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. 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.

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. I pray you’ve enjoyed what you’ve heard so far and you’ll listen to me a couple years ago and see how I sounded. Then 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 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 Good morning.

Today we celebrate the 31st Sunday in Ordinary time. The opening prayer Almighty merciful God, by whose gift your faithful offer you right and praiseworthy service. Grant, we pray, that we may hasten without stumbling to receive things you have promised 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 wisdom, 11th chapter 22nd verse to the 12th chapter, second verse before the Lord. The whole universe is a grain from a balance or a drop of morning dew come down upon the earth.

But you have mercy on all, because you can do all things and you overlook people’s sins that they may repent for you love all things that are and loathe nothing that you have made for what you hated you would not have fashioned. And how could a thing remain unless you willed it or be preserved, had it not been called forth by you? But you spare all things because they are yours, O Lord and lover of souls, for your imperishable spirit is in all things. Therefore you rebuke offenders little by little, warn them, and remind them of the sins they are committing, that they may abandon their wickedness and believe in you, O Lord. The Word of the Lord. I will praise your name forever, my King and my God.

A Reading from the New Testament from The letter of St. Paul to the Thessalonians, first, chapter 11 brothers and sisters, we always pray for you that our God may make you worthy of his calling and powerfully bring to fulfillment every good purpose and every effort of faith that the name of our Lord Jesus Christ may be glorified in you and you in him, accordance with the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. We ask you, brothers and sisters, with regard to the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our assembling with him, not to be shaken out of your mind suddenly, or to be alarmed either by a spirit or by an oral statement, or by a letter allegedly from us, to the effect that the day of the Lord is at the word of the Lord. Alleluia Verse God so loved the world that he gave His Son, so that everyone who believes in him might have eternal life. The Gospel for this Sunday is taken from St. Luke 19:1st through the 10th verse.

At that time Jesus came to Jericho and intended to pass through the town. Now a man named Zacchaeus, who was a chief tax collector and also a wealthy man, was seeking to see who Jesus was. But he could not see him because of the crowd, for he was short in stature. So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore tree in order to see Jesus, who was about to pass that way. When he reached the place, Jesus looked up and said, zacchaeus, come down quickly for today I will stay at your house. And he came down quickly and received him with joy.

And when they saw all this, the others began to grumble, saying, he has gone to stay at the house of a sinner. Zacchaeus stood there and said to the Lord, behold, half of my possessions. Lord, I give to the poor, and if I extorted anything from anyone, I shall repay it four times over. And Jesus said to him, today salvation has come to this house because this man too is a descendant of Abraham. For the Son of man has come to seek and to save what is lost The Gospel of the Lord. Sa Sam Sa I’ve mentioned to you often that I’ve been doing this work for a long time.

It’ll be 50 years next year that I’ve been preaching, teaching. It’ll be 30 years that I’ve been on this radio program. And I look back at the homilies I’ve given. Sometimes I go back and listen to one, and I’m always struck by something. My voice sounds a little different. But when I listen to the images that I use and the explanations that I give, I realize that I was at one point in my life of understanding, and now I’m at a different point.

Not that I. I contradict anything that I said before. Well, maybe a few things I had to change, but basically, it’s just. I see more, I understand more. I have a clearer picture of what’s really going on in me and then in the people that I teach and preach to. So here’s one of the things that I’ve seen change.

I really began my ministry like a lot of young men coming out of a seminary, Catholic seminary would be ready to do this kind of work. And that was, how can I keep people from sinning? That was just probably the biggest thing that I thought my job was. And I would do that by encouraging them to do sacraments, confession on a regular basis, and always mass on Sunday, and then get involved in some project in the parish. And you would be a good Catholic, and you would basically learn from the images and the homilies and the images in Scripture, and you would learn that you have to force yourself to stop doing bad things and just force yourself to do good things. It seemed like it was an exercise of will, a strong, powerful will supported by sacraments.

Sacraments mean promises. That’s what the word means. And so God is promising help, and we call it grace. But what I think I missed is what I see in the readings today. And that is that the thing that Jesus came into the world to do is to save what was lost. And I might think, well, you know, you’re lost when you’re not in touch with the grace of God.

