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.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: The Lord be with you and with your spirit. A reading from the Holy Gospel according to Luke.
The apostles said to the Lord, increase our faith.
The Lord replied, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you would say to this mulberry tree, be uprooted and planted in the sea, and it would obey you.
Who among you would say to your servant, who has just come in from plowing or tending sheep in the field, come here immediately and take your place at table?
Would he not rather say to him, prepare something for me to eat, put on your apron and wait on me while I eat and drink?
You may eat and drink when I am finished.
Is he grateful to that servant because he did what was commanded?
So should it be with you when you have done all you have been commanded.
Say, we are unprofitable servants.
We have done what we were obliged to do.
The Gospel of the Lord.
Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.
This may come as a bit of a surprise to many of you, but I was, in some ways a bit of an odd kid.
And one of those ways I was odd was that in our religion classes at our parish, I loved them.
And virtually none of my friends could stand being there.
And in fact, I must admit, I became dear Sister Miriam's pet.
She would always call on me when she needed an answer.
And the funny part of that, though, is that it got me a little bit hyper focused.
So when I would be at Mass, I would be paying attention to every word with an occasional nap in between.
And I distinctly remember this gospel being proclaimed and me spending the rest of that Mass staring at a hymnal, sitting on the pew, trying to get it to move.
And no matter how hard I stared at it, no matter how faith filled I was, that book wouldn't move.
And for a while I thought, boy, I must really be pitiful. I don't even have faith the size of a mustard seed, can't move a book, let alone a mulberry tree.
But that's really not what Jesus is saying here, because he ties that part of the story with the other part about being a servant.
And he wants us to know, because it's the only way faith really works, is that faith doesn't get stuck here.
Faith doesn't even get stuck here.
Faith, by its very definition, should lead us to be people of action, people that go out and do things to make Christ's presence known in the world, not just talk about it.
And all you need to do is look around us in society today, and there are a lot of people out there claiming to be Christian that frankly, are so far from it.
Christianity requires us. Faith coming from our Christianity requires us to reach out to others, to be people that shares mercy and abundance, to be people that are generous, to be people that want healing, not division.
And if we as a church, with all of our individual faiths combined, not just church here in Midland, in Blessed Sacrament, but in the whole world, really put our minds and our efforts to us, we could say to the mulberry tree, jump in the sea, and it would.
But what we ought to be doing with that faith called to be people of action, is work to change things that seem impossible.
I guarantee you, if we all put our minds and hearts and actions to it, we could do things that seem impossible.
We could end hunger in the world, we could end violence in the world, we could end poverty.
We could do all kinds of things, but only if we put our collective efforts together to make them happen.
Now, I am saying this under no illusion that I do it very well. That's not why I'm saying this.
But that's what Jesus is talking about.
That's what he is trying to get us to do. That's the motivation he's trying to put in our hearts to not let faith die up here, but to have it show in what we do.
