Good morning. I’d like to take a few moments to speak with you about some changes. I’ll be taking a break from recording new material. Programming through the end of the church year will be pre recorded from the 2019 homilies and will continue to follow the Churchill calendar, but I’ll return in five weeks with a new homily for Christ the King on November 20th. I know many of you are new listeners and I’m delighted that you’re opening your hearts to my teaching and my preaching. I know it’s always a privilege for me to imagine that you allow me to enter into you and to awaken in you the awareness that you need and I need in order to be in this world as God intends us to be.

So thank you for listening. I’ve been doing this for 35 years in Dallas on a radio program and those have been wonderful years and to be able to reach out to more people has been exciting and I’m filled with some enthusiasm about it. So I pray you’ve enjoyed what you’ve heard so far and you listened to me a couple years ago and see how I sounded then. And then I’ll be back with you on the Feast of Christ the King on November 20th. You’ll be able to continue hearing my weekly homilies on our homepage@pastreflectionsinstitute.com you can continue hearing my homilies by subscribing to our podcast, recently renamed Finding God in Our Hearts. Anywhere you find your podcasts, thank you and God bless you.

Welcome to Finding God in Our Hearts. The following production Pastoral Reflections with Monsignor Don Fisher and is a weekly program of deep spiritual insight on scripture, revealing the indwelling presence of God. We appreciate your listenership and if you find this program valuable, please subscribe and share with your friends. This program is funded with kind donations by listeners just like you make your donation@pastoralreflectionsinstitute.com Foreign Good morning. Today we celebrate the 29th Sunday in Ordinary time. The opening prayer Almighty ever living God, grant that we may always conform our will to yours and serve your majesty in sincerity of heart through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever.

Amen. A reading from the Old Testament from the book of Exodus 17, 8, 13 in those days Amalek came and waged war against Israel. Moses therefore said to Joshua, pick out certain men and tomorrow go out and engage Amalek in battle. I’ll be standing on top of the hill with the staff of God in my hand. So Joshua did as Moses told him. He engaged Amalek in battle, and after Moses had climbed to the top of the hill with Aaron and Hur, as long as Moses kept his hands raised up, Israel had the better of the fight.

But when he let his hands rest, Amalek had the better of the fight. Moses hands, however, grew tired, so they put a rock in place for him to sit on. Meanwhile, Aaron and Hur supported his hands, one on one side and one on the other, so that his hands remained steady till sunset. And Joshua mowed down Amalek and his people with the edge of the sword. The Word of the Lord Sam Satan Ram Responsorial Psalm Our help is from the Lord who made heaven and earth A reading from the second letter of St. Paul to Timothy, third chapter 14th verse to the fourth chapter, second verse Beloved, remain faithful to what you have learned and believed, because you know from whom you learned it, and that from infancy you have known the sacred Scriptures, which are capable of giving you wisdom for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.

All scripture is inspired by God, and is useful for teaching, refutation, for correction, and for training in righteousness. That one who belongs to God may be competent, equipped for every good work. I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who will judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing in his kingly power, proclaim the word, be persistent, whether it is convenient or inconvenient, convince, reprimand, encourage, through all patience and teaching, the word of the Lord. The Alleluia verse the word of God is living and effective, discerning reflections and thoughts of the heart. The Gospel for this Sunday is taken from St. Luke 18.

Jesus told his disciples a parable about the necessity for them to pray always without becoming weary. He said, there was a judge in a certain town who neither feared God nor respected any human being, and a widow in that town used to come to him and say, render a just decision for me against my adversary. For a long time the judge was unwilling, but eventually he thought, while it is true that I neither fear God nor respect any human being because this widow keeps bothering me, I shall deliver a just decision for her, lest she finally come and strike me. The Lord said, pay attention to what the dishonest judge says. Will not God then secure the rights of his chosen ones who call out to him day and night? Will he be slow to answer them?

I tell you, he will see to it that justice is done for them speedily. When The Son of Man comes. Will he find faith on earth? The Gospel of the Lord. Before I actually start my homily, I wanted to mention that today is an anniversary. Ten years ago today, we got permission to begin Pastoral Reflections Institute, which enables me to receive contributions and make them tax deductible.

And. And I now have a board and I have a kind of focus on this ministry of mine after my retirement. But it’s also, as you well know, that I’ve been on this radio program for well over 30 years. And this week we’re beginning for the first time, a podcast. And podcasts are, I think, the future of how people communicate. But I’ll stay very much on this beloved station, wrr.

