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. We appreciate your listenership and if you find this program valuable, please subscribe and share with your friends. Share 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. Make us always determined to carry out good works. Your 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, second book of kings, fifth 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 like the flesh of a little child, and he was cleansed of his leprosy. Naaman returned with the whole retinue to the man of God. On his arrival he stood before Elisha and said, now I know 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. And 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 holy costs or sacrifices to any other God except to the Lord. The Word of the Lord. Responsorial Psalm the Lord has revealed to the nations his saving power. Sing to the Lord a new song, for he has done wondrous deeds. His right hand has won victory for him his holy arm. The Lord has revealed to the nations his saving power.
The Lord has made his salvation known in the sight of the nations he’s revealed his justice. You remember his kindness and his faithfulness toward the house of Israel. The Lord has revealed to the nations his saving power. All the ends of the earth have seen the salvation of our God. Sing joyfully to the Lord all you lands break into songs. Sing praise.
The Lord has revealed to the nations 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 changed. Therefore I bear with everything for the sake of those who are chosen so that they too may obtain the salvation that is in Christ Jesus, together with eternal glory.
This saying is trustworthy. If we die with him, we shall live with him. If we persevere, we shall reign with Him. But if we deny him, he will deny us. But if we are unfaithful, he remains faithful, for he cannot deny himself. The word of the Lord.
Hallelujah. Verse in all circumstances, give thanks. This is the will of God for you in Christ Jesus. Hallelujah. The gospel for this Sunday is taken from St. Luke 17th chapter 11 through the 19th verse.
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. When he saw them, he said, go show yourselves to the priests as they’re 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. Sam Sa that piece of music that was composed for this program by Ryan Harner was. It’s amazing how that always seems to help me to focus on what it is I just listen to.
Not through my brain, not through my trying to understand it, but feel it, feel what’s in these readings about these men and women, that we are, like us, that went through an experience with the God of the Old Testament, God of the New Testament. And that’s our story that we go back to over and over again, the story of salvation history. I’m also, for some reason, struck by the very awesome nature of what a preacher like myself. Anybody that stands up in front of people or sits in front of a microphone in front, and so people can listen, but, you know, they just. We have this incredible gift. I pray it’s always a gift that we are able to interpret these mysterious stories without sticking to one or another story, but rather listening to the whole thing.
When we listen to the whole thing, there’s something that comes through that is so important for us to share with each other. And I’m worried at times that it comes across sometimes as the religions sometimes come across as something. It’s a real burden. If I just didn’t have that pressure on me, I might be okay. And yet we need pressure on us. And the pressure we want is not the pressure of fear and shame and anger and being told that we’re not good enough and being forced to be better, but rather to be affirmed and engaged in a relationship with this God that is so powerful.
And his power, most especially is in his ability to reveal to you, to me, who he is. And that’s all I want to do in my work. How can I reveal to you the God who is without focusing primarily on religion? And don’t get me wrong, religion is wonderful, and it’s a tool that is so powerful, but it’s also dangerous. And if I cannot, it’s impossible to read the salvation history and not realize the danger in religion of putting a person into an excessive, you know, vice, in a sense of rules and regulations that rob us of our own individuality. One of the things that has probably impacted me more than anything else in my formation is the whole notion that I was trained on a thing called the Vatican Council.
And it was 55 years ago, and many of you may not even remember it or even know much about it, but it was the most amazing period of the Church’s history and probably the most powerful thing that’s ever happened in the Church since Christ. Meaning it tried to go and find, as fully as it could the essence of what Christ is trying to teach. And the teaching is so beautiful. He wants you and me to have an intimate relationship with him where we’re not simply guided by rules and regulations, things we must do in order to receive his love. Now, he wants us to feel that his presence is in us, and his love is there for us as we are. And his desire is nothing more than for us not to deny who we really are, but to accept that and to somehow bring that into fullness.
One of the documents of the Vatican Council is ecumenism. And one of the things about ecumenism is it said that there’s a new way we should be looking at other religions. And other religions were always considered to be a negative. It was like other religions were robbing us of the thing that Catholicism, because that’s the tradition I came from. Catholicism was the only religion that was going to save people. And a lot of religions believe that, even today.
