Homily Prep August 18th

-Last Sunday's homily is available by email (Just request it in the comments)
-This Sunday's Scriptures can be found at USCCB.org
 -I will be celebrating mass this weekend at 5:30 Sat & 11:00 Sunday

What has your discipleship or faith cost you?

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August 11th Homily Prep

-Last Sunday's homily is available by email
-This Sunday's Scriptures can be found at USCCB.org
-I will be celebrating mass this weekend at 4:00, 12:30 and 6:00pm

Like a New Mother's Sleep!
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August 3 Homily Prep

-This Sunday's Scriptures can be found at USCCB.org
 -A missionary will be preaching at all the masses this weekend.

Homily Video Prep for July 28

-Last Sunday's homily is available by email
 -This Sunday's Scriptures can be found at USCCB.org
 -I will be celebrating mass this weekend at 12:30 and 6:00pm

Demanding Little Things!

Click here to view Video Prep July 28

Homily Video Prep for July 21

-Last Sunday's homily is available by email
-This Sunday's Scriptures can be found at USCCB.org
-I will be celebrating mass this weekend at 9:30am Mass

What's Your Complaint?

And what is the price you're paying for it.  Is it worth it?

Click HERE to view Video Prep for 7/21

July 14 Homily Video Prep

-Last Sunday's homily is available by email
-This Sunday's Scriptures can be found at USCCB.org
-I will be celebrating mass this weekend at 5:30 Sat, 8:00am and 12:30pm on Sunday

How Free are You to Love?

I'm thinking most of us are under lock and key in the self referential dungeon! How about you?

Click Here for July 14 Video prep

July 7 Homily Prep

-Last Sunday's homily is NOT available
-This Sunday's Scriptures can be found at USCCB.org
-I will be celebrating mass this weekend at 4:00, 11:00, 6:00pm

Shake the "stumbling blocks" off your feet

Jesus warns his disciple-missionaries that if they are not successful they are to "shake the dust of that town" from their shoes and move on.  What I hear in that encouragement is that the dust of "failure" cannot be allowed to stick with  us without it becoming "stumbling stones" in our path.

Remarkably, Jesus says the same thing about "success" in mission.  He admonishes his disciples to forget their successes on mission  "rather, rejoice because you are sharing in the communion of the redemption(saving work of God)." Allowing the glow of success to stick to your cheeks can also result in stumbling stones in a disciple's path.  

All of this tells me that a faithful disciple is one who practices the art and spirituality of detachment.  This attitude of detachment is not the stoicism of people who "just don't care". This is also not the emotional habit of "not sweating the small stuff".  Disciples must be enthusiastic and passionate about their mission.  

This detachment is not a separation from the feelings but from the Self. Our being distressed about our failures and impressed about our successes tells us how NOT detached we are. 

Jesus wants us to see ourselves as gifted and called to build up the kingdom of heaven here on earth.  Jesus has invited us to be a part of His team, the Kingdom team.  That's our mission.  According to our vocation (calling) and our occupation (the work we do in the world) our daily life is an opportunity to advance the Kingdom/build or to destroy the kingdom/crumble.  The pain of "personal failure" and the rejoicing in "one's successes" are the sure sign of a wrong-headed disciple.  Its not about you.  Suffering and rejoicing over "how one is doing" is all about YOU and not about Jesus' mission team. As the saying goes, there's no U in team.

This is true enough that we can assess the quality of our participation in the discipleship mission/team based upon "what we are suffering over and what we are delighted about". The suffering one is easiest.  What are we so upset about?  As a spouse, a parent, a church member, a student, a friend....what are we so upset about?  Our lack of success?  What are we so happy about?  All of our success?

Would that we might all be at peace for having contributed the very best of our gifts to the work of the kingdom today...and allow the whining and weeping and bragging and high-fiving to others.

Be detached. Our lives are not about us. Our Christian faith calls us to make our living about His Kingdom:love!

Make any sense to you?

June 23 Homily Prep

-Last Sunday's homily is available by email
-This Sunday's Scriptures can be found at USCCB.org
-I will be celebrating mass this weekend at 8:00am and 12:30

Click here for Video homily Prep

Homily Prep for June 16th

-Last Sunday's homily is available by email 
-This Sunday's Scriptures can be found at USCCB.org
-I will be celebrating mass this weekend at 4:00pm, 9:30, and 11:00

Whose Living in You?

