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, Lord. Since many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the events that have been fulfilled among us, just as those who are eyewitnesses from the beginning and ministers of the Word have handed them down to us, I too have decided, and after investigating everything accurately anew, to write it down in an orderly sequence for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may realize the certainty of the teachings you have received.
Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit, and news of him spread throughout the whole region.
He taught in their synagogues and was praised by all.
He came to Nazareth, where he had grown up and went, according to his custom into the synagogue. On the Sabbath day, he stood up to read and was handed the scroll of the prophet Isaiah. He unrolled the scroll and found the passage where it was written. The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to bring glad tidings to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord.
Rolling up the scroll, he handed it back to the attendant and sat down. And the eyes of all in the synagogue looked intently at him.
He said to them, today this scripture passage has been fulfilled in your hearing the Gospel of the Lord. Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ. The most harmful weapon that I can think of that first appeared in the late 20th century and has continued a quarter of the way through the 21st century. That's kind of scary to think we're a quarter way through it already. Anyway, is, in my opinion, anyway, email.
The reason being is before email existed, before I won't even mention social media, if you wanted to write someone to express your opinion, it took a lot of effort. It took getting out a sheet of paper and a pen.
It took putting your thoughts into words carefully because you could not correct them.
It took looking up an address, finding a stamp, walking to a mailbox and depositing it.
And now with email, the moment something gets under our skin a little bit, we can sit down at the keyboard of our computer and type up an email.
And the real dangerous part of it is, is with one click we can hit send.
And sometimes, in fact, I would argue virtually all of the time. It is better in those situations to sit on it for a while, to think it through, perhaps even to consult with somebody we trust and say, is this okay to send?
Because oftentimes those emails are a touch on the acid side.
And sometimes when we get our dander up, we're not always right.
Sometimes, even if we are right, our motivations are not the right motivations.
And words matter.
Words matter, in my opinion, more than virtually any other thing we can do outside of physically killing someone.
Because words can cut deep, but they can also bring healing.
You know what it's like the first time someone close to you says to you I love you?
It sinks in.
But you also know what it's like when someone ridicules you or says I hate you or says you're stupid.
You know how that can cut to the quick?
Well, each one of our three scripture readings at their heart, deal with the importance of words.
In Nehemiah, Ezra understands that the words that were part of the people's tradition for centuries had started to fade. They weren't current, they weren't a part of their day to day life.
So he doesn't change anything, he just reminds them of those words.
And the scripture tells us people got emotional about it because they realized how the truth of the law that would been part of their tradition forever had deep and profound meaning for how God loved them, how they related to God and to one another, and how important that was to their identity.
St. Paul understood the importance of words because he gave us an imagery that took things that can be very complicated and taught us how they can make sense by using that imagery of all members of one body, that there isn't one, one part that's less important than another. In other words, everybody here has an equal worth and importance in the big picture of the body of Christ.
And Jesus reached back into the tradition of his people to show that even in the prophet Isaiah, those words that foretold a great and powerful presence of God's love had to do directly with him, that he was the fulfillment of all this great promise and all this great tradition and this whole story of salvation, words matter.
So for each one of us, it does us some good at times. To what? Recognize that our words matter too, and that we evaluate not just the things we say, but the things we send to understand that the motivation that makes us true disciples is when that motivation is simply out of love, be it to offer support to someone who's suffering.
But even in those times where we need to offer some correction where we're not happy with something and we think we're a little off the mark, the motivation still has to be love.
And if it's simply vengeance or hate or anger, those are the times we need to say delete rather than sin.