And yet this beautiful awakening to the fullness of who the Spirit is and how he wants to reveal to us who we are as a people, as a religion, our religion is essential if it teaches the truth, and if any religion teaches the truth. The Council said They are means of salvation. They are means of salvation. And the other thing the Vatican said that was so important to me was our conscience, that place, that mysterious tabernacle inside of us, our heart, where God dwells. It says so clearly that we go to that in times of really difficult decision making issues where we have to discern what’s the right thing to do with all the complications of it. We’re told and taught that we should follow that conscience which seems to free us from the burden of an excessive dependence on regulations and rules that we have to fulfill them no matter what their impact on us is.
So with those two things in me and I want to go to these readings and see if I can’t point out some things, especially about ecumenism. To start with this, this set of readings is all about the beauty of the healing power of God. The one thing I want you to know is that power is not solely in an institution. It is there. And the institution is responsible for awakening it in people. But it doesn’t belong to the institution.
It can’t give it and hold it back. It’s a God given gift to every human being. And here’s Naaman. Naaman is a general. He’s not a believer, he’s not an Israelite. He doesn’t follow any of the rules and regulations of the temple.
But he’s a good man and he’s done good things for his king. And his king wants him to be healed. Well, let’s say his wife wants him to be healed. And this pre story of it is his wife. She’s hired a girl that is from Israel. And the girl keeps saying to her master, the woman, there’s a God that is so beautiful and he lives in Israel and he’s so healing.
And he can heal your husband. I know he can. Because her husband had leprosy. And leprosy is symbolized in scripture as sin. Sin, our weaknesses, our selfishness, our self centeredness. And so without any right to go, he decides he will go and try this prophet called Elisha.
He doesn’t know who he is and he goes. And when he arrives, the most interesting thing happens. Elisha, I don’t know what he expected, but he brought all kinds of money and garments and he was going to pay Elisha a lot of money. And basically when he gets to Elisha, Elisha doesn’t even come out and see him. But his servant says to Elisha, there’s this guy out there, Naaman, and he needs your healing. And he says, go tell him to Wash in the Jordan River.
And when he comes back and the servant tells Naaman that all you got to do is go wash in the river. Well, that’s ordinary. Nothing extraordinary about that ritual. But somebody says to him, well, try it. Because, you know, what do you got to lose? That’s about as little faith as I think anybody would ever have to be able to receive the gift as rich and wonderful as freedom from sin.
It’s called forgiveness. It’s called acceptance of the person. Not because of their performance, but because of who they are and the potential they have to change and grow when they know they’re valuable and they can be touched by grace. So he does it and he’s cleansed and he goes back to pay. You know, the prophet. And the prophet looks at him and says, I’m not doing this for pay.
I’m doing this because this is who God is. He’s a God who isn’t needing payment. He isn’t needing you to do something before. He will do something for you. He’s there to give you life. That’s all he wants.
And so he’s so touched by that. All he said, he made that decision right then and there. His faith made him so convinced that this was the God to turn to. And there was a belief at the time that God’s lived in the earth. But I love about that because when God in the Old Testament, they had this belief of a God who could, you know, just be in a place. So to go to that place was to find God.
And there’s something to that. But he said, I’m going to take a couple of mule loads of earth so I can put it down and stand on it and worship your God. What a beautiful story about faith. And then we flip to the gospel. Same kind of story, same kind of images. Jesus going to Jerusalem.
He’s going to face his death. He’s going to know that. He knows he’s got something that he’s got to do. And it terrifies him in some ways, but he knows he has to do it. He wants to do it as it is written. That’s what he said in the Garden of Gethsemane.
But think of it. He’s on his way, Jesus, his way to his destiny. In a sense which is true of all of us. That’s our work, to be on our way to who we are called to become. And then there’s this crowd of lepers, it’s a crowd of sinners. And they all cry out, please, please have mercy on us.
And God never asks, do they believe? He never does anything. He knows he has this healing power. He knows it’s his task to reveal it to the people. And it just comes out of him, you know, be healed, be cleansed. And the interesting thing about this story is that they all realized they were cleansed.
