St. Joseph Church Homilies

Maybe some here are lucky enough to know a good listener. A good listener can make you feel like what you have to say matters. A good listener can make you feel valued and understood. Parents and teachers are easily frustrated when a child doesn’t listen and few escape the hurt that comes when a...

At every Mass, right after the consecration, after the bread and wine become the Body and Blood of our Saviour, the priest says, “The mystery of faith”. We started reflecting last weekend on how the Mass stirs us to explore the mysteries of our faith. God’s love, forgiveness and mercy, his wisdom, the ways he...

While growing up, one of the ways my siblings and I would entertain ourselves would be to play a board game and one game we might pull of the shelf was the game ‘Clue’. Now, my siblings and I: we didn’t use the game as intended. For us, the game was yet another way to...

If I were to ask for a show of hands as to who has burdens in their life, I expect that most every hand would go up. Some might even put up two hands. Not me, of course, because it’s always great to serve here. But even children can find their chores or siblings or...

Of all the people mentioned in the scriptures who endured tough circumstances, I probably feel worst for the prophet Jeremiah who we heard about in today’s First Reading. At God’s prompting, the prophet declared that the people of Judah would be conquered if they didn’t change their ways; a very unpopular message, to be sure....

At every election we’re given the great opportunity to elect new leaders. Sometimes, we end up with leaders we like and sometimes we don’t. Sometimes we elect great and strong leaders and sometimes we’re left simply thankful that time will eventually present another chance to vote in someone else. Of course, we know that no...

I don’t know if anyone here does jigsaw puzzles. I don’t really have the patience needed to finish puzzles, but I know some who love them and even go to yard sales to find cheap ones. That must be a real gamble, though: to buy puzzles that have already been opened. There’s no way to know if there are any missing pieces till the end and without every single piece, a puzzle is incomplete; the full image remains clouded. Or, have any here ever tried playing a card game with a deck that’s missing a few cards? Not even Solitaire works without all the cards.

When sharing the Good News, we’re eager to describe God as being love, but explaining the Trinity is just a bit more difficult because it’s a mystery. So, it’s easy to shy away from discussing the Trinity. Yet, our teaching on the Trinity is a core belief of our faith; without it, describing our faith would be like playing a card game without all the cards or trying to finish a puzzle that has missing pieces.

The Christian teachings about the Trinity are important not just because they’re about God but because they reveal things about us and about love too. The fires we’re witnessing both out east and out west really highlight the changing climate our planet is currently experiencing. I know there’s lots of great debates about causes and future effects of climate change that go well over my head and probably over the heads of many experts too. But I believe climate change is a great example of how all God’s creation is connected. Rising sea temperatures in the south pacific makes a difference in weather patterns on the other side of the world. Factories opened and closed over a hundred years ago continue to have an effect today. Across both space and time, it seems that all God’s creation is connected; there’s a unity built right into the many things God has created.

Really, this shouldn’t be a surprise for Christians as Jesus has shown that our maker is a unity. The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit aren’t created beings, of course. But these three persons exist as one united God without division. An examination of God’s work throughout history uncovers a being who wishes for creation to mirror his own unity. God the Father has sent many prophets to gather and unite his people by disclosing his will and law. God the Son is seen present in the darkest of all places to gather and unite God’s people through the forgiveness of sin. God the Holy Spirit continues to gather and unite all through the adoption offered in Baptism. God gathers and unites all of creation so it might reflect the unity and love of the Trinity.

The Christian teachings about the Trinity are important not just because they’re about God but because they’re about healing too. Recognizing how each of us exist as independent beings, there’s always a temptation to invent ourselves, to decide for ourselves who we are, how we’ll be treated and even labeled. It’s an attempt to be a puzzle piece that needs no puzzle and there’s no unity in this. Jesus never called on his disciples to invent themselves but to discern who they were created to be. This is where we find the full picture of ourselves: by discerning how we’re called to fit into the great puzzle of creation. This is where we begin to mirror the love of God: by seeking out how we’re connected to the rest of all that God has made.

Last weekend we reflected on the Holy Spirit, especially on how the Holy Spirit makes great saints from good people. We’re all good people, of course. But we know we’ve been called to greatness. While the saints are all great each in their own unique way, one common quality all saints seem to share is a desire to gather. Like God, the saints have worked to gather and unite God’s people and creation and they did so by making use of many gifts given to them by the Holy Spirit.