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 28th Sunday in Ordinary Time.

The opening Prayer May your grace O Lord, we pray at all times. Go before us and follow after us and make us always determined to carry out good works through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son. A Reading from the Old Testament from the second book of Kings, 5th chapter 14 to the 17th verse, Naaman went down and plunged into the Jordan seven times. At the word of Elisha, the man of God, his flesh became again like the flesh of a little child, and he was clean of his leprosy. Naaman returned with his whole retinue to the man of God. On his arrival he stood before Elisha and said, now I know that there is no God in all the earth except in Israel.

Please accept a gift from your servant. Elisha replied, as the Lord lives whom I serve, I will not take it. Despite Naaman’s urging, he still refused. Naaman said, if you will not accept, please let me, your servant, have two mule loads of earth, for I will no longer offer holocaust or sacrifice to any other God, except to the Lord. The Word of the Lord the Lord has revealed to the nations and his saving power. A Reading from the New Testament St.

Paul’s Second Letter to Timothy 2, 8:13 Beloved remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, a descendant of David. Such is my gospel, for which I am suffering even to the point of change, like a criminal. But the Word of God is not chained. Therefore I bear with everything for the sake of those who are chosen so that they too may obtain salvation in Christ Jesus, together with eternal glory. This saying is trustworthy. If we have died with him, we shall live with him.

If we persevere, we shall also reign with him. But if we deny him, he will deny us. If we are unfaithful, he remains faithful, for he cannot deny himself the Word of the Lord. Hallelujah Verse in all circumstances give thanks for this. This is the will of God for us in Christ Jesus. The Gospel for this Sunday is taken from St.

Luke 17. As Jesus continued his journey to Jerusalem, he traveled through Samaria and Galilee. As he was entering a village, 10 lepers met him. They stood at a distance from him and raised their voices, saying, jesus, master, have pity on us. And when he saw them, he said, go, show yourselves to the priests. As they were going, they were cleansed.

And one of them, realizing he had been healed, returned glorifying God in a loud voice. And he fell at the feet of Jesus and thanked him. He was a Samaritan. Jesus said in reply, 10 were cleansed, were they not? Where are the other 9? Has none?

But this foreigner returned to give thanks to God. Then he said to him, stand up and go. Your faith has saved you. The Gospel of the Lord. I don’t know if you realize this, but every time I pray in the liturgy, the prayer is always addressed to God. And then at the end of the prayer, we say, through our Lord Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns forever and ever.

Amen. We pray to God through Jesus the God man. The God man is the promise that we have the same experience that Jesus had. Not to the extent that he had it, but the same experience of knowing and believing that God is with us. God is in us. He’s the source of all good within us.

And I don’t know if you’re like me, but all in my early years as I was a, you know, a young man, as a young priest, middle aged priest, I’m an old priest. But it’s only recently that I begin to realize how important the relationship I have with God the Father. It is to me what every true spiritual life will lead us to. An intimate, loving relationship with God the Father, the big one, the boss. You know, it seems easier to fall in love with Jesus, or the Holy Spirit is more ethereal. And sometimes we lean tremendously on saints and their intercessory powers or angels.

So there may really be some kind of inner resistance to going to the main one, the God who made everything, and believe that he is deeply in love with us and intimately engaged in our life. It’s hard for us to believe that. At least it was for me, and still is, in a sense. So I want to look at these readings today because I think they say something really important that is not the usual way I would approach this set of readings. Normally, this is the perfect time to give a talk on gratitude, how thankful we should be for everything we receive. But I think there’s something more challenging in these readings, more profound.

It has to do with both our willingness to turn to a power greater than ourselves when we’re in need. That’s sometimes something that’s hard for us, but also the struggle that we sometimes have with believing in the heart of this incredible Christianity that we all believe in what it’s really promising. And the promise is always connected to a gift. Salvation is a gift won for us by God in Christ, a gift. So when we fall into the trap of did we, Are we earning it? Are we good enough to get it if things go bad?

Is that because we haven’t done enough to get the grace of God that we need? Is it a conditional relationship with this God? Humanity is filled with conditional relationships. I think all of them are, in a sense, but this one’s different. So let’s look at the readings. The first reading is about Naaman.

