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 25th Sunday in Ordinary Time.

The Opening Prayer oh God, who founded all the commands on your sacred law upon love of you and our neighbor, grant that by keeping your precepts we may merit to attain eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God forever and ever. Amen. A reading from the Book of Amos, eighth chapter four through the seventh verse. Hear this, you who trample upon the needy and destroy the poor of the land. When will the new moon be over, you ask? We may sell our grain and the Sabbath that we may display the wheat we’ll diminish the Ephah, add to the shekel, fix our scales for cheating, will buy the lowly for silver and the poor for a pair of sandals Even the refuse of the wheat we will sell.

The Lord has sworn by the pride of Jacob Never will I forget a thing they have done. The Word of the Lord Responsorial Psalm Praise the Lord who lifts up the poor. Praise you servants of the Lord. Praise the name of the Lord Blessed is the name of the Lord, both now and forever. Praise the Lord who lifts up the poor. High above the nations is the Lord above the heavens is his glory, who is like the Lord our God, who is enlightened on high and looks upon the heavens and the earth below.

Praise the Lord who lifts up the poor he raises up the lowly from the dust from the dunghill he lifts up the poor to seat them with princes, with princes of of his own people. Praise the Lord who lifts up the poor. A Reading from the New Testament from first Timothy, verse three. Beloved first of all, I ask that supplications, prayers, petitions, and thanksgivings be offered for everyone, for kings and for all in authority, that we may lead a quiet and tranquil life in all devotion and dignity. This is good and pleasing to God our Savior, who wills everyone to be saved and to come to knowledge of the truth. For there is one God.

There is also one Mediator between God and man, the man Jesus Christ, who gave himself as A ransom for all. This was the testimony at the proper time. For this I was appointed preacher and apostle. I’m speaking the truth, I’m not lying. And and teacher the Gentiles in faith and truth. It is my wish then, that in every place men should pray, lifting up holy hands without anger or argument.

The Word of the Lord. Alleluia verse. Though our Lord Jesus Christ was rich, he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich. The gospel for this 25th Sunday in Ordinary Time is taken from St. Luke 16. Jesus said to his disciples, a rich man had a steward who was reported to him for squandering his property.

He summoned him and said, what is this I hear about you? Prepare a full account of your stewardship, because you can no longer be my steward. The steward said to himself, what shall I do now that my master is taking the position of steward away from me? I’m not strong enough to dig. I’m ashamed to beg. I know what I shall do, that when I am removed from the stewardship, they may welcome me into their homes.

So he called in his master’s debtors one by one. To the first he said, how much do you owe your master? He replied, 100 measures of olive oil. He said to him, here is your promissory note. Sit down quickly and write one for 50. Then to another the steward said, and you, how much do you owe?

He replied, 100 cores of wheat. Steward said to him, here is your promissory note. Write one for 80. And the master commended that dishonest steward for acting prudently. But the children of this world are more prudent in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light. I tell you, make friends for yourselves with dishonest wealth, so when it fails, you’ll be welcomed into eternal dwellings.

The person who is trustworthy in small matters is also trustworthy in great ones. The person who is dishonest in small matters is also dishonest in great ones. If, therefore, you are not trustworthy with dishonest wealth, who will trust you with true wealth? If you are not trustworthy with what belongs to another, who will give you what is yours? No servant can serve two masters. You either hate one and love the other, or be devoted to one and despise the other.

You cannot serve both God and mammon. The Gospel OF the Lord the Gospel ended with an interesting comment or statement about service. There’s something in human nature that is meant to serve. We can either serve God or serve mammon. We can either serve ourselves or serve others. My point is, I think mammon is a really interesting word because you look it up in the Oxford English Dictionary and it says it’s another word for money.

But then if you read on, it talks about. In medieval writings, mammon was considered to be the devil, evil. It was basically focused totally on itself and greed was a major part of it. So I think to myself, in the spiritual journey that you and I are sharing, you know, we may not have a lot of problems with money in that sense of using it to make money off of people in a way that’s unfair and unjust. Though we do see a lot in the world today of corporations somehow falling into that trap of making sure that they can get as much money as possible for the least amount of product. And that’s kind of considered good business in some ways.