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Homily Prep June 9

-Last Sunday's homily is available by email
-This Sunday's Scriptures can be found at USCCB.org
-I will be celebrating mass this weekend at 5:30, 9:30, and 12:30

What's the Truth? vs. What's the Teaching?
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Homily Prep June 2 - Corpus Christi

-Last Sunday's homily is available by email
-This Sunday's Scriptures can be found at USCCB.org
 -I will be celebrating mass this weekend at 11:00am and 6:00pm

Break It Down

Click here - June 2 homily prep - Corpus Christi

Homily Prep May 26 - Trinity

 -This Sunday's Scriptures can be found at USCCB.org
 -I will be celebrating mass this weekend at 4:00 on Saturday, 9:30 and 6:00pm on Sunday

Our DNA is Divine

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homily Prep May 26 - Trinity Sunday

Pentecost Homily Prep May 19

-Last Sunday's homily is available by email

-This Sunday's Scriptures can be found at USCCB.org

-I will be celebrating mass this weekend at 8:00 and 12:30 on Sunday

Do We Believe? It Ain't Easy!
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Homily Prep for Ascension May 12

-Last Sunday's homily is available by email
 -This Sunday's Scriptures can be found at USCCB.org
 -I will be celebrating mass this weekend at 5:30 on Saturday and 12:30 on Sunday

Click here for Video Prep:
Homily Prep for Ascension May 12

May 5 Homily Prep

-Last Sunday's homily is available by email
-This Sunday's Scriptures can be found at USCCB.org
-I will be celebrating mass this weekend at 11:00 Mass Sunday

"God's in the House"

Homily Prep April 28

-Last Sunday's homily is available by email
-This Sunday's Scriptures can be found at USCCB.org
-I will be celebrating mass this weekend at 4:00 on Sat., 9:30am and 6:00pm Sunday

He's Got the Whole World......

-Last Sunday's homily is available by email
-This Sunday's Scriptures can be found at USCCB.org
-I will be celebrating mass this weekend at 8:00am and 12:30pm on Sunday

Carved on the Palm of His Hand

I hear the words of Jesus referring to the sheep of the flock as those who can not be "snatched from the Father's hand". It reminds me immediately of that Glory and Praise song, Isaiah 42 "I have carved you on the palm of my hand." I used to love that song on weekend renewals when people would experience the tender care and closeness of God in their lives. Tears always accompanied that song.

If there is a tragic feature to people's spiritual lives today that I notice it is the lack of being held in the palm of God's hand. Everyone seems so vunlerable and frightened, abandoned and on their own, forced to defend and protect themselves, against everyone else, fighting for a limited amount of God's blessings for themeselves.

That is a spiritual sickness in our generation. Very few people seem blessed by the Providence of Almighty God.

On this Good Shepherd Sunday I am praying that all of us might experience the conversion of heart that would reassure us that God has us carved on the palm of His hand, there is no snatching us away from Him. No matter what life brings us, we and God can manage it together.

As a pastor of souls, I would expect that believers would experience this providential, tender care in and through the Church. That was Jesus' idea and intention in establishing the Church. Communion (yes in the Sacrament and in the Church) is "to be safe in the embrace of our loving God".

Are you open to that embrace? Is that security expressed in your life by calm and peace? Can you trust the Church to imperfectly provide that embrace in daily life?

I'd be interested to know why or why not.

Feed My Sheep

-Last Sunday's homily is available by email
-This Sunday's Scriptures can be found at USCCB.org
-I will be celebrating mass this weekend at 4:00 Saturday and 8:00 AM and 12:30 PM Sunday

The lost sheep

In the context of this year of faith and the call to the new evangelization my thoughts have turned to feeding and tending the sheep, as Jesus commanded Peter, in regards to those who are currently"Lost".

Pope Francis has recalled for all of us the need to offer tender care, like St. Peter, for the sake of the love of Christ. I am thinking about all the Catholics who are baptized and registered in our parish alone who do not join us for Sunday Eucharist. I recently asked a group of parishioners as to why those 75% do not participate. The answers were varied.

We concluded that all of those who do not participate have received a message from the church that there is something "wrong" with them. Lapsed, fallen away, bad marriages, same-sex orientation, Contracepting, divorced, addicted, Or just for having a "mortal sin" for having missed mass.

