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.
While the crowds were pressing in on Jesus and listening to the word of God, he was standing by the lake of Gennesaret.
He saw two boats there, alongside the lake, the fishermen had disembarked and were washing their nets.
Getting into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, he asked him to put out a short distance from the shore.
Then he sat down and he taught the crowds from the boat.
After he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, put out into deep water and lower your nets for a catch.
Simon said in reply, master, we have worked hard all night, have caught nothing, but at your command, I will lower the nets.
When they had done this, they caught a great number of fish and their nets were tearing.
He signaled to their partners in the other boat to come and help them.
They came and filled both boats so that the boats were in danger of sinking.
When Simon Peter saw this, he fell at the knees of Jesus and said, depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man.
For astonishment at the catch of fish they had made seized him and all those with him. And likewise James and John, the sons of Zebedee, who were partners of Simon.
Jesus said to Simon, do not be afraid. From now on, you will be catching men.
When they brought their boat to the shore, they left everything and followed him. The Gospel of the Lord. Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.
Even a cursory review of world history will reveal one thing to be by and large true, and that is that any great thing that has happened in world history caused by the work or the effort of a human being was rarely, if ever, done by the rich and powerful. They were done by people that prior to these events, had seemed very ordinary.
But through hard work and diligence, and, I would argue, the help of Jesus Christ, great things happened.
You can look to our own president, Abraham Lincoln, who came from very, very humble beginnings, but changed the nature of what our nation is like.
And there are many examples of people in the medical field and in the world of politics that through good works, change the course of human history.
Well, what does that say about our lives?
Well, it tells us that even though we may seem ordinary and insignificant, with the right effort and with the trusting presence of Jesus Christ in our lives, we can make the world different as well.
And all you need to do is look at today's scripture readings to see the profound truth of that.
Here we have St. Paul, who, frankly, if you read him carefully, know one thing. He didn't know what a period or a comma was.
And his writing is, by and large, not the most eloquent.
But his writing also has profound truth in it, truth that speaks to the human heart.
And it's through his effort and his hard work, and as he tells us, through the presence of Christ in him, that the Christian faith began to spread throughout the known world.
Or look at the gospel, where Jesus goes to some pretty ordinary and, some would argue, insignificant individuals. Simon Peter and James and John, the sons of Zebedee, and he goes to them in their ordinariness and puts into motion the preaching of his gospel to the world.
They weren't even good fishermen. They'd been out all night, came back with nothing. And Jesus says, well, go out and lower your nets. And you could almost hear Simon Peter say, we've done this already. All right, all right, we'll do it.
And then in that imagery of the nets being full, we can see how he teaches us that when we work with Christ and through Christ, great and marvelous things can happen.
So there's not one of us gathered here that can't make a significant change in the world. If we allow Christ to work through us now, we're probably not going to be famous, we're not going to be written in sacred scripture.
We may not be remembered except for the people that were closest to us. But when we allow Christ to work through us, we can make a change. We can bring the fullness of the kingdom of God closer than it was before we existed.
