Wisdom of the Ages (29th Sunday, Year A)

  When I was in middle school, I decided my mom and dad could use some parenting advice. So I sat them down and offered my two cents on how they could improve and better meet my lofty standards of parenthood. I’m sure they were grateful for my wisdom! They handled it remarkably well and promised to keep my suggestions in mind.

I look back on that moment now and cringe! I’m reminded of a Mark Twain quote about how foolish he thought his father was when he was a teenager, and how amazed he was by how much the old man seemed to have learned by the time he became an adult. Funny how that works. Sometimes it takes maturity to recognize that the people who came before us might actually have something to teach us.

I think that’s a helpful place to begin when considering the relationship between our Catholic faith and the way we vote. The Church has been wrestling with questions of right and wrong, human dignity, marriage, family, and our responsibilities to each other for 2,000 years. Drawing on Scripture, the teaching of Christ, and the experience of generations of Christians, she offers a depth of moral wisdom that no individual or political party can match. And we believe Christ has given his Church the Holy Spirit to guide her in faithfully teaching the truth about faith and morals.

That doesn’t mean the Church should wade into every issue that politics poses or that every statement made by a Church leader is infallible. But it does mean we should approach her moral teaching with humility rather than assuming we know better simply because we disagree.

This brings us to today’s Gospel, where Jesus tells us to “repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God.” We have responsibilities as citizens, and voting is one of them. But we are also citizens of heaven, and our highest allegiance belongs to God. So when those responsibilities come together, we need to ask ourselves: Am I allowing my faith to shape my political decisions, or am I allowing my political opinions to rule my faith?

That’s an important distinction in our time. Every election brings fierce arguments, dire warnings, and accusations of treachery. Political parties try to convince us that their candidates can fix all our problems and the other side threatens everything we hold dear. These divisions have found their way into families, friendships, and even our parish communities.

It can be tempting to approach our faith the same way. We choose our candidate, pick our party, and decide which issues matter most. Then we want the Church to agree with us, embracing the teachings that support our positions while setting aside those that challenge them.

But that’s not how this works. We should not ask the Church to validate the political choices we’ve already made. We must allow her teachings to challenge, inform, and sometimes correct those choices. If we believe Jesus Christ is the way, the truth, and the life, then his truth must be allowed to challenge us, even when it makes us uncomfortable or conflicts with our political loyalties.

So, how do we put that into practice when we vote?

First, recognize that voting is a moral responsibility, not simply a personal preference. We’re not just choosing the candidate we like best or the person who promises to make our lives easier. Our decisions help determine how society treats others, especially the vulnerable and those unable to defend themselves.  

Second, recognize that not all issues carry the same moral weight. Some actions are intrinsically evil and can never be justified, regardless of intentions or circumstances. The direct taking of innocent human life is one of them. That is why protecting unborn children deserves particular moral seriousness in our voting decisions. Abortion is not merely a political disagreement; it concerns whether the most vulnerable members of the human family will be protected and their most basic right…the right to life…respected.

    Our bishops identify this as a preeminent priority because without life, none of our other rights matter. The fact that all the Missouri bishops have endorsed Amendment 3 on the upcoming ballot should lead us to take their teaching and recommendation seriously as we prepare to vote in a couple weeks. Of course, our commitment to life cannot stop there. We must also build a culture in which every person’s dignity is recognized and vulnerable people receive practical support.

Third, form your conscience rather than simply following your feelings or political instincts. Saying, “I voted according to my conscience,” isn’t enough. Conscience is not simply whatever we happen to think is right. We must form it through prayer, Scripture, Church teaching, reason, and an honest examination of the facts. That means learning what candidates actually believe, considering the likely consequences of their policies, and being willing to reconsider our assumptions.

Finally, never confuse our Catholic faith with a political party. Our faith must remain free to challenge any party or platform when its positions or actions conflict with human dignity and the common good.

As your priest, I have a responsibility to help you understand what the Church teaches and encourage you to take those teachings seriously. I’m not here to endorse a political party or pretend every difficult decision has an easy answer. But our faith has real consequences for how we vote. We cannot separate what we believe here at Mass from the choices we make when we leave this church.

So, as we prepare to exercise our responsibilities as citizens, let’s begin with humility. Let’s pray for wisdom, study the issues and candidates carefully, and allow God’s truth to challenge us, even when it disrupts the positions we already hold. The goal is not simply to ‘win’. It is to exercise our civic responsibilities in a way that respects every human person’s dignity and advances the common good. We render to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, but we must never forget that everything ultimately belongs to God…including our loyalties, our decisions, and our votes.

