Homily for 18^th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year C)
August 3-4, 2019
St. Lawrence, Mentor – Sat 7:30 PM; Sun 10:30 AM
St. Joseph, Fertile – Sun 8:30 AM
Sacred Heart, EGF – Sun 5:30 PM

Focus:              So many things don’t matter to God
Function:        Seek what matters to God

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DL Moody (1800’s preacher): Our greatest fear should not be of failure, but of succeeding at things in life that don’t really matter.

 So many things don’t matter to God

• Your hair color
• The car you drive
• Sports results
• The plot of the latest TV show
• The latest drama on social media
• Your job title
• Vanity – having my ego stoked
• Money, possessions

So many things don’t matter to God

Some things matter greatly to God:

• Relationships
• Quantity time
• Virtue: the disposition to love and to live in right relationship with others. Humility, Patience, Generosity, Gratitude, Diligence, Discipline, Temperance, Chastity.
• Learning to love – learning to make a gift of yourself to others
• Loving God and Loving others: union with God and union with others. PURPOSE – THIS IS WHY YOU EXIST. God made us for him.
• Prayer, which fosters and strengthens your relationship with God
• Repentance: “turn away from sin and believe in the Gospel”
• Eternity – our eternal salvation

So many things don’t matter to God.

Some things matter greatly to God.

Holiness: transforming our desires so that “what matters to me is what matters to God.”
To advance along the path of holiness is to stop chasing what matters to me and to start chasing what matters to God.

In your own life, how do you know what matters to God?

The gospel gives us a clue.
The gospel puts it into perspective.

The man in the gospel chased things that did not matter to God. He had been given all of these riches, all of these good things.  Instead of emptying his barns and making a gift of what he had to others, he stored them up for himself so that he could rest on his laurels.

And that very night his life was demanded of him.

How do you know what matters to God?

Here’s the test:
If your life was demanded of you tonight, what will you wish you would have done?

…

Recently I listened to a talk where the speaker likened how old you are to the time of day.
If you are 15 years old, it’s 10:25 AM.
If you are 20 years old, it’s 11:34 AM.
If you are 25 years old, it’s 12:42 PM – just after lunch.
If you are 35 years old, it’s 3:00 PM.
If you are 45 years old, it’s 5:15 PM.
If you are 50 years old, it’s 6:25 PM.
If you are 70 years old, it’s 11:00 PM.

It puts it in perspective, doesn’t it? I thought I had more time…

Are you chasing what matters to God?  Or are you chasing what matters to you?  When you get to the end of your life, you will wish you had chased what mattered to God, because what matters to God is what will ultimately matter to us in the end.

Cardinal Francis George: The only things you take with you in the life to come are the things you’ve given away on earth.

Bishop Robert Barron: You’ll have in the heavenly realm nothing other than the love you’ve cultivated here below.

The man in the gospel would not give his life away, so his life was demanded of him.

John Paul II: Man will not fully find himself until he learns to make a sincere gift of himself.

Jesus: He who loses his life for my sake will find it.

We are meant to give our lives away.

My work in the Office of Vocations with the Diocese of Crookston: walking with guys discerning a vocation to the priesthood. It’s so often the same.  “I think this is what God wants.  It’s not what I want”

To the infinite call of God, man must add his finite yes.

God empties himself in the call to the man, man must empty himself so that he can receive that call.

The man being called to the priesthood must learn to want for himself what God wants for him.

The man must die to himself, must empty himself, in order to be filled with what God desires to give.

It’s a painful thing to give up what you want, but once you do, you find that really you wanted what God wanted for you all along.

State of things in the Diocese.  It takes 6-8 years to journey through seminary. 15 of our 35 active priests eligible to retire in that time.  We have 4 men in seminary.  God will provide.  This is not a cause for despair, but it is a cause to ask ourselves if we are doing our part, if we are doing all that we can.

God is still calling, but the men he is calling may not want what God wants.  To get to that point – they need your help.

They need you to empty yourself of your riches so that they can discover what God wants for them, and ultimately, what we want for them – to realize their vocations as priests.

Will you give of the riches of your encouragement, speaking that word that you’d rather hold in because you don’t know how it will be received?

Will you pour out the gift of your prayers and the sacrifice of your time? In the words of your pastor: “How can we expect a man to give his whole life in service to God’s people when we will not give an hour a week before the Blessed Sacrament praying for his vocation?”

Brothers and sisters,
The goal of life is not to fill your barn.
The goal of life is to empty your barn,
to empty it so that you have room to receive what God wishes to give you: life to the full on this earth and eternal life in the Kingdom of Heaven.

Let me say it again.

What matters to God is not that you fill your barn.
What matters to God is that you empty your barn so that he can fill it with what he wants to give you.

What ultimately matters to God? You.  He emptied himself for you.

What does he want to give you?
His very self (Crucifix)

What does he want to give you?
His very self (Eucharist/altar)

He emptied himself for you.
Will you empty yourself for him?