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 16th Sunday in Ordinary Time.
The Opening Prayer show favor, O Lord, to your servants and mercifully increase the gifts of your grace that made fervent in hope, faith and charity. They may be ever watchful in keeping your commands 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 the book of Genesis, 18th chapter, 1st through the 10th verse the Lord appeared to Abraham by the Tenebrith of Mamre, as he sat in the entrance of his tent while the day was growing hot. Looking up, Abraham saw three men standing nearby. When he saw them, he ran from the entrance of the tent to greet them, and bowing to the ground, he said, sir, he if I may ask you this favor, please do not go on past your servant.
Let some water be brought that you may bathe your feet and then rest yourselves under the tree. And now that you have come this close to your servant, let me bring you a little food that you may refresh yourselves, and afterwards you may go on your way. The men replied, very well to as you have said. Abraham hastened to the tent and told Sarah, quick, three measures of fine flour, knead it and make rolls. He ran to the herd, picked out a tender choice steer, gave it to the servants, who quickly prepared it, and Abraham got some curds and milk as well as the steer that had been prepared, and set these before the three men, and he waited on them under the tree while they ate. They asked Abraham, where is your wife Sarah?
He replied, there in the tent. One of them said, I will surely return to you about this time next year, and Sarah will have a son. The Word of the Lord he who does justice will live in the presence of the Lord. A Reading from the New Testament from St. Paul’s Letter to the Colossians 1st chapter 2428 verse Brothers and sisters, now I rejoice in my suffering for your sake and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ on behalf of his body, which is the church of which I am a minister in accordance with God’s stewardship that he gave me to bring to completion for you the Word of God, the mystery hidden from the ages and from generations past. But now it has been manifested to his holy ones, to whom God chose to make known the riches of his glory, of his mystery among the Gentiles.
It is Christ in you the hope for glory. It is he whom we proclaim, admonishing everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom that we may present everyone perfect in Christ. The Word of the Lord. Alleluia Verse Blessed are they who have kept the Word with a generous heart and yield a harvest through perseverance. The Gospel for this Sunday is taken from St. Luke 10:38 42 Jesus entered a village where a woman whose name was Martha welcomed him.
She had a sister named Mary who sat beside the Lord at his feet, listening to him speak. Martha, burdened with much serving, came to him and said, lord, do you not care that my sister has left me by myself to do the serving? Tell her to help me. The Lord said to her in reply, martha, Martha, you’re anxious and worried about many things. There is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part.
It will not be taken from her. The Gospel of the Lord sa We human beings have some amazing talents. Some of them work for the good. Some of them get in the way of who we are supposed to be and why we’re here. But one of them is the fact that we can create a world of our own making. We can say, like, the world is wonderful, the world is terrible, the world is filled with riches, the world is empty and dry.
And it’s almost like we have this ability in our mind to imagine something. And then the power of that imagination is so real that it can actually give us a sense that the world we have created then is the world we live in. And there’s such a terrible risk in that, because in our Judeo Christian tradition, what we have is a God who is entering into our life. Throughout history, for 4,000 years, been communicating with human beings in a truly intimate way, trying to help them see the world as it really is, as he created it. And I want to see if I can get to that issue because of one simple truth or help you get to a better insight of what the world is about by one simple truth that is so clearly depicted in the scriptures today, it’s hospitality to the truth, openness to what’s real. Receiving message after message after message that God is placing in our lives so we can open our eyes and see.
That’s one of the big promises he made to human beings. I’ve come to restore your sight, so it’s been distorted by your experiences in life. It’s normal that we grow up with other people who are not fully mature yet. And we pick up a lot of things that are not healthy from our family of origin, from our culture. It’s normal. But our job is to work out of that, to work through that.
At the very heart of what I’m trying to say today is going to be found in that second reading from St. Paul when he is talking to the Jews, trying to convince them that this system that they belong to, that was so much about control and about laws and rules, has been obliterated. And what is in its place is a God of such generosity and such intimacy that he wants to enter into us. He says, I mean, he said, Paul said, you know, the mystery is Christ in us, God in us. And to make it even more poignant to the Jews, he’s saying, and he’s in the Gentiles, the sinners, the bad people. If he can be there, then think how much more he’ll be with us.
I mean, it’s like, can you get past all that sense of God being disgusted by our weaknesses and seeing us as polluted by our sins and wanting to have nothing to do with us? He said, that’s over. It’s not true. It was there. It was never the full intent of God, but it was the best thing humans could come up with in trying to control people through a religion. The shadow of all religions, human beings in charge that need to control, not to free and open people to the most dynamic experience of an intimate, real relationship with divinity.
So in the first reading and in the Gospel, we have two encounters with something that I hope and pray you will hear me say to you, and you will believe it with me. The divine force in the world, this God, this personal God, is constantly, constantly longing to communicate with us. And it’s up to us to be in a disposition of what we call hospitality, which is a great virtue in Judeo Christianity because it’s about openness to the mystery of God speaking to you, to me. So look at the first story. It’s got every element of what I’m trying to teach you about the world. It’s about, here’s two people, a Man sitting near his tent, in his tent, and he sees some strangers walking by, insists they come in.
He wants to feed them, nurture them. He just wants to be hospitable. Turns out there are three angels. He doesn’t know that these angels are messengers from God coming to him to say something that is going to be so far out that they. Well, the reaction of the news that the angels brought to them was ludicrous. I mean, Sarah overheard it and she started laughing, you know, and he said, this is impossible.
