St. Dominic Catholic Church

Homilies

September 2 - 22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time

The other evening at daily Mass I stood up after communion and, from the altar, said, “the Lord be with you.”  

Of course, everyone responded, “and with your Spirit.”

I had to smile, because I was standing in front of the Missal to offer the prayer after communion and had meant to say, “Let us pray.”

My mind had wandered just for a moment and something else slipped out.

I know I’m not the only one who does this.

Sometimes, for example, in the preface to the Eucharistic prayer, I might be praying, “through Christ our Lord you give us all these things,” but no sooner do I say, “through Christ our Lord,” and a quarter of the congregation pipes up, “Amen”.

 

Jesus quotes the prophet Isaiah and chides the Pharisees and scribes saying, “you honor God with your lips, but your hearts are far from him.”

We think of the heart as the seat of emotion, but for the Jew, it was the seat of thought and the will.

When God said through Isaiah the prophet, “their hearts are far from me,” he was saying ‘they are not thinking about me, nor are they doing my will.’

It’s easy for us to become distracted in our prayer – thinking about what to make for dinner, what your spouse meant when he/she said something, problems at work.

We can come to Mass and just go through the motions: speak words without thinking, veg out during the homily – don’t veg out during the homily, please.

For example, does anyone remember anything from the opening prayer? 

Were we tuning out already?

We asked God to put the love of His name into our hearts.

That is, that we might love God for Who He is, not just for what He does.

We asked God to deepen our sense of reverence, so that we can appreciate the miracle that will take place when bread and wine become Jesus’ body, blood, soul and divinity among us.

We asked God to nurture in us what is good, and to keep it safe.

To love God “with all your heart” is a conscious act of will, not a passing emotion.

 

Jesus would not have thought of the hypocritical scribes and Pharisees as two-faced as we would say, but two-hearted.

On the one hand they had numerous, detailed, unwritten laws that they regarded as having the same binding force as Mosaic law.

These pertained to everything from fasts to keep, tithes to pay, what constituted work that could not be done on the Sabbath, and many daily purifications.

The whole point was to keep God in the heart– that is, to be thinking about God throughout the day as one did these rituals.

It’s similar to the blessings we Catholics have for people, places, things and events.

But just as the Pharisee could do all sorts of practices meant to call God to mind while having their hearts elsewhere, we can go through life seldom thinking of God.

Even at Mass, we are so accustomed to the prayers we neither hear what the priest says, nor pay attention to our responses anymore.

We may say a rosary thinking about anything but the event in Jesus and Mary’s life.

When we finish our prayer, do we have a sense of relief that we just finished a tedious chore?

Then we’re giving God lip service.

It’s possible to obey the commandments, be a nice person, but not a Christian.

The letter of James sets the bar higher: “Religion that is pure and undefiled is care for the orphans and widows in their affliction” – the weakest, most vulnerable people in the ancient world.

It is also keeping “oneself unstained by the world.”

That is, to be in the world, but not of it, always realizing that the world that is so concrete, that demands so much of our attention, is a passing thing, and that we are created for immortality.

 

In the sermon on the mount, Jesus tells us “where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

We can turn that around by saying, “where your heart is, there is your treasure.”

So when you are distracted in your prayer, where is your mind taking you?

It may be pointing out to you what’s really important.

When your mind wanders at Mass, are you thinking about work? About your kids?

About whether the Dodgers will beat the Diamondbacks this afternoon?

What do we allow to live in our hearts – that is, what do we obsess about?

If it’s something other than God, the giver of every good gift, according to both the letter of James and our opening prayer, then it may be separating us from God.

Sometimes our minds are fixed on money, or poisoned with envy of what others have, or we allow anger and resentment to fester until it boils over in our words and actions.

When I obsess about the administrative aspects of a parish or, at this time of year, college football, or anything that’s not God, I have found one thing helpful.

If my heart is full of something that’s not God, it means God has been crowded out.

And the solution is to wholeheartedly (that is, with full intention), do what is necessary to put God back in.

Usually that means taking time to pray – to focus on what I’m grateful for, to praise God for the wonder of creation, to review what has occupied my mind and to offer that to God’s providential care.

How easy it is to worry, rather than wrapping those concerns in prayer and leaving them in God’s heart!

If prayer is especially hard, keep at it, don’t give up – any effort to lift our heart to God is pleasing to Him.

Doing some spiritual reading can help refocus my mind on Jesus, too, and that sometimes jumpstarts my prayer life.

 

Jesus says that what defiles us is what comes from within our hearts – within our minds.

He doesn’t let us place the blame on others, or the things we have, and certainly not on God our Father.

He says we are responsible for evil, and that occurs when our heart is far from God.

So this week, let’s do a heart checkup.

What words describe us when we are involved in something with our whole hearts? 

Words like, “exciting, challenging, joyful, and passionate”?

What words describe us when we are not?

Words like, “dull, routine, unexciting, joyless”?

The heart check is this: which set of words best describes our religious lives? 

 

Fr. Michael Fones, OP