That gives you the courage in your will to force yourself to do the right thing. But what I really think he’s talking about is that when we are not doing the thing that we should do, we have lost something. And what we’ve lost is a connection. Not necessarily a connection with the church or with God, but a connection that the church and God hopefully are there to repair and to increase and to make healthy and that’s the connection with who we really are. Who are we? What do we really want?

Do we really want the things that the world talks us into that seem to be so attractive and seem to be pretty effective in making us feel good, but somehow we get a gnawing sense after we have them for a while that they aren’t all that we thought they would be. I love the image of the first reading when we listen to the book of Wisdom and it’s saying something about our human nature. I know sometimes I get the feeling as I look at my own human nature, you know, why did I get stuck with this thing? Why did I get stuck with all these longings and passions for things that I’m not supposed to have? And it just seemed like a kind of burden to have this human nature until I began to realize, perhaps more recently than ever before, that this human nature that we have is a reflection of divine nature. And in that book of Wisdom, we find this particular passage rich in its presentation, that there is this mysterious figure, this God who is big, really big.

And isn’t it an interesting image when it says when you think of the universe. And of course, now we know more about the universe than they would have ever known when this was listened to in the very beginning by those who were part of the Israelite community. But, you know, it’s not just those stars right above us, but the universe is unlimited. There’s no end to it. It goes on and on and on forever. So the image is that this God that created us is so much more than any of that, that the universe is like a little drop of dew on a leaf.

So this God is big, powerful, wise, but most especially his greatness, his awesome glory is his relationship with his people, the people he created. Human beings. There are other beings, angels. But we humans have this inheritance, you might say, of being made in the image of God, so that when we evolve, when we develop, when we become who we are, we reflect this beautiful, powerful, loving, forgiving God. And that’s our nature. It’s natural.

It’s not a forced way of life on us. And the reason we feel it’s forced is basically because we haven’t evolved very much yet into that. Because the process of living is all about evolution. And it’s evolution that we know from Darwin. We know that we have gained abilities and strengths to do things from the most primitive time to now. It’s interesting to me that if you look back to the time that Abraham was called, what age were human beings at what Level of awareness did they have?

Well, they had just left the Stone Age and gotten into the Bronze Age. They hadn’t yet come into the Iron Age. I mean, I used to think that those stories about God taking care of the Israelites and killing all their enemies, you know, I often thought. Didn’t they kind of think it was kind of violent to kill all their enemies? I mean, didn’t that worry them? Well, I don’t think so.

I mean, they were not very evolved. And the thought that there was a God out of all the other gods that took such interest in them that he would show his love for them by conquering their enemies. Which means. Which simply means this is a God who came into their life not so much to take from them their offerings and then perhaps give them something back. But no, this was the God whose intention was that they grow and they become who they are. And the only way, in the most primitive sense he could do that is to keep them from being killed by their enemies.

And I can’t imagine what the world was like back then. I mean, enemies could be coming around the corner anytime and wipe out a whole village. I guess that was what they had to live with. So if there was somebody that could protect them, that was the beginning of a relationship with human beings and their parent God. If you know Erik Erikson’s work, he talks about the first stage of human beings in terms of maturity and growing. It’s is they have to form trust with their parents.

And that means they have to understand that these people who they are now living with, once they realize they’re not really part of their mother anymore and they begin to sense their individuality, they need to feel that these bigger people around them are going to take care of them, feed them, nurture them, hold them, love them. And if that’s not there, something is deeply damaged. And so the very first stage of evolution, of becoming who God made us to be, is to learn that we are safe. And that’s the beginning of our relationship with the world that we live in. But also in a spiritual way. We have to have that kind of trust in God, that He’s there for us.

And what a powerful image it is that he did this work of saving them from their enemies. And so if I look at my life and I say, do I trust in God? I would like to say I do. I do now. But there was a time I didn’t. Because I thought if his relationship with me was based on my sinlessness, then I can’t trust in a God.

