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 32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time. The opening prayer. Almighty and merciful God, graciously keep from us all adversity, so that unhindered in mind and body alike, we may pursue in freedom of heart the things that are yours, 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 second book of Maccabees, seventh chapter, first and second verse, and the ninth through the 14th verse.
It happened that seven brothers with their mother were arrested and tortured with whips and scourges by the King to force them to eat pork in violation of God’s law. One of the brothers speaking for the others said, what do you expect to achieve by questioning us, we ought to die rather than transgress the laws of our ancestors. At the point of death he said, you accursed fiend, you are depriving us of this present life. But the king of the world will rise up and we will live again forever. It is for his laws that we are dying. After him the third suffered the cruel sport.
He put out his tongue and once, when told to do so, and bravely held out his hands as he spoke these noble words. It was from heaven that I received these for the sake of his law I disdain them from him I hope to receive them again. Even the king and his attendants marveled at the young man’s courage because he regarded his sufferings as nothing. After he had died, they tortured and maltreated the fourth brother in the same way. When he was near death, he said, it is my choice to die at the hands of men, with the hope God gives of being raised up by him. But for you there will be no resurrection to life.
The Word of the Lord Responsorial Psalm Lord, when your glory appears, my joy will be full. A reading from the New Testament from the second letter of St. Paul to the Thessalonians, second chapter, 16th verse to the third chapter, fifth verse brothers and sisters, may our Lord Jesus Christ Himself, and God our Father, who has loved us and given us everlasting encouragement and good hope through his grace, encourage your hearts and strengthen them in every good deed and word. Finally, brothers and sisters, pray for us so that the word of the Lord may speed forward and be glorified and as it did among you, that we may be delivered from perverse and wicked people. For not all have faith, but the Lord is faithful. He will strengthen you and guard you from the evil one.
We are confident of you in the Lord, that what we instruct you, you are doing and will continue to do. May the Lord direct your hearts to the love of God and to the endurance of Christ. The Word of the Lord. Hallelujah. Verse Jesus Christ is the firstborn of the dead. To him be glory and power forever and ever.
The Gospel this Sunday is taken from St. Luke 27:38 verse Some Sadducees those who deny that there is a resurrection came forward and put this question to Jesus, saying, teacher, Moses wrote for us, if someone’s brother dies leaving a wife but no child, his brother must take his wife and raise up descendants for his brother. Now there were seven brothers. The first married a woman but died childless. Then the second and third married her, and likewise all the seven died childless Finally, a woman also died. Now at the resurrection, whose wife will that woman be, for all seven had been married to her.
The children of this age marry and remarry, Jesus said. But those who are deemed worthy to attain to the coming age and to the resurrection of the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. They can no longer die, for they are like angels, and they are the children of God. But they are the ones who arise that the dead will rise. Even Moses made known in the passage about the bush when he called out Lord, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob. He is not the God of the dead, but the God of the living, for to him all are alive.
The Gospel of the Lord. It sa. You’re not supposed to discuss politics or religion at dinner parties, at least that’s what they say. But when I’m at a dinner party, often it goes to religion. And if we ever get on the topic of today’s Liturgy of the Word, when we talk about life after death, it’s amazing how different people’s image is of that whole issue of what happens when we die. You can be a Catholic forever.
And I know many Catholics that have this kind of fear of death, with this sense that I just don’t know if I’m good enough. I don’t know if I’m going to make it to the next world. I worry about punishment because for Catholics, like many religions, we had a very strong dose. Not so much today, but, you know, past my mid-70s. So I remember when I was a child, that was the biggest thing that seemed to be placed before our imagination, and that is that, you know, if you didn’t do the right thing, you would burn in hell forever. And it was imprinted in my mind.
So I always had this fear that I wasn’t going to own up to what I should be, because the model that I was always given so often in homilies was the model of Jesus. We must be like Jesus. We must be like Him. Somehow. I wish they told me that Jesus lives in me and I need to rely upon him to move through me rather than me trying to become like Him. But that was.
It came later in my spiritual life, thank God. But it’s interesting to me that many people that you talk to just say, well, I don’t think there’s any really thing afterwards. I think when I cease to live, I just cease to exist. I just go back to pure energy and become part of the cosmos or whatever. And I just find it all fascinating that we have such different views. And I’m wondering what does it reflect?