It wasn’t that, you know, when I ponder this story, I think, well, you know, if only one came back to say that he was really, really thankful and he realized what had happened to him, what a gift he had received and the others didn’t. What is it about that story that is so powerful but kind of hidden like it always is? But could it be because they were part of the temple and they were part of that work of going through rituals from the temple in order to believe and feel that they were being saved? They couldn’t maybe believe it directly because what he said is, go show yourselves to the priest. Now, the priest would be the one to say that they were accepted. But there was also a very complicated ritual they would go through.
You want to look it up? Look up Leviticus 14. It’s amazing. It was the right to receive someone back who was a leper into the community. And the thing that I find so fascinating about it, it was so complicated. I mean, just read it.
It’s a ritual that is taking. It took a great deal of time and. And unfortunately, a great deal of money. After going through this long description of how you can be cleansed through the power of the temple and the religion, then it said that if you don’t have enough money, we have a cheaper one. And that’s exactly what it says, if you can’t afford this. There’s another.
Gives you a real sense of what Jesus felt about how the temple had gotten out of proportion in terms of its role. It was never intended to be the only source of God’s power into a person through whatever it demanded first in order to give it. It was there ultimately to be who Jesus is. And it couldn’t be that without being destroyed. And that’s a frightening image to me as we work with religion. There’s something in religion that if we’re not careful and it’s not removed by grace, we might find that the only reason we’re doing the things that God calls us to do is because we’re scared and we don’t want to be punished and we don’t want to go to hell.
And so we work so hard to be who God wants us to be, out of our own stuff. And there’s Never enough stuff. There’s never enough understanding, compassion. I mean, the church, and this was true of Vatican ii, it’s that the church is made up not so much of the hierarchy in the rules and the laws demanding so much of people. But the Vatican Council said it’s made up, made up of individuals, individual souls filled with the awareness of they’ve been forgiven and given life not because they earned it or did something to get it, but they were just gifted with it. And they’ve got to give that to other people who are struggling.
And isn’t it interesting, it’s so often when religious people are really adhering to the letter of the law of their religion, they seem to be more interested in condemning people who are not part of that religion or not doing it the way they think they should. And there isn’t much compassion or understanding in them. And it should be a sign to all of us of the danger of that very thing where religion becomes not the vehicle that it’s meant to be to put you in touch with God’s working in your life and then you representing being filled with that God doing the same thing to other people. The church in the Vatican Council said is made up of individual people filled with the Spirit, offering life to each other. When I was pastor at St. Joseph Church in Richardson, there were so many parishioners, I think the number was probably 3,000 families.
That’s maybe 15,000 people. And I never felt that it was up to me in the pulpit to tell them what they must do. I was trying to awaken in them something that I knew they would receive through this ritual of the Liturgy of the Word and liturgy of the Eucharist. I knew they would receive this beautiful power of God’s indwelling presence and it would be life giving to the people around them. I an instrument of awakening them to the reality of God’s indwelling presence. And they using that presence, aware of that presence, it resonating through them to the other people would be the way the church would flourish.
And I believed it was. And people were changed and people became more and more engaged. It’s my task then to be a representative of God and as well the church. And I believe in the Catholic Church, it’s been the church that I have grown up in and. And yet as all churches have the same struggle to be pure and to be free of the kind of pressure they can use on a person to make them do something. And that’s why I think the only person that comes back to thank Jesus is a person who doesn’t think he deserves it.
Maybe the others went through the rituals and said, well, we’ll do this and then we’ll get it. But they didn’t seem to feel that direct contact. If there’s anything my ministry wants to do is to put you in contact with this God. I love Paul when he says, you know, you can be denying God, you can be separate from God, you can be doing everything on your own. And yet he says, all right, if you do that, God can’t reach you. You’re right.
But God can’t deny himself. What a beautiful image. God can’t deny himself, his nature, what he’s here for. And what is it to pour himself, God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, into your heart and through your heart to everyone else’s heart in your circle. And they’ll do the same. And it spreads and it grows and it transforms.
It’s the beauty of the church. Amen. Sa Sam Sa the Closing Prayer Father, pray for all religions, for all those who minister to people in the name of their churches, that they truly be open to the mystery of God’s indwelling presence, that they call upon their believers to trust in a God and the only source of real salvation is that intimacy with God. So bless them in their work. Bless my work, all of us who struggle to bring the gospel to life. 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 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 and 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.
