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 17th Sunday in Ordinary Time.

The opening Prayer O God, protector of those who hope in you, without whom nothing has firm foundation, nothing is holy, bestow in abundance your mercy upon us and grant that with you as our ruler and guide, we may use the good things that pass in such a way as to hold even now to those that ever endure to 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 Genesis, 18th chapter 20 in those days the Lord said, the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is so great and their sins so grave, that I must go down and and see whether or not their actions fully correspond to the cry against them that comes to me. I mean to find out. While Abraham’s visitors walked on farther toward Sodom, the Lord remained standing before Abraham. And Abraham drew near and said, will you sweep away the innocent with the guilty?

Suppose there were 50 innocent people in the city. Would you wipe out the place rather than spare it for the sake of the 50 innocent people within it? Far be it from you to do such a thing, to make the innocent die with the guilty, so that the innocent and the guilty would be treated alike. Do not the Judge of all the world act with justice? The Lord replied, If I find 50 innocent people in the city of Sodom, I will spare the whole place for their sake. Abraham spoke up again, see how I am presuming to speak to my Lord, though I am but dust and ashes.

What if there are 5 less than 50 innocent people? Will you destroy the whole city because of those five? He answered, I will not destroy it if I find 45 there. But Abraham persisted, saying, what if only 40 are found there? And he replied, I will forbear doing it for the sake of the 40. And Abraham said, let not my Lord grow impatient if I go on.

What if there only 30 are found there. He replied, I will forbear it doing it, if I can find but 30 there still. Abraham went on, since I have thus dared to speak to my Lord, what if there are no more than 20? Lord answered, I will not destroy it for the sake of the 20. But he still persisted, please let my Lord not grow angry if I speak up this last time. But what if there is at least 10 there?

He replied, for the sake of those 10, I will not destroy it. The Word of the Lord Responsorial Psalm Lord, on the day I called for help, you answered me. A Reading from the New Testament from St. Paul’s letter to the Colossians, second chapter 12 to the 14th verse brothers and sisters, you were buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the power of God, who raised him from the dead, even though when you were dead in transgressions and the uncircumcision of your flesh, he brought you to life along with him. Having forgiven us all our transgressions, obliterating the bond against us with its legal claims, which was opposed to us, he also removed it from our midst, nailing it to the cross. The Word of the Lord.

Hallelujah. Verse you have received a spirit of adoption through which we cry Abba. Father, the gospel for this Sunday is taken from St. Luke, 11th verse. Jesus was praying in a certain place, and when he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, lord, teach us to pray. Just as John taught his disciples, he said to them, when you pray, say, father, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come.

Give us each day our daily bread, and forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone in debt to us, and do not subject us to the final test. And he said to them, suppose one of you has a friend to whom he goes at midnight and says, friend, lend me three loaves of bread, for a friend of mine has arrived at my house from a journey, and I have nothing to offer him. And he said in reply, from within, do not bother me. The door has already been locked and my children and I are already in bed. I cannot get up to do you anything. I tell you, if he does not get up to give the visitor the loaves because of their friendship, he will get up to give him whatever he needs because of his persistence.

I tell you, ask and you will receive. Seek and you will find. Knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and the one who knocks, the door will be opened what father among you would hand his son a snake when he asks for a fish? Or hand him a scorpion when he asks for an egg? If you then who are wicked know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the Father in Heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him the Gospel of the Lord?

Sometimes it’s really confusing to figure out who God really is. So many voices, so many opinions, so many different ways that people present him to the world around them. I often wonder about the patience of God when people get up and say things about him that are so far from the truth and they’re not struck dumb, or God lets them do it. And you wonder why? Why don’t you just control all those who preach and teach all heads of all religion to make sure they are always right on target? Or why did you make the Scriptures so confusing?

At times, when we have a God in the Old Testament that seems so. At times impatient and angry at human beings, and other times he’s sort of like milquetoast and you can talk him out of anything. Well, I think the reason is because all of those things that I just mentioned are ways in which we. We can ponder and wonder about the many facets of our God. But there is only one real source of knowing Him. In my growing up as a Catholic and now a Catholic priest, I relied so heavily on the Church.

