will mark in a week, took up this theme several years ago in his daily homily at the St. Martha Domus in the Vatican. He said that we can only progress on our Christian journey in life if we are capable of judging ourselves first. “We are all sinners,” he said, “not in theory but in reality,” but we need the ability to judge ourselves to be sinners in need of God’s mercy. We need to say, “I accuse myself!” We need to pray, as we do at the beginning of each Mass, “I have greatly sinned … by my own … most grievous fault.” Pope Francis says that many of us spend time judging others rather than accusing ourselves. “We are all masters, professors of self-justification: ‘No it wasn’t me, it’s not my fault.’ … We all have an alibi to explain away our shortcomings, our sins, and we are often to put on a face that says ‘I do not know,’ a face that says ‘I didn’t do it, maybe someone else did,’ an innocent face. This is no way to lead a Christian life.” The Pope said, “If we do not learn this first step in life, we will never, never be able to take other steps on the road of our Christian life, of our spiritual life. The first step is to judge ourselves. Without saying anything out loud. Between you and your conscience. … This is what judging yourself means, not hiding from the roots of sin that are in all of us, the many things we are capable of doing, even if we cannot see them.” Once we begin to judge ourselves as the sinners we are, we can open ourselves to God’s mercy because we’ll recognize how much and why we need it. C.S. Lewis once said that the two essential truths of Christianity are that we’re sinners and that Jesus has come to save us from our sins. We can’t appreciate God’s mercy unless we recognize how desperate we are for it. And once we recognize how much we need it, then we can be compassionate toward others who need it, too. The way we stop judging and condemning others is when we recognize that but for God’s grace we would be under the very same judgment and condemnation since we, too, are sinners responsible for Christ’s crucifixion through our sins just as much as others have.

* While judging ourselves instead of others is the first step, however, it’s not the last.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Second Sunday of Lent, Year A

March 5, 2023

Gen 12:1-4, Ps 33, 2 Tim 1:8-10, Mt 17:1-9

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/3.5.23_Homily_CCM_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* On the first Sunday of Lent, the Church always leads us out with Christ into the desert, so that we can get away from the distractions of day to day life and focus with Christ on our prayer, almsgiving and fasting as respective antidotes to the way that the devil tries to tempt us to distort our relationships with God, others and within ourselves. On the Second Sunday of Lent each year, the Church always has us make a different pilgrimage, this time with Jesus, Peter, James and John up the Mount of Transfiguration, where Christ seeks to teach us three valuable lessons necessary for a good Lent and a holy life.

* The first lesson is about exertion, about the effort, that a holy Lent and true Christian life entails. Jesus leads Peter, James and John on a hike up what St. Matthew calls an “exceedingly high mountain.” Christian tradition associates the place where Jesus was transfigured as Mount Tabor, which towers over Galilee and the Plains of Megiddo, and takes over ten minutes to climb in vans zig-zagging up narrow paths. It would take vigorous climbers at least a few hours to ascend on foot. The three apostles needed to leave civilization behind, they needed to leave their comfort zones behind, and climb with Jesus, sweating, probably gasping for air, to pray. This Lent the Lord Jesus is likewise asking of us to make an exertion. He’s calling us to hard work. He’s calling us to be on the move. And the pilgrimage he seeks to have us make with him isn’t in a high-speed van. This annual spiritual altitude training, however, is meant to strengthen us for the uphill marathon of life and the inevitable vicissitudes that arise. The first test is whether we will put in the effort to live a good and holy Lent, whether we will make bold resolutions with regard to prayer, fasting and charity, or whether we will try to live a watered down one.