But I want to talk about something, not so much about money, dollars in business, or, you know, shekels or grain. I’m going to talk about another kind of mammon. It’s a kind of spiritual mammon. It’s when you put yourself in a situation on your spiritual journey and you’re looking at yourself carefully. And no matter how hard you try to find in your life things that are good, you keep coming up with the things that are wrong, keep focusing on what’s wrong. And if you focus too much on what’s wrong, something goes haywire.

And the thing that goes haywire is there’s this thing in human beings that when they’re criticized, when they’re judged, they cannot just think about themselves as somebody doing something wrong, but they can consider themselves as something’s wrong. With me, it’s called shame. So the idea of being judged is really risky. If we’re going to do self judgment, we have to be filled with mercy and understanding. That’s exactly what we find in the person of Jesus. So compassionate, so understanding.

He lived on this planet with us. He knew what it was like to struggle as a human being. He knew that in a way. Not that God doesn’t know these things, God the Father. But nevertheless, it was an experience that we have of a God learning what it’s like to be human. And it increases his capacity for empathy, care, a desire to see change, not condemnation.

So I want to talk about spiritual pride. I guess that’s what I’m talking about. If we can get ourselves in a position where we’re never really good enough. Remember the rich man who came and said, look, I do everything, everything right. And Jesus looked at him and smiled and actually Looked at him with love, saying, this is great. You’re really trying, but you’ve got one problem.

Why don’t you give up everything you have and then. And then come and follow me? And I think the man thought it was about his money or his wealth, though he didn’t really talk about that. He just said that he was very, very, very, very good. So I think what that lesson is, is that there’s something in us. When we focus too much on being good, being perfect, being without stain of sin or whatever we do, it more likely comes about where we can’t do the job as well as we thought we should or could do.

And we get worried, all of that. That’s what he was asking the rich man to let go of. Call him his possessions, possessions. So interesting. Performance can become a possession, meaning how I perform is exactly how much I’m worth. And by performance, I mean living out your life in the midst of other people.

It doesn’t have to be giving a homily. It can be just being a parent, being a friend, being something. But you’re. If you’re looking too much at the performance part of you, you’re going to run into a real difficult problem. And that’s where it gets into something I would call spiritual pride. Just look at it more carefully now.

You know, we’ve only been listening to. To the Old Testament every Sunday for the last, I don’t know, 55 years before that, as you well know, although those who are not Catholic might not realize, but we were only listening to a gospel and an epistle, just 52 of them for the entire year. It’s easy to see when having that small of a. Of a source to preach from, that maybe homilies became routine. They knew them by heart, and probably they were more likely to then give just good advice or. Or teach things that the church was teaching about sacraments and about laws and rules and things like that.

So I wonder about the depth of the preaching before we had the Old Testament, because it has changed my mind so much about this whole relationship I have with God. And it even has been, I think, in a sense, a worrisome thing to me if I can’t integrate it correctly, because there’s something so clear about how upset God is when we do things wrong. So if you remember last Sunday’s reading, there was the Moses coming down with the tablets and he saw all the people going back to their old ways, and he was upset. But then God really got upset and decided he was going to destroy them all. Kill them all. I can’t stand these people.

They drive me nuts. That’s God speaking to sinful human beings in the Old Testament. And now we have another passage from Amos. He’s a prophet, and he knows about the corruption in the marketplace. And so he’s saying to them, you know, this is something you’ve got to stop. You’ve got to stop cheating people.

You’ve got to stop using your position to suck life out of people. You got to learn how to help people, not hurt people. And then he says at the end that the Lord, and this is Amos speaking for God will never forget a thing that you’ve done. And earlier in the passage, it says, I will never forgive you. I don’t know if you’ve ever had anybody say that to you, but it’s a horrible feeling. I’ll never forgive you.

So why am I bringing these stories up? Well, it seems to me that if you read a lot of the Old Testament, you’re going to see this angry, angry God at the beginning. I mean, granted, Adam and Eve didn’t exactly shine as examples of obedience, but they were asked to leave the garden. And it seemed kind of cruel in a way. Except I think if you read it carefully, you’ll see that Eve, who was motivated actually by wisdom when she made the mistake of following the other creature’s voice, but she did want something good, but she made a bad mistake in what it was going to be. And so they’re in bad shape with God, in a sense.