Does it really reflect the notion of what’s going to happen after death? I mean, we don’t know much about it. We haven’t experienced it. We have lots of people today more than ever that have near death experiences where they have this kind of universal sense that when they die they go to a place and it feels good and they often disassociate and they see their body maybe on the operating table and then somehow the doctor brings them back to life and their bodies goes back, their spirit goes back into their body and then they find themselves like, oh shoot, I’m back. Interesting. I think it’s fascinating that scripture has a really interesting history of this whole notion of life after death.
And one of the things that’s fascinating is the first five books of the Old Testament, the Torah and the Sadducees were the people who really were the conservative rabbis, the conservative teachers. They only believed in the first five books of the Bible. Everything after that didn’t seem that important. But there’s nothing in those first five books of the Bible that say anything about life after death. It was more about living a good life, a rich life, a full life here. And maybe that was what needed to be said first.
I mean, you could see how easy it could be for religion to sort of ignore this life if all of our attention was placed on afterlife. So it makes sense that maybe as God began his revelation and you have to realize the beauty of the Old Testament is this wonderful thousand plus years of the story of God revealing who he is and teaching us who we are. There’s an evolution of understanding in terms of the teaching came in stages. It didn’t start with the fullness of the message. In the beginning, it was mostly God revealing himself as the God who is the God, the only God who is the primary God. Monotheism.
And this, this God had a love for his people and wanted them to live according to a law, a rule that he would share with them. It was his law, that was his wisdom, his gift. The law was everything. And so that’s the way it began. And slowly we see creeping into the Old Testament later stories and then most especially in the New Testament. But this questioning of what does happen afterwards.
And every now and then you get a clear indication early on in the Old Testament of what was to come into fullness in the New Testament, that is that there is a life after death. And the sufferings that we go through in this life don’t begin to compare with the gifts that we have. So we have this unique story in Second Maccabees. These seven brothers and this woman, their mother. And they had this insight into the fact that no matter what a human being does to me, whatever he tries to take from me, if he even takes my body or takes my tongue or takes my body, limbs off, that’s fine, because I get everything back. Everything’s going to work out.
I am going to be safe. You can’t destroy me. And that, to me, is one of the most interesting aspects of the story of life after death. When you have that as a part of your imagination of who you are, how God works, there is a kind of sense that when you are overwhelmed by pain and suffering of this life, or if you get discouraged that your life hasn’t turned out the way it’s supposed to, there is this promise that no matter how difficult this life is or how easy or hard it is, there is this promise of something absolutely full for us coming. I mean, it’s like it could be described as simply a deep conviction that there’s nothing in this world that can destroy me. Nothing.
It can take my physical life, but you can’t destroy me. One of the most interesting core teachings that God longs for his people to know about who God is. I will never, ever let anyone destroy you. You are safe. It’s interesting then, that this core issue that we need to have in our relationship with God is tied up in the way we imagine life after death. Now, the other thing that I find fascinating in this set of readings, when it talks about life after death, is the story of Jesus and the Sadducees.
The Sadducees were the conservative group who stuck only to the Torah. And they really did not believe in the resurrection, which in a sense has something maybe subtly to do with. They didn’t believe that somehow, out of pain and suffering, something good could come. And so when they are arguing with Jesus over the issue, you can see something in their questioning that is a little simple, I guess you’d say. I mean, they take the words of scripture so literally. It’s like a lot of fundamentalists who are wonderful people, but many times they take the word so literally that when the word that they understand it, what they understand the word to mean, they try to apply it to the mysteries of the universe and the mystery of God’s working with us and his love, and it doesn’t fit.
And so they say, well, it can’t be true. So it’s a really almost humorous story to me. When they come and they say, look, if you’re talking about life after death and people are going to be together after death, what about the relationships that people have? I mean, here’s a woman who ends up marrying seven different men, and each man died, and he died childless. So her job was to marry the next brother and to try to make a baby. And then she died.
The joke we always tell is the reason she died was she found out there was an eighth brother, but now she died. And so the question is, they are saying, whose wife is she going to be? I mean, this is really a problem because they imagine life after death is in most literal sense, that we would just continue to live. And if we’re living there, we’d have to continue to procreate. And so they saw this big problem, and Jesus answer is just. I mean, it’s caring, it’s empathetic, it understands what’s going on.