* The second Lenten lesson is the help God wants to give us as we make that spiritual and often physical ascent. When they reach the top of the mountain, Saints Peter, James and John see something extraordinary. Jesus is transfigured. He and his clothes become radiant. St. Luke tells us that he speaks with Moses and Elijah, the greatest figures in Jewish history who symbolize the law and the prophets, about the “exodus” he was to accomplish in Jerusalem, when Jesus would seek to lead us, not from slavery in Egypt through the Red Sea and the desert to the promised land, but through slavery to sin through baptism into his kingdom and ultimately from death to eternal life. The experience of the various theophanies at the top of the mountain are so powerful that the apostles don’t know what to say, but it leads Peter immediately to want to get into real estate, building booths for Jesus, Moses and Elijah, to keep the experience going for as long as possible. Why did Jesus want them to have this experience? The reason was ultimately to strengthen them to remain strong in faith even when they would descend the Mount of Transfiguration to ascend the hill of Calvary. When they would see Jesus transfigured in blood, they would be able to remember Jesus in glory. The Church helps us to capture the reason for Jesus’ transfiguration in the Eucharistic Preface for Mass, in which the priest prays, “For after [Jesus] had told the disciples of his coming death, on the holy mountain he manifested to them his glory, to show, even by the testimony of the law and the prophets,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, NY

Second Sunday of Lent, Year A

March 5, 2023

Gen 12:1-4, Ps 33, 2 Tim 1:8-10, Mt 17:1-9

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/3.5.23_MC_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* The Second Sunday of Lent is called the Sunday of Abraham and the Transfiguration because every year in the first reading we focus on part of the story of the calling of Abraham and in the Gospel one of the evangelist’s accounts of Jesus’ transfiguration at the top of the very high mountain. The lessons we learn in these scenes are important not only for us to live Lent well but to be strengthened to live the Christian life well.

* Lent is about growth in faith and Abraham shows us very clearly what real faith is, the type of faith to which God calls each of us and wants to renew in us. When Abraham was 75 years old — well past retirement age for people today — the Lord called him in Ur of the Chaldeans and told him to leave the land of his kinfolk and go to a land He would show him. God asked him to pack his bags, get his extended family and animals and leave behind everything, his language, his land, his friends. Abraham trusted in God and departed his comfortable, familiar surroundings, not knowing where his destination would be. That was only the beginning of the ways God challenged Abraham to trust in Him. God gave him a promise, one that would have sounded crazy to Abraham and his wife, fellow septuagenarian Sara, who were childless at the time. “I will make of you a great nation.” How could Abraham become a great nation if he and his wife had been unable to have children during what was likely fifty or sixty years of marriage? Yet Abraham believed again. When they arrived in Canaan, Abraham found that the land God was intending to give him and his eventual descendants was not going to come to him with a golden key. He and his family were going to have to fight for the land, against several tribes consecutively. Abraham again consented. After they were settled, Abraham and Sara tried for 24 years to have a child, to no avail. But he continued to believe in the Lord’s promise, despite the excruciatingly long wait. Eventually when Abraham was 100, Sarah gave birth to Isaac, who was destined, Abraham thought, to be the one through whom God would make Abraham the father of many nations. Thirteen years later, however, God decided to test Abraham’s faith to the utmost. He asked Abraham to go to Mt. Moriah, a hill in Jerusalem, and there sacrifice his son, the son for whom he had waited for so long and in whom he had put so much hope. Abraham did what the Lord wanted, even though it would have seemed so contradictory to God’s previous plans. He did so hoping that God himself would provide the lamb for the Holocaust. Isaac his son carried the wood. Abraham built the altar and then was prepared to sacrifice his own son to the Lord, something that the Canaanite pagans were accustomed to do. He did so, as the Letter to the Hebrews tells us, fully believing that even if he should kill his son, God would raise his son from the dead (Heb 11:19), because Isaac was the son of the promise through whom God would make Abraham the father of many nations. But as Abraham’s hand was coming down with the knife, the angel of the Lord stopped him.

* The Church gives us the story of Abraham each year at the beginning of Lent first because we’re called to have faith similar to Abraham’s. While God might or might not ask all of us to leave behind everything and go to fight to win a faraway land — although for most of us in this chapel, he has indeed brought us far away from home!

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Immaculate Conception Parish, Washington, DC

Second Sunday of Lent, Year A

Parish Day of Recollection: “Extraordinary Help for a Holy Lent:

The Eucharistic Revival and Jesus’ Call to Pray, Fast and Give Alms”

March 4, 2023

Gen 12:1-4, Ps 33, 2 Tim 1:8-10, Mt 17:1-9

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/3.4.23_Transfiguration_Vigil_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* The Second Sunday of Lent is called the Sunday of Abraham and the Transfiguration because every year in the first reading we focus on part of the story of the calling of Abraham and in the Gospel one of the evangelist’s accounts of Jesus’ transfiguration at the top of the very high mountain. The lessons we learn in these scenes are important not only for us to live Lent well but, especially for those who are now finishing up today’s parish retreat, for us to make well the transition that God wants us to help us make.

