Episode Transcript
[00:00:12] Speaker A: Welcome to the Blessed Sacrament Homilies podcast, where our mission is to help everyone recognize and experience the presence of God. We hope you are nourished and encouraged by the Word. Thank you for joining us.
[00:00:26] Speaker B: The Lord be with you and with your spirit. A reading from the Holy Gospel According to Luke Glory to you, O Lord Jesus said to his disciples, do not be afraid any longer, little flock, for your Father is pleased to give you the kingdom.
Sell your belongings and give alms.
Provide money bags for yourselves that do not wear out an inexhaustible treasure in heaven that no thief can destroy nor moth destroy.
For where your treasure is, there also will your heart be gird your loins and light your lamps, and be like servants who await their master's return from a wedding, ready to open immediately when he comes and knocks.
Blessed are those servants whom the Master finds vigilant on his arrival.
Amen, I say to you. He will gird himself, have them recline at table, and proceed to wait on them.
And should he come in the second or third watch and find them prepared in this way, blessed are those servants.
Be sure of this. If the master of the house had known the hour when the thief was coming, he would not have let his house be broken into.
You also must be prepared, for in an hour you do not expect the Son of Man will come.
Then Peter said to him, lord, is this parable meant for us or for everyone?
And the Lord replied, who then is that faithful and prudent steward whom the Master will put in charge of his servants to distribute the food allowance at the proper time?
Blessed is the servant whom his master on his arrival, finds him doing so truly, I tell you, the Master will put the servant in charge of all of his property.
But if that servant says to himself, my master is delayed in coming, and begins to beat the menservants and the maidservants, and to eat and drink and get drunk?
Then that servant's master will come at an unexpected day and an unknown hour, and will punish the servant severely, assign him to a place with the unfaithful.
The servant who knew his master's will, but did not make preparations nor act in accord with his will, shall be beaten severely.
And the servant who was ignorant of his master's will, but acted in a way deserving of a severe beating, shall be beaten only lightly.
Much will be required of the person entrusted with much, and still more will be demanded of the person entrusted with more.
The Gospel of the Lord well, hopefully you've spent at least a little bit of Time deciding if you want a severe beating or a less severe beating.
Now, it would take me literally a week to break open that part of this reading, so I'm going to leave it alone.
But I want to talk about the first part, because the first part is like an onion. There are multiple layers to it. And the more you break it open, sometimes even the sweeter that it gets.
And the part I want to talk about requires you to do a little bit of self reflection. Now, I would ask you to close your eyes, but I know every time I do that only about half of you are willing to do it. Like I'm going to steal your wallet or something.
So I just want you to at least go into your mind's eye and be honest with yourself on this question.
I want you to think of an individual or perhaps a couple of individuals who, if you are walking through Kroger or about to walk into Costco or going down the sidewalk and you see them approaching you, you will do everything in your power to scatter. You'll go down another aisle, you'll turn on another street just so you don't have to deal with them.
Now, if any of you are thinking of me, that's extremely rude. So please don't do that.
But I think we all have people that kind of fall into that category. We're walking well, it's going to go like this, right?
Here's the problem with that is we never know when the encounter we were going to have with that individual was going to turn into a profound encounter with Christ where they say or do something that allows us to experience his presence in a very real way. Or the flip side of it, where our presence to them can make Christ manifest in their life.
Perhaps they're having a hard day. Perhaps they feel like they have no friends and are totally alone.
And our presence and a kind word or a pat on the shoulder can make all the difference.
Well, that's part of what Jesus is talking about here. He's not just talking about the end of our lives and when we'll meet Christ.
He's talking about those day to day moments as well, where we can be highly attuned to them or they can just pass us by like a breeze and we never know.
One of the ways we can be more attuned to them, however, is to truly be present in this moment at this time.
Because there's only one real time in our lives and that's now.
The future may never come and the past can't be repeated.
So rather than Dwelling on the things we're worried about or on our list of things we still need to do.
We need to be aware of where we're at. No.
Rather than fretting over things we've said or done in the past that we can't change, we're better off being in the now.
And there's one more thing we can do that'll make that even easier, and that's stop walking around staring into a screen.
It doesn't matter where you go, doesn't matter what day of the week it is.
How many times do you see folks staring into their phone screen like that is reality for them?
It isn't.
It isn't. And if I could wave a magic wand and make those things disappear, I would do it in a second.
Because it's turned us from a people that were interconnected with one another to a people that have lied to themselves, thinking that that's where my friends lie. And the amount of likes I get on Instagram or on Facebook.
And if you remember the lie we were all told when this kind of technology first started coming into play, that it was going to make us all smarter because the information was going to be at hand. Well, who thinks we're smarter now than we were 10 years ago, or 15 or 20?
I don't.
I don't think we're even close. I think we fill ourselves up with information that may or may not be true simply because we read it on a screen.
And we were smarter when we'd go and use the old card catalog in the library and actually read a book if we needed information.
So stop doing that.
And it makes it a lot easier to be in the now.
The other thing we can do, the one that's more important by the way, is to be people that pray enough that we learn to recognize Christ in our day to day lives.
We learn to know what we're looking for.
We're looking for a gentleness, a compassion, a kindness, a mercy.
So we get to a point where we can see it from day to day, but we also get to a point where we can be it for one another.
