My name is Don and I’ve been a Catholic priest now for over 50 years, and during that time I keep going back to the same readings over and over again, only to discover that they contain something I never understood was there before. It gives me new enthusiasm and excitement for the message that keeps revealing itself, and I pray that the message that I’m sending you will be valuable, and if you find it so, please share these podcasts with your friends. Thank you. Good morning. Today we celebrate the 23rd Sunday in Ordinary time. The opening Prayer O God, by whom we are redeemed and receive adoption, look graciously upon your beloved sons and daughters, that those who believe in Christ may receive true freedom and an everlasting inheritance 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 wisdom, ninth, chapter 13. Who can know the counsel of God, or who can conceive what the Lord intends for the deliberations of mortals are timid, and unsure are their plans. But the corruptible body burdens the soul, and the earthen shelter weighs down the mind that has many concerns, and scarce do we guess the things on earth and what is within our grasp we find with difficulty. But when things are in heaven, who can search them out? Who ever knew your counsel, except you had given wisdom, sent your Holy Spirit from on high, and thus were the paths of those on earth made straight the word of the Lord.

In every age, O Lord, you have been our refuge. You turn man back to dust, saying, return, O children of men, for a thousand years in your sight, or as yesterday, now that it is past, or as a watch in the night. In every age, O Lord, you have been our refuge. You make an end of them in their sleep. The next morning they are like the changing grass, which at dawn springs up anew, but by evening wilts and fades. In every age, O Lord, you have been our refuge.

Teach us to number the days right, that we may gain wisdom of heart. Return, O Lord, how long have pity on your servants? In every age, O Lord, you have been our refuge. Fill us at daybreak with kindness, that we may shout for joy and gladness all our days. May the gracious care of the Lord our God be ours. Prosper the work of our hands.

Prosper the work of our hands. In every age, O Lord, you have been our refuge. A reading from the New Testament, from St. Paul’s letter to Philemon, 9th chapter, 10th verse and the 12th to the 17th verse. I, Paul, an old man and now also a prisoner for Christ Jesus, urge you on behalf of my child Osisimus, whose father I have become in my imprisonment. I’m sending him that is my own heart back to you.

I should have liked to retain him for myself so that he might serve me on your behalf in my imprisonment for the Gospel. But I did not want to do anything without your consent, so that the good you do might not be forced, but voluntary. Perhaps this is why he was away from you for a while, that you might have him back forever, no longer as a slave, but more than a slave, a brother beloved especially to me, but even more so to you as a man and in the Lord. So if you regard me as a partner, welcome him as you would welcome me. The word of the Lord. Hallelujah.

Verse Let your face shine upon your servant and teach me your laws. Hallelujah. The gospel for this 23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time is taken from St. Luke 14:25. 33 great crowds were traveling with Jesus, and he turned and addressed them. If anyone comes to me without hating his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, even his own life, he can’t be my disciple.

Whoever does not carry his cross and come after me cannot be my disciple. Which of you, wishing to construct a tower, does not sit down and calculate the cost to see if there is enough for its completion. Otherwise, after laying the foundation and finding himself unable to finish the work, the onlookers should laugh at him and say, this one began to build, but he didn’t have the resources to finish. But what king marching into battle would not first sit down and decide whether with 10,000 troops he can successfully oppose another king advancing upon him with 20,000 troops. But if not, while he is still far away, he will send a delegation to ask for peace terms. In the same way, a any one of you who does not renounce all his possessions cannot be my disciple.

The Gospel of the Lord and now we reflect on these readings as we prepare for the homily. It was 12 years ago that I stopped pastoring a church. I had a wonderful parish called St. Joseph’s I was there for 15 years, and we did a lot of things together, built a school, and it was a wonderful, wonderful way of spending those last 15 years, and I’ve been in other wonderful places. But when I stopped all the work that goes along with running a parish, I had more time to sit and reflect, and I continued to do my homilies on the radio. And one of the things that began to dawn on me two things that I had never really spent enough time pondering and wondering.

And they really changed the way I read the Gospel and listen to the story of Jesus and understand what it is that he was trying to do, what he was trying to accomplish, what he was trying to change in the hearts of the religious leaders. You know, he came to change a way of seeing God. And when he tried to change the temple, which was the place where people learned about God, they hated his message. I mean, it wasn’t just like, now he’s wrong. He’s one of those crazy, crazy new guys that came along. There had to be a million people that thought they were Messiah, but they didn’t write him off like that.