* Lent, and every retreat, is about growth in faith and Abraham shows us very clearly what real faith is, the type of faith to which God calls each of us and wants to renew in us. When Abraham was 75 years old — well past retirement age for people today — the Lord called him in Ur of the Chaldeans and told him to leave the land of his kinfolk and go to a land He would show him. God asked him to pack his bags, get his extended family and animals and leave behind everything, his language, his land, his friends. Abraham trusted in God and departed his comfortable, familiar surroundings, not knowing where his destination would be. That was only the beginning of the ways God challenged Abraham to trust in Him. God gave him a promise, one that would have sounded crazy to Abraham and his wife, fellow septuagenarian Sara, who were childless at the time. “I will make of you a great nation.” How could Abraham become a great nation if he and his wife had been unable to have children during what was likely fifty or sixty years of marriage? Yet Abraham believed again. When they arrived in Canaan, Abraham found that the land God was intending to give him and his eventual descendants was not going to come to him with a golden key. He He and his family were going to have to fight for the land, against several tribes consecutively. Abraham again consented. After they were settled, Abraham and Sara tried for 24 years to have a child, to no avail. But he continued to believe in the Lord’s promise, despite the excruciatingly long wait. Eventually when Abraham was 100, Sarah gave birth to Isaac, who was destined, Abraham thought, to be the one through whom God would make Abraham the father of many nations. Thirteen years later, however, God decided to test Abraham’s faith to the utmost. He asked Abraham to go to Mt. Moriah, a hill in Jerusalem, and there sacrifice his son, the son for whom he had waited for so long and in whom he had put so much hope. Abraham did what the Lord wanted, even though it would have seemed so contradictory to God’s previous plans. He did so hoping that God himself would provide the lamb for the Holocaust. Isaac his son carried the wood. Abraham built the altar and then was prepared to sacrifice his own son to the Lord, something that the Canaanite pagans were accustomed to do. He did so, as the Letter to the Hebrews tells us, fully believing that even if he should kill his son, God would raise his son from the dead (Heb 11:19), because Isaac was the son of the promise through whom God would make Abraham the father of many nations. But as Abraham’s hand was coming down with the knife, the angel of the Lord stopped him.

* The Church gives us the story of Abraham each year at the beginning of Lent first because we’re called to have fai...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Immaculate Conception Parish, Washington, DC

Parish Day of Recollection: “Extraordinary Help for a Holy Lent: The Eucharistic Revival and Jesus’ Call to Pray, Fast and Give Alms”

March 3-4, 2023

(There was a problem with the recorder and hence there’s a little static on the recording).

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/3.4.23_Charity_1.mp3

 

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Immaculate Conception Parish, Washington, DC

Parish Day of Recollection: “Extraordinary Help for a Holy Lent: The Eucharistic Revival and Jesus’ Call to Pray, Fast and Give Alms”

March 3-4, 2023

(There was a problem with the recorder and hence there’s a little static on the recording).

 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/3.4.23_Going_to_the_Desert_to_Adore_1.mp3

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Immaculate Conception Parish, Washington, DC

Saturday of the First Week of Lent

Parish Day of Recollection: “Extraordinary Help for a Holy Lent:

The Eucharistic Revival and Jesus’ Call to Pray, Fast and Give Alms”

March 4, 2023

Dt 26:16-19, Ps 119, Mt 5:43-48

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/3.4.23_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* The whole point and purpose of Lenten season is to help us become who we’re supposed to be, to grow in the image and likeness of God in which we’ve been made. This holy season is a gift is for us to become fully Christian in identity and behavior — and that involves rediscovering or deepening our relationship with God in the Father through Christ in the Holy Spirit. On Ash Wednesday, we pondered how Jesus calls us to give alms, fast and pray differently from everyone else, doing each of these things in communion with our Father who sees in secret. We’re supposed to give alms recognizing that all that we are able to give to others we have first received from God the Father, and so our giving is an extension of his own loving Providence. We’re supposed to fast in order to hunger for what he hungers. We’re supposed to pray by meeting God the Father in our “inner room,” the locked “storeroom” in a Jewish house where all valuables were kept, indicating to us not only are we supposed to treasure God most but also his love in coming to meet us in the tiny “closet” of our interior life, whether we’re praying at home or in the middle of a multitude.

