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 Matthew. Glory to the Lord. When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain and after he sat down, his disciples came to him.
He began to teach them, saying, blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are they who mourn, for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the land.
Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied.
Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.
Blessed are the clean of heart, for they will see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
Blessed are they who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are you when they insult you and persecute you and utter every kind of evil against you falsely because of me.
Rejoice and be glad, for your reward will be great in heaven.
The Gospel of the Lord Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.
My guess is most of you, at least at one time or another, have felt that the Scriptures were talking directly to you.
There was a truth that rang out for me. This is a perfect example about me.
For God chose the lowly and despised.
I was like, yeah, maybe that's true.
But I want to talk to you a little bit about an experience I've had that's developed over a lot of years.
And we've all heard the adage that with age comes wisdom.
And I don't claim to be at all wise, but my views on things definitely have changed as I've gotten older.
And the thing about our church and being a part of it is there are parts of our tradition that truly bring us strength, that ground us in ways that would be impossible without them.
Our liturgical tradition and the pattern and the cadence of our prayer is one of those examples.
It not only allows us to experience Christ's presence alive in our midst, but also can be almost meditative in the commonness of it, in the repetition of it.
And the depth of our theology that has been assembled and accrued over 2000 years is also a comfort.
But sometimes those things that are our strengths, that are our greatest gifts, can also sometimes be our greatest liability.
And what I mean by that is, if we stop with our liturgical tradition, if we get so rooted in the logic of our theology without having a change of heart, then it all goes for naught.
Over the last week or so in a book I read every day, it's a book of holy people and the examples of their lives, and not just people that are under the Christian umbrella, but people who have lived out the Christian ideal.
There were two examples this week that have kind of dovetailed with where my heart has been.
The first one was St. Thomas Aquinas, who could easily be argued, was, if not the, one of the most brilliant theologians the Church has ever produced.
And he was able to take the Greek philosopher Aristotle and totally draw him in with his knowledge, into what we believe as Christian.
Yet with the voluminous writings of Thomas Aquinas, with all that he produced, he eventually got to a point in his life, a moment of clarity, a moment of, I would say, epiphany, where he realized he didn't even get close, that God is bigger than he was able to fully understand or ever express. And from that time on, he stopped. He said, I'm wasting my time trying to produce more and greater theological works because God is bigger and more powerful and more loving than my words could ever handle.
The second one, one who was from the non Christian tradition, was Gandhi, who, if you read enough about him, will quickly see that one of the biggest guides spiritually in his life actually happened to be Jesus Christ.
Because he admired and took courage from the words and the example of who Jesus was.
But in doing so, he also was pretty quick to call to mind that the Christian church and the examples he saw under missionaries and people who hid under the umbrella of being a Christian were rarely even close to what Jesus said and taught, simply paying lip service.
And this goes back to that, I guess you could call it conversion that I've had.
And that is, I've come to believe it is much more important that we live as Jesus taught us to live, that we follow the example that he set for us than it is we have right prayer or right belief.
It's more that we have right life.
Because everything that he did always pointed to basically one thing.
If we want to be seen as his disciples, then we need to love one another, period, full stop.
St. Paul, I think that's what he was wrestling with, with the people of Corinth. He was trying to change how they lived, and they were more enthralled with what they heard and the theology that was pressed to them.
We're called to conversion, to change of heart, to a different lifestyle.
And that's what really.