He is not a believing Jew. He is actually the commander of the troops in Syria, a very successful man. And he’s always attributed his. His work to some divine power, whatever God he believed in. But he developed leprosy. And the servant of his wife knew of Elisha the Prophet, and said, you know, if you go to Elisha the Prophet, the prophet from Israel, he can heal you.

And so Naaman decides to send a letter. The letter goes to the king of the Israelites, and he says, I’m going to Elisha to ask him to heal me. And the king goes crazy thinking, oh, no, this is a setup, you know, now if I can’t heal him, he’s going to start a war with me. Times never change. But Elisha hears about the king being really upset and said, what are you upset about? Come, I’ll take care of him.

And so Naaman goes to Elisha the Prophet, and he brings all these gifts and gold and garments that he’s going to pay for this great gift. And he goes there and he expects Elisha to come out and do some kind of magic ceremony and lay hands on him, and poof, it’ll be gone. Elisha doesn’t even come out, doesn’t even greet him. Sends a messenger, says, go wash in the river, the Jordan river, seven times. And Naaman is furious. I mean, what.

It’s an insult. I’m this great guy. I’ve come, and he won’t even come out and talk to me. And again, a servant comes into the story and says, well, Naaman, if he asked you to do something really extreme, I mean, really tough, you’d have done it. So why not go wash seven times in the Jordan? So Naaman daz and his skin becomes like the skin of a newborn baby, so beautiful and smooth.

And he comes back and said, oh my gosh, thank you, thank you. Here, take all this silver, take all these garments, take all of this. Naman said, no, no, I’m not taking it. It’s not me. I didn’t do this. I didn’t even come out and see you.

No, this is God doing it. That’s what he didn’t say those words, but that’s what his gestures and that’s what his refusal of a gift payment was. You don’t pay for, to do something for you. Got it? Okay. So right away we see a prophet working for God, doing extraordinary things, not expecting anything to come back to him.

He gives all the credit to God, and it implies that God is not asking for anything other than believe in him, believe in him, trust him, he’s real. That’s exactly what Naaman does. There’s a thing about God’s living in territories and they didn’t move from one territory to another. So he needed the soil from there to take back to where he was from. And he would stand on that soil and worship the God of Israel, the God who gives healing to those outside the community and refuses to accept any kind of payment. Now, Paul, in the second reading, gives us an image of one of the really powerful images of Christ’s message when he’s saying, you know, we have to put up with a lot of stuff when we’re doing this work, and it’s not always easy.

But he said, you know, for everybody, everybody, there’s a thing going on we have to die with, die with God, die with Christ, persevere in our belief with him and trust that he’s always faithful, always going to be faithful. Even though he gets upset and tries to deny us, he can’t, because he’s faithful, can’t deny himself. So what does it mean to die and to persevere? Dying is always misunderstood as kind of a suffering, painful death. But no, what it really means is day after day, week after week, year after year, God is working in our life so that we die to those lower forms of consciousness that keep us separated from one another, from God. And we change, we change, and something falls away, some kind of level of selfishness, and it’s dead, it’s gone.

So we die with Christ. And then you. Persevere is another word for suffering. You endure suffering, and suffering means you accept. So you’re going through this painful process of dying and you have to stay with it and Trust in it and endure it, because it has such a tremendously effective and powerful work of changing you, moving you ever closer to the God who created you to be something, that you’re in a struggle to become what he made you to be. Then we go to this wonderful story of Jesus and the lepers.

And the same theme is here. God healing because he wants to in the person of Jesus. Jesus is the new temple. He is the way God chooses now to dwell with his people. Not in a building, not in an institution, but in a person. And then in all of us.

And so when he sees these men, and he’s healed many lepers in his life, but usually when he would do it, he would say to them, be cleansed. You know, be freed of your disease. He doesn’t say that to these men. They cry out as they would have cried out to most people. Have mercy on me. Help me, help me.

They were beggars. And Jesus hears something that he knows is in the heart of everybody that is suffering. Please take me out of this. Please help me to grow through this. Help me to become what this is asking me to be, what he just says. Go and show yourselves to the priests.

Go to the temple where you believe God resides, even though I’m here to tell you that God resides in me and will soon reside in you. But go there and ask them to do what they do. Well, the job of the temple priest was to look at someone and to see that they were being healed of leprosy. And so they would go through a pretty well, an interesting ceremony. You had to go find two birds, and then one was killed. And the blood of that one was put into some water and that was sprinkled on the other bird that then flew away.