* Lent is the time in which with God’s help we reorder our relationship with God through prayer, our relationship with others through almsgiving, our relationship with ourselves through fasting and self-denial. It’s a time to convert our hearts, our insides, our motivations, our aspirations, so that from the inside out, in all our actions, we might live as Christians ought, in the love of God the Father. Lent is the time when we relive the Parable of the Prodigal Son, when we come to our senses as to how we’ve treated God as if he were not a loving Father, wandered from his house, squandered the inheritance he has given us and make the journey home. It’s a time when he runs out to meet us, to cleanse us, to restore us to our full dignity and to rejoice with us at our conversion. It’s the time when God the Father invites us to enter into his own merciful, loving heart and become his children. Lent is about becoming more and more Godlike.

* That’s what today’s Gospel passage is about. Jesus puts an exclamation point on our Lenten and Christian summons. He tells us, “Therefore, be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.” Often when we hear this we’re thrown off by the word “perfect” and think that this is an unachievable standard, because after all, none of us is perfect, none of us will ever be perfect, and therefore if God is calling us never to make a mistake, then he’s calling us to something beyond human capacity. Therefore, we can feel somewhat justified in dismissing what Jesus says as if it’s clearly an unattainable goal. But lest we ignore what Jesus is calling us to, as if he couldn’t possibly have meant it, we should focus on a couple things:

* First, the main emphasis of what Jesus is clearly saying is “Be like your heavenly Father.” After calling us to offer no resistance to evil doers, turn the other check, love our enemies and pray for our persecutors, he tells us why: so “that you may be children of your Father in heaven, who makes his sun rise on the bad and the good and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.” He wants us to become true children of our heavenly Father and implies that we will not really become c...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Immaculate Conception Parish, Washington, DC

Parish Day of Recollection: “Extraordinary Help for a Holy Lent: The Eucharistic Revival and Jesus’ Call to Pray, Fast and Give Alms”

March 3-4, 2023

(There was a problem with the recorder and hence there’s a little static on the recording).

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/3.3.23_Hungering_for_the_Feast_of_Faith_1.mp3

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Second Sunday of Lent, A, Vigil

March 4, 2023

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/3.4.23_Landry_ConCon_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily:

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy to join you again and ponder with you the consequential conversation Jesus wants to have with us in the Gospel this Sunday, as we, with the apostles Peter, James and John, behold Jesus transfigured among us.

* Every year ten days into Lent the Church has us journey with Jesus to the top of an exceedingly high mountain. It does so for the same reason why God the Father conceded to Peter, James and John the experience of the Transfiguration in the first place: to give them a foretaste of Jesus Christ’s glory, to sustain them when they would see Jesus transfigured in blood, pain and suffering on Good Friday.

* We see the connection between Mt. Tabor and Mt. Calvary, between the glory of the Transfiguration and the glorification of Christ on the throne of the Cross, in what the subject matter of the conversation between Jesus and the two great heroes of the Old Testament, Moses and Elijah, was. Moses and Elijah are both precursors of Lent. Elijah had lived a Lent of 40 days crossing the desert to the mountain of God, Horeb, being hunted by King Ahab. Moses had spent 40 days in prayer at the top of Mt. Sinai. They came specifically to speak with Jesus not about the glory that was to come, not about Heaven, but about the culmination of the Lenten Season: Jesus’ suffering, Cross and death. St. Luke tells us they spoke about the “exodus” that Jesus was to accomplish in Jerusalem, when he would lead us, like Moses led the Israelites from slavery through water and the desert to the promised land, only this time the slavery is not Pharaoh but sin, the water is not the Red Sea but baptism, the desert is not in the Middle East but the experience of Lent, and the Promised Land is not flowing with milk and honey but the Living Water that wells up to eternal life.

* There are three lessons from the Transfiguration that are meant to influence the way we live Lent and life.

