Stirring Into a Flame the Gift of Our Faith, 27th Sunday (C), October 2, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Twenty-Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C
October 2, 2022
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 text that guided the homily was: 

• Right before today’s Gospel begins, Jesus told his followers about the millstone that awaited the necks of those who cause scandal to the young, about the need to correct our brothers and sisters who sin, and about the need to forgive them each they sin against us, repent and ask for reconciliation. All three of these are challenging to live and in response to them, the apostles say to Jesus, “Increase our faith!” They knew they needed a deeper trust in God to rise up to the challenges of setting good example, loving others enough to help them convert, and forgiving those who repeatedly offend or hurt us. Jesus in response to their request describes the power of faith, using typical rabbinical hyperbole to say that if we had even a tiny amount of faith we could transplant mountains. He was saying we should be grateful for the gift of faith we have and act on it, while at the same time always seeking to make our faith stronger by exercising it. Faith is an extraordinary gift. God through the prophet Habakkuk tells us in today’s first reading that “the just man lives by faith,” and that he permits even violence, destruction, strife, discord and misery, to help us grow in faith, which God promises “will not disappoint” even if we sometimes have to wait patiently for the answer to the prayers we make in faith. Ultimately Jesus wants to say about us what we said to a Canaanite woman in the Gospel who approached Jesus begging perseveringly for a miracle for her sick daughter “Woman, great is your faith,” or what he exclaimed with amazement about a Centurion who asked him for a miraculous cure at a distance when his beloved servant was at the point of death: “Amen, I say to you, in no one in Israel have I found such faith.” This Sunday the whole Church is meant to focus on the gift of faith, to be grateful for the mustard seed or mountain of faith we have, and to consider prayerfully how God wants to help our faith increase to the point that he can praise us, too, with amazement for having great faith that excels beyond the rest.
• At a university, students grow in lots of ways. They certainly grow in knowledge about scores of subjects and hopefully advance in wisdom. They grow in age, some in size, and expand a network of friendships. But the most important way Catholic students are called to grow is in faith. In today’s second reading, a middle-aged, imprisoned St. Paul writes a still-young St. Timothy, whom he had met in Lystra during his first missionary journey through modern-day Turkey, and who had left his mother Eunice and grandmother Lois to grow in faith at St. Paul’s side until the time when St. Paul would be able to send St. Timothy as a missionary himself and even appoint him a bishop for the important, growing Christian community in Ephesus. St. Paul always remained his mentor, champion and spiritual father. In today’s excerpt from his second letter to St. Timothy, St. Paul reminds him to “stir into a flame the gift of God” that he had received. St. Paul knew it was easy for people of all ages, including precocious young Christian leaders like Timothy, to let the spark of faith die out, to become tepid or lukewarm, as challenges and oppositions mount, as the life of faith stands in ever greater contradiction to worldly values, and as the price of Christianity becomes costly or even fatal. He urges St. Timothy not to let this happen, but actively to fan into a flame the faith he has so that it might grow from a mustard seed into a mountain and become a bonfire that could light the world ablaze. Today St. Paul from heaven gives us all the same advice.
• For St. Timothy, we can see the difficulties he was facing. Ephesus was the location of the enormous sanctuary of the sex goddess Artemis and all the commercialization of statues not to mention commodification of women in cultic prostitution to sustain it. The wealth that flowed into Ephesus made it the temple treasury the world’s largest bank in the world at the time. Those in charge were very powerful and knew that Christianity was very bad for business — not just because Christians didn’t believe in Artemis as a fertility goddess but trained believers in purity of heart, chaste love and the sanctity of marriage. With lots of money, power and influence, they battled St. Paul for more than two years. After Paul left to continue his missionary journeys, they continued to war against St. Timothy and the Christians present. It was without question demanding work that required strong faith. And St. Paul was giving his spiritual son a pep talk. He reminded him that the gift of faith he had received was not a “