Are You Investing in Heavenly Treasure?

 

Deacon Dave · Are You Investing in Heavenly Treasure?

Homily for the 25th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Sept. 21, 2025. Gospel of Luke 16:1-13. Theme: Are You Investing in Heavenly Treasure? 

 The Parable of the Shrewd Manager in today’s Gospel is not meant to give us a lesson in clever business management. So, no need to get caught up in the details of the steward cutting his employer’s profits nor in wondering why the story seems to approve the end justifying the means. These things are just embellishments that Jesus used to hold his listeners attention so that he could convey his teachings on the proper use of wealth and the importance of having a long-term perspective when it comes to our future security. 

 When Jesus tells us to be wise with our money (which the Bible calls “mammon”) he means that we need to have in mind the bigger picture of our existence. He doesn’t want us to be a short-sighted instant-gratification kind of people who think only about the limited span of life we have on planet Earth. He is directing us to plan ahead and make long-term investments that will yield for us amazing dividends in eternal life. In other words, like the clever steward of the parable, Jesus wants us to be purpose-driven but in the right direction. And that direction is towards Heaven! He is reminding us that the ultimate purpose for which each one of us was created is to know, love and serve God in this world so as to be happy with him forever in the next. 

 By both his words and his example, Jesus taught us the proper place that wealth and material things should occupy in our lives. You see, as God-come-in-the-flesh he could have pre-arranged for himself a life in a luxurious palace with royal parents and a multitude of servants. But instead, he freely chose to be born among animals in a stable. His years as an infant and a toddler, which should be filled with happy times and joyful experiences, were spent as a foreigner and refugee in Egypt, the land in which his human ancestors had been enslaved and mistreated. Returning back to Palestine, he grew up as the son of a poor working class family living in the backwoods village of Nazareth, which made him what some Americans would call “a hick from the sticks”. He then spent most of his life working in construction and the trades as a day laborer from sunrise to sunset. When he was around 30 years old, he became a traveling rabbi or Jewish teacher, who in his poverty had “nowhere to lay his head” as he himself described it. 

 So, you see, Jesus didn’t just talk the talk, but he walked the walk when it came to embracing a simple uncluttered life that puts material possessions in their proper place. He knew that the danger of wealth is not at all in the money itself but that we too easily run the risk of becoming possessed by it. And so because he loves us and wants us to know true happiness both there and hereafter, he warns us that we can too easily become consumed with an unhealthy desire for more and more – what we call greed. Almost without realizing it, we can allow our desires for wealth and possessions to become a driving force, a central motivation in our lives. For many, money can even become an idol, a false god that they worship seven days a week with all of their decisions revolving around it. 

 Jesus is teaching us that greed is such an ugly thing that can deceive even the best of us. It can blur our vision, making us see others as potential profits or debits instead of recognizing their innate dignity as persons. Greed tells us to use our wealth primarily for ourselves and our personal enjoyment. It can tempt us to dismiss the poor and needy as a drain on society or even to write them off completely as just being lazy. It motivates societies to sentence criminals to death rather than having to pay for their lifelong imprisonment. It fractures families of the deceased by leading them into fierce arguments over inheritances, destroying their bonds of relationship. 

 Jesus has taught in so many ways that an excessive preoccupation with money will ultimately ruin us and work against us in the eternal long-run. The only thing it will accumulate for the greedy is an investment with dividends awaiting them in Hell. Ultimately, what Jesus is telling us in today’s gospel is that from God’s point of view the amount of money we have is irrelevant to him. It’s our attitude towards whatever wealth we have and what we do with it that makes all the difference in this life and in the next.

The Healing Remedy of the Eucharist

 

Deacon Dave · The Healing Remedy of the Eucharist

Homily for Exaltation of the Holy Cross Sunday, Sept. 14, 2025. Numbers 21:4-9; Gospel of St. John 6:13-17. Theme: The Healing Remedy of the Eucharist 

 Have you ever noticed the emblem on medical alert bracelets? It is a snake wrapped around a pole and it comes directly from the Old Testament story we heard in our First Reading. Jesus also makes reference to it in today’s Gospel. This bronze serpent lifted up on a pole was a foreshadowing or prophecy of Jesus being lifted up, both on the cross and then from the grave, for the spiritual healing of all humanity. 

 As I was pondering today’s Scriptures that speak about healing for those who are dying, I thought of my long career in radiology. I was thinking about the cancer patients who put themselves into the beams of radiation for a chance to receive healing. All they had to do was show up for treatment and stay under the invisible radiating beam. Its power and energy did the rest. But they had to do this faithfully and frequently no matter how they felt. If they wanted the best chances at healing and living a better life, they needed to make this treatment a priority. 

 And you know, it’s very much the same for us who are spiritually dying of what has rightly been called the cancer of sin. First, like oncology patients we have to realize that if left untreated it’s fatal. Second, as it ravages our soul, it plunges us into an unmanageable life here on planet Earth that just spirals into worsening spiritual health. But we have real hope for a complete healing if we put ourselves under the care of Christ the Divine Physician. He who was lifted up on the cross for us is the remedy and the cure. In him and by the power of his cross, we can and will be restored to spiritual strength and wholeness! 

 

How do we do this? Well we can once again look to the cancer patients to show us the way. They consent to the prescribed treatment because they trust their physician. They undergo radiation therapy because they trust the skills of their health care team. And this personal trust enables them to faithfully follow instructions even if they do not fully understand the why or the how. They just keep trusting and hoping all will go well. We need to have this same kind of trusting attitude and the commitment to see our treatment through to the end, convinced that it’s a matter of eternal life or eternal death. 

