Living by Increased Faith, 27th Sunday (C), October 6, 2019

Fr. Roger J. Landry
St. Sylvester Church, Medford, New York
Twenty-Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C
October 6, 2019
Hab 1:2-3.2:2-4, Ps 95, 2 Tim 1:6-8.13-14, Lk 17:5-10

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:

The following text guided today’s homily: 

In the Gospel today, the apostles did not ask the Lord for money. They didn’t ask him for fame. They didn’t ask him, like Solomon, for worldly wisdom and prudence. They didn’t ask him for health or a long life. They didn’t ask them for the Yankees to beat the Twins, Astros and Dodgers to capture the World Series. They asked him for something they had discovered was far more important than all of these things combined. They begged him, “Increase our faith!” The first reading from the prophet Habakkuk tells us explicitly that “the just man lives by faith” and the apostles wanted to be such men.

The way we evaluate whether we are living by faith, Jesus tells us in the Gospel, is whether we are faithful in “doing all [we] have been commanded to do.” As St. Paul describes in the second reading, it’s whether we “take as [our] norm the sound words” that we have heard “in the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus” and guard the faith as a “rich trust” and that we seek to “stir flame.” God wants us to be on fire with faith. He wants us to treat our faith as a treasure. He wants us to look at his “sound words” and all he commands us as the path to progress in faith.

The apostles’ prayer for increased faith shows us their humble recognition that up until then — even though they were followers of Jesus, even though they were listening to his words, even though they had become in fact his friends — they were not living enough by faith and that they needed the Lord’s help to grow. This morning we come here with the same prayer to the Lord, to increase our faith, so that we might become the type of just men and women God and we both want to be.

To ask for an increase in faith means to ask for three things, because faith means these three things.

First, it means an obedient trust in God. We see this type of trust in Abraham, our father in faith, and in Mary, our mother in faith. When God asked seventy-five year-old Abraham to leave everything he had behind and journey to a far-away land, Abraham trusted in God and did so (Gen 12:1 ff). He trusted in God when God promised that he and Sarah in their old age would finally conceive a son (Gen 15:5; Gen 18:1 ff). He trusted in God even when God had him wait almost 25 years — even after he was 75 — to fulfill that promise. He trusted in God when, 13 years later, God seemed to be asking him to sacrifice that son, Isaac, even though Isaac was the son God promised through whom he would make Abraham the father of many nations (Gen 22:1ff). Abraham trusted in the Lord so much that he would do anything God asked. Similarly, Mary trusted in God’s words through Gabriel that she would conceive a child without the help of a man and that child would be the Son of God (Gen 1:35). She trusted in God when Simeon prophesied that her Son the Messiah would be a “sign of contradiction” rather than a triumphant king and that her own soul would be pierced (Lk 2:34-35). She trusted when she saw her Son carry the wood of his sacrifice up the same mountain that Isaac ascended and no angel held back the hands of the Roman soldiers as they nailed him to the Cross. She trusted when she held her Son’s limp, bloodied body in her arms. She trusted that God would bring great good, in fact our salvation, out of all of this evil. Likewise for us to ask God to “increase our faith!” is to ask Him to increase our trust in Him, so that we might confidently obey him in everything, but especially in the most difficult times and circumstances. Yesterday was the feast of St. Faustina Kowalska, the Polish cloistered sister through whom Jesus revealed to us devotion to his Divine Mercy. Jesus had her paint an image of his blessing us with his mercy at the bottom of which he instructed her to write, “Jesus, I trust in you.” The first way we’re called to grow in faith is through trusting in God, trusting in his ways, trusting in how all things work out for the good for those who love him, even suffering, or death, or crucifixion. When we pray, “Lord increase our faith,” God responds to infusing within us this gift, but he also puts us in tests and circumstances — like he did with Abraham and Mary — in which we need to grow that moral muscle. But whenever we entrust ourselves to God in those circumstances, we grow in faith.

