St. Thomas the Apostle Parish

Homily for the 30th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Today's Gospel reading highlights the two commandments that Jesus says are the greatest: Love of God and love of neighbor. No matter how often we hear these words, we are struck by the demands they place on us.

Jesus brings together the love of God and the love of neighbor as two absolutely inseparable things, like two sides of the same coin. Love of God, whom we cannot see, is false if it is not complemented by the love of people we see and with whom we rub shoulders daily in our workplaces, at school, on the streets, and in our homes.

It's essential to recognize that Jesus does not throw our neighbor into the commandment as an afterthought. Instead, our neighbors, the people around us, are crucial to the commandment to love because it is through the people around us that God makes contact with us daily. Scripture keeps hammering home God's teaching that "anyone who says he loves God but hates his brother or sister is a liar." If we call ourselves "Christian," we must love one another. 

Loving our neighbor as ourselves sounds very nice until we get a good look at some of our neighbors or co-workers. You know well that some people out there push every one of our buttons. There are people out there who can be rude, selfish, and downright unbearable. But we're called to love them anyway. Some people have hurt us and done unspeakable harm to us. No one is free from that, not me, you, anyone, or even Jesus. But we are called to follow the example of Jesus, who hung on the Cross, looked at the people who nailed him to it, and said, "Father, forgive them…" 

To show love to people in complicated circumstances may seem quite impossible. Yet, it is often in these circumstances, when we seek to do God's will, that we must experience the love of God. In these experiences, the love comes from God, dwelling deep within ourselves, a love we open ourselves to when we act as God commands.

Today, we are being asked to look at those shadowy areas of our lives that are sealed off from God. To profess that we love God while harboring resentments or being indifferent to the plight of others is a contradiction. We all want love to be a rose without thorns: smooth and velvety. But, if we follow Christ, we will find that love involves sacrifice and the shadow of the Cross. Love is waiting upon the aged, nursing the sick, patching up quarrels, and listening to the broken-hearted. Love is being kind and courteous to strangers.

Few people expect to discover love in weakness, powerlessness, and suffering. Yet, that is the heart of Christ's message to the world. From his birth in a stable as one who was homeless to his death on the Cross like a common criminal, Jesus always identified with the spiritually, physically, and materially poor of this world. This Gospel is not an ideal to be admired but a way of life to live if we walk humbly with our God.

Homily for the Feast of Sts. Simon and Jude, Apostles

All four Gospels tell the story of Jesus choosing His Apostles. Still, only St. Luke tells us that, before He chose them, Jesus prayed the entire night. He prayed about this; His choice of those twelve people resulted from His prayer. St. Luke emphasizes that Jesus prayed before all the essential moments of His life — just after His baptism, just before He set out for Jerusalem, while in the Garden of Gethsemane as He neared His passion and death, and on the Cross only moments before He died.
 
We, too, should pray to God at significant moments. During those moments, we need to appreciate our need for guidance, strength, and courage from God. Our prayer does not necessarily mean everything will work out perfectly for us. We know that, although Jesus spent the whole night in prayer before He chose the Twelve, one of them would go on to betray him. Yet, we can be sure that our prayerful surrender to the LORD at such times will always create space for Him to work, even when things do not work out as we had hoped.

Homily for Friday of the 29th Week in Ordinary Time

Weather is often the topic of conversation. The Galileans of Jesus’ time were also very much aware of the weather. They knew what weather they could expect from the direction of the wind and could read the signs in the sky.

Nonetheless, as Jesus told them in today’s Gospel passage, they could not read signs of the times in which they were living; they failed to recognize that God was moving among them in a particular way in the words and actions of Jesus.

We, too, can be good at forecasting the weather but not so good at recognizing the presence of the LORD in our daily lives. Jesus promised to be with us always, and the signs of His presence can be subtle, but it is authentic.

Let us pray that we may have a better spiritual insight and a better sense of the presence of the LORD in our daily lives.

Homily for Thursday of the 29th Week in Ordinary Time

Jesus' words to His disciples in our Gospel today are a proclamation of the kingdom as a refining and purifying fire. Such refining does not come easily; it requires absolute honesty with oneself, a willingness to change what we need to change and discard those things we need to eliminate from our lives to open our hearts, minds, and souls to the redemptive love of God. This process of purification can even cause discord among family members and friends.

Let us pray that we will have the resolve, courage, and faith it takes to allow ourselves to be transformed by the refining fire of God's love.

Homily for Wednesday of the 29th Week in Ordinary Time

Many people prefer to avoid being taken by surprise. Many want to know what is coming down the road and when. However, experience tells us that the unexpected happens all the time.

It is that experience from which Jesus draws today’s parables. The burglar breaks into a house at an hour nobody expects; the master arrives home when his irresponsible servant is not expecting him. Jesus implies that there can be an element of surprise in His relationship with us.

The Son of Man comes at an hour we do not expect. This forewarning may be about sudden and unexpected death. Still, it is just as likely to be about the unexpected coming of Jesus to us in our everyday lives. The LORD may call us to do something we had never thought about; He may take us down a path we might never have gone down on our own. The LORD can come to us through unexpected people, people we would never see as the LORD’s messengers. The Gospel suggests that we can always expect the unexpected when it comes to the LORD.

Homily for Tuesday of the 29th Week in Ordinary Time

Jesus startles His listeners with the image of the master of a household putting on an apron, inviting his servants to sit down at the table, and then waiting on them. The scene would be bizarre, entirely in opposition to the standard social practice of His times. However, it does call to mind Jesus washing the feet of His Apostles. Jesus combines the roles of master and servant most unconventionally; typically, they are separate and distinct.

