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. Monsignor Fisher is a Catholic priest, a member of the Diocese of Dallas, and founder of the Pastoral Reflections Institute, a nonprofit in Dallas, Texas, dedicated to to enriching your spiritual journey. 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 fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time. The opening Prayer Keep your family safe, O Lord, with unfailing care that relying solely on the hope of heavenly grace, they may be defended always by your protection 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 the Prophet Isaiah, sixth chapter, first and second verse, and the third through the eighth verse. In the year of King Uzziah when he died, I saw the Lord seated on a high and lofty throne, with a train of his garments filling the temple. Seraphim were standing above.

They cried out, one to the other, holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts. All the earth is filled with his glory. The sound of that cry, the frame of the door shook and the house was filled with smoke. Then I said, woe is me. I am doomed, for I am a man of unclean lips, living among a people of unclean lips. Yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts.

Then one of the seraphim flew to me, holding an ember that had he had taken with tongs from the altar. He touched my mouth with it and said, see, now that this has touched your lips, your wickedness is removed, your sin is purged. Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, whom shall I send? Who will go for us? Here I am. I said, send me the word of the Lord.

In the sight of the angels I will sing your praise as Lord. Now reading from the first letter of St. Paul to the Corinthians, 15th chapter, first through the 11th verse, I am reminding you, brothers and sisters, of the gospel I preached to you, which you indeed received, and which you also stand through it, you are also being saved, for you hold fast to the word I preached to you, unless you believed in vain. For I handed on to you as first importance what I had received that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, he was buried. He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures. Then he appeared to Cephas, then to the 12.

After that he appeared to more than 500 brothers at once, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. After that he appeared to James. Then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one born abnormally, he appeared to me. For I am the least of the apostles, not fit to be called an apostle because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God, I am what I am.

And his grace to me has not been ineffective. Indeed, I have toiled harder than all of them. Not I, however, but the grace of God that is with me. Therefore, whether it is I or they. So we preach. And so you believed the word of the Lord.

Hallelujah verse. Come after me, and I will make you fishers of men. The Gospel for this Sunday is taken from St. Luke, fifth chapter, first through the 11th verse. While the crowd was pressing in on Jesus and listening to the word of God, he was standing by the lake of Gennesaret. He saw two boats there, alongside the lake.

The fishermen had disembarked and were washing their nets. Getting into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, he asked him to put out a short distance from the shore. Then he sat down and taught the crowds from the boat. After he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, put out into deep water and lower your nets for a catch. Simon said in reply, master, we have worked hard all night and have caught nothing. But at your command, I will lower the nets.

When they had done this, they caught a great number of fish and their nets were tearing. They signaled to their partners in the other boat to come and help them. They came and filled both boats so that the boats were in danger of sinking. When Simon Peter saw this, he fell at the knees of Jesus and said, depart from me, Lord. I am a sinful man. For astonishment at the catch of fish they had made seized him and all those with him.

And likewise James and John and the sons of Zebedee, who were partners of Simon. Jesus said to Simon, do not be afraid. From now on you will be catching men. They brought their boats to the shore. They left everything and followed him. The Gospel of the Lord.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that today, more than ever, we are aware of people in places of authority that lie to us. It’s everywhere, and it so shakes us. Because we often give people in positions of authority a kind of openness to they’re the ones that should be telling the truth. So what they say we would say we are supposed to believe because of their position. It is very unsettling and very frightening when we can’t turn to those people and find the truth. So where do we find it?

Where’s our source of truth? Well, certainly in many cases what we’re looking for is just the right facts. That’s easy. We can find those out. Find out that what was said is not fact, factual, and therefore it’s a lie. But there’s something more insidious about lies, how they can rob us of things, even destroy us.

I keep going back to what Jesus said that he was coming into the world to do. Open the eyes of the blind, release those in prison, unburden those that are stressed. Interesting. What’s imprisoned that he wants to free? Well, we have in our tradition the belief that God has created us in his likeness. We are like our God and therefore our nature is made to be like God.

