May we like Jesus have total trust in our heavenly Father.

 

FIRST SUNDAY OF LENT  C  2025

 

There is the story of the famous scientist Einstein who was on a train in Europe.  The conductor asked him for his ticket.  He checked his pockets and then his wallet and he wasn’t able to come with it.  Then the conductor, seeing Einstein’s frustration in not being able to find his ticket, said:  “Don’t worry Mr.  Einstein, we trust you.”  Sometime later, the conductor returned to the train car and saw Einstein now on his knees looking for the ticket under his seat.  The conductor again told Einstein not to worry about it.

Einstein responded:  “Thank you, but I need the ticket to remind me where I’m supposed to be going.”

In a similar way, we need the Lenten season to focus us spiritually on where we are going,  on the meaning and direction of our lives as well.  Lent is a time when we, like Jesus, are led by the Spirit into the desert -- into the depths of ourselves, into our inner wilderness, so to speak, away from the world of achievements.

We were marked with ashes this past Wednesday as Lent formally began. These ashes acknowledge that we all belong to the order of penitents.  We all confess that we are sinners, and we stand in need of the Lord’s healing forgiveness.  The light of Christ that is within us has been dimmed by the darkness of our sin.   We acknowledge this reality with these ashes.  We were given the mantra to:  Repent and believe in the Gospel.

God led the people of Israel into the desert, to forge them into a new people.  The Spirit led Jesus into the desert to clarify the meaning of his Messiahship.  The Spirit leads us into the desert of Lent to reflect on how we have not always resisted temptation and have failed to love.  In the desert we seek mercy and forgiveness.  Lent is God’s gift to us to become more aware that we are God’s redeemed and forgiven people.

May our mantra for the Lenten season be the words spoken to us as ashes were placed on our foreheads on Ash Wednesday:  “Repent and believe in the Gospel.”

In the Lenten season,  we are led by the Holy Spirit into the desert to experience fasting and self-denial and to be tempted and to be tested by the devil.  As disciples of the Lord Jesus, we are tested; we are tried during the Lenten season to gauge our commitment of turning away from sin and being faithful to the Gospel.  How do we deal with the Lenten call to embrace spiritual disciplines?  What fasting are we willing to embrace in the Lenten season?  What spiritual discipline of prayer can we make a commitment to?  What almsgiving, what are willing to tithe in the service of others?

The story of Jesus’ temptations reveals to us the deepest thing about him:  he had total trust in his heavenly Father.  Jesus turned to the Word of God in the face of temptation and expressed his trust, his obedience to God’s plan for him. 

This Lent, into which desert are you being led into by the desert?  May we like Jesus have total trust in our loving Father even in the midst of the crosses and struggles of life.

My hope for myself and for you is that you will encounter the Lord in prayer this Lenten season.  May this encounter fill you with joy and inner peace.  Make a decision, for example, to pray the Stations of the Cross on the Friday Evenings of Lent with other parishioners, experience the merciful love of Jesus in the Sacrament of Reconciliation on Saturday afternoons or on the diocesan day of penance on Wednesday, April 2nd, participate in our parish retreat on March 17,18, 19^th on the theme of becoming a Listening, Missionary Church, and celebrate the Eucharist more frequently during Lent.

May our Lenten prayer further motivate ourselves to share the merciful love of Jesus with others.  Participate in one of the corporal works of mercy:  Feed the hungry, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless.  Make a difference in the lives of people in need.

For example, the rationale behind your generosity to operation rice bowl is that our Lenten sacrifices become the source of hope and change for some of our poorest brothers and sisters around the world.  May our Lenten spiritual disciplines lead us to share what we have with those who are hungry and in need of our generosity.

Yes, we are called to make a difference as the disciples of Jesus.  What commitment will I make that will enhance the world, aid the poor, and provide resources for building up the kingdom of justice, love, and peace?

 

The Stations of the Cross describe the stages of the suffering and death of Jesus.  As we experience the stations of the cross of illness, of death, of brokenness in our own stories, may we too get the help of Simon of Cyrene and be strengthened by the love of Mary our mother.  As for Jesus, our own stations of the cross are our way of discipleship.

Yes, there are demons; there is sinfulness in our lives that we seek to turn away from.  Yes, we encounter Satan in the desert of our inner wilderness.  But that is not the end of our Lenten journey.  The real purpose of our Lenten spiritual disciplines is that we are to encounter God in the desert of Lent.  May we allow ourselves to believe in His love.

The Lenten desert is about wrestling with the demons of our life; but the Lenten season is also about conversion; it is our retreat in which we encounter God with blessed and grateful hearts.  We embrace the spiritual disciplines of lent – we embrace prayer, fasting, almsgiving – so that we are clearly place God as first in our lives.

May we encounter the God who loves us in our Lenten journey.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We are called to be a Church of Mercy.

