Fr. Brian Soliven Sermons

In the mountains of Umbria, a region in southern Italy, there is a small town called Norcia where the famous Saint Benedict was born in the year 480. A Benedictine monastery (a religious order that he founded which bears his name) sits high on a mountain overlooking the town. The first hour of prayer begins at 2:15AM in the morning. The valley is dark and the stone is cold. Somewhere in a quiet corridor, a man in a black habit puts his feet on the floor and rises to pray.

Most of us have never chosen an hour like that. We reach for our phones and negotiate with the alarm. Yet in the monastery, men who have given up careers, families, and the freedom to order their own days get up in the dark, and they do it by choice. Rising is the first thing they offer each day. Before they have achieved anything or spoken to anyone, before they have been useful to the world, they stand and sing to God as the rest of sleep.

The reason goes back to the command Christ called the greatest: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. Most of us hear those words and agree with them in the abstract. The monks have tried to build a life that takes the words literally. If you are to love God with all your heart, then no part of the day can be held back from him, not the best hours, not the first hours, not even the hours when sleep is sweetest. Saint Benedict wrote in his Rule that nothing should be put before the Work of God, and he meant the chanted prayer of the Church, the Divine Office, offered again and again through the day.

There is something unspeakably tender in this. A man does not rise at four to prove his toughness. He rises because love keeps its own hours. Think of a mother awake with a sick child or a lover watching at a window. Love does not ask when it is convenient. The monks have simply turned that old human truth toward heaven and decided that God deserves the watch.

And the early hour is not only a sacrifice. It is also a gift. In the dark, before the world fills with noise, the soul is quiet enough to hear. The psalms rise and fall in the candlelit choir, and the Latin settles into the stone. There is a kind of freedom in having nothing to prove at that hour. No one is watching, and no one will be impressed. The only audience is the One who is always awake. Whatever is sung in that darkness is sung for love alone.

Then the light comes.They pray, they work, and they return again to prayer. They have spent the whole day, hour by hour, saying one word in a hundred ways: yes.

I think this is what moves us about the monks of Norcia, even if we will never wear the habit. They remind us that a human life can be organized around something greater than ourselves. They keep alive the astonishing claim that God is real enough to wake up for, that love is worth the cost of a hard morning, and that all of it is for him.

Somewhere tonight a bell will ring in the dark, and men will rise. They are not at the edge of the world, as it might seem. They are at the center of it, doing what we were all made to do: loving God with everything they have, beginning before the dawn.

From Pope John Paul II first homily as he begins his pontificate in 1978: 

"Do not be afraid. Open, I say open wide the doors for Christ.... Christ knows “that which is in man”. He alone knows it. So often today, man does not know that which is in him, in the depths of his mind and heart. So often he is uncertain about the meaning of his life on this earth. He is assailed by doubt, a doubt which turns into despair. We ask you, therefore, we beg you with humility and with trust, let Christ speak to man. He alone has words of life, yes, of life eternal."

When the Pharisees tried to trap Jesus in this Sundays Gospel passage, He answered with words that reach into the very heart of our lives: “Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”

The coin bore Caesar’s image, and so it belonged to Caesar. But you and I bear another image. Scripture tells us that we are created in the image and likeness of God. And what bears God’s image belongs to God.

We owe Caesar our taxes, our lawful obedience, and our duties as citizens. But we owe God something far greater. We owe Him our hearts.

And yet, how often do we give the world our time, our energy, and our attention, leaving God whatever remains? We fill our days with work, worries, and distractions, then wonder why our souls feel empty. We give Caesar our coins, but do we give God our hearts?

My brothers and sisters, God does not want to be merely one part of our lives. He wants to be the center of our lives. He wants to enter our decisions, our relationships, our struggles, and even our hidden thoughts. He wants us to belong to Him completely.

This is the invitation of Catholic spirituality: not to escape the world, but to live in the world with our hearts fixed on heaven. We fulfill our daily duties, but we never forget whom we ultimately serve. No earthly power, no worldly ambition, and no passing pleasure can take the place of God.

So today, let us ask ourselves: What have I been withholding from the Lord? My time? My forgiveness? My trust? My willingness to follow His will?

The coin may belong to Caesar, but you belong to God. You were created in His image, redeemed by His Son, and called to eternal life with Him.

Do not give God merely what is left over. Give Him your first love, your deepest trust, and your whole heart.

For in the end, the greatest question will not be what we have given to Caesar, but whether we have given ourselves to God.

From a letter written by the French nun St. Margaret Mary: 

This divine heart (Sacred Heart of Jesus) is an abyss of all blessings, and into it the poor should submerge all their needs. It is an abyss of joy in which all of us can immerse our sorrows. It is an abyss of lowliness to counteract our foolishness, an abyss of mercy for the wretched, an abyss of love to meet our every need.

Have you ever heard this before –All religions are really the same: different paths up the same mountain, different languages describing the same God?  It sounds tolerant, fashionable, enlightened, hip and even cool. It is also false.

Religions make claims about reality, and those claims contradict one another. Christianity does not merely say that God exists or that God wants us to be good. It makes a far more astonishing claim: God has come for us.

This is why Christianity cannot be reduced to “being nice.” If Christianity were simply a lesson in kindness, we would hardly need an Incarnation, a Cross, a Resurrection—or the Eucharist. Christianity is not a program for making kind people. It is an invitation into something much more dramatic; it’s ultimately about union with God.