And therefore our nature is to be the kind of loving, caring, forgiving source of life that God is. But if we’ve been lied to, we’ve been told that we are basically sinners and that we have this terrible burden of our faults and our task is to focus on our faults and change them. And, and if we just focus on self enough to say, well, I can clean my act up enough to get approval from the one who demands all this of me and then maybe I can make it to a better place afterwards. It’s a lie. It’s not what God is about. It’s not what our nature is made for self improvement.

No, it’s made for self discovery. And what God is longing to do for you and for me is to free us from the bondage of a misconception of who we are and what we’re here for. Because that kind of misconception, that lie that we have been told by our culture, our family, our religion, robs us of who we really are. The true self that we are, the loving, forgiving, nurturing figure that we are is imprisoned. The true self. And when it’s imprisoned, it stays there because we’re blind.

We don’t even realize what’s happening. And the life that we are told is supposed to be the life God wants us to live here, of trying to always improve ourselves, forcing ourselves to do things we don’t want to is so stressful. Stressful because it doesn’t bring what it promises. It just seems there’s more work and more things to do and More things to improve, and there’s never enough time. And we never get to where we think we should be. If that’s an image you have of your life, you have been lied to.

Listen to Isaiah, who’s being called to be a prophet. The core thing of a prophet is what. What does a prophet do? Tells the truth. And so when he’s being asked to think about God needs prophets, he said, well, I can’t be a prophet because I’m a man of unclean lips, and I live with a bunch of people with unclean lips. We are lying to each other.

We don’t know what’s real. And God says, well, I’m not surprised. And let me just take this ember off this altar and touch your lips, an image of purification, and I will purify you of your lies. And when that was being done for Isaiah, when that was a gift, not that he had to understand everything, no, he was given some kind of power to see the truth, to speak the truth. And he said, yes, yes, send me. I would love to be the truth.

That’s in all of our natures. We’re all prophets in some way, called to be. So we listen to Paul. And Paul is saying, you know, I was caught in a lie. I believed with all my heart that Christians were wrong. They were going against God because we saw them.

They were caring for each other and disregarding our law. And, well, they were wrong. They were somehow wrong. And so I had to destroy them. So I went about trying to destroy the people who were telling the truth. Caring for each other, loving each other, nurturing each other.

The most striking thing about Christians was the way they treated each other. Imagine leaving a system that said anybody who is sick or anybody who’s in trouble, they’re being punished by God. You have no obligation, in fact, shouldn’t try to help them. Take care of yourself. What an interesting lie. It’s not unlike the way we are.

You know, we tend to think that we are the most important thing we’re here to take care of. And we do have a responsibility to care for ourselves. But that’s just the beginning. You care for yourself, you find your true self. You find yourself in a way of life that isn’t stressful. You open your eyes and you see what’s real.

Then you have to become someone. It’s the antithesis of someone who walks away from everyone who is hurting, broken, poor. So Paul realizes something happened to him, and he claims, I didn’t figure this out. But somehow the grace of God entered Into me. God came to me, opened my eyes to see what was going on, freed me from the prison of this lie I was in so I could find my true self. And all of a sudden, my life was not as stressful as it was.

It was filled with hope. Because somehow I knew I was given a gift. It wasn’t me. It isn’t from me. It’s called grace. And it came to me, not earned.

In fact, I really didn’t deserve it because I was doing the opposite of what God wanted. But maybe what Paul didn’t realize is. No, exactly. The people who are in the lie is who God wants to reach. So he freed him from his lie. And he was so filled with energy that he claims, I work harder than anybody.

I love that I’m the best one. But then he goes on to say, not because I am the source of what I’m doing. No, because God is the source of what I’m doing. And I’ve been graced. It’s been given to me. I see the truth.

So now we’re still in the period of time when we’re looking at the beginning of Jesus ministry. So now we see Jesus doing something really interesting. Imagine with me that he knows that he is the one who’s come into the world to open people’s eyes, free them from a prison and release them from stress. That’s his intention. We slowly learn that he’s doing this by slowly revealing what is real, what is true. The great lie that’s still in the world it’s in all of us is a description of the world that doesn’t match reality.