But he’s saying, look, you don’t understand. When people die, they’re not going to be just the same. They’re not going to have their bodies in exactly the same way. But Jesus is trying to open up to a mystery. They’re going to be like angels, angels. All religions, major religions, have angels.
They know there is such a thing as a spiritual being that doesn’t have a body that can move from heaven to the earth, that can believe that angels can take human form. And. And they have this wonderful role of taking care of people. They’re like messengers from God to human beings. And they’re always there next to us, taking care of us. And if you’re Catholic, you remember always you have a guardian angel at your side.
He’s going to take care of you. It’s a beautiful image of comfort from a spiritual being. And so Jesus is trying to say, look, this is something that goes way beyond the way you are imagining the spiritual realm. So they really weren’t that grounded in spirituality. But then you look at the Old Testament as it moves all the way from Abraham to the resurrected life of Jesus. There is a wonderful, slow, beautiful evolution of teaching where every teaching builds on the one before.
So the Old Testament is essential to understanding the New Testament. And you have this. This image that finally comes to mind where you realize that Jesus, when he has lost everything, suffered everything, but he believes deep in his heart that this is all about something that had to be the way it is, it had to be written this way, and that he knew somehow he would move on to something. He had that sense. And then when he gave up Everything freely, with the expectation that there was something more for him. He became a resurrected body.
And almost to underscore the reality of what life after death is like, he spends 40 days walking the earth as a spirit that we all become after we die, able to move, able to teach, able to continue. When I was growing up, I’d go to funerals as a Catholic and. And I’d go to other funerals for friends that weren’t Catholic. And it seemed like the theme of the homily was always to talk about how good or the sermon was how good the man was, especially if it was not a Catholic service, because it seems like the Catholics were urged not to talk about the person so much as to talk about the mystery of death. But in either case, I always used to hear something like, well, he’s gone and we’re separated, and one day soon when we die, we’ll go back and meet them. And in my mind, I had this image of, oh, shoot, when they die, you lose contact, and then you have to wait till you die, and then you see them, and then you fill them in on all the things that happened.
Now, so and so did this, so and so did that, and then this happened. I remember people saying, you know, when a woman dies young and she’s always so sad, the woman died and she has three daughters. She’ll never see her daughters graduation, her daughter’s weddings. Death is a separation completely from this world. Well, then why would Jesus have said, when you die, you become like an angel? Angels are anything but separated from this world.
They’re the ones that are most engaged in this world. So what? I’ve changed dramatically because I used to preach that way of, he’s gone, we’ll see him someday. But now I believe that when I think about the communion of saints, that wonderful thing we have in our church where we believe that we can call upon a holy person that lived centuries ago and ask them to intercede for us to God. They will do that. How can they possibly listen to 5 billion people who might be praying to St.
Anthony because they lost their keys or whatever? It’s like, how does that happen? Well, if you do like the Sadducees, do you try to, you know, how can everybody talk to one person? Well, they can. That’s easy. In the spiritual world.
It’s like we change. We have to shift our way of imagining life into a new, beautiful, expansive view. And then what I believe we begin to see is something that I believe the dead so long for us to understand. And that is when they die, when they enter into the next world, they go through a period perhaps of purgation, purification and purgatory. But they’re on their journey to the fullness of heaven. And in that process of that journey they’re growing.
And it strikes me that that would be the time when they’d be most anxious and interested in being in contact with us, maybe making up for the things they didn’t do when they were with us, wanting to guide us because of their deep love for us. Or all those things are there. It seems intuitively in a human heart that that’s what they would want to do. And it makes sense to me that we do it. So believing in life after death has a lot to do with believing in a very real thing, that whatever struggles and problems we go through, whatever sense of separation, all those things are illusions because they ultimately lead to greater union, greater oneness, greater joy. What a beautiful thing to remember that the dead are with us every day, loving us, encouraging us, and being there as a spirit that was with them.
And then we can continue to feel them. Sa Foreign Closing Prayer Father, your death and resurrection opened our eyes to the greatest mystery that we are invited to participate in. This is mysterious transformation from the world that we know to a world so beyond our imagining, so full, so rich, and so generously offered to all of us who who long for it. Bless us with a greater understanding of your mercy, your forgiveness, your desire for us to always live with you and with one another forever. 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.