Homily for the Sixth Sunday of Ordinary Time
February 15, 2025
St. Bartholomew Catholic Church
Fort Worth, Texas
Jeremiah 17:5-8
Psalm 1:1-2, 3, 4, 6
1 Corinthians 15:12, 16-20
Luke 6:17, 20-26
Jesus cautions us that prestige, power, and complacency can prompt us to lose our way with Him. To be a disciple of Jesus involves our dying to these selfish preoccupations so that the life of Christ can exist in us that we might raise with Him from the dead on the last day. His teaching on the Beatitudes in today’s Gospel requires us to invert the sense of values and purposes that our contemporary world espouses for meaning and happiness — power, financial success, and pleasure. These values only seem to promise freedom and to bring security to the individual. This teaching of Jesus in His Sermon on the Plain invites His disciples to risk estrangement from this world by trusting Him and by following Him in the way that He lives and loves. This way of life and love that involves surrender and trust is most clearly manifested and made present in the sacramental vocation of marriage with its graced and promised intentions of permanence, fidelity, and openness to God’s gift of children.
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Homily for the Vigil of the Twenty-fifth Sunday of Ordinary Time
September 21, 2024
Mass for Young Adults
St. Patrick Cathedral
Fort Worth, Texas
Wisdom 2:12, 17-20
Psalm 54:3-4, 5, 6, 8
James 3:16-4:3
Mark 9:30-37
Paragraphs 4-5 are in Spanish; English resumes in paragraph 6.
The reading from the Book of Wisdom today lets us hear the thoughts of the wicked. They devise ways to attack and persecute the just person for opposing them and bringing to light their wickedness; so, they torture and condemn the just to see if God will protect them. “Let us beset the just one, because he is obnoxious to us; he sets himself against our doings, reproaches us for transgressions of the law and charges us with violations of our training. Let us see whether his words be true; let us find out what will happen to him.” The just one is a cause for their own insecurity and fear and they resent him as an adversary.
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Life on the Chrism Trail 