Nor is it enough to say, “I’m a Christian because I love Jesus.” Of course we must love Jesus. But love cannot mean choosing which parts of Him we find agreeable. If we love Him, we must take seriously what He says, what He commands, and what He gives. And what does He give? He gives Himself.

This is where the Catholic faith becomes startlingly more astonishing and hard hitting. Look at the Holy Mass, this ancient ritual that is the heart of Catholic life. This Eucharist must be understood in the light of Jesus’ repeated teaching about the wedding banquet. In the Gospel, the Kingdom of God is like a king who gives a wedding feast for his son. Jesus constantly speaks as the Bridegroom coming for His bride.

Why a wedding?

Because salvation is not merely forgiveness. It is communion. A wedding is the union of two who give themselves completely to one another. And Christianity says that God desires something analogous—indeed, something infinitely greater: the union of humanity with God.

The Eucharist is therefore not a religious accessory, nor merely a reminder of Jesus. It is the sacramental sign and reality of the Bridegroom giving Himself to His people.

The Christian life is not fundamentally about being nice. It is not even merely about having warm feelings toward Jesus. It is about being invited to the wedding feast of the Lamb.

And the shocking thing is that Christ does not invite us merely to watch the Bridegroom like a mere spectator at a wedding.

He invites us to be united to Him.

The rosary is a powerful tool to build the Church. 

There is something wonderfully persistent about the Bible’s picture of God’s people as a vineyard. One might have expected Scripture to choose an image more impressive: an army marching beneath its banners, perhaps, or a mighty city rising toward heaven. Instead, again and again, we are given vines, branches, fruit, soil, pruning, and harvest. Perhaps this is because a vineyard teaches us something we are very reluctant to learn: life cannot be hurried, and fruit cannot be manufactured.

The vineyard belongs to God. He plants it, tends it, waters it, protects it, and looks for fruit from it. Israel is described as the vine God brought out of Egypt and planted in the land. The prophets then speak with painful honesty about what became of that vineyard when it ceased to bear the fruit its Owner desired.

And then Christ comes and takes the image upon Himself. He does not merely say that He is a worker in the vineyard. He says, “I am the true vine.” The old image finds its fulfillment in Him. The people of God are no longer understood apart from their living connection to the Son. We are branches, drawing our life from Him.

This also gives us a picture of the Kingdom of God. A vineyard is not built in a single afternoon. The work is patient. There is planting before harvesting, pruning before abundance, and seasons in which very little seems to be happening at all. Yet beneath the apparent stillness, the life of the vine continues.

We often wish God would build His Kingdom in the manner of an architect—quickly, visibly, and according to our timetable. But He seems to prefer the patience of a gardener. He grows His Kingdom through ordinary people, ordinary faithfulness, ordinary acts of love and obedience. Much of the work is hidden from our eyes. And this is perhaps the great comfort of the vineyard: the harvest belongs to God.

The branch does not create the sap. The soil does not create the seed. The servant does not create the life within the vine. We work, certainly; we prune and plant and tend. But we are participating in a life that was God's before it was ever ours. The Kingdom is His vineyard. Christ is the true Vine. And we are branches, invited not to possess the vineyard, but to abide in the One through whom its life flows—and, in His time, to bear fruit.

The moment we were conceived in mother's womb, a spiritual being was assigned to watch over us. 

We are never alone. An entire spiritual realm exists around us. Watch what happens when the archangels break through. 

***Meditation hymn begins at minute 14:05 ***

There is a strange inversion at the heart of the Gospel: the One who had every right to command became the One who obeyed. Christ, “though he was in the form of God,” emptied Himself and took “the form of a servant” (Philippians 2:6–7). He did not merely come near to our misery. He entered it.

We speak of sin as though it were only a list of bad choices. But anyone who has tried to escape a habit, a resentment, a lust, a fear, or a selfishness knows that sin can become a kind of slavery. We discover, with St. Paul, that we often do not do the good we wish to do. Something in us is terribly sick. And it is precisely there that Christ comes.

He takes upon Himself the condition of the slave, the Bible tells us, not because He is enslaved, but because we are. He takes our mortal, wounded flesh, the very flesh in which our bondage is so often felt. The hands that created the stars become hands that can be pierced. The body that belongs wholly to God is given wholly for us. This is the astonishing generosity of Christianity: God does not stand at a safe distance and shout instructions to prisoners. He enters the prison. And more than that, He gives His own body as the price of our freedom.

The Christian therefore does not begin with the question, “How can I make myself good enough for God?” The answer would be terribly small if that were the Gospel. We begin instead with the fact that God has come down into the depths where we are and has given Himself for us. The chains are not broken by our heroic strength, but by His sacrificial love. Christ becomes what we are, so that we may receive what He is. The slave who is Christ is therefore the Lord who sets slaves free. And the cross, which appears to be the ultimate picture of defeat, becomes the doorway into liberty.

If you’re still on the fence about coming to the Well, this Thursday October 1st, come encounter Jesus. We learn about how our bodies play a pivotal role in God’s plan. We no longer have to live as slaves to sin, to lust, to sickness and to the suffering that we experience so often with our bodies. The Church offers us freedom, true lasting freedom in Jesus Christ. Come learn and experience how this Thursday. If you are thirsty, come to the eternal Well. Get your tickets!