And then the two children, Cain and Abel, come along. And then one of them, Cain, kills Abel. And then there’s this evil in that family and things like that. And so you see God responding negatively. He doesn’t forgive Cain, he punishes him with a mark. So he lives the rest of his life alone.

So over and over again, these stories, and then the one in. In the time of Noah was when he’s looking at all that he’s created. And this is the most troubling one for me. When I first read it, he looked at everything he made, all the animals, everything. And all just a few lines earlier in the Scriptures, he was saying how beautiful and how wonderful everything is. And now this same God is saying, I want to destroy all of them.

Kill them all. Destroy them. What? Why? Because they weren’t who God wanted them to be. Now, there’s something in these stories that I think have a clear teaching for a very low, low level of evolution of understanding for a group of people who don’t understand their hearts.

Yet they work solely out of their minds and their wills. And they need to be threatened and they need to be punished. And so you get so much of that in the Old Testament. And it’s really hard in a way not to carry that over, not to carry it into the New Testament without realizing it’s working on me. God does not like me when I fail. God is disappointed deeply in me.

And there’s something, even in a very unsophisticated person, a sense when God says that to them, they feel something. One of the most devastating of all feelings, I think, is shame. And so you hear the first response of human beings to having disappointed God is shame. Hiding from God, I’m not worthy, I’m no good, I’m valueless. That can come upon us without realizing it, even realizing maybe where it comes from. But it can come from an indication deep inside of us that we’re not living up to what we should be.

And it creates this anxiety and this shame. And then shame is the most interesting of all things. It needs to be fed, it needs to be encouraged. And so you find all you do is look at your mistakes. So then you look at the gospel and there’s this wonderful story about a man who basically is doing the wrong thing. And Jesus looks at him and says, you know what, Watch this guy, watch what he’s doing.

He’s doing something really smart. Smarter than the people out there that are not listening to me and not trying to do what I ask them to do. And I can’t reach them. I threaten them, they still won’t listen to me. But this guy, on his own with his mind and his will, he comes with an idea. I know what I can do.

I’m being fired. So I know my, my life after this is going to be very difficult. I don’t know what to do. I don’t, I can’t, I can’t dig. I’m too proud to beg. So basically he says, I know what I can do.

I can use my position now to befriend the people that we have been abusing with our over inflated invoices. And I’ll make sure that when I’m let go of, I will be welcomed. What’s the man doing? He’s not serving his ego, he’s not serving himself. He’s not looking for money, he’s looking for relationship. A relationship.

I want to connect with someone so I will be in a relationship that sustains me. That’s pure wisdom to a mind especially, that is, that is not in any way, shape or form, very much evolved. So then you look at Paul and he’s giving this wonderful advice. First of all, here’s what he’s saying all the time. You should be working for someone else, praying for them, doing things in your heart for them. When you pray, you are intending something for someone.

And when you are not condemning, not judging, but always trying to give somebody something that will help them see through what they’re doing. When you do the opposite of what God did, and the reason God did it was to prove that it didn’t work, that condemning people and judging people is never going to change them. It only leads them deeper and deeper into darkness or ignoring God because it’s too difficult. Jesus came to change all of that, and he did it by this he wants you. When you’re at your worst and you’re feeling you’re no good and unlovable and you own that feeling and you say, maybe it’s because of what I did, or it’s just the way I’m thinking. And then he looks you in the eye and I love this part about Jesus who reveals who God really is.

He looks in your eye and says, you know, you’re an absolute mess. You’ve done some bad things or you’re beating yourself up too much and it’s wrong. But when I see you, I look at you, I love you now more than I ever have because you’re honest, you’re facing things and you’re not able to fix it. That’s where forgiveness, being loved as you are is essential. Without it, there’s only darkness. Foreign the Closing Prayer God the Old Testament is filled with images of the God that is terrifying to so many of us.

God that just looks and judges and condemns. But that was Awaken in us the dramatic change that you have made possible through entering into our life and living in the form of a human being and teaching us what it means to be forgiven, to be loved, to be held, to be safe. Fill us with that awareness. Take away our anxiety over trying to be better. Let us accept ourselves as we are 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 on our website. Thank you so much for your listenership and your continued support. Without it, this program would not be possible.