The master performs this gesture of honor to his servants in response to their faithful vigilance. The LORD who supports us expects us to be loyal and alert so that we are ready to open the door to Him at whatever moment He arrives.

In the Book of Revelation, the Risen LORD says, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock.” Jesus is always knocking at our door. If we welcome His daily coming, He will serve and support us in endless ways.

Homily for Monday of the 29th Week in Ordinary Time

Today's Gospel may seem to be speaking against wealth, but it can be debated that God does not have an issue with our being successful. Recall the prayer of the ancient Psalmist asking that God would "prosper the work of our hands."

We know from the words of Jesus that we should use our wealth, gifts, and the prosperous work of our hands and do something with them for others' good.

We live in a culture where people are teeming with possessions, schedules, and pointless busyness; many are enthralled with pursuing more and building larger "barns" to store more. To be people of faith and genuine disciples of Jesus begins with emptying ourselves of our stuff and busyness to create a place and a time for God to dwell and fill. The most tragic poverty is the emptiness of a life filled with things but possessing nothing of God.

Christ calls us to "think of what is above" — love, forgiveness, compassion, mercy, and gratitude. God has given us this invaluable, wonderful life to embrace and be embraced by His selfless and affirming love, to discover how to love one another as God loves us.

Homily for the 29th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Today's Gospel reading contains a crucial message for every Christian: Jesus clarifies that we possess dual citizenship. We are citizens of two worlds: citizens of earth and citizens of heaven. Because of our dual citizenship, we have responsibilities toward both worlds, toward God and toward Caesar, to use Jesus' term. As citizens of earth and citizens of heaven, we must elect people who promote our ideals and fight for what is just and proper. We are responsible for working with our government leaders to help them fulfill their responsibilities so that justice, peace, and prosperity might be a part of our secular society.

What happens if our dual citizenship leads us into an open conflict between our God and our country? We hope this will never happen, but if it does, we must resolve the conflict in a way that does not compromise our primary responsibility to God. Christians have had to do this throughout history. They did it in Roman times when thousands of Christians accepted death rather than worship the emperor. They did it in the 17th century when thousands of European Christians fled to America to practice their faith, and they're still doing it now.

Franz Jägerstätter was an Austrian peasant, a husband, and father of three young children in the 1930s. He vehemently opposed Adolf Hitler as he rose to power. When Hitler marched into Austria and held a phony vote to show that people backed him, Jägerstätter was the only person in his small village who didn't vote for Hitler. When war broke out in 1939, Jägerstätter refused to fight in Hitler's army. He even refused noncombatant service because his opposition to everything Hitler stood for was so strong. Finally, on August 2, 1943, the military arrested and executed him.

Jägerstätter had two obligations: one to God and one to his country. When they conflicted in his own conscience, he chose to remain faithful to his primary obligation: to God. This is sometimes difficult to do, for following our conscience and God's ways may not be popular and may have consequences in this life that are not to our liking. In faith, however, we know that the life to follow is forever and that the rewards of this life are nothing compared to those in the life to follow.

Homily for Saturday of the 28th Week in Ordinary Time

As Jesus' disciples, we must be unafraid in our witness to Him in sharing His message of love, mercy, compassion, and redemption with others. Jesus promised us that in our struggles to follow His call, we will not be left alone and that the Holy Spirit will help us and give us the words we need when facing challenges and difficulties in this mission.

Sharing our faith in today's world is very difficult; our culture can be very opposed to religion in general and, particularly, to the Catholic faith because of the many scandals in which our leaders have been involved and which the media has so strongly publicized.

We can be discouraged into silence and invisibility with so much negative commentary and feelings against our faith. But we need to be strong and share our faith with others. We have Jesus' promise that the Holy Spirit will be with us, and we hope the same Spirit will bring healing to our Church and its members. As St. Paul says, the Holy Spirit helps us in our weakness. We must keep praying for the courage to be true to the LORD who gave Himself for us, giving us life through His death on the Cross. 

Homily for the Feast of St. Luke, Evangelist

In this part of Paul’s second letter to Timothy, we encounter the loneliness Paul felt after Demas took off to explore Thessalonica, Crescens to Galatia, and Titus went off to Dalmatia. Paul sent Tychicus to Ephesus. He hoped that Timothy and Mark would join him and Luke as they continued their mission.

The very ordinary elements of this part of Paul’s letter are intriguing. He asks Timothy to pick up a cloak he left behind and bring some papyrus rolls and parchments. He also complains about how a coppersmith named Alexander treated him.

These few lines remind us that, in reality, the Apostles and early Christians were human, just as we are; they could be lonely, forgetful, and even a bit sensitive at times. They weren’t perfect, and they weren’t other-worldly. If they were, we couldn’t hope to be like them.

But we are called to be like them; we are called to be like the seventy-two that Jesus sends out on a mission in today’s Gospel passage; we are called to be people who have to navigate our own world with all of its attractions and still find a way to experience our faith, to live it out, and to bring it to others. We may not be called to do it as dramatically as those seventy-two disciples. Still, there are elements of their mission that we are called to both emulate and imitate.

Let us pray for the ability to sense the ways that God is calling on us to be His voice in our world today, and may the example of those fully human early disciples give us the inspiration we need to follow God’s call for us to go forth and to preach in His Name.