St. Thomas the Apostle Parish

Homily for Tuesday of the 6th Week in Ordinary Time

In our Gospel passage from St. Mark today, Jesus tries to teach His disciples the truth of His power in the name of His Father. He warns the disciples about the “leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of Herod,” who, in the passage from yesterday’s Gospel, had asked Him for signs to prove He was speaking on behalf of the Father.

Essentially, Jesus says to them, “Hey, did you not see what I just did back there; feeding that huge crowd with seven loaves of bread? That was a sign, people! How did you not get that? Open your eyes! The signs are happening right in front of you!”^[1]

As we listen to Jesus and His disbelief at His disciples’ lack of understanding, we might get the idea they just didn’t hear the great glory of God spoken about in today’s psalm response; that they missed the power of God alive in the Flood, mentioned in our first reading today from the Book of Genesis. The signs that Pharisees and Herod asked for were to test Jesus’ power; the signs Jesus actually gave sprang forth from love: He did what he did not to entertain or to prove anything except that He wanted to care for people in their need.

“The challenge for us, then, is to trust in God’s will even without a grand display of power to help our faith along. Jesus calls us to wake up to the acts of love God is already doing in our lives. When we focus on returning to God tomorrow, that trust will be important. We, like Noah, might not know exactly what awaits us when we follow God’s will.”^[2]

 

[1] Mattingly, Molly, Creighton University, Daily Reflection, 2015

[2] Ibid.

Homily for Monday of the 6th Week in Ordinary Time

More often than the other evangelists, St. Mark, in his Gospel, refers to the emotions of Jesus. And we need to remember that Jesus was both fully divine and fully human; He experienced the full range of human emotions, but without sin.

In today’s Gospel passage, Mark shows Jesus responding with a “sigh to the depths of His spirit” (also known as a groan) to the argument of the Pharisees and their request for a sign. Then He asks, “Why does this generation seek a sign?” 

While listening to this story play itself out, it’s almost impossible to get beyond a sense of the LORD’s frustration in that sigh from the depths of His spirit. We have all experienced that kind of a sigh, both within ourselves and from others. We know the emotion it conveys. But why was He sighing? What frustration was He experiencing as He dealt with the Pharisees? 

Well, throughout human history, people who are religious have often been tempted to search excitedly for signs from heaven, for visions that are extraordinary and unusual. But Jesus is always directing us towards the ordinary moments of our lives as moments to find the divine: the sower who goes out to sow seed in his field; the woman who looks for her lost coin; the care given by a Samaritan (one who was looked down upon) to a stranger on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho; the man who unexpectedly finds treasure in his field; and the list goes on.

If we see God only in the rare miraculous moments, then we miss His presence in the ordinary moments of our everyday lives, where He dwells at all times. It is in the ordinary that the mystery of God’s kingdom is to be found, because all of God’s creation of full of God’s glory.+

Homily for the 6th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Several years ago, on a Friday afternoon, the late actor Michael Landon was driving home on the freeway in Los Angeles. It was very hot, and the traffic was quite congested. Horns were honking, tempers were flaring, and drivers were exchanging assorted gestures with each other.

As Landon sat in his car watching all of this unfold, he began asking a lot of questions like: “Why do people hate one another so much? Why is so much energy wasted on rage? What would happen is we used that energy on kindness rather than anger?”

In the midst of this questioning, an idea popped into his head. He began to think about creating a television series dedicated to the idea that kindness, and not rage, will best address the problems of our world. That day on the road spawned the television series, “Highway to Heaven.”

The theme of each episode of the series was the same point Jesus made when He urged people to show kindness to one another even to the point of “turning the other cheek” when someone treated them unkindly.

Kindness blesses the person to whom we are kind, but it also blesses us. Michael Landon told a story about how, when he was 19 years old, he got paid $260 for his first acting job in a TV show called “John Nesbitt’s Passing Parade.” He said he felt so rich and famous that he decided to go to Beverly Hills (where he almost never went) to look at the store windows. 

As he passed by a toy store, he saw two boys with their noses pressed up against the glass looking at the toys inside. Landon walked up to them and asked them which of the toys they liked best. One boy pointed to a wagon, the other to a model airplane. He then took the boys inside where he bought the wagon and the model airplane for them. The boys were filled with great excitement and joy. What surprised Landon most, however, was the thrill that he got from his act of kindness. He said it was deeper and more satisfying than anything he had experienced before. And more lasting; it was an experience he would remember for the rest of his life. 

