St. Thomas the Apostle Parish

Homily for Monday of the 2nd Week of Lent

We often measure our success in life through what we have compiled, whether it be money, belongings, or achievements.

The person of faith, however, is called to invest love, caring, and compassion in people without seeking a reward. In God’s eyes, love and mercy are what matter most. Jesus calls all of us to love one another as God loves us: unconditionally and without limit. And in the end, God will reward us with the things of heaven.

Let us pray that God will open our minds and hearts to look at the things of heaven as the ultimate reward for all that we do in this life.+

Homily for the 2nd Sunday of Lent

When immigrants from Norway and Sweden came to the United States in the early years of the Twentieth Century, they brought with them a staple of the Scandinavian diet: yogurt. However, they brought it in the form of what they called “yogurt slips.” A yogurt slip was a small, clean piece of white flannel, dipped in yogurt, and set out to dry in the sun.

The cloth, a few inches square, dried like a stiff piece of cardboard, and then it was stored. When they settled in their new homes, the Norwegians and Swedes would take the yogurt slips they carried with them to America and place them in a glass of warm milk. The culture on the piece of cloth would turn the milk into yogurt.

Family members in the old country would often enclose new yogurt slips in letters to their relatives in the new land.

Within each one of us, we possess the Spirit of God’s compassion and justice that enables us to “transfigure” our world. Too often, however, the temptation is to remain mere “slips” filled with potential but unable to bring the culture of God’s grace into the mix of work, play, and school.

On the mountain of the transfiguration, the disciples see in Jesus the very life and love of God that dwelled within Him – that same love of God lives in each one of us, as well, calling us beyond our own wants, needs, and interests.

Love that calls us beyond ourselves is called transforming. The challenge of the disciple’s call – our call – is to allow that love to transfigure, that is, to radically change our lives and our world, just as those yogurt slips would change the milk into yogurt. In the transforming love of Christ, the Messiah-Servant, we can change despair into hope, sadness into joy, anguish into healing, and estrangement into community. Today’s Gospel invites us to make the prayer of St. Francis our own:

 

LORD, make me an instrument of your peace.

Where there is hatred, let me sow love;

where there is injury, pardon;

where there is doubt, faith;

where there is despair, hope;

where there is darkness, light;

and where there is sadness, joy.

 

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek

to be consoled as to console;

to be understood as to understand;

to be loved as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive;

it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;

and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

Amen.+

 

Homily for Saturday of the 1st Week of Lent

From 1979 until 2008, cartoonist Lynn Johnston created a wonderful comic strip about the simple joys and struggles of family life called “For Better or for Worse.” In one strip, teenager Lizzy has had a fight with her friend Candace about a boy. The two are not speaking.

In the first panel, Lizzy and Candace walk right by each other. "There's Candace," Lizzy says to herself, "I do not know her!"

In the second panel, in the corridor on the way to class, Lizzy says to herself, "She's going down the hallway, so I'll go the other way. If she sits near me in class, I'll move!!" 

In the third panel, in class, Lizzy says to herself, "Here comes Candace. If she talks to me, I'll pretend I didn't hear her; if she looks at me, I'll pretend I didn't see her."

In the final panel, with Candace sitting in the background, Lizzy sinks her head into her hands, and realizes, "Whew! I didn't think hating somebody could be so much WORK!”

Hatred calls for a great deal of wasted time, energy, and emotion. God’s gift of life is not meant to be wasted on estrangement and alienation, but to be celebrated in the love of family and friends.

The challenge of the Gospel and one of the primary challenges of Lent is to be ready and willing to take that first difficult step towards forgiving and seeking forgiveness. To imitate the forgiveness of Christ means putting aside our own need for the justice we may believe is owed us for the good of others and never letting bitterness close our hearts to someone, regardless of how deeply they have hurt us.+[1]

 

[1] Jay Cormier, Connections

Homily for Friday of the 1st Week of Lent

In our Gospel passage today, Jesus calls His followers to a virtue and a standard 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 recreation of our minds and souls.

The deeper and more fundamental re-creation and transformation for which Jesus is calling is not something we can bring about by our own efforts; we need the power and the grace of the Holy Spirit to bring about that deep transformation within us. 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 Thursday of the 1st Week of Lent

Jesus encourages us to be seekers, “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened to you.” What are we to seek? What should we ask for? The simple answer is to seek the LORD and His will for our lives. Many such seekers are mentioned in the gospels. Zacchaeus comes to mind among many others. His story reminds us that the LORD whom we seek is always seeking us. While at table with Zacchaeus, Jesus spoke of Himself as the Son of Man who came to seek out and to save the lost.