The second meaning of faith is the content of what we believe on the basis of our trust in God who reveals those truths. This meaning refers to the various truths of the faith, found in the Creed we profess each Sunday, in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and embedded throughout the Church’s prayer. To appeal to the Lord “to increase our faith!” means to ask him to give us a greater knowledge and understanding of the truths of faith he reveals. The Lord wants to augment our assimilation of the doctrine of the faith, to help us cooperate with the Holy Spirit as he seeks to “guide us to all truth” (Jn 16:12-13). But in general God won’t do so without our effort. To pray for increased faith implies a willingness to make the effort, in response to God’s help, to get to know our faith better, by studying the Catechism, by reading what the Holy Father writes to us, by praying Sacred Scripture, by attending adult education classes, by taking advantage of the incredible materials available now in books, podcasts, videos, online, from programs like Word on Fire, or Formed, Dynamic Catholic, or Ascension Press, or so many solid Catholic publishing houses. To ask God to increase our faith without a willingness to put more effort into learning and understanding the content of the faith would be like a seventh grader’s asking God to help him get a 100 on a test without ever wanting to study. It is only in such a process of growing in faith through working with the light of the Holy Spirit to understand it better that the Lord makes us ever more persons of faith.

The third meaning of faith is lived faith, what St. Paul calls “faith working through love” (Gal 5:6). St. James reminds us that “faith without works is dead,” and if we have true faith, it will impact — and impact in a big way — how we think, how we speak, how we behave. Earlier this week I was reading an article about some of the 13 bishops Pope Francis made Cardinals yesterday. One of them is Sigitas Tamkevicius of Lithuania. He spent over a decade in a Soviet labor camp because he was a Catholic priest who courageously defended human rights. He survived those years through prayer and Mass, secretly absconding bread and grapes from the kitchen surreptitiously to make the elements needed for Mass. He was asked by a reporter about the brutal suffering he endured, and he didn’t want to get into his scars. He wanted to focus on something he considered more important. Cardinal Tamkevicius responded matter-of-factly, “If a believer isn’t ready to suffer for his faith, then he’s not much of a believer.” St. Paul tells us in today’s second reading, “God did not give us a spirit of cowardice but rather of power and love and self-control,” and for that reason we should “not be ashamed of [our] testimony to our Lord, … but bear [our] share of the hardship for the Gospel with the strength that comes from God.” Cardinal Tamkevicius did. So many Christians with him in the labor camp did. And we are called to that same courage, love, self-control and witness. To be a believer is to commit to live what we believe. We believe in the word of God and therefore we treasure it and read it. We believe in the Sacrament of Baptism and bring our children at the earliest instant. We believe in the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist and so come to Mass, because we recognize that there can be nothing greater than being in the presence of God and receiving him within. We believe in the need for the forgiveness of sins and so we humbly come to confession to receive the mercy Jesus sent out the apostles on Easter Sunday to bestow in his name. We believe in the commandments, the beatitudes, the corporal and spiritual works of mercy, in simple right and wrong, and seek, with God’s help, to live by the faith and the morals that flow from the faith. To ask God to increase our faith is to desire, with God’s help, to grow in steadfast practice of the faith.

Today as we echo the apostles’ prayer for increased faith, God wants to help us grow in trust of him, in knowledge and understanding about the truths of our faith, and in our putting our faith into action.

This Sunday there is a particular application of this request for greater trust in God, greater understanding of the truths he has revealed, and greater witness to them in action. The bishops of our country have designated the first Sunday of October “Respect Life Sunday,” so that Catholics throughout our land may become “just” by living fully our faith with respect to the sacredness of all human life. God made us, and every human being, however young or old, frail or strong, in his image and likeness. He says whatever we do or fail to do to the least of his brothers and sisters, we do or fail to do to him. There are many types of disrespect and irreverence for life that happens in our culture. We saw it in what happened early yesterday morning in Manhattan when a 24 year old man took a metal bar and proceeded to bludgeon four sleeping homeless men to death and injuring a fifth. We see it in the bullying that takes place in schools or on cyberspace, in the torture that occurs in situation of war or even peacetime, the creation and destruction of embryos in laboratories, in the facilitation of suicide among the elderly and suffering, in the hardened hearts toward those in prison or on death row, in the xenophobia and racism that so often rejects others because they are different, in the disregard of the 815 million people in the world, including 155 million children, who are chronically malnourished, terrible spate of mass murders and terrorist attacks against totally innocent people taking place in schools, houses of worship, sporting events and concerts, movies and Walmarts. But we also know where all of this irreverence for life begins. It begins with the way we treat human beings at their start, when they are at their smallest, most vulnerable, most dependent. As St. Mother Teresa of Calcutta said with holy candor 26 years ago at the National Prayer Breakfast, “The greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a war against the child — a direct killing of the innocent child — murder by the mother herself. And if we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another? …  Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching the people to love, but to use any violence to get what they want. That is why the greatest destroyer of love and peace is abortion.” Those are very powerful words from a woman of great faith, who trusted in God, who knew deeply what the Church has always taught, and who lived by that faith.

