Homilies
Featured
Think of one person it is hard for you to be patient with. That is where God’s chisel is at work in you this week. Let God keep chipping away, until what is left looks like love.
Over and over again in the Scriptures the fullness of God’s kingdom, the experience of heaven, is portrayed as a great banquet. The only requirement is the desire to receive God’s grace and to participate with joy. The wedding garment, then, is the grace of God, freely given, and the new life that grace produces in us: love, mercy, and good deeds.
The way we are living now, not so much our past actions, matters in the eyes of God. No matter how often we have fallen, if today we are repentant sinners, God is ever ready to forgive and accepts us as his children.
God’s justice seeks to heal, to restore, to embrace and build up. Where love is involved, it is never too late.
At the heart of Christianity is an experience of the forgiveness of sins. We can’t say that we have begun to understand the Gospel if we do not have a profound sense of our need for God’s forgiveness. When we hold onto resentment and unforgiveness we wound ourselves and prevent our own healing and peace.
Our Lady of Good Hope, pray for us. Pray for this parish, that it may be a true community of missionary disciples of Jesus Christ. Pray for each of us, that the grace which transformed you may go on transforming us, until we, too, come to share in the glory you already enjoy.
Imagine what would change if we actually believed that the Messiah is among us - that Christ is present in the person next to us, however irritating or wrong they may be. We are responsible for each other. The Christian journey is not a solo flight; we travel it together, as fellow pilgrims.
To be human is to long for meaning and purpose. We are deeply spiritual beings and our souls long for that which truly satisfies.
There is a hunger in the human heart to know where we come from — whose son we are, whose daughter, whose line we continue.
The deeper question is not only where we come from, but who God says we are when he calls us by name. Not the identity we construct for ourselves, but the name Jesus already speaks over us.
We can fall into the trap of thinking that God has gone silent. Really, we have been listening for a shout, while God often chooses to whisper. The question is not whether God is speaking. It’s whether we've made room to hear him. The step of faith doesn't have to be perfect. It only has to be taken.
We are a people made for the heart of God and our true purpose is a heart relationship with God. In the Eucharist the Lord of the universe so humbles Himself that for our salvation He hides Himself under a morsel of bread and invites us back to the bread which truly satisfies so that it is the food we are asked today to become for others.