 

EIGHTH SUNDAY IN OT C  2025

 

Jesus opens today’s Gospel account with a parable: “Can a blind person guide a blind person?  Will not both fall into a pit?  This leads us to ask what blindness Jesus is talking about?

I suggest we need to be aware of the dangers of spiritual blindness.  I suggest for our prayer today we see the blind guides that Jesus refers to are people who don’t know their own need for mercy, who have not experienced mercy, and who therefore cannot act with mercy.

We see in our Eucharistic Liturgy how we humbly ask for the mercy of our forgiving God.  The Penitential Rite is part of the beginning of our Eucharistic celebration.  For us to enter into the mystery of God’s presence among us, we first acknowledge our need for the healing forgiveness of Good.  Then before receiving Communion, we humbly pray: “Lord, I am not worthy that you should come under my roof, but only say the Word and my soul shall be healed.”

The genuineness of our discipleship of the Lord Jesus is dependent upon our humility and our humble recognition that we need the mercy of a forgiving God, and we are to share this mercy with others.

The cross of Jesus is His great act of love for us.  In the cross, we encounter the mercy, the forgiveness, and the love of Jesus for us.

Please God, may we always be aware that we are sinners who stand in need of a forgiving, healing God.  As we approach Ash Wednesday, the ashes to be placed on our foreheads announce that the light of Christ that is burning within us is dimmed.  It has been darkened by sin symbolized by the ashes on our foreheads.

On an international scale, the wars in the Middle East and In Ukraine show the effect show the effect of sin on an international scale.  War is the result of hearts that are not filled with the merciful, forgiving love of our God.

With the ashes that we will receive on Ash Wednesday, we are confessing and announcing we stand in need of God’s forgiveness.  Further, we commit ourselves to the penitential season so that we will be reconciled with God and so prepare ourselves for the joy of Easter.  The blessed ashes that we receive are blessed ashes, holy ashes, and they hold the promise of cleansing protection and, most importantly, the promise of resurrection.

Our upcoming Lenten journey invites us to become more aware of our inner life, our spiritual life before God.  The Lenten season invites us to accept the disciplines of prayer, fasting, and self-denial.  The purpose of these spiritual disciplines is to lead us to conversion, to place God first in our lives.  In following these spiritual disciplines, we come to know the Gospel good news.  The Good News is precisely this:  it tells us about a God who gives first, loves first, who loves unconditionally, and who loves us whether we deserve it or not.

Pope Francis in his Lenten message to us invites us to reflect on jubilee theme of making our Lenten journey as pilgrims of hope.  Yes, we are pilgrims as we journey through the forty of lent and even more than that, we are pilgrims in the journey of life.  May we journey together as pilgrims of hope.  May we always know deep in our hearts that we are the recipients of the hope that comes from our experience of the merciful love of Jesus deep in our hearts.  As pilgrims of hope, we are to be a Church of Mercy.

The conversion we seek is to be a Church of mercy.  Our world torn by the effects of war needs to experience the mercy of God in the world, and in our personal lives we need to encounter a God who loves us unconditionally and calls us to a Church of mercy, a Church of welcome.

For the 3^rd consecutive Sunday, the Gospel has been taken for Luke’s account of the Sermon on the Mount.  The last two Sundays we have been invited to reflect on what to do.  The Beatitudes call us to a way of life in which our values are turned upside down.  “Blessed are the Poor; Blessed are they who hunger; Blessed are they who mourn.” These people are most in touch with the spiritual dimension of life.  They more clearly know their need for God’s grace.

Last Sunday the Gospel called us to love even our enemies.  That doesn’t come naturally for any one of us.  It’s not in our genes.  It is only with the grace of God and the example of Jesus Himself that we are empowered to love our enemies.

This Sunday’s Gospel tells us how we can live our discipleship of Christ Jesus in which we are called to love our enemies.  Where the Gospel last week dealt with action toward others, this Sunday’s Gospel calls to reflect and to reach deeper:  to the wellspring of eternal life that is found in the human heart.  Get the heart right, Jesus seems to be saying, and all else will follow.

Plain and simple, the conversion we seek must come from the inside.  We need to be aware of our inner life, our interior life if we are to live out the Gospel demands in our outer life.  Jesus in the Gospel proclaimed that a tree cannot bear good fruit unless the core of the trunk is solid.  “A good tree does not bear rotten fruit, nor does a rotten tree bear good fruit.  For every three is known by its own fruit.”  So too, a good person out of the store of the goodness in his heart produces good fruit, for from the fullness of the heart the mouth speaks.

May our conversation come from the language of our heart – a heart that has experienced the merciful love of Jesus.    The last line of today’s Gospel is very telling:  “Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks.” For us to be a Church of mercy, we need to know that our God calls us beyond our faults to be immersed in the mystery of His love for us.  May the conversion we experience at St. Joseph’s Church lead us to be a Church of mercy, a Church of welcome.

May God lead us to know His merciful love, and may we share this love with one and all.