I knew the Church was the one that would tell me who God is. And yet with all my experience behind me, now entering my 80th year, I know that everything the Church teaches and everything the Church directs us to do is not always the will of God. Does that make me doubt the value of the Church? Absolutely not. The value of the Church is beyond anyone’s understanding because it’s a gathering place of people who long to be fed every day by this life force that is personal. Personal.

I don’t know what I’d do without sacraments, without the liturgy, without gathering with people every Sunday and listening to the Word and pondering it and singing and eating and drinking is the heart of it. But the theology, that’s tricky. Most especially moral theology, that’s even trickier because so often we’re told things that people believe because it’s more about their background and their own personal history than it is about the religion, who God really is. Look at this first reading. It’s fascinating. Here’s God has just called upon Abraham to become a partner with him.

In a sense, an invitation for us to imagine that ultimately everyone is being asked to enter into that kind of partnership with God to work and save themselves in the world. And it’s clear that God, I love this human part of him, you know, he’s concerned about Sodom. He doesn’t really know what’s going on, so he has to go down and check it out. I love that. You know, like, I don’t trust the reports. I need to make a personal visit.

So human. And so this God goes down and finds that this place is pretty corrupt, to say the least. And so here’s Abraham, who has just, in a sense, encountered God. And they haven’t worked together that long. And all of a sudden we have. Abraham is a little more compassionate than God because he starts talking about, well, okay, if you go down and just send down fire and destruction on this city, you’re going to kill everybody.

What about the people there that might not be bad? And as if God didn’t think about that, he’s reminded, well, what about the good people? You want to kill innocent people along with the bad? Well, yeah, kind of. I do. Well, what if you found so many?

Would you save the whole city for just 50 or 45 or 30 or 20 or 10 each time God says, well, probably not. No, I’ll let it go for that. I mean, what is that? What do we learn from a story like that? Or Moses talking Jesus. Excuse me, Moses talking God out of destroying, you know, the Israelites that he’s kind of been frustrated with on this long journey.

And when they turn back to their ways, when they’re left without a leader and they fall back to their ways, God is furious. And maybe it’s because the moment is when he’s about to give them their greatest gift. The greatest thing he’s ever given to human beings are the Ten Commandments, the manual for what it means to be human. We’re made for those things. A relationship with God, a healthy relationship with each other. That’s who we are.

That’s our essence. And he told us that for the first time. Then maybe it just underscores this part of God that is so like us, so passionate about this relationship. It’s like he’s a typical human being in a loving relationship that he sometimes just loses his patience and wants to just dump it all. But he keeps coming back and coming back and being more and more amazing in terms of his patience, his understanding, his compassion. And so we have in the second reading, Paul, who’s nailing it to, no pun intended, on the last part of the reading.

But he makes it so clear the Fullness of who God is. The reason why he came into the world to begin to reveal himself to us is because he wanted us to see us as he really is. And why it took so long. I don’t know why we had to see him grow. Almost as if he was learning how to deal with human beings. He wasn’t.

He just revealed himself as if he were a God learning. And what he was learning is compassion and forgiveness. And so there’s a word in this reading that I think is so interesting. It says that this Jesus came into the world to die on the cross, to do something for all human beings who were ever lived and would ever live in the future. And he said, I will obliterate. What a word.

Obliterate your sins. Not punish you for them, but obliterate them. I looked that up in the Oxford English Dictionary. To erase, to eradicate, to remove. As if they never happened. It’s almost stronger than the word forgiveness.

I’ll obliterate your sins. I don’t even remember them. But if that’s the fullness of his relationship with us when it comes to sin, it has not yet taken root. It hasn’t taken root in me yet. I still feel shame and guilt over my faults and my sins. I still hear people begging me to pray that they will be forgiven.

I had someone call me the other day who was close to death and said, I don’t know if I’m going to make it. I don’t know. I think maybe I did more bad things than good things in my entire life. What? No, your sins are obliterated. You took them away completely.

How do we understand that? What would it be like if that really was the truth? That every sin you or I ever, ever commit is automatically obliterated by what, the sacrament of confession? Yes, in a sense, because that’s where we go to be assured and affirmed that that’s really who God is. But then I know many priests who deny absolution to people, which is something I’ve never done in my entire life. I’m not saying I’m better than them, but that’s what we were taught.