Today’s readings invite us to take a look at our lives and to ask ourselves how much kindness is present in them. They invite us to look at our own lives and our love and to ask ourselves how they compare to the life and love Jesus describes in his Sermon on the Mount. They invite us to take a look at our own lives and to ask ourselves what would happen if we took the energy we now expend on anger and expend it on kindness. How would our lives and the lives of those around us change and become happier? What miracle might result if we took seriously Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount?

Kindness is a power greater all earthly powers. It’s not the resource of one nation or one person: It’s at the disposal of every person in every nation. And our supply of kindness is unlimited. The more we give of it, the more there is to give, much like the loaves and fish Jesus gave to the hungry multitude.

Let us pray:

LORD, help us to realize the power of kindness. Help us to use this power the way you intended us to use it when you created us. Help us use it to bring happiness to those around us. Help us use it to work miracles, healing people in our time, just as you healed them through kindness in your time. Through Christ our LORD. Amen+

Homily for Saturday of the 5th Week in Ordinary Time

Every day of our lives we are given all sorts of opportunities and situations, and how we respond to them is determined, to a large degree, on our moral character.

The human tendency toward ambition and selfishness is something that all of us have to deal with both within our society and within ourselves. Every day, we have choices to make that show how we respond to God and His call to set aside our own desires to help those most in need. Today’s Gospel passage gives us a good example of a positive response to people in their time of need.

It is important to take note of how quickly and simply this story ends. As soon as the miracle takes place, and the people are fed, Jesus immediately hops into a boat and leaves, not waiting around to receive the accolades of the crowd that had been satisfied. Jesus’ actions were motivated by compassion, not by a desire for fame or praise. He did not perform miracles for show; restoring others to life and strength was His constant motivation, and He calls us to the same.+

Homily for the Memorial of Saints Cyril and Methodius

We can sometimes take our senses for granted, the fact that we can see, hear, smell, touch and speak. It is only when we lose one of our senses or someone close to us loses one of theirs that we begin to realize how valued those gifts are. Because they are such great gifts, we need to keep asking ourselves, “How am I using these gifts of hearing, sight, and speech?”

In our Gospel passage, a deaf man is brought before Jesus with an impediment in his speech. There can be a link between the two; the inability to hear can affect how people speak. Jesus first opened the man’s ears, and then he could speak clearly.

For us who have the gifts of both hearing and speech, it is still true to say that the quality of our speaking is in some way related to the quality of our hearing. The better we are at listening, the better we may be at speaking. We need to listen to each other if we are to speak well to each other. More deeply, we need to listen to the Word of the LORD if we are to speak the Word of the LORD. It is only in listening to Him that He can truly speak through us.+

Homily for Thursday of the 5th Week in Ordinary Time

Love and friendship make great demands on our generosity. Even Jesus seems reluctant to divert attention away from His own chosen people, Israel, to attend to the pagan woman.

There is no simple way to soften the harsh reply of Jesus, except perhaps that He would not repeat the missteps of Solomon who was led astray by foreign women.

The apparent rejection is reconciled by the woman’s humility, perseverance, and love for her child. Not for selfish pleasure or personal gain, but for the sake of her daughter, does the woman turn aside Jesus’ harsh words by replying, “LORD, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s scraps.” This answer overcomes Jesus’ first objections, and He heals the woman’s daughter – a wonderful example of gentle perseverance rewarded.+

Homily for Wednesday of the 5th Week in Ordinary Time

While the heart is a powerful traditional symbol for love, Jesus takes a look at what else can lie hidden in the human heart. It can be the place of evil intentions; it can be damaging and destructive of others. The heart is the person’s inner core and we know that our hearts can hold both light and darkness; our hearts can be reservoirs for good and for evil.

One of the great traditional images of our faith has been the Sacred Heart.  This image declares that, at God’s inner core, there is a totally selfless love, a love revealed fully in the life, death, and Resurrection of Jesus. This greatest love is immeasurably creative and life-giving.

Our own hearts should, in some sense, reflect the Sacred Heart, with an inner core connected to God’s inner core. This vision of our potential is echoed in a simple prayer that many of us will have learned at some point in our lives: “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.”+

Homily for Tuesday of the 5th Week in Ordinary Time

Jesus accused His critics of ignoring the commandments of God while insisting on the adherence to merely human rules. Jesus recognized that the religious traditions of His time did not always correspond to God’s will as revealed in the Scriptures, and as revealed in a much fuller way now by Jesus Himself.

