Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Seventeenth Sunday of Ordinary Time, C, Vigil

July 23, 2022

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/7.23.22_Landry_ConCon_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday in which the disciples of Jesus ask him how to enter into the most fundamental consequential conversation of all: the dialogue with God we call prayer.

* “Lord, teach us to pray,” one of Jesus’ disciples asks at the beginning of this Sunday’s Gospel. On its face, it seems like a straightforward-enough request, but when one understands well the context in which it would have been asked, it would be similar to Michael Jordan’s asking someone to teach him how to dribble a basketball. The Jewish disciples of Jesus already should have been experts on prayer. The whole of what we call today the Old Testament was one long instruction on how to pray: Abraham, Moses, Samson, David, Elijah, Esther all teach us by example. The 150 psalms were a prayer book the Jews sang over and over with inspired words, the prophetic books contain many examples of prayer, and the wisdom literature shares the fruit of much prayer and contemplation on the mysteries of God. The history of the Jews and the whole Hebrew Bible was a school of prayer. Yet Jesus’ disciples, fully educated in that school, knew that there was something different about Jesus’ prayer that they hadn’t learned from the rabbis in the synagogues or the levitical priests in the Temple. His example of prayer — going off to the desert, heading up on a mountain, stealing a corner in a garden, often spending all night — enticed them to ask him to teach them his secret. Implicitly they knew that the type of prayer to which God was calling them was more than merely making some time for God, or reflecting on the Torah or putting the sacred words of the Psalms on their lips. So they turned to Jesus to ask him to teach them this special art, and Jesus didn’t let them down. This weekend we learn from the same Master.

* One cannot exaggerate the importance of prayer in a life that’s truly and fully Christian. St. John Paul II, in his 2001 Pastoral Plan for the Church in the new millennium, said, “Prayer cannot be taken for granted. We have to learn to pray: as it were learning this art ever anew from the lips of the Divine Master himself, like the first disciples: ‘Lord, teach us to pray!’” He went on to emphasize what happens if we don’t learn that art. “It would be wrong to think,” he said, “that ordinary Christians can be content with a shallow prayer that is unable to fill their whole life. Especially in the face of the many trials to which today’s world subjects faith, they would be not only mediocre Christians but ‘Christians at risk’ … of seeing their faith progressively undermined,” something we see when Catholics drift away from the faith because they were often not finding God and entering into intimate existential dialogue with Him through the practice of their faith. So St. John Paul said, “It is therefore essential that education in prayer should become in some way a key-point” of everything the Church does, because “learning this Trinitarian shape of Christian prayer and living it fully, above all in the liturgy … but also in personal experience, is the secret of a truly vital Christianity” (NMI 32-34). For our faith to be truly alive, we must learn from Christ how to pray to the Father by the power of the Holy Spirit.