If you’ve been told by your culture, your society, whatever, that you are alone in this world, your job is to do everything you can to improve yourself. Then to use those improvements to win favor, to get a job, to get money so you can take care of you and do the things you want, but you work in order to have some fun later. Work is drudgery. If you think that’s what life is about, then you’re living in a lie. Jesus came to open our eyes to a world that was frightening to a lot of people. It’s a world that is filled with the unknown.

It’s filled with divinity, it’s filled with angels, it’s filled with dead people. It’s speaking to us. It’s filled with this energy, this force, this power that’s swirling around us. When Jesus did some of his miracles and people saw his power, let’s say over evil. When he told this young man that he wanted to free him from the devil. And the devil said, I can’t leave this man.

Send me somewhere. He sent him into these pigs. And both the man and the pigs, when they were possessed, were completely self destructive. Self destructive. An illusion that destroys the true self. What were they afraid of?

Afraid of a world that was so foreign to them and so powerful that they’d rather go to what they knew rather than to face something they didn’t. They didn’t want to live in a world of grace and energy and spiritual forces. I feel uncomfortable there. But that’s our place to be in a world that is filled with mystery, with grace, with divinity, with all these powers helping one another in ways that are beyond our imagining. It’s a perfect ecosystem where these spiritual beings are there to give us everything we need to be to grow into spiritual beings. That’s the truth.

So what is Jesus doing? He wants to introduce this. So he’s walking along one day and he thought, here’s a way I can do this. He wants to give a speech. And it’s always better if you give a talk and there’s a bunch of crowds to keep them from crowding in on you. You go out a little bit from the water.

Actually, the water becomes a kind of amplifier for your voice. And so you sit in a boat and you speak to the people on the crowd. It’s a perfect auditorium. And there he is in this boat teaching. The very thing that I want you to understand is the truth, reality. It’s so fascinating to me that why didn’t we get the speech?

Why didn’t we get it word for word of everything that Jesus gave in that talk? No, he doesn’t want us to believe that you go to scriptures to fear the voice of God solely, but he wants you to believe that the scriptures say the voice of God is coming to you 24 7. He lives inside of you. If he can’t reach you, he’s using his angels to reach you. He’s using the dead to reach you. He’s using circumstances in your life to reach you.

Always with one thing, the truth of what is. And so he sits there and he does it. He does his talk. Then he notices that those who had the boat were out there and they were complaining. You know, we try. We’re stressed, we’re stressed.

We can’t get what we want. And so what he says is, look, I will give you something that will enable you to do something way beyond what you could normally do. I’ll show you not only where the fish are. But I will give you the largest, most incredible group of fish you’ve ever seen. And so what do they do? Get away from me.

I’m a sinful man. What’s he saying when he said, I’ll make you fishers of men? They were catching fish, which is nourishment for human beings. He’s saying, I want you to catch men and teach them their nourishment for other human beings, their food. They’ll eventually tell you that you also are going to bring drink to them, a cup of salvation. You’re going to feed them, you’re going to forgive them, you’re going to feed them, you’re going to forgive them.

That’s the truth. That’s your destiny. That’s what we’re called for. Closing prayer, Father, the truth you’ve called us to enter into, to accept and to believe with all our hearts. It gives us enormous freedom from the stress of struggling to become someone that would please you, when in fact all you ask is that we open our hearts to your presence and let you flow through us. Bless us with an understanding of grace, your presence within us, and let us be food and forgiveness to everyone everywhere, knowing that that’s our destiny, that’s our life and that’s our joy.

We ask this through Christ our Lord. Amen. The music in our program was composed and produced by Ryan Harner for this show. Pastoral Reflections with Monsignor Don Fisher, a listener supported program is archived and available on our website pastoralreflectionsinstitute.com and available anytime, anywhere and for free on our podcast, Finding God in Our Hearts. You can search and subscribe to Finding God in Our Hearts anywhere you download your podcasts. 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. Pastor, 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 2020.