May the Lord give us the wisdom to recognize what is true, the courage to stand up for what is right, and the humility to change when we need to change. And may our faith not only guide the way we vote, but shape the way we live, so that we may help build a society reflecting the love, justice, and mercy of Jesus Christ.

What's Your Excuse? (28th Sunday, Year A)

  One of the distinguishing marks of childhood, is how creative we can be when it comes to creating excuses. Many, if not most, were pretty far-fetched and unbelievable, but in our minds, they made perfect sense. Not so much to parents and teachers, and certainly not to your adult self looking back on them!

One of my brothers was particularly creative with language. Like most families, we weren’t allowed to argue with our fists. Generally, that’s a pretty good rule for all of us to live by! Well, my brother slipped up one day and made his point with another sibling kinetically. When he was pleading his case before Mom and Dad, he insisted, “I didn’t punch my sister. I pushed her with my fist.”

Extra credit for the effort to explain, but still an F in following the rules!

It’s funny how we can convince ourselves that our excuses make perfect sense, even when everyone else can see right through them. This is not something we completely outgrow. We just get a little more sophisticated in the excuses we make, especially when God invites us to do something we don’t really want to do.

Think about the Gospel today. Jesus tells us about a king who prepares a wedding feast for his son. He sends out invitations, but the guests refuse to come. So he sends his servants again, explaining that everything is ready. The feast is prepared, the table is set, and there’s no good reason not to come. Yet some guests go back to their farms or businesses, while others mistreat the messengers.

What makes this parable so striking is that the king isn’t asking them to do something burdensome. He’s inviting them to a celebration, to a free meal with all of the best food and drink! All the hard work is done. He wants to share something good with them, and they act as though they have better things to do.

Jesus is speaking directly to the religious leaders of his day, who refuse to recognize him as the Messiah. But he’s also speaking to us. God continues to invite us into personal relationship with him, and we can be remarkably good at coming up with reasons to turn him down. Sometimes our excuses sound perfectly reasonable. “I’m too busy to pray. I’ll get back to church when things settle down. I know I need to go to confession, but I’m not ready yet. I know I should forgive that person, but you don’t know what they did to me.” Other times, we simply put God off. We assume there will be more time later, when work slows down, the kids are older, or we finally get around to it.

But here’s the problem: we don’t have an unlimited amount of time to respond to God’s invitation. This life is the time we’ve been given to decide whether we will accept his invitation, to allow him to change us, and prepare our souls for eternity. God is patient and will continue to call us throughout our lives, but we shouldn’t presume we can put him off indefinitely.

What what makes our excuses so ridiculous is that God isn’t inviting us to something that will make our lives worse. He’s inviting us to the wedding feast! He wants us to experience his love, his mercy, and the joy of living in friendship with him. He knows us better than we know ourselves, and he knows what will truly make us happy.

One day, at the moment of death, each of us will stand before God, finally seeing his love and wisdom in their fullness. Imagine understanding how often he called you back to himself and how many opportunities you passed up because you thought you had something more important to do. How foolish some of our excuses will seem then! How silly it will seem that we were too busy to pray, too proud to apologize, or too stubborn to let go of a sin we knew was keeping us from God.

The point isn’t to make us afraid of God. It’s to help us recognize the urgency of his invitation while we still have time to respond. God isn’t looking for an excuse to keep us out. He’s looking for every opportunity to share his love and grace!

That’s also why the detail about the wedding garment at the end of the Gospel is so important. When the king finds a guest without a proper garment, the man has no explanation for himself. The invitation was real, and he was allowed to come, but he wasn’t prepared to honor it. Accepting God’s invitation means more than just showing up. It means allowing ourselves to be changed. We can’t expect to follow Jesus while insisting that nothing in our lives needs to be transformed.

Of course, none of us does this perfectly. We all fall short. But there’s a difference between struggling to follow Jesus and deciding that we don’t need to. The Church isn’t a club for perfect people. It’s a place for sinners who know they need God’s help. When we fail, we turn back to him rather than using our failures as another excuse to give up.

As we sit with this hard-hitting parable, we can ask, What excuse am I making for not responding to God’s invitation? Is there a sin I need to confront, a person I need to forgive, a commitment I need to honor, or more time I need to give to God?

We don’t have to fix everything at once. But we must take the invitation seriously and respond to the grace God is offering us today.