* The first is the exertion, the effort that a holy Lent entails. Jesus leads Peter, James and John on a tough climb. Christian tradition normally associates the mountain where Jesus was transfigured as Mount Tabor, which towers over Galilee and the Plains of Megiddo, and takes over ten minutes to climb in vans up narrow zig-zagging paths. It takes vigorous climbers at least a couple of hours to ascend on foot. The apostles needed to leave civilization and their comfort zones behind, and climb with Jesus, sweating, probably gasping a little for air, to pray with Jesus and see him revealed. The lesson for us is that the Lord is likewise asking of us to make an exertion this Lent. Lent is fundamentally dynamic. We’re called to be on the move. And the pilgrimage he seeks to have us make with him isn’t in some comfy vehicle. He’s asking us to climb, to sweat, to work. Prayer, fasting and almsgiving — if we’ve set proper resolutions — all require effort, sacrifice, and perseverance. Repenting and believing in the Gospel require grit.

* That leads us to the second lesson, which is the help God gives us to make this exertion. In the Transfiguration, Saints Peter, James and John saw something extraordinary at the end of their spiritual and physical climb. Jesus was transfigured. He and his clothes were radiant. He was speaking with Moses and Elijah, the greatest figures in Jewish history. The cloud — a sign of God’s presence — came down upon them.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Friday of the First Week of Lent

Memorial of St. Katharine Drexel

March 3, 2023

Ez 18:21-18, Ps 130, Mt 5:20-26

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/3.3.23_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* In today’s Gospel, Jesus says that our righteousness, our justice, must surpass that of the scribes and Pharisees to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, in order to enter into eternal life, in order not to go to Hell. The “justice” of the Pharisees was quite rigorous in terms of prayer, weekly fasting, tithing. But there were two things it lacked. First, it was external, focusing on acts rather than the heart; second, it lacked mercy. The Pharisees were the “separated ones,” those who in order to cut themselves off from sin sought to cut themselves totally off from sinners, as if they weren’t sinners themselves. That’s why they complained when Jesus was eating with Matthew and the other tax collectors, because they had no communion at all with sinners, whom they thought would just be straw for the fires of hell. Likewise, to convert them, Jesus preached the three parables of the Lost Sheep, Lost Coin and Lost Son in Lk 15, because the scribes and Pharisees were like the older brother in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, preferring their brothers to remain dead in sin rather than rejoicing in their resurrection through reconciliation with God. Our righteousness must surpass theirs because theirs wasn’t truly “right” with God or with others: they served him with their lips and even externally with some of their deeds, but their hearts were far from him, because they didn’t realize their need for God’s mercy and God’s desire to transform them by that mercy to be merciful like he is merciful. The whole practice of Lent is meant to help us become like God: in fasting, we learn to hunger for what he hungers; in almsgiving, we share in his providential care, passing on to others who need it more than we do what God has first given to us; and in prayer, allowing his thoughts to become our thoughts and his ways our ways. Today in the readings we enter into these truths.

* God responds to a complaint he knows has welled up in the hearts of the people of Israel in Ezekiel’s day and one that arises in every age. It certainly arose for the Scribes and Pharisees whose righteousness ours needs to surpass. “The Lord’s way is not fair!,” we can complain. Ezekiel had described clearly what the Lord’s way is. On the one hand, “If the wicked man turns away from all the sins he committed, if he keeps all my statutes and does what is right and just, he shall surely live, he shall not die. None of the crimes he committed shall be remembered against him; he shall live because of the virtue he has practiced.” On the other hand, “If the virtuous man turns from the path of virtue to do evil, the same kind of abominable things that the wicked man does, can he do this and still live? None of his virtuous deeds shall be remembered, because he has broken faith and committed sin; because of this, he shall die.”

* The first way we and others complain that the Lord’s way is not just is that it is a way of mercy for sinners. Someone who has lived a sinful live for decades all of a sudden converts and God says he shall live. God won’t remember the crimes he has committed. True justice, we can object, is to hold people accountable forever. Like the older brother in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, we can get into the state that we don’t rejoice when our lost brother is found and our dead brother comes to life again. Our self-identity is caught up, somehow, in a sense of spiritual superiority,