Who says that if I died he would punish me and send me to a place of darkness and pain. So as a child I was confused about my Father in heaven because I was taught that he would punish me if I made a mistake. But listen to the way this reading speaks about human beings mistakes. I was taught I would go to hell if I sinned and didn’t go to confession. In this beautiful image, this is God looks at me, sees me as a growing, evolving human being, is not holding me to something that I can’t fully grasp yet. Like we don’t hold a child to some kind of responsibility they can’t achieve.

So this God of ours in this wisdom book is saying I’m there for them, I love them, and I’m going to gently remind them of their sins so that they can repent. So as they grow and mature, I will point out the places where they might be going back to an earlier time, not realizing what they know, making a decision that’s short sighted, something that they would regret. And repentance means to regret. So imagine that we’re always evolving and our sins are those signs to us of where we’re not hitting the mark, where we’re needing to repent, regretting that we did something that we now see is wrong. And for a sin to be a sin you have to know that it’s a sin. So you’d be being aware that I’m.

Well, it’s interesting the word could be regression because the word regret comes from the same word. It’s like to go back to something less than we are. So what if you thought of sin as simply a regression to go back to something that we perhaps were before, but we’ve grown beyond it and we feel bad about what we’ve done. Now that’s a relationship with God that I can deal with in a way. And it’s a way I would like everybody to treat everyone else. Because we are supposed to grow into an image like God.

And so when we see God, we see the perfection of what we’re called to. And if it looks like it’s beyond our reach, we’re correct. Because we can’t achieve it, but we can evolve into it, evolve into it. So now we look at Zacchaeus and Zacchaeus is an interesting man. He’s wealthy, he’s been making his money off of people. That’s what a lot of ways we make money.

He was a toll collector. So anytime people moved around, he charged them for doing something which in a way they’re right. But he still got money for it. And he was interested in Jesus. It’s fascinating. He was so attracted to him.

And you wonder why was a sinner, because he would have considered any rabbi, and Jesus was a rabbi, to look down on him and say that, you’re no good, you’re a sinner, you’re an outcast. We don’t want to have anything to do with you. We don’t care about you. In fact, we’re not even supposed to get near you because you’re so bad. We’re supposed to protect ourselves from evil. So we stay in our nice little enclosed capsule of goodness.

Hypocritically, unfortunately. But isn’t it interesting that Zacchaeus perhaps had heard about this rabbi who said, and it’s a great quote. Tax collectors and Pharisees are getting into the kingdom more than the leaders of the temple. That made their day, I’m sure. So let’s say he’s really interested in this man. Who is he?

I want to see him. He’s short of stature. Maybe that’s a way to say he’s not yet fully grown. And he gets up in this tree and he looks and he sees this man, and the eyes meet with Jesus, and Jesus knows what’s going on inside of him. And he said, I want to stay with you. He was constantly bombarded by Pharisees around him who were condemning his work and saying that he was wrong and off balance and too liberal or whatever they said.

And yet, when somebody recognized Jesus for who he was, who he is, that was awesome. And he was transforming Zacchaeus into a new man, moving him, in a way, up the ladder of evolution and becoming more conscious of his life. And his regret was almost instantaneously, because now I realize I’ve been living in a way that I really don’t want to live. And I’m going to repay everybody that I’ve ever taken money from fourfold, and I’m never going to do this again. That’s conversion based in a repentant heart that sees that it’s no longer capable of doing the evil it was doing because it sees more than they saw before. And they see through it and say, there’s nothing in this that I really want.

There’s nothing in this that really gives me joy. But this man, this Christ, seems filled with joy. He seems like I want what he wants. And that’s the mystery of conversion. You see someone, you see something in them. A light, a goodness, a patience, understanding.

You see it and you say, I want that and then if you understand that that’s what you’re made for, then the work really begins. Father, you have made everything according to a plan that brings fullness, that brings goodness, that brings joy to everything you’ve created. Everything has the mark of your spirit, your wisdom, your goodness. Bless us with open eyes to see you, to see us as we are, to to know the union that we have with you as we continue to grow into becoming who you’ve called us to be. 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.

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