You can deny someone freedom from their sin if they don’t sound like they’re going to change? Well, what happens when you’re in a relationship with God, when you have been a sinner? And what is your feeling about this? God is. Is he judging you and condemning you until you make some kind of major shift and change in the world, even though you’re doing things that you really don’t want to do, but you don’t know how to stop. They’re like an addiction.

And we know enough about addiction now to know that that’s not really something someone can freely decide not to do. Boom. I’m not going to do it anymore. Grace can change you, but our will can’t. So how do we understand it? Well, the gospel is interesting because it talks so beautifully about this notion that this God of ours is a God of mercy.

And so the thing about Jesus that’s so unique is his closeness with God, his intimacy with God. It was what they just drove everybody in the temple nuts because you can’t have a relationship with God of intimacy because you’re a sinner and you’re polluted and you’re disgusting to God until you come to the temple and be purified. What is this story saying? Well, it’s very clear that what it’s trying to say is that just Jesus is the one who connected so beautifully with God and he was fully human. Of course we have to say that he never sinned, and that’s true. But what is sin?

Is sin human weaknesses? Did he get angry? Did he scream? Did he yell? Did he get mad? Isn’t that a sin?

People come to me, bless me, Father, I’ve sinned. I got so mad at my children, I screamed and yelled at them. Well, then Jesus must have sinned. No, sin is a complete turning away from God, a refusal of his love and his forgiveness. It’s. It’s a hard hardening of a heart that is longing for God.

And our will can do that. But in this story, it seems that when they’re asking Jesus, what do you do when you talk to God? What do you say? What’s your relationship like with him? He said, well, I believe in him. I know he’s my Father.

I also know that somehow I want so much for his work to take root in every human being and take root in me. And I want to enter into this thing he calls the kingdom, which is a place free of shame and fear and anger and jealousy and envy. And it’s a place of truth and reality. I just want that to happen. That’s why I came into the world. And I know what he’s doing.

He’s feeding me every day. He gives me everything I need and every fault I have, every human mistake I make, he. He forgives me, and I try to forgive everybody around me. And you know, and I know he’s not going to tempt me to do evil things, but when he says, you Know, do not subject us to the final test. He means don’t test us beyond our ability to. To survive the test.

And it’s as if God is the tester, but God isn’t the tester as much as evil is the tester. Evil is the one that talks you into doing bad things. So it’s like, protect me from that source that’s bigger than I am, but not bigger than you are, God, but that steps in. If you don’t believe in evil, then you just have a really negative view of people who struggle, because it’s all up to them. I guarantee you they’d be a hell of a lot better than they really are. They would.

So then he goes on and says something about persistence. You got to be persistent in believing in God, believing in the kingdom, and wanting to be a part of making it happen. And know you’re being fed and nourished. Be persistent. Ask for that. Seek that knock to find that.

It’s such an interesting thing that he says there. He’s like saying, you know, if human beings can be, you know, badgered enough and they’ll give in, well, so will God. You know, I mean, it’s just like saying God doesn’t need to be badgered, but he does need to know that you are open and willing to receive him and everything he teaches and everything he longs for you to see. So if you’re really asking for that, think about it. Do you really want to see the truth? And if you really want to see it, are you able to seek it, looking reflectively on everything you’re doing and seek and find something that is like, yeah, I can see the truth there.

And then finally, the best knock, knock and open. Something opens what opens the heart of God. You go inside and there you live, forgiven, loved, supported, nurtured. He’s not a God of punishment. He’s a God of forgiveness and love and affirmation. If you don’t believe that at the core of your being, you can’t ever enter the kingdom.

Foreign closing prayer Father, awaken our hearts to the beauty of your mercy. Your love for us when we fail you, desire that we never feel separated from you because of our human weakness, which you created so that we would trust in you and love you. Performance is important, but it is not the basis of how you treat us. Bless us with an understanding of forgiveness. 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, pastoralreflectionsinsinstitute.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 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 Producer produced by Kyle Cross and recorded in Pastoral Reflections Institute Studios. Copyright 2020.