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 Mark Glory. Glory to you, Lord. At that time John said to Jesus, teacher, we saw someone driving out demons in your name and we tried to prevent him because he does not follow us.
Jesus replied, do not prevent him. There is no one who performs a mighty deed in my name who can at the same time speak ill of me forever. Is not against us, is for us.
Anyone who gives you a cup of water to drink because you belong to Christ.
Amen, I say to you will surely not lose his reward.
Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him if a great millstone were put around his neck and he were thrown into the sea.
If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter into life maimed than with two hands to go into Gehenna, into the unquenchable fire.
And if your foot causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter into life crippled than with 2ft to be thrown into Gehenna.
And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out. Better for you to enter into the kingdom of God with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into Gehenna where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched.
The gospel of the Lord praise to.
[00:02:21] Speaker A: The Lord Jesus Christ.
[00:02:24] Speaker B: In our culture, in our society, fall tends to be rivalry season.
It could be Midland high versus Dow high.
It could be Michigan versus Michigan state.
It could be Detroit versus everybody.
But all of those rivalries, in reality tend to be just fun.
We don't have hatred for the other side, we just like to rub it in a little bit.
But over the last few weeks, I have heard at least a half dozen times from people how they cannot wait for the election to be over with.
It has been weighing people down.
At times it even gets depressing.
And there's a difference that seems to be underneath it all. And that is, unlike the rivalries of our sports teams, we're tending to have a difficult way, a different way, I should say, of looking at people we disagree with. Politically, it's no longer good enough to simply argue our point and walk away as friends.
It has become much more the norm that if we disagree with someone politically, we dismiss them.
We ignore them and sometimes even we hate them.
Well, when that happens, there's no other way to say it than that is downright unequivocal sin.
That is so contrary to absolutely everything Jesus did, everything that he taught, how he laid his life down for us, he's the one that told us to love those who hate us.
So there's never an excuse for us to hate here in the gospel we can see that even his closest disciples sometimes had a hard time understanding things and they were trying to prevent someone from doing a good thing in Jesus name. He said, don't do that. Don't do that. If someone's doing a good deed in my name, they can't be against me.
Well, perhaps, in fact, not perhaps with certainty.
We need to be that kind of counter cultural approach to our world of politics.
If we say that we are disciples of Jesus, if we say that we are Catholic, Christian, then we have to be that line in the sand that says, no, I'm not going to hate. I can disagree with you, I can argue with you.
Those arguments can even get heated.
But at the end of the day, we don't hate.
And just maybe if we realize that those things that we hold in common are still bigger than the things that separate us, we wouldn't be as tired and as sick of dealing with the coming election.
And there's only one way it's going to stop.
And that's that if we tune the hatred out and we never reward it, because then politicians do one thing and they do it very well, they read what the people like and they try to give it to them.
So if you're one of those people like me that have had enough, want it to stop, that's how we can do it, by not rewarding hatred, by not joining into it, by saying, that's enough.