They couldn’t because of who he was and especially because of the miracles. But nevertheless, there was something in them that was angry at them, at him, Jesus. And the angry was because Jesus had nailed them on the exact mistake they were making. And somehow, deep inside of them, there was a truth, a wisdom that God places in every single human being. And somehow when Jesus accused them of keeping God in that temple place where they, and only they could put people in touch with God and dole out God’s forgiveness if people paid the right amount of money or gave the right kind of sacrifice. In other words, they had this God in a way, hidden from the people and owned by the temple staff.

If you think how crazy that is. And so one of the things that helped me understand more about how this story unfolds was to. To realize that that was the key thing that Jesus came to do to change the mind of the church. Not individuals, not the people in the streets. They could understand what he was saying. And they were witnessing, I think, back to the temple.

What Jesus was trying to say about the temple and his miracles made it impossible for them just to write him off. So they had to do something a little more dramatic. They had to execute him. And it just seemed so bizarre that the God who created the Jewish people, formed them into a people, gave them the temple, gave them his presence in a certain way through prophets and through this ark that he dwelt in. You know, all of that is what killed Jesus. And so there’s something we need to look at that carefully because it means that one of the places we need to be sure we’re reexamining and re examining again our notion of who God is and how God works in our life.

Jesus came to change our vision from a moralistic vision of following regulations, rules and laws and when you follow those rules and laws, you. You were rewarded. Now, that’s what people needed in the beginning. It makes sense. So when I realized that this is the work that Jesus had, then the other thing that made me so interested in the stories of Jesus is that he was fully human. And I’ve known that intellectually, yes, Jesus was a human being.

But I’m almost embarrassed to tell you this, that at times when I would be preaching, and I hope I didn’t say this out loud too often, but I used to say, well, you know, when it came to the end of Jesus life, he knew exactly what was going to happen. Of course he knew he was going to save the world by dying on the cross. And it was, you know, it happened Thursday night. He was arrested. Friday, he was. I mean, he was beaten.

And then Friday and all, he dies, and then he rises. And he knew all that was going to happen. So it was like, all right, I can go through this horrific shame of the cross because it’s going to be so beneficial to the world. I don’t think he thought that way. Otherwise, it doesn’t make any sense that he sat there or knelt there in the Garden of Gethsemane and begged God, please take this away. I don’t want to do this.

Anything but this. I feel like a failure. I feel I didn’t do my job and he had to be filled with some kind of shame. In fact, there’s a great line where it said he actually, you know, he actually accepted, you know, the. The horrific shame that the cross made him feel a failure. So if he’s here to tell the church and the world, the religion that focuses on laws and rules, commandments, you follow the rules and laws, and then you’re blessed.

You’ll never find God. So that’s what this set of readings about. What do you find if you do not focus fully on just rules and laws and reward and punishment? You focus on God in you, with you, for you. It’s called wisdom. Wisdom, that’s the thing that God invited Jesus come into the world to give to the world because once he redeemed us, he entered into us.

And when God entered into us, he was both our Father, our Creator, but he was also intimately engaged in us. So he. He’s an incarnate God. He lives in human beings. He’s always longed to live in human beings. He’s always been here.

And then the impact of that indwelling presence is a thing called wisdom. And it’s this way of seeing the world. So Radically different than a simple black and white right and wrong world. The right and wrong world is founded in your mind and your will. You understand it. If I do this, I get rewarded.

If I don’t do it, I get punished. That’s clear. But it’s not enough. So the first reading is so beautiful because it’s saying, look, we human beings try to sit down and figure out how to do this thing called religion. We sit down and try to figure out how to do everything. We worry about all kinds of things.

I love the two examples. Our corruptible body burdens the soul. I mean, I’m aging, you know, I worry about aging. I worry about health. The earthen shelter weighs down the mind. The place we have in the world, we worry about it.

Is it good enough? Are we doing a good job? We have all these concerns about the things of the earth. And even if we try to grasp those, we don’t do that well. So if you’re going to be in this story like Solomon, that’s the story of Solomon’s Prayer we’re listening to. He’s saying, I need to rule and guide the world.

And what I’m going to do, I need something besides my brain and my instinct and my logic. I need instinct. I need wisdom. I need that thing that only you can give me, a way of seeing things differently than simply black and white. A way of understanding that the thing that God calls me to is not to be disciplined human being doing what I’m told, but to be a human being radically open to the presence of a living God inside of us, guiding us, awakening us, solving problems that can’t be solved by logic. So we pray for wisdom.