The Church needs to be always watchful to ensure that its own traditions conform to God’s Word to us, especially as spoken by Jesus. Every so often our Church has to renew itself, with the help of the Holy Spirit, to purify its traditions so that they correspond more closely to the true spirit of the Gospel. We can understand the Council of Vatican II as a significant attempt to do just that.

In our own personal lives, too, we can get into traditional ways of doing things that are not always in keeping with the core of God’s message to us in and through the Scriptures. Our own personal tradition, whether it is our religious tradition or our tradition in the broader sense, is always in need of reform in the light of the Gospel. We need to keep on hearing the Word of the LORD anew, and to invoke the Holy Spirit to help us to do so.+

Homily for the Memorial of Saint Scholastica

Today’s Gospel passage highlights the great popularity of Jesus among the ordinary people of Galilee. In particular, He attracted the sick and broken because God’s healing power was so clearly at work through Him. People begged Him to let them touch even the tassel on His cloak, as the woman had done who was healed of her flow of blood. The Gospel says that people were hurrying to bring their sick to Him. The poor and the needy were especially desperate to get to Him and to make contact with Him.

In our own lives, too, it is often in our brokenness and weakness that we seek out the LORD with the greatest sense of urgency. Something happens to us that brings home to us our vulnerability, our weakness, our inability to manage things completely on our own. In those situations, when we come face to face with our limitations, we can seek out the LORD with greater energy and an urgency that we don’t normally display. It is those experiences, when we come face to face with our frailties, that bring home to us our need for the LORD and our dependence on Him. It is often the darker and more painful experiences of life that open us up to the LORD. When St. Paul was struggling with his “thorn in the flesh,” he heard the Risen LORD say to him, “My power is made perfect in weakness.” Our various experiences of weakness can be like doorways through which we reach out to the LORD and the LORD comes to us.+

Homily for the 5th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Today’s readings remind us that each one of us has some gift or talent that has been given to us by God who has called us to use these gifts and talents to share with others so that we might be instruments of God’s love and compassion in our world.

The difficulty we often have is our inability to appreciate the gifts that each of us has to offer. Perhaps we think that we’re not good enough to actually be messengers of God’s glory. Perhaps we lack the self-esteem and self-confidence to believe that God would actually want to use us as instruments of peace and love in the world.

Several years ago, in my discernment about the priesthood, I kept procrastinating because I felt that I had to somehow be perfect or exceedingly holy to be a priest. But then I recognized that priests are people just like anyone else; that they, like me, are interested in things other than incense and vestments, that they have their faults and foibles. I recognized that priests didn’t have some special “connection” to God above and beyond the rest of the members of the Church. It was then that I was able to surrender myself to this tugging at my heart and say “yes” to God’s call.

Another difficulty is that we sometimes find it inconvenient to use our gifts. That using our gifts and talents is sometimes a painful thing to do is a very legitimate statement. But that is what sacrifice, more often than not, entails. When we make a choice to do something, we often make the choice not to do something else that we may very well have wanted to do.

Another personal story, again, several years ago, I was on my way to a store. On my way there I drove by a neighbor’s house whose father had recently died. My neighbor was sitting on the steps. My immediate feeling was that I should stop and talk to him, but I hesitated because I only had a short time to get to the store and get back. I kept driving by something inside me caused me to stop and go back to talk to him. When we started talking about his father he began to cry. We talked for about an hour. I never did get to the store, but I knew I had done the right thing by stopping. My neighbor needed to release his grief and sorrow and God put me in the right place to help him to do that. While I had no idea that stopping to talk would help my neighbor, farthest from my mind was the idea that I would benefit so much from his pouring forth of emotion. Indeed, sacrifice is often more life-giving than we can ever fully appreciate.

And so, we come back to the call of today’s readings, the call to recognize our gifts and talents, the call to share those gifts, the call to see that God can work through our imperfections and failings if we open our hearts to His grace.

In discerning our gifts and talents we must remember that not everyone has the same ones. Some of us are called to roles of leadership, some of us are called to roles of teaching, and some of us are called to roles that play themselves out quietly. But all of us are called to bestow God’s blessings on others by the use of our gifts, to see that our practice of faith means more than showing up for Mass on Sundays and Holy Days; that it means being an active part of the Church, the Body of Christ on earth. What we do the building should be reflected in all our actions so that the Gospel message of Christ might be heard and seen by all who know us.

“You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden. People do not light a lamp and put it under a bushel basket. They set it on a stand where it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, your light must shine before all people so that they may see goodness in your acts and give praise to your heavenly Father.”+