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 you, O Lord Jesus said to the 12, fear no one.
Nothing is concealed that will not be revealed, nor secret that will not be made known.
What I say to you in the darkness, speak in the light what you hear whispered. Proclaim on the hilltops.
And do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul.
Rather, be afraid of the one who can destroy both soul and body. In Gehenna, are not two sparrows sold for a small coin, yet not one of them falls to the ground.
Without your Father's knowledge, even all the hairs of your head are counted. So do not be afraid.
You are worth more than many sparrows.
Everyone who acknowledges me before others, I will acknowledge before my heavenly Father.
But whoever denies me before others, I will deny before my heavenly Father the Gospel of the Lord.
[00:01:49] Speaker A: Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.
[00:01:51] Speaker B: I would guess that most of you, if not all of you, at one point in time in your life have arrived at perhaps a wedding reception or a birthday party or a graduation party.
And every seat at the tables with people you know are taken.
So you're forced to sit at a table with people you do not know.
And what we usually do is look around trying to decide who might be the most interesting person to sit by.
And on one occasion, I walked into a graduation party, and it was that very scenario.
So I looked around and I saw an older gentleman who I thought might be interesting. He looked. Looked like he probably would have been a veteran of the Civil War.
And as I sat next to him, I did what I always do, which is try to make small talk.
Now, the best way I've learned to make small talk is simply take an interest in somebody else, ask them questions. And if you ask enough questions, you can usually get people to open up and carry the conversation and you can just sit back.
Well, it didn't take long for me to realize I have chosen very poorly because this individual may have been at least second place, if not first place, in the crabbiest person I have ever seen.
And he proceeded to tell me everything that was wrong with the generation of this kid who just graduated, everything that was wrong with the previous generation and the generation before that.
And the only generation that really was good was the one he was a Part of now, part of my questioning gave me a few answers. And this guy was born in the teens, the 19 teens.
Remember? This was quite a while ago.
So after about 10 minutes of him complaining about everybody else but his own people, I'd finally kind of had it up to here.
So then I said, well, you know, I couldn't think you could possibly be more wrong.
And he just kind of sat up in his chair and was ready for a debate. And I said, well, you know what?
In your lifetime, you've had two world wars where tens of millions of people died.
In your lifetime, there was a holocaust where 6 million people were put to death simply because of their faith or their ethnicity.
That hadn't happened in my lifetime. So why is yours better?
Well, I turned to grab my beer to take a drink, and he got up, got in his car, and he left.
At which point in time, a couple of other people at the table smiled at me and nodded. So evidently I did a great public service that day.
But here's the thing.
Because I do it myself, every generation thinks that the one that follows them is somehow worse, that they're not capable of.
Of what ours did.
And here is the universal truth that is 100% always wrong.
In fact, subsequent generations are. Guess what?
They're always a little bit better than we were.
Why is that?
Because of what Jesus talks about here when he says, better fear nothing. Why does he tell us that?
Because he wants us to understand that his presence is active and alive in the world.
Active, alive in us.
Active, alive in those who follow us.
And because of that reality, the kingdom of God with each subsequent generation gets just a little bit closer than it was the day before or the day before that, or the day before that.
And in a world where it is so easy to look at the news or to read the newspapers and despair and think everything is falling apart.
We don't need to fear.
While things may seem chaotic, guess what? They've always have been. There's always been struggles. There's always been troubles. There's always been violence. There's always been war.
But the one constant truth is the thread of Christ's presence active in the story of humanity.
And it's that presence that day by day reveals to us God's glory and brings the fullness of the kingdom just a little bit closer.