But also you can go to any of the normal podcast places, Apple, Spotify, and find this program and at least 20 programs in the past that will continue this ministry. And I love the idea that it’s going to be more available because there’s something about this work I do. And now I’m going to be in the homily. But it’s all about a story. You know, the story. We all know how powerful stories are and how important they have been to culture.

In fact, there’s never been a culture that didn’t tell stories, didn’t create art, had a way of celebrating life with dancing. That’s just part of our nature. And so what’s interesting about this particular story that is believed by over half of the world as something more than just a story about something happened in the past, but it’s a story that conveys a wisdom that is eternal. There’s a phrase in the second reading that I just caught as I was reading it a moment ago, and it was saying that we’ve known this story from infancy. Well, infants don’t fathom the Old Testament and New Testament. What he’s saying is this story is in our heart.

It’s our story. It’s the story of life. It’s the story of this planet, this creation we are sharing in. Without it, we get lost, don’t have any real understanding of what’s going on yet the understanding that the story invites us into is belief, belief in a human God. By human, I mean someone so like us. So we have a story of the God who created the world, revealing to us what this is all about.

And the last line of the Gospel is so potent to anyone who pays attention to this story when it’s all over and God comes back in the form of, in a sense, ending the world as we know it, drawing us into another world that’s eternal. Will anybody have really figured out who God is? Would anybody really have faith? And I don’t think faith is about belief in whether God exists. It’s almost harder to believe there is no God. How many people understand God, know what he wants, what he desires, what he longs for most, what this world that he created is for?

I mean, what’s the purpose of our spending, you know, a Couple hours over 100 years living with each other on this mysterious blue ball in the sky? What’s it about? What’s he up to? Well, it’s probably why I feel so blessed to be a. A priest, a preacher, a teacher. Because I’m called upon to take this story and to work with it and try to understand it and share my understanding and my insights with you and invite you to go deeper into your own heart and your mind and say, is he at all helping me?

Is what he’s saying? Truthfully, I point to things. I don’t make things happen in your brain. I can’t. I just say, what if this is what he means? And the reason I think that’s so important is because I really believe that the things that are there are hidden.

They’re like gold that’s buried in another rock. I mean, there’s a simple way to understand the story on the surface, and it’s valuable in that sense. But you can’t read it as if it’s just about some things that happened back then. It’s about what happened to those people is what is life, what we’re here for, what we need to understand. So let’s look at these stories and see how my work works, and then to see what your work is in response, which is to ponder what I say, or to ponder the story on your own or whatever. But there’s something in this for you and me today that we need in the way the church works.

Everyone throughout the Catholic world and most Christian churches use this set of readings. So millions upon millions, billions of people are thinking about these very same stories. I’ve always felt you should pay attention to that and capture that, because when anything happens to one of us, it happens to all of us. So people listen to it and walk out and say, oh, yeah, I remember that story from a couple years ago. Or they sit there and go, wow, I just see something that I never saw before. Oh, my God, there’s something that I needed to know that I now know that makes life different, better, more full.

So we go to the first reading, and there’s a very interesting image of God in the Old Testament. He’s mysterious, to say the least. We know that he’s like us. He’s more human than anybody ever thought. And it’s interesting that the thing about his humanity is that he showed human traits like anger, resentment, changing his mind, having some human talk him out of doing something that he was planning on doing. All of that is very confusing if you believe that God is this all knowing being who is absolutely autonomous, doesn’t need our help, doesn’t need our advice.

Why would he ever decide something that wasn’t good? Why would he change something that he was going to do if it was good? So what do you make of these stories? Well, don’t try to figure out how it works. Just understand it’s saying something about our relationship with God, that it’s not this all knowing, all independent, all strong figure at a distance. And we over here trying to live up to some code of conduct so that we can get in at the end.

I mean, like there’s great chasm between us. It’s just the opposite. The intimacy with God is the hardest thing for us to understand. It’s what belief really draws us into. Believing in this all loving, all powerful, all forgiving God so intimate that the only thing we can say about the relationship is that he lives inside of us. And his life inside of us is a sign of all the wisdom and the creativity and the intelligence that we have, which is like God.

So it is a very, very close relationship and it flows both ways. So just as I mentioned, the fact that Moses had talked God out of doing something like destroying all those who were on a journey to the promised land because they lost their way. We also have in this story, Moses helping God win a battle. Amalek goes to war with Israel. And Moses said, okay, I will help and I’ll extend my arms. And as I extend my arms, that means that I’m winning a victory, a battle.