The good news is that the invitation is still open. No matter what we’ve done or how far we’ve wandered, we can still turn back to God. Let’s not wait until the end of our lives to discover how foolish or insane our excuses were. Let’s respond while we have the opportunity to determine our eternity. One day, when we see God face to face and finally understand the fullness of his love, we will realize that accepting his invitation was never a burden or an inconvenience. It was the most important decision we could ever make. May God give us the grace to become his chosen!

Have No Anxiety at All! (27th Sunday, Year A)

  If I asked you right now, “What are you anxious about?”… what would come to mind? Maybe it’s gas prices, interest rates, or the cost of just about everything. Maybe it’s political issues, the conflict with Iran, concerns about the power of artificial intelligence, or any of the countless other threats and problems that are placed in front of us every day.

This raises another interesting question: How much anxiety in our lives comes from the things that actually happen to us, and how much comes from the things we are constantly being told to worry about?

We live in a world where the average American spends something like six hours a day looking at screens. And a lot of what comes across those screens is designed to get our attention by making us angry, frightened or outraged. The news cycle has discovered that the crisis of anxiety is very good for business. The more worried we are, the more we click, scroll and watch. We do so almost subconsciously at this point, and then we wonder why we have trouble finding peace.

With this sense of worry and foreboding all around us, St. Paul’s words in the second reading are especially meaningful: “Have no anxiety at all.” That would make perfect sense coming from someone sitting on a beach, enjoying a peaceful retirement. But Paul wasn’t on easy street. He was under house arrest in Rome, in chains and under guard, waiting for his trial. He knew that his faith in Christ could very well lead to his execution. And yet his advice is still, “Have no anxiety at all.”

St. Paul isn't telling us to pretend that problems don't exist. He isn't saying that there aren't legitimate things to be concerned about. He is telling us that anxiety doesn't have to control us. Instead, he offers a better way: “In everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, make your requests known to God. Then the peace of God…will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.”

That is a very different way of living.

I think one of the problems for us is that we spend an enormous amount of time looking at everything except Christ. We wake up and reach for our phones. We check the news, scroll through social media, listen to commentary and read about the latest crisis. Before we know it, our minds are filled with the problems of the entire world, most of which we have absolutely no power to change or grace to get involved with, and we get consumed worrying about them.

I'm not speaking from some high and mighty place. I struggle with this too. I have a bad habit of reading news commentary before bed. Lately, I’ve also been spending far too much time stalking real estate. Neither is an especially good way to end the day. If the last things I am putting into my mind before I go to sleep are political commentary, bad news or houses I will never be able to buy, I'm not exactly giving God much opportunity to have the last word.

So recently I put a little New Testament on my nightstand. And I have made myself read for about five minutes every night, no matter how tired I am. The difference is no surprise but wonderfully noticeable: peace. Five minutes isn't much, but there is something very different about ending the day looking at the Lord rather than looking at the problems of the world or feeding the desire for more stuff.

And that gets us to the second part of Paul's advice. He says, “Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, whatever is excellent, whatever is worthy of praise, think about these things.”

In other words, pay attention to what you are putting into your mind. 

Our thoughts matter. What we repeatedly look at, listen to and dwell upon shapes the way we see the world and what our interior life becomes. If we spend hours consuming anger, outrage and anxiety, we shouldn't be surprised when we become more anxious, more angry and more discouraged.

So perhaps one of the simplest spiritual habits we could adopt is to fast from the news and the internet for a little while every day. Put down the phone. Turn off the television. We don't have to know every breaking story the moment it breaks, or carry the entire world around in our heads.

Instead, give some of that attention to Christ. Read a little bit of the Gospels. Read the daily Mass readings. Spend a few minutes sitting quietly in the presence of God. Better yet, come here and sit in this church or in the Adoration Chapel. Let your mind become quiet enough to remember that God is here and listen to what he has to say. Ultimately, the answer to anxiety isn't simply less information. It's more of God.

St. Paul knew suffering, uncertainty, imprisonment and the possibility of death. And yet he could say, “Have no anxiety at all.” The saints weren't people who lived in a world without problems. They were people who knew where to look when problems came.

So that's our challenge today. First of all to figure out: Where is our anxiety? What are we worried about right now? And how might we be feeding it in the things we watch, listen to, and think about?

And then after we identify the problem, we must follow St. Paul… by having no anxiety… Being prayerful… And turning our mind toward all that is good. The world will always give us something to worry about. But Christ is always giving us reasons to have peace!