But here’s this messenger coming and saying something about new life being born to this family that was considered barren. It’s a perfect image of. Of a way of life. When you see it, there’s no life in it. And here these people are coming and saying, no, no, there’s another way to look at the situation you’re in. Yeah, you’re 90 years old.
You can’t have a baby. But God can do anything. He can give you something when there’s no possibility of you producing it yourself. Trust him. He can come into your life and change everything in a minute if he wants. And I always wonder what those months and months would have been for Sarah and for Abraham, thinking, my God, you really are pregnant.
This thing is really changing. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. I don’t know what it would have been like. But it’s so fascinating that it’s about God’s capacity to enter into someone’s life when there’s no possibility of change or growth in a particular, particular area. And if you’re open to the hope you have the hope that God can do this kind of work, you enter into what I would call the mystical world, the mystical life.
You see the same thing in the story of Jesus, only it goes a little bit deeper. Now it’s not Abraham and Sarah who are greeting angels. It’s another couple, Martha and Mary, receiving the incarnate God. He comes, and the two of them choose a little different response to his presence. Notice the first time they laugh in disbelief. Now Martha is very busy with all the things that you need to do to take care of a guest.
So just think that that’s a perfect image of all us in our relationship with God, where we say, well, we’ve got to get all this stuff done so that I please God. I mean, be a church and do this and don’t do that, and all the obligations, all the obligations in order to please this master God. And that’s what Martha’s working on. And here’s Mary, lazy Mary. She’s sitting there listening, listening, attentive to the guest. That’s beautiful.
He’s here. He’s speaking to us. And it must have pleased Jesus so much. And I would say the same thing pleases God now, that whenever you feel that you are really receptive to whatever information God wants to show you, give you, you want to sit there and ponder it and wonder about it. And that’s what Mary represents, the part of humanity that is willing to ponder something that doesn’t make a lot of sense, at least at first hearing. But she’s listening to Jesus because she knows he’s got something.
I just can’t imagine the presence of this man, Jesus, that would resonate out of him because he was pure divinity inside of a pure human being. By pure, it means, well, yes, sinless, but I mean human, Fully human. And he’s. He’s got it. He’s got what we are supposed to be. He’s the representative of how we become the person that God wants us to be.
A fully human being infused with some kind of wisdom and power to affect change in people. And how do we do it? We do it through communicating with each other. That’s how we do it. But the way we tend to communicate with each other is often through a kind of. I don’t know, maybe it’s control, criticism, judgment.
Why is it we have this negative energy? It’s because it’s evil, because it’s in the world. But when you think about the way we relate to each other, when we’re not functioning in the way we feel that the other person should function, it’s often not a suggestion or a conversation about transformation slowly. No, it’s an attack. We attack. Why?
Why do you. It seems to me the attack is almost always in response to something that’s been done to you and what’s been done to you. If it’s pushing you to a point where you’re asked to look at something you don’t want to look at, face something that you’re afraid of, and somebody pushes you on that, then you know what kicks in? Self, survival, Fight or flight. So you either. Like my mother went to a room and when she had arguments with my dad, and other people come back with vengeance.
So how do you learn to listen to what’s happening between you in your relationships, believing that in the tension that’s there and in the struggle that’s there, there’s a work going on that is natural to human beings but is supernatural in its capacity to change you. Like, what if every Day you wake up and you say, I want to be part of the process of what God does in the world. And that is to awaken people, open their eyes to see what’s real and true. I want to be a catalyst for that. I want to communicate truth, life, wholeness. And then we’re human, right?
So we’re not going to do that just perfectly. We can’t go around and all of a sudden imagine that we’re these peaceful gurus who never raise our temper. No, we’re going to continue to attack and counterattack. So what would it be like if you take those counterattacks and attacks and look at them more deeply and just break them apart and say, what’s being communicated right here, God, what are you showing me? What do you want me to look at? What do you want me to see?
And what would he say? You’re there to feed each other. You’re there to welcome each other into each other’s heart. You’re there to comfort, but to challenge. And you’re there that when you act in a way that is part of your most natural human nature. And if you have someone who’s mature enough to say, all right, I understand that when we act that way, we go to a lower level of consciousness and we spew stuff out.
So does that mean that we are that lower level of consciousness? No, it means we got pushed there. And the more you get pushed down in there and feel the anger and the bitterness in it, the more likely you are. You don’t want to go back down in there because you don’t want to be spewing out something that’s destructive. What a strange human nature thing we do when we are out of touch with the divinity inside of us and we actually do want to do harm to each other because we’ve been harmed. It’s natural.
It’s not something to be ashamed of. It’s not something to say, I’m no good. It’s something to say, yes, I do that. But if God is the messenger, if we are messengers to each other, if we’re open to whatever message is in every situation that we’re in, if we turn to it and say, look, teach me, teach me, teach me, show me the truth. Show me the truth, God. It would do so much to keep things from escalating into real destruction.
What a gift. Angels, the saints, God, surrounding us, watching us act, react, act, react. And right there to comfort, put their arm on a shoulder when we’re alone and say, look. Look at it, look at it, read it. Read it. It’s got something in there for you.
It’s a message. It’s for you. You can take it in, grow from it. And then life becomes something so different than a battle. It becomes an exciting, transformative journey to light, truth and awareness. Closing Prayer Father, create in us a deeper, deeper conviction of your constant watchfulness.
Everything we do, knowing that with your grace you can use every incident, every situation to bring us to knowledge, wisdom, understanding, truth. That’s what you have offered us. Let us never neglect this great gift, your wisdom. 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, a listener supported program is archived and available on our website pastoralrefleflectionsinstitute.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 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 non profit in Dallas, Texas dedicated to 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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