The image in the second reading, that seems interesting to me to be part of this. I don’t want to leave out the psalm. The psalm is saying, you know God, when youn come to us and you’d wisdom is in us. We are prosperous, that gives us peace. Figuring things out, being in charge of my life, making it work, that’s satisfying. But there’s something about the peace that only wisdom can give when you know that everything is as it needs to be and you surrendered everything.

So in Paul’s reading, we just have this interesting story about a man that Paul meets in prison. And he was a slave, a servant. And that image of slave and master is the temple. It’s the world we often live in. In a black and white moralistic religion, we’re the slaves to the rules. If we follow the rules without having to think much about them, even Though they don’t seem to fit the situation, we do them anyway because we want the reward.

So he’s talking about how wonderful it is when a relationship changes between master and slave. And it’s a heart connection. Paul says, I send you my heart. When I send this man to you, where does God dwell? In your heart? He doesn’t want a relationship with us where we’re working for a reward.

Afraid, terrified of the punishment. Living in the brain and will. No, he wants a relationship. He wants to be inside of us. Living inside of us, incarnate inside of us. And what flows out of that is this mysterious thing called the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit. So now let’s go back to this last week in Jesus life. And this is why I wanted to stress so much the humanity of Jesus. This has been a tough week in his life. He’s been going through all kinds of things. He just had a breakdown, let’s say, at the temple.

He’s been trying to reach the people there. So that same week that he was arrested is the time he went in to the temple, turned over all the tables and screamed out, this whole place has become a business. It has nothing to do with my Father. It’s not opening your heart to the wisdom God wants. It is making you slaves. He did that.

And then he also found a fig tree somewhere, and he wanted figs on it. And it wasn’t there. And he got mad and he cursed it, and it was just. You can read that story a lot of the ways. But what it reminded him in is my ministry that I came into this world to do. I’m not sure I’ve done it correctly.

I’m not sure I finished it right. Maybe I should have done something different. If I don’t think that way about my Jesus, I don’t find him resonating inside of me, listening as attentively as he does to my own frustrations that are like that. He understands human nature not because he’s smart enough to do it, but because he was fully human. And so he yells out at these people, which I think is so interesting. The Ten Commandments was the biggest thing that they were given.

The Ten Commandments, because of the temple and the way it developed, went from 10 rules and laws to 613 rules and laws. So you can kind of say they overdid the law part. He said, look, unless you hate. Unless you hate your father and mother, your children, your own life, unless you hate that, you can’t be my disciple. And what’s he saying when he says all that unless you pick up your cross and follow me, unless you think what it is I’m asking you to do. It’s like you don’t build a house without having the right stuff.

You don’t go into a battle without knowing what you’re up against. And we’re up against a radical change in the way we see possessions. That’s what he says at the end. Possessions. What were possessions in the Old Testament? If you followed the law, you had multiple possessions, you were rich, you were healthy, you were strong.

God only gave good things to the people that follow the moral rules and they became judgmental, exclusive from other people. It went to the dark, dark side of religion. Now, if this sounds like this only happened once and then God fixed it. You know what I’m trying to say? This is the shadow of all religion, of all spiritual journeys. Our journey is not a journey toward perfection, performance, reward, punishment.

That doesn’t take anything more than a good strong will and a pretty smart mind. No, we’re made for wisdom, a mysterious knowing and experience. Something that is beyond anything that makes sense logically. But it lives inside of us, an incarnate God inside of you and inside of me. And what we resonate out from that union is wisdom. Another word for wisdom.

Love. Another word for love is this incredible desire we have to not do anything more than be servants. Servants. To serve other people, to be there for other people. The focus is not on me, on those I can love and care for. That’s the transformation that God is asking you and me to go through.

And it’s not easy. The Closing prayer Father, your life, the life you had when you walked this earth as one of us, is filled with hope for all of us because you showed us what it is that we’re engaged in as a work with you. Saving the world, changing the world, bringing people closer to the essence of who you are in them and who they are with you. Bless this ministry. Bless my words. Bless all of us who speak this truth and may penetrate hearts, awaken them to the joy and the prosperity of a life of service.

And we ask this in Jesus name, Amen. The music in this program was composed and produced by Ryan Harner. I’m excited for the opportunity to awaken your spiritual journey. If you enjoy this program, please subscribe and share it with a friend. This ministry also needs your support, so make a one time or recurring tax deductible donation on our website. Thank you so much for your listenership and your continued support.

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