Really interesting. That’s worth another homily. Someone dying so that someone can be free. So they were told to go and do what you were supposed to do to get the gift from God that the temple could give you. And it says in a very interesting way, on the way to the temple, they were being healed. So there was, like, something happening to them as they walked, maybe a building up of, oh, my gosh, this is going to be great.

I am going to be healed. I’m going to pass this test, and I’m going to do this ceremony. I’ll be back with my family. But one of them realized, wait a minute. And he was a Samaritan, and in one sense, he may not have been so excited about going to the temple, because Samaritans were considered to be Half breeds. They were part Jew, part Samaritan.

They had a different temple, they worshiped God, but it was a different temple location. And as you know what I’ve already said, something about a God living in a particular territory was important. So they didn’t worship the God of Israel, but their own God. And so he’s thinking about this, thinking, well, wait a minute. Do I go to the temple to thank the temple, to pay the temple, or did I just experience something through a man? It was God.

And I’m healed. Now I’m going to amplify the story a little bit, fill it into it. I think it might be. It helps you understand what I see in it. And then as I think the others would have gone to the temple and would have done the sacrifice and would have talked about their healing and they would have said, there was this man. And then the temple healed us.

Or at least the temple had a major part in healing us. So we should. And they paid for that. So there they are doing what they are required to do in order to get from the temple who the people there are in charge of God’s grace. And they dole it out as they see they should according to the rules and laws. And Jesus came to blow all those rules and laws to pieces.

Only Jews are saved. Only Jews get to the temple. Only men can go in so far. Only the special men can go into the very core place of it, all of that. Jesus blew all that to pieces. In fact, when he died on the cross.

There’s a beautiful passage in scripture where there was a veil that separated the holy of holies, the holiest part, where only the Levites, the priests could go in there and ripped open, everybody can come in, everybody is welcome into the heart of God and got into their heart. It’s beautiful. So I’m seeing in this then that this man that came back to Jesus recognized something, that Jesus was who he was and what he was teaching and the exciting thing he was saying. And so it’s interesting when he goes back, the thing he said, you know, stand up, you know, and go, now you’ve got faith. Like you’ve done it, you’ve got it. Faith in God, in a human, not simply just in Jesus.

And there it was so mysteriously one that there’s no separation. We’re not to ever become that. But it’s almost like he’s saying to the Samaritan, you understand that I’m trying to free people from the rigorous rules and laws connected to this religion and this temple. And they were designed for the, that was not the intention. And people needed some kind of really concrete image of God’s presence. And so that was in that institution.

And yet still probably today, I mean, I know people whose faith is completely destroyed because the institution fails, or they’re completely destroyed because a priest is a failure, is a sinner, and like, oh my God, you know, then it’s all been phony or fake. And no, no, no, the priest or the church is not what saves you. These are conduits. We’re a conduit to putting you in touch with the God who lives inside of you, which is the source of everything you need. The healing, the grace to endure, the grace to die, grace to grow. That’s your inheritance.

You don’t have to earn it or find it somewhere else. The institution is designed beautifully to be an effective conduit, creating a community of people where it flows so freely between each other. This presence of God, this belief in God and the Eucharist is, is the most powerful way in which we celebrate it. But the question is, do people really believe when they receive the Eucharist, they’re receiving God? Yes, it’s Jesus, but it’s more than Jesus. It’s his teaching, it’s his longing, it’s his core.

And the core is your relationship with His. Father Sam Sa Sam Closing Prayer Father, you’ve challenged each of us to bring your presence into the world in a way that reaches the heart, the soul of those around us. It’s an awesome responsibility. At the same time, an incredible gift. So bless us with this mysterious partnership we have with you. Help us to stay balanced.

It means a great deal when we do it well with belief. And yet at the same time, we’re never the source of what it is that we see affecting people, changing people, bringing them new life. So bless us with humility and faith, 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 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 pastoralrefleflectionsinstitute.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 enriching your spiritual journey. Executive Producer Monsignor Don Fisher produced by Kyle Cross and recorded in Pastoral Reflections Institute Studios. Copyright 2020.