Each year in our country, more than 638 thousand babies, made in God’s image and likeness, are killed through surgical abortion in our country, one every 49 seconds. In the course of this homily, another 25 — a whole kindergarten class five years from now — will have their lives ended. If we had ears to listen to what they would want to communicate, I think we would hear their womb-piercing silent screams to us and to God, saying, in the words of the first reading: “How long shall I cry for help, and you will not listen? Or cry to you ‘Violence!’ and you will not save?” So many Americans, including Catholic Americans, have turned a deaf ear to those cries. On behalf of them today, and on behalf of God, the Church asks us to tune in their frequency and to act. Paraphrasing the words of today’s Responsorial Psalm, “If today you hear [their] voice, harden not your hearts!” To be a faithful Catholic living by faith, one who lives by all that God has commanded, including the fifth commandment not to kill, means to respect life, to protect life, to reverence life, and to work with a “spirit of … power and love and self-control,” to bring to an end the culture and laws that support the practice of aborting those made in God’s image and likeness in the womb. It means to care for those women who are pregnant in need of long-term help. It means with tender compassion to reach out to the women who have had abortions and bring them to receive God’s mercy and divine healing. It means “not to be ashamed of [our] testimony to our Lord” and boldly, prudently and prophetically address the cultural practices flowing from the sexual revolution that put so many women in situations of unwanted pregnancies as well as to indicate to our contemporaries a better way, a way far more consistent with life, love and goodness.

Today God wants to give every Catholic an increase in faith so that we may live out of faith in reverencing every human life and “bear [our] share of hardship for the Gospel with the strength that comes from God.” Jesus says that if we have faith the size of a mustard seed, we could transplant forests into seas. He wants us to have faith so much greater than that, so that we can replace our culture with one that respects every human life. We remember that soon after Jesus was born, Herod hunted him down to try to murder him. In trying to kill Jesus, he shed the blood of countless “holy innocents” in and around Bethlehem of Judea. We ask the Lord Jesus to make us strong so that, like Mary and Joseph, who courageously collaborated with God the Father and the Holy Spirit to save Jesus’ life, we might work courageously to save the Holy Innocents of our own day. To give us that increase it faith, he gives us himself on the inside in the Holy Eucharist. Sometimes people have more faith in the power of two Advil to relieve a headache than they do in the power of receiving Jesus in the Eucharist to make us holy. But if we receive him with the faith he wants to give us, he can, through Holy Communion, increase our faith so that it might be like that of Saint Teresa of Calcutta, Pope St. Sylvester, the patron of this parish, or Cardinal Sigitas Tamkevicius. From the inside Jesus can and wants to make us what the Cardinal calls “such believers” that we will live for our faith, love our faith, give witness to our faith, and, if God wills it, with “power and love and self-control,” courageously suffer for our faith and die for Him who suffered and died out of love for us. This is our faith. This is the faith of the Church. How proud we are to profess it in Christ Jesus our Lord!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Gospel LK 17:5-10

The apostles said to the Lord, “Increase our faith.”
The Lord replied,
“If you have faith the size of a mustard seed,
you would say to this mulberry tree,
‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.
“Who among you would say to your servant
who has just come in from plowing or tending sheep in the field,
‘Come here immediately and take your place at table’?
Would he not rather say to him,
‘Prepare something for me to eat.
Put on your apron and wait on me while I eat and drink.
You may eat and drink when I am finished’?
Is he grateful to that servant because he did what was commanded?
So should it be with you.
When you have done all you have been commanded,
say, ‘We are unprofitable servants;
we have done what we were obliged to do.'”