Homilies

What we do and how we live our lives speaks to our commitment to make a stewardship a way of life for us.   In stewardship, we start with the basic truth that all is a gift of God  -- our life, our family, the people we love, the beauty of creation, the opportunities we have in life.  All is a gift of God.  Our stewardship response to the abundance of God’s gifts to us is gratitude and a desire to share what we have been given.  The heart of a spirituality of stewardship is living with an attitude of gratitude and sharing with others the blessings that we have been given. This is living our discipleship of the Lord Jesus.

Our readings today call us to be unafraid! We are called to have faith, and place our trust in the Lord, even when our friends, family, and institutions fail us! We are called to be open and trust despite how we might feel! We need to be brave enough to let Christ open our ears, eyes and hearts! We have a wonderful sign of the spirit of openness as we see our children return to school this week. We pray for them and we pray that they be a sign for all of us to be open, to be unafraid to enter into new encounters, to let our faith lead us.

In all truth, all of us probably need to acknowledge a bit of hypocrisy when our egos get in the way of reaching out to people in need and reaching out to people whom we find unlovable for whatever reason.  There is sin in the world and sin in our own hearts.  We always need to recognize our own sinfulness and come before our healing, forgiving God. The North Star of our spiritual lives is rooted in our faith conviction that there is nothing hypocritical about God’s love for us.  It is unconditional and unending.  I invite you to hold on to the truth:  There is nothing we can do to stop God from loving us.  God is love.

This past Friday, I was at St. Paul’s Church in Brooklyn officiating at the wedding of my 2nd cousin Connor Oberst and Flor de Jesus.  In the words of the marriage vows, Connor and Flor committed themselves to love and honor each other in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health all the days of their lives.  The 39 words of the marriage vows are a life-defining commitment.What are the significant commitments of your life -- to your family, to your spouse, to your children, to your parents?  What are the commitments of your life?

I love the church and I am both angry and saddened! It is tragic when innocents, children and those most vulnerable are hurt. I am sure this week most of us have heard of the Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report. This report outlines patterns of abuse in six Catholic dioceses in Pennsylvania. I find this news personally devastating, and it causes me both great anger and grief. And what makes me especially angry is that this report indicates that there were on-going efforts by church officials to cover up this abuse and not nearly enough was done to report and prevent this tragic abuse .I implore you to voice your concern and anger, to start a dialog with clergy, staff, with your friends and family.  This is your church! This is the faith we share as community!  God calls us together as community to support one another.  We are the people of God let us use these tragic events to help move the church forward, forward toward the light, forward in the direction that God is pulling us.  The direction that God speaks in our heart.

This Sunday’s Gospel is the fourth consecutive Sunday that the Gospel is taken from the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel.   The Bread of Life Discourse from the 6th chapter of John’s Gospel reaches a crescendo with startling hopes and startling claims.  “The one who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him on the last day.”   The second claim is:    “He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him.”