St. Thomas the Apostle Parish

Homily for Monday of the 2nd Week of Lent

This season of Lent seems so somber for some people. Indeed, it is a time when we take a good, hard look at what is missing in our response to the gift of love and the gifts of life that we receive from God.

But the joyful part of this season is that God is merciful; God is forgiving. With true and humble repentance, we accept God’s mercy and forgiveness, which are always being offered to us.

We, too, are called to be merciful and forgiving. All of us have been hurt; all of us have been betrayed. And it is difficult for us to forgive because we have been hurt.

Let us remember the words of our Gospel reading today: “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful…. for the measure with which you measure will in return be measured out to you.”+

Homily for the 2nd Sunday of Lent

A very learned and holy rabbi traveled throughout the world preaching and teaching. The rabbi was welcomed wherever he went -except in one small town in Eastern Europe, which he visited shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The people wanted nothing to do with him; they were cold and distant -they closed the door, literally and metaphorically, in his face.

All except for one man. This one man was welcoming, kind, open and accepting. The man and the rabbi became fast friends.

As he was about to leave the town, the rabbi asked his new friend the question that had been burning inside. He said, "There is something I need to know. I understand the people of this town. I realize why they want nothing to do with a rabbi from the West. They have been devastated by the Holocaust; they have lived for fifty years under the [oppression] of Communism. I understand their anger. What I don't understand is you! Why are you so loving, why are you so different?”

The man smiled. "I am an old man,” he said, “and [I] have lived in this town my entire life. One night during the First World War, a rumor swept through the town that the Cossacks were coming, and they would loot and steal and destroy our town. So, all the parents from the whole town gathered up all the children and brought us to the rabbi's house.”

He explained that it was the dead of winter. All the town's children were scattered throughout the rabbi's house, sleeping on the floor in his kitchen, in his living room, in his study. All night long the rabbi paced, watching over the children as they slept. The small boy was curled up in a small corner of the rabbi's study. It was so bitter cold that he could not sleep. The rabbi slipped his coat off his shoulders, and laid it over him and said, “Good night.”

The old man concluded saying, "You know, it has been seventy-five years since the rabbi spread his coat on me, but it still keeps me warm."

The figure of Christ on Mount Tabor calls us to the Lenten work of transfiguration – to transform the coldness, sadness, and despair around us into the love, compassion, and hope of Christ.

The simplest act of kindness -like giving our coat to warm a cold, scared child can be a dazzling act of transfiguration.

St. Catherine of Siena tells us that we are called to be the hands, the feet and the voice of the LORD in our world. In answering that call, we become agents of transfiguration in our world, bringing God’s peace, love and faith in His saving power to all those we meet.+

Homily for Saturday of the 1st Week of Lent

In today’s Gospel passage, Jesus calls His followers to a standard even greater than those of the scribes and Pharisees for whom a key commandment was “You shall not kill.” Jesus’ call goes far beyond that to the fundamental feelings and passions that lead people to kill others or put the lives of others in danger. Deep-seated attitudes and emotions need to be addressed to not only prevent evil actions but also to lead us to a renewal of our hearts, minds and souls.

The key renewal Jesus is calling forth from us is not something we can bring about by our own efforts; we need the power and the grace of God’s Spirit to make that happen. We already know this in the words of the well-known prayer: “Come Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful and kindle in them the fire of your love. Send forth your Spirit and they shall be created. And You shall renew the face of the earth.”

This prayer asks the Holy Spirit to re-create deep within us the love that is God; it prays that the roots of that deeper virtue and standard may grow within our hearts and minds and helps us to become what God truly wants us to be.+

Homily for Friday of the 1st Week of Lent

One of the hardest things we can do in this life is to look deep into our hearts and minds and see ourselves as we really are.

This can work two ways: we may like to see ourselves as perfect and, yet, a real look at ourselves shows us that we are flawed people. It can also work the other way: we may see ourselves as very inadequate people and yet, we are made in the image of God.

What matters most is how God sees us and how we respond to the One who created us and made us to be his loving children.

May we trust in God’s love and mercy and may we truly accept God’s gift of reconciliation, so that we may grow in God’s love given to us at every moment of our lives.+

Homily for Thursday of the 1st Week of Lent

“LORD, on the day I called for help, you answered me.”

So often, in our need, we call on the LORD for help. Sometimes, we ask for miracles, but we know that they are few and far between.

A more realistic prayer is that we ask God to help us know that He is by our side at every moment of our lives and that he will give us wisdom and courage to do that which we need to do. 

Our prayers may not keep us from pain and tragedy in our lives, but real prayer will help us to trust in God’s love and God’s promise of everlasting life, regardless of the struggles we endure in this life.+

Homily for Wednesday of the 1st Week of Lent

Our Psalm response today comes from one of my favorite Psalms; Sometimes, I actually give it out to people as a penance during the Sacrament of Reconciliation.