Because we can never fully find the LORD on this side of eternity, we will always be seeking Him for as long as we live on this earth. We are always on a journey toward the LORD, without ever fully arriving at our destination. Like Abraham, we are always embarking on a journey in response to the LORD’S call. In the words of Saint Paul in his letter to the Philippians, we strain “forward to what lies ahead;” [Philippians 3:13] we press on towards our goal, which is the LORD. Jesus assures us in the gospel that if we remain faithful to that search for the LORD, and the journey to which it gives rise, we will be given good things by God. In our seeking the LORD, we open ourselves to His many gifts and graces.+

Homily for Wednesday of the 1st Week of Lent

Our Psalm response today — A heart contrite and humble, O God, you will not spurn. — comes from one of my favorite Psalms: Psalm 51. 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, 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 given 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 the Feast of the Chair of St. Peter

The feast that we celebrate today, The Chair of St. Peter, Apostle, is not about a piece of furniture. Instead, it is about the authority that Jesus bestowed upon St. Peter and his successors. And this authority is not St. Peter’s authority but the authority of Christ. The Chair (or Cathedra) is the symbol of that authority. This is where we get the word “Cathedral” which is the seat of authority in any diocese.

Jesus’ authority or power, we know, was never used for His own purposes; it was used to do the will of His Father in heaven; it was used to heal the sick, give comfort to the brokenhearted, to give hope to the downtrodden; to help the needy. So, the authority He bestowed upon St. Peter was less power and more responsibility; a responsibility of faith, love, and compassion. This is reflected in Bernini’s sculpture of the Chair of St. Peter under the dome of the Basilica in Rome: On the inscription on it are the following words: "O Pastor Ecclesiae, tu omnes Christi pascis agnos et oves," which means,  “O pastor of the Church, you feed all Christ's lambs and sheep.”

On this feast day, then, let us pray especially for our Holy Father: that the Holy Spirit may ever guide him as he continues to act as the Vicar of Christ on earth. May his work, his prayer, and his very life be an example to us of how to use the gifts we have received to bring the love and grace of God to all those we meet.+

Homily for the 1st Sunday of Lent

There is a story of a man who loved desserts and candy. On his way to work every day, he would stop at the bakery and get donuts or cakes and he would eat them for lunch. One Lent he decided to give up desserts and candy. He devised ways to avoid the temptation; he even changed the route that he would drive to work so that he would avoid the bakery. One morning, however, he arrived at the office carrying a large, sugarcoated coffeecake.

His colleagues scolded him, but he only smiled and said, “What could I do? This is a very special cake. What happened is that, by force of habit, I accidentally drove by the bakery this morning and, there in the window, were trays of incredible desserts.”

He believed that this was no accident that he passed by that way, so he prayed, “LORD, if you really want me to have one of those delicious coffee cakes, let me find a parking space right in front of the bakery. And sure enough,” he said, “on the ninth time around the block, there it was!”[1]

Today’s Gospel awakens us to the fact that Jesus was human just as we are. As Jesus was in the wilderness, Satan tempted Him just as he tempts us. And we can be sure that the temptations Jesus experienced were far more serious than whether or not to buy a coffeecake. The temptations He experienced were about the kind of power that he could have as He was beginning His public ministry. His temptations were about how he could force his way upon the people and how wonderfully he could live under the influence of the power at His disposal.

However, He took on the role of suffering servant. Instead of being popular, He took on the serious issues in His day and challenged the people who might have made life very easy for Him. He resisted temptation and went on to complete His mission: proclaiming God’s kingdom, showing us how to put aside our own concerns to focus on the needy.

We are called upon to work through and resist our temptations: things like seeking the comfort and security we experience when we stay quiet in the face of injustice, when we look away from the needy, when we are indifferent to those suffering physical or emotional pain.

Ultimately, the only real comfort and security we experience is given to us by God and only truly experienced when we empty ourselves and surrender ourselves to the power of God in our lives.

In his book When the Well Runs Dry, Thomas Green likened this surrender to the physical act of learning to float in the sea. He says learning to float is difficult because “it demands much letting go.” The secret of floating lies in doing the opposite of what our instinct tells us to do. When we follow our instincts, we tend to fight the waves and we will tire and eventually sink. Yet, if we relax and float we are buoyed up by the waves.[2]

This is what we are to do with God if we are to both follow the His will and experience the comfort and security that only God can offer.

As we move through this season of Lent, may we use these days as an opportunity to empty ourselves of those things that keep us from trusting in God and those things that keep us from doing the work of God in our world. May we seek to work through the temptations that keep us from following God as we should. May our sacrifices and prayers bring us closer to God and closer to a willingness to give ourselves over to God’s will.+

 

[1] Bausch, William J., A World of Stories for Preachers and Teachers, Twenty-Third Publications, Mystic, CT, 1999, p. 390.

[2] Green, Thomas, When the Well Runs Dry, Ave Maria Press, Notre Dame, IN, 1998.

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, 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.+