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.
[00:00:24] Speaker B: The Lord be with you and with your Spirit. A reading from the Holy Gospel According to Luke Jesus said to his disciples, the person who is trustworthy in very small matters is also trustworthy in great ones.
And the person who is dishonest in very small matters is also dishonest in great ones.
If, therefore, you are not trustworthy with dishonest wealth, who will trust you with true wealth?
If you are not trustworthy with what belongs to another, who will give you what is yours?
No servant can serve two masters.
He will either hate one and love the other, or be devoted to one and despise the other.
You cannot serve both God and Mammon. The Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ I need your help for a moment. I need you to indulge me just for a second because I'm going to ask you a question and I want you to answer it honestly to yourself. I'm not going to make you raise your hand and share it with anybody else, but if you knew that between the next nine days and two weeks you were going to die, would you live any differently?
Now, that's not as far fetched as it may sound, because in my six plus years here, roughly every 10 days we have averaged a funeral.
So it's not out of the question.
My guess is when you are honest with yourself, you've said, yeah, there's some things I would do differently.
It would be a lot less important that I'm scrolling on my phone looking at useless information, right?
My guess is all of those grudges that you can kind of hang on to would disappear.
I'm thinking that the need to constantly win every argument would suddenly become a lot less important.
Probably we would be a little less judgmental than we typically are, and quite possibly we might also learn to smile at others a bit more. Although I would never learn that, of course.
Now, if that is the case, and you answered yes to any of those possible scenarios, why in the world aren't you doing it right now?
Right.
It makes perfect sense.
If things we do now would not be important if we knew we were going to die in a short amount of time, then there's absolutely no reason why they should ever be important now.
Well, each of our scripture readings today dovetail into that reality.
From Amos reminding us that we need to be a people that cares for one another, period End of discussion.
To Timothy, one of the pastoral letters that reminds us to care for and lift up one another in prayer and in our hearts to Jesus telling us that all these things that we think are so blasted important in reality mean absolutely nothing.
What matters is our relationship with God that shows itself in our relationship to one another.
Now, if all of that is true, wouldn't our world be a lot better if each one of us started doing that?
All the vitriol, all the hatred, all the things that separate us and divide us into camps and and into ideologies would quickly vanish and we would start living together as true disciples that each one of us is called upon to do.
Now, I share all this with you, perhaps being one of the biggest violators of this truth.
I don't live that way.
But when I sit down and I analyze it and I pray about it, I can't help but think that I should live that way.
And I guess all of our lives are wrapped up in each day, hopefully trying to be better than we were the day before.
And maybe if I live to be 170, I'll get close.