 

While it touches heavily upon the sinful nature of the human person, it is a Psalm of incredible hope; hope that a truly repentant heart cannot be ignored by God. It is filled with hope that the human person can be cleansed of sin and created anew in the deepest recesses of the soul. It speaks, too, about the fact that nothing will earn God’s forgiveness more than a truly contrite and humble spirit; no offering, no action, no matter how great, earns the merciful attention of God than a sincere word and spirit of being sorry for our sins.

Throughout this season of Lent, may we ask God for the grace to remove from our lives, our minds, and our hearts those things that keep us from being truly repentant for our failings and may we use the grace God gives us to do so.+

Homily for Tuesday of the 1st Week of Lent

In our reading from the Prophet Isaiah this morning, we hear that God’s word, going forth from his mouth, does not return to Him void, but achieving the end for which He sent it.

Each one of us has been giving life by God and each one of us has a calling to spread God’s love and mercy to those around us. By our cooperating with the will and call of God, we do His work on earth and return to him with the fruit of our labors.

May this Lent help us to see how it is that we must be ambassadors of God’s love on earth and, thus, return to the LORD all that He has given to us.+

Homily for Monday of the 1st Week of Lent

Today, in our Gospel reading from Matthew, we hear that when we serve the needs of those most in need, we are really serving Jesus.

Jesus lives and acts in each one of us, whether rich or poor, whether self-sufficient or dependent on others. Jesus is alive in each one of us and he acts in and through each one of us. Jesus is encountered by the one serving and the one being served.

May we seek to truly recognize the person of Jesus in each person we meet this day.+

Homily for the 1st Sunday of Lent

In the movie The Fellowship of the Ring, the first of three films based on the classic Tolkien trilogy, The Lord of the Rings. There is a good wizard who provides a bit of wisdom that is helpful as we start our Lenten journey.

In the movie, the young hobbit Frodo Baggins finds himself in possession of a ring that once belonged to the Dark Lord. The magic ring, which contains all kinds of “cruelty, malice, and the will to dominate all life” gives its possessor indescribable power. The Dark Lord seeks the return of the powerful ring for his own evil plan to enslave the world. The Dark Lord kills and destroys everyone and everything in his path as he searches for the ring.

Frodo is now unexpectedly thrust into a struggle for the very survival of the world. Frodo’s friend, the good wizard Gandalf, explains that the ring must be destroyed in the fiery pits of the mountains of Mordor, where the ring was originally forged. And so, Frodo, Gandalf and their band of hobbits, dwarves, elves and human warriors begin the perilous journey to Mordor, relentlessly pursued by the Dark Lord and his followers.

At one point in their long journey, after yet another narrow escape, the discouraged Frodo laments to Gandalf, “I wish the ring had never come to me… I wish none of this had happened.”

The kind old wizard replies, “So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”[1]

Obviously, the movie is a work of fantasy, but it also speaks of the very real struggle of good versus evil that is a very real part of the human experience. The wisdom of Gandalf is very real as well.

Like the character of Frodo and his companions, like Jesus in his encounter with Satan in the desert, our lives are journeys that constantly call us to decide “what we are to do with the time we are given.”

In The Lord of the Rings, Frodo must fight the temptation to possess the ring of evil himself rather than destroy it in order that good might triumph in the world. In our Gospel reading today, Jesus must decide between the choices given him by the tempter – personal profit, comfort and fame – or the hard work to which God the Father has called him to take on.[2]

Likewise, life presents each of us with the same kind of choices. These choices can be very hard ones to make and, at times, they can be unrelenting. The choice always comes down to working hard to live the values that dwell deep in our hearts and souls or forsake those values and for things of far less worth and permanence.

The season of Lent calls us to embrace God’s spirit of truth so that we may make the choices that will lead us to the promised kingdom of heaven; that we may see through all the obstacles and illusions of this world and see clearly, the kingdom that God has prepared for us.+

 

[1] Tolkien, J.R.R., The Fellowship of the Ring, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, MA, 1954.

[2] Cormier, Jay, Editor, Connections, MediaWorks, Londonderry, NH, February 2002, p. 3.

Homily for Saturday after Ash Wednesday

In today’s Gospel passage, the scribes and the Pharisees ask why Jesus eats with tax collectors and sinners. For them, eating with tax collectors and sinners was to risk being contaminated by them. For them, it was better to keep oneself separate from such people in order to preserve one’s own moral health.

However, Jesus wasn’t concerned about that. Rather than the sin of others infecting Him, He knew that His goodness, the goodness of the Father in Him, would infect or transform them.

The LORD is never reduced by our failings; rather, we are always enriched by His holiness. That is why the LORD does not separate Himself from us, even when we might be tempted to separate ourselves from Him, because of what we have done or what we have failed to do. The LORD is always ready to sit with us, to break bread with us, to enter into communion with us, so that, in our weakness, we might draw from His strength, and in our many failings, we might draw from His goodness and love.+