 And what precisely is our prescribed treatment? It’s being in the Presence of Jesus our Savior who heals us from the inside out through the Holy Eucharist. And so we faithfully attend the Liturgy as vital to our treatment plan, allowing the supernatural rays of grace from Word and Sacrament to penetrate our hearts. As we are about to receive Jesus, we first gaze upon him who is held up before our eyes and then we profess our trust in him by saying, “Amen”. We consume his Sacred Body and Blood allowing his healing Presence to enter into us and radiate spiritual healing within us. 

 We keep showing up for this Eucharistic treatment plan because we realize that healing is a lifelong process. It’s an ongoing encounter with Jesus. and each time we receive Him with faith, we become a little more whole, a little more spiritually healthy. And so, even though it takes time to see the results we never lose hope but we keep trusting because we firmly believe that “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life.” (John 3:16)

The Hard Sayings of Jesus

 

Deacon Dave · The Hard Sayings of Jesus

Homily for the 23rd Sunday of Ordinary Time, Sept. 7, 20225. Gospel of St. Luke 14:25-43. Philemon 9-10, 12-17. Theme: The Hard Sayings of Jesus 

 I want to focus on our Second Reading, but I can't pass on explaining some potentially confusing words of Jesus that we hear in the Gospel today. So let me touch briefly on that first and then we’ll dive into the unusual and powerful Letter to Philemon. 

 When Christ talks about hating one's family and hating one's life, he is using a common idiom in his culture that means “to love less than”. He does not mean hate as we understand it as “detest” or “despise”. What Jesus is emphasizing is that our love and allegiance must be given to him first and above all of our other relationships. And when he talks of “renouncing” ones’ possessions, it’s another way of saying that we must be detached from the money we have and indifferent to the material goods we have accumulated. In other words, should our wealth and personal goods be taken away, it would not change our attachment to him. So, “hating” and “renouncing” are other ways of saying that we stand in need of conversion of heart, renewal of mind, and reorientation of priorities with Jesus as the Center. 

 We see these “hard sayings of Jesus” (as they have come to be called) lived out in a powerful way in the Letter to Philemon from which our Second Reading is taken. There are three main characters involved in the story: the Apostle Paul (the letter-writer), Philemon (the letter’s primary recipient) and Onesimus (the subject of the letter). Another thing we need to know in order to understand the full impact of our Second Reading is the backstory that leads up to the passage read at Mass. Philemon is such a short letter (it fits on one side of a sheet of paper) that I strongly recommend reading the whole thing so as to put today's passage in its proper perspective. 

 Ok so on to the backstory. Philemon was a well-respected Christian leader. We know he was extremely wealthy and prominent because the Christian community in his city gathered for Mass in his spacious home (there were no churches in early Christianity due to persecution). We also know of his upper class status because he had slaves and one of them, a pagan named Onesimus, seems to have done him some serious wrong and then hightailed it out of town! But the runaway eventually got arrested and was thrown into prison where he met Paul, who converted him to Christianity. The two of them formed a tight bond with one another. 

 It’s at this point that we come into the story in our Second Reading. Paul calls Philemon to have mercy on Onesimus and gives him accountability by making sure the letter is not private. It is also addressed to Apphia (Mrs. Philemon) and Archippus (his pastor) as well as to the entire parish! So everyone knows what is going on and is watching to see if Philemon will rise to the occasion and do the right thing. Paul urges him to reorient his relationship with Onesiumus now that the two of them had been made one in Christ by Baptism. Philemon was to see that they were equals and Onesimus was to be treated as a brother and not a slave. This might all sound pretty neat and clean to us but in 1st century Roman culture it was radical and revolutionary! 

 Paul was calling Philemon to a radical revamping of his attitudes based on Christ’s hard sayings in today’s Gospel. As a disciple of the Lord, Philemon was to love God more than his role as church-leader, more than his reputation, and more than himself. He was being asked to carry the cross of possible social humiliation by being a master who sees himself as equal to his slave. He was being called by Paul to give a real life example to his home-church parish of Jesus’ teaching about detachment and renunciation for the sake of the Kingdom of God! 

 The Letter to Philemon is a summons for all of us to reexamine our lives, our relationships, and our attitudes in the light of the hard sayings of Jesus. This means that we probably will need to reform and revamp our relationships with people and possessions as well as how we see ourselves. But like Philemon, we can find hope and help to do so in our parish community. For it is there that we celebrate and receive the Eucharist that gives us the supernatural strength to actually live these (and other) hard sayings of Jesus. And in our parish community we should be able to meet like-minded Christians whose example and spiritual support help us along this difficult pathway. A parish should be more than just where we show up on the weekend for Mass. 

 Oh! Do you wonder what happened to Philemon and Onesimus? Did they do as Paul said or did they have a bigger falling out? Well, Philemon was so deeply changed by Paul’s words that he sent copies of the letter to all of the Christian churches so that they, too, could learn that all the baptized are equal in God’s eyes and all are to live at-oneness with each other: rich or poor, slave or free, man or woman. As for Onesimus, he became a missionary of the Gospel and later in life was made the Bishop of Ephesus in Turkey, eventually becoming a martyr for Jesus Christ. Isn’t it amazing what God's grace can do to change hearts and transform lives once we choose to lower our pride and humbly set out to put the hard sayings of Jesus into practice?