Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (A) (Vigil)

June 27, 2020

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/6.27.20_Landry_ConCon_1.mp3

 

The text that guided the homily was: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege 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.

* There are two essential aspects of our Christian life, discipleship and apostolate, on the one hand, our following Jesus and on the other, our proclaiming him. We could also phrase it as our work to become holy as God is holy and our fidelity to the mission he gives us to become instruments in the sanctification of others. These can also be summarized by the two principle verbs in Jesus’ vocabulary, come and go. We come to him and then he sends us forth.

* We see both of these aspects in the dialogue Jesus has with us in this Sunday’s Gospel. First he talks to us about the conditions of discipleship and then he speaks to us of our apostolate.

* Jesus describes that to be his disciple, to enter into his kingdom, isn’t easy. It requires a decisive choice. To do so, he tells us, we must love him more than father and mother, more than son or daughter. We must take up our cross and follow after him, losing our life for his sake in order to find it. Many people today do not recognize the seriousness of the call of Jesus. The people in Jesus’ own day had a similar problem. For centuries, they anticipated that a Messiah would come, overwhelm all foreign powers, and they would ride his coattails to great triumph and riches. They were unprepared for the cost of discipleship, for the fact that to follow him might involve family opposition, not to mention the Cross, suffering, and struggle. In terms of family relations, Jesus says that we can only have one absolute in our life, only one love can have primacy, only one thing can have our ultimate obedience and affection, either God or our parents, or our spouse, or our children. The same God who calls us to honor our mother and father, who calls us to reverence our spouse out of love for Christ, who calls us to love our children as God loves us, at the same time calls us to love God with all our mind, heart, soul and strength. When we choose to love God above all, we do not love our family members less, but better. Many times we won’t have to choose between the love of God and the love of family members, but when faced with the choice, Jesus is saying God must come first.

* This choice sadly comes up sometimes and we all need to be ready for it. When I was in seminary, many of my classmates were there over the opposition of their family members, who didn’t want them to become priests because, sadly, in many cases their family members preferred them to marry and continue on the family name than to help make children for God through baptism and the Sacraments. I’m a spiritual director to many religious women and many of them, too, have received not encouragement but opposition from their families, who think they’re throwing their lives away when they give them to Jesus. A few weeks ago, a priest friend of mine died, Fr. John Jay Hughes, a famous convert. I just wrote a tribute to him for the National Catholic Register. His father and grandfather were well-known influential Episcopal priests in Newport, RI and at St. John Divine Cathedral in New York. Fr. Jay himself became an Episcopal priest. But eventually he realized that God was calling him to be a Catholic. His dad told him that if he “perverted to Rome,” he would never be welcome again in the family home. Fr. Hughes knew, however,