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Thank you for visiting. I hope you will enjoy the variety of topics to enhance your spiritual life. You can read them below or download them and read at your leisure. I have also added my Sunday Homilies.
CURRENT TOPICS: Notes for Presentation on Mary + God Is Beautiful + Hosea, The Unwanted Prophet+
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28 Sunday – Luke 17:11-19
Still on the road to Jerusalem, Jesus meets ten lepers. Like the blind man outside Jericho, they cry out to him for mercy. Jesus did not reject their request. They are typical of so many in Luke’s gospel who encounter Jesus’ compassion for those whom society rejected. He cured them, or rather they went to the priests as the law demanded and found themselves cured.
This story, like that of Elisha and Naaman, has a sequel. One of the lepers saw beyond his cure to the God who through Jesus made it possible. He turned back, praised God and expressed his gratitude to Jesus. Like Naaman he was a foreigner. But he was no ordinary foreigner; he was a Samaritan, one of those, who do not associate with Jews except in illness and disease. Misery finds company, the great equalizer.
Nine of them disappeared: they did not see beyond their healing. The word of Jesus had already been taken from their hearts, whether by Satan or through their inability to think beyond the present. “Where are the other nine?” Jesus was expecting, waiting for them, like the father looking out for his son. “Were none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner, this immigrant?”
The point of the physical healing of Jesus was to lead to spiritual healing, to a metanoia or turning around, a change of direction in repentance. Encountering the mercy of God should move us to the praise of God. The nationality of the man fulfilled the program that Jesus had proclaimed in the synagogue at Nazareth and anticipated the successful mission of Philip to the Samaritans and of the disciples to the ends of the earth.
Lazarus was raised from the dead and her brother’s healing led Marth to declare, “I have come to believe that you are the Messiah, the one who is to come into the world.” This was essentially Peter’s confession in the other gospels, but on the lips of Martha in John’s. Jesus ends this passage with the true message of miracles, “Stand up and go: your faith has saved you.” In other words, it is your faith that saves you because the miracle has led to your salvation through your faith.
Shawnee M. Daniels-Sykes writes in Give Us This Day, “Just like Naaman and the Samaritan, who were socially excluded because of their skin disorders and their otherness, today’s refugees have been seen as ritually unclean because of human-made purity laws. Many people throughout the world find themselves in inhuman and oppressive situations where they are treated as if they are lepers, ritually or otherwise unclean.
“The good news is that the Lord knows that human beings are created in the image and likeness of God and therefore are brothers and sisters to each other. The Lord hears their cries for assistance through his mission and ministry, he erases any stigmas, stereotypes, prejudices, and oppressions resulting from skin disorders, sink color differences, foreigner or un-welcome status, and so forth.”
Pope Leo XIV’s apostolic exhortation, Dilexi Te (I have loved you), is about love and care for the poor. It is a follow up of Pope Francis’ encyclical Dilexit Nos (He has loved us), an exhortation on the Church’s care for the poor.
The document also addresses the church’s tradition of working for and with migrants—which today is “expressed in initiatives such as refugee reception centers, border missions and the efforts of Caritas Internationalis and other institutions”—saying the church’s mission is to all living on the peripheries.
Pope Leo in his apostolic exhortation begins with the story of the woman who poured costly oil on Jesus’ head, only to be upbraided by one of the disciples who fretted, “Why this waste? For this ointment could have been sold for a large sum, and the money given to the poor.” Jesus’ reply is often seen as an excuse for indifference to the clamant needs of the poor: “You always have the poor with you, but you will not always have me,” before asserting that as long as the Gospel is proclaimed, this woman’s kindness to him will be told.
Pope Leo draws an important conclusion: “No sign of affection, even the smallest, will ever be forgotten, especially if it is shown to those who are suffering. Attending to the poor is not only about money. It is about affection. The Gospel call is no mere noble obligation; (but also) the call is to solidarity.”
That is why our tutor possibilities in our Grade School and our Hight School give us the opportunities to show affection and kindness. Those who deliver food to the shut ins through our Mercy Neighborhood Ministry also gives opportunities to practice affection and love. All our programs and our St. Francis de Sales gatherings give us the opportunity to show affection and love for one another, like Mary and Martha, through our Wednesday Mass and Meals, our Book Discussion Gatherings, and through our Scripture Study, and so forth.