So my intention is that we win and God’s intention is that we win. So let’s work together. And so he does it, but it’s really hard. So he has to have other people hold up his arms. Like it’s not just one person that helps God. It’s like we all have this obligation together to help God to achieve what he wants, what he longs for, what he needs, the destruction of that which is dark and the awakening of that which is truthful and light.

So there we are, we have this image of human beings helping God. How do you reconcile that with an image of an all powerful, all knowing, independent God. All I can say is I don’t know how it can work, but I do know it’s what he planned, what he designed. So he’s saying to us, I want to be a partner with you, I want to cooperate with you, I want you to cooperate with me as we do these things. So your prayer, which is a real, really an intention, is effective. It changes things, it makes things different.

And so God in the gospel is trying to say so clearly, look, or Jesus is saying so clearly. I want you to realize that my, my teaching to you is inviting you to know that you work with the divine, with God, with the risen Christ, with the Holy Spirit. And when your intention is the same as theirs, it increases the effectiveness of what is being done. The effectiveness is on free will people to change, to become more compassionate, more empathetic, more caring, less selfish, less violent. And God’s work is to help that to happen, to teach people how to do that. And he said, but I need your help.

I want you to help me do that. And so it means that this mysterious relationship we have with God where we’re a co worker, we need to believe in that and feel that and feel the intimacy it creates with us, us and this God who is saving the world, one thing it does is it implies that we have an intention that is based on a promise that is from God that I will bring you to life, I will not let you be destroyed. So if we believe in that promise, to us it’s true, then we should have the same promise to ourselves and to others, saying we’re going to make it, we’re going to make it, we are going to make it. It’s a conviction that has some kind of force and some kind of energy in it that changes everything. By that I mean our intention with God’s intention is something greater than God’s intention alone. Now that sounds heretical, but it’s not saying that that’s what God needs, it’s what God planned.

And when I think about all the things we have to listen to on the news today about how bad things are, how things are going wrong, or how much lack of truth there is, or what is the truth and all those questions, it just can be depressing. And depressing is something that does the opposite of what the world is longing for from each of us. And that is no, we should be positive, we should have an intention. We should make a prayer where, which is not a repetition of a zillion words. Jesus said don’t think repeating your prayers helps. Just believe that your intention when you hear some horrible thing in the world and you’re filled with not disgust or depression or it’s all going in the wrong direction, no, you believe it is going to go in the right direction.

And you offer an intention that that be healed, that those people be cared for, that something good come from out of this. And then believe with all your heart you changed it. That’s what’s so depressing today for people is the world is in problem. We know more about the problems of the world now. We listen to every problem everywhere in the world. And what for do I need to know all that?

Well, not just to know how bad things are going for some people, but maybe it’s God’s will that we do know all that so that we can join a prayer, our prayer to his prayer to the whole situation. And a newscast can be a simple time to sit and pray, not having to sit and make long prayers to God and tell him what to do. Just an intention. I want this to be better. I believe it’s going to be better. I want it to be better.

I believe it’s going to be better. You surround yourself with people like that. There’s a new energy, a life giving energy. And you know what it’s like to sit around with depressed people. It’s not fun and it pulls us down. Maybe that’s part of the reason why God planned it this way, so that we can give us hope in bad situations that we are able to do something about it.

And if we have faith and we join an intention with his, it will happen. He’s saying if a guy who doesn’t care about anybody will do something because they keep being asked, don’t you think I’m willing to do anything you ask me to do? And yet I like you better. Not I like you better, but I want you to ask. Ask, Ask and you will receive. Seek and you shall.

Closing prayer Father, your gifts are beyond our imagining. Your love is so hard for us to comprehend and the dignity that you’ve given us in sharing the work of this world’s destiny. So please bless us with a deep faith and a deep appreciation of this role that we take on and help us to take it on with great faith and trust and know how effective we can be in bringing about life and goodness to the world. And we ask this in Jesus name. Amen. The music in our program was composed and produced by Ryan Harner for this show Pastoral Reflections with Monsignor Don Fisher is funded with kind donations by listeners just like you.

You can make a one time or recurring tax deductible donation on our website pastoralreflectionsinstitute.com we thank you for your listenership and your continued support. Without it, this program would not be possible. Pastoral Reflections with Monsignor Don Fisher is a production of the Pastoral Reflections Institute, a NonProfit in Dallas, Texas dedicated to enriching your spiritual journey. Executive Producer Monsignor Don Fisher, produced by Kyle Cross and recorded in Pastoral Reflections Institute Studios. Copyright 2022 SAM.