Our message to them is that there is something wrong or irregular about them and that they ought to get their life right with Jesus and come back to church. I am not convinced that such a message is "tending or feeding the lambs". We need another message that precedes the current message. The message that they need to hear is Peter's answer to Jesus in today's Gospel, "Lord you know everything, you know that I love you."

How might the ministry of our parish church and our individual lives of faith express to our neighbors and the world that "Jesus knows everything and that we love Jesus?" Let's work on that and I believe we will begin to tend to the lambs and feed all the sheep So much more effectively

Mercy is "Believing" at Work

-Last Sunday's homily is NOT available
-This Sunday's Scriptures can be found at USCCB.org
-I will be celebrating mass this weekend at 5:30 Sat and 9:30 and 11:00 on Sunday

Believe By Becoming God's Mercy

Theologian Ronald Rolheiser has described for me the legend of St. Christopher. I knew St. Christopher only as a "debunked" patron saint of safe travel. I was unfamiliar with the story of his conversion.

As a youth, Christopher was gifted in every way, except faith. He was a big man physically, powerful, strong, goodhearted, mellow, and well liked by all. He was also generous, using his physical strength to help others. His one fault was that he found it hard to believe in God. For him, the physical was what was real and everything else seemed unreal. However, he yearned to believe in God and deeply respected those who did believe. And so he lived his life in a certain honest agnosticism, unable to really believe in anything beyond what he could physically see, feel, and touch.

This, however, did not prevent him from using his gifts, especially his physical strength, to serve others. This became his refuge, generosity and service. He became a ferryboat operator, spending his life helping to carry people across a dangerous river. One night, so the legend goes, during a storm, the ferryboat capsized and Christopher dove into the dark waters to rescue a young child. Carrying that child to the shore, he looked into its face and saw there the face of Christ. After that he believed, for he had seen the face of Christ. The very name, Christopher, contains the legend. Christopher means Christ-bearer.

Are we not all at times like Christopher and like St. Thomas, weak in faith? We don't even feel like we believe. There are, for everyone of us, dark nights of the soul, silences of God, cold lonely seasons, bitter times when God's appearances to us cannot be truly grasped or recognized. The history of faith, as witnessed by the life of Jesus and the lives of the saints, shows us that God often seems dead and, at those times, the reality of the empirical world can so overpower us that nothing seems real except what we can see and feel right now, namely our own pain.

Whenever this happens, we need to become Christ-bearers, Christophers, honest agnostics who use their goodness and God-given strengths to help carry others across the burdensome rivers of life. God does not ask us to have a faith that is certain, but a service that is sure. We have the assurance that, should we faithfully help carry others without first thinking of ourselves, we will one day find ourselves before the person of Christ who will gently say to us: "See for yourself, that I am real, and not a ghost".

By living mercy we can become believers in the flesh! Help, Lord, our unbelief!

Non-condemnation - a spirituality

-Last Sunday's homily is available by email
-This Sunday's Scriptures can be found at USCCB.org
-I will be celebrating mass this weekend at 4:00pm Saturday and 11:00am on Sunday

Non-condemnation as a way of life!

Last week in my reflection on faith as a condition of the heart and unforgiveness as the hardening of the heart I think we may have been misled. What I mean by that is that the life of forgiveness or non-condemnation that Jesus displays today in the Gospel of the woman caught adultery, we see that, for those of us called to be the disciples of Jesus, non-condemnation is a way of life.

The call to be forgiving can be misunderstood, in my opinion, as the goal of forgiving particular persons for particular offenses. What I hear in the Gospel today is that Jesus is inviting us to a new way of being, "metanoia" which literally means "a change in knowing or mind. That we might on a daily basis adopt a new approach to loving and it excludes condemnation.

Think of all the people that in one day can disappoint us, frustrate us, offend us, insult us, disrespect us, look down on us, et cetera. We can come to the conclusion that all of them are condemnable. We can begin to live a life of self protective, condemnation- "all THOSE people". This attitude of condemnation colors our loving. In fact, our loving can disappear because we are dominated by self protective condemnation. Wow..

I recall a parent of a child with ADD, who said that every night she had to forgive her child and forgive herself, get a good night's sleep, wake up the next day and begin again - free. That is the formula that all of us can adopt if we are to live the life of Jesus-"neither do I condemn you".

Does this make sense to your life?