GOD IS BEAUTY – BEAUTY IS GOD
“Go Back To Where You Came From!”
Amos, The Unwanted Prophet: Part Three
Complacent Theology: more than ever the elite were confident that Yahweh was with them and that, Yahweh being who he is, the greatest of gods, they were the first of nations. Indeed, there appears to have arisen at this time an expectation that Yahweh might soon act on a certain day to bring them as a people to a position of unprecedented preeminence over all others. It is this complacent theology which comes under attack in several of Amos’ most memorable words.
Soporific Worship: Amos’ abhorrence of these practices in his famous diatribe against solemn assemblies, is transparent. And this is what is wrong with it. In and of itself it may be all right, but it distracts from doing what is really important, what Yahweh really wants. “But let justice flow like water and uprightness like a never-failing stream.”
“I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them…But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever flowing stream.”
“Father,” his son Joshua looks at him. “You look startled.”
“I am son,” Amos replies. “I had another vision.” Amos was speechless but tried to describe what he experienced. “At first I wasn’t sure whether I was daydreaming or having a vision or seeing the real thing.”
“Mother said you had these visions often,” Joshua said.
“This is only the third one.” he said. “I had thought they had ended after the last two.”
“Why is that, father?” Joshua said. “Mom said that the Lord God had relented and it would not happen.”
“This is more shocking than even the catastrophe of Locust and drought!” Amos said still shaken.
“I am afraid to ask what the vision showed you this time.”
Amos begins to explain the vision. “I saw a man standing by a tottering wall. It was a military invasion that would soon sweep through the land!”
“What does that mean,” Joshua asked, “a tottering wall?”
“It came to me that it represents the House of Jacob’s moral condition,” he said. “The high places of Isaac will be ruined, and the sanctuaries of Israel laid waste, and the sword in hand, says the Lord God, I will attack the House of Jeroboam!” Amos felt exhausted.
“Father,” Joshua looks worried, “Why is the Lord God doing this?”
“From what I have heard from our merchant friends from Edom, is that basically good people are being sold by the rich into debt-slavery for piddling sums,” Amos said angrily. “They are the ones who are bringing on this catastrophe that will punish the guilty rich and the innocent poor as well.”
“Our Edomite brothers that pass through our way north know a lot from their travels,” Joshua said with awe.
“Yes they do. From their travels they glean a lot of information that would otherwise be hard to come by,” Amos said. “Unfortunately, unless you live in Jerusalem or are the rich in Samaria, the rest are considered outside the covenant, especially the Edomites and the Moabites.”
Amos continued, “Another reason is that certain oppressed ones who prior to this time had been living on small ancestral estates were now being forced to sell under pressure from an upper class elite who were taxing and cheating them to death.”
“How unjust!” now even Joshua was indignant. “The very ones sold into debt-slavery could have been landed owners like ourselves!”
“Exactly!” Amos replied. “And to make matters worse, the rich keep the cloaks taken in pledge from the desperately poor as collateral for small loans and holding them beyond nightfall!”
“That is expressly forbidden in the Torah!” Joshua added.
Amos was proud of his son for remembering well the teachings of the Law. “And that is why my son we have the Law from God through Moses. Unless we keep the Law of the Lord God, then they are useless, but more important, it will make our people vulnerable to the pagans from other lands around us.”
“Father,” his son asks. “When will this happen?”
“Son,” and now Amos looks him in the face and answers. “I do not know for certain, but it may be soon. All I know is that when the vision is delivered to the North, the Lord God will put into action what he has warned he will do, unless the people repent. By then, all my pleading will have no effect.”
“But, Father, why you?”
“I do not know,” Amos honestly said. “Who knows the mind of God.”
Joshua asks one more time, “Will we be safe?”
“If we put our trust in the Lord and keep his commandments,” Amos said, “we will be safe. The Lord God has promised this.”
Go Back To Where You Came From pt 3
Go Back To Where You Came From pt 2
Go Back To Where You Came From pt 1