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.
When Jesus went into the region of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, who do people say that the Son of man is?
They replied, some John the Baptist, others Elijah, still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.
He said to them, but who do you say that I am?
Simon Peter said in reply, you are the Christ, the Son of the living God.
Jesus said to him in reply, blessed are you, Simon, son of Jonah, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my heavenly Father.
And so I say to you, you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it.
I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven.
Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. The Gospel of the Lord.
[00:01:49] Speaker A: Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.
[00:01:53] Speaker B: Two weeks after being graduated from college, I got my first, what I would term adult job.
But that required me to relocate.
And it was a little bit of a culture shock. I had never been in the Deep south and moving there was tough.
I got south of Lansing and I realized I still had another 15 or 20 miles before I got to Jackson, the Deep South.
And so I wanted to acclimate there as best I could.
So that first weekend when I moved in, I went and bought the local paper, the Jackson Citizen Patriot, the paper that influences the nation.
And as I was looking through it, something jumped out at me that kind of gave me a bit of a cold chill.
And that was in the obituaries.
There it was.
Robert J. Howe died.
And at first I found it funny. I said, well, there's some symmetry. One dies and another one comes in. This is great.
But it caused me to think some long thoughts.
For the first time in my life as a 21 year old, I realized, yet one day this will be me.
And as I sat there thinking about that, I went through those kind of thoughts that I think we probably all have.
There is a fear.
It's a fear of the unknown. And anything we don't know about can make us a bit nervous or scared.
There was a little bit of, I don't want to. Maybe excitement isn't the right word, but it was close to that of wondering what it will be like.
And then lastly there was that melancholy that hit, but also recognizing that people like my parents weren't going to be around forever either.
Well, in our first two readings, we have both St. Peter and St. Paul wrestling in their own heads with those kind of deep questions.
And my guess is they would have had some of the same feelings that I had that day.
And they also had the strength and the eternal hope of their experience of Jesus Christ dying and rising, and that would have been there to give them absolutely all the strength they needed.
Well, the good news for all of us is that same truth there for each one of us.
That promise and hope of resurrection is there for us, too.
And to rely on that truth can bring a strength and a comfort that at least tempers down. I would hope for all of us that fear. There's still the unknown, of course, but there's also all of the promise and hope that comes from life in Christ.
Sometimes it is good for us to think those long thoughts, to digest them and allow them to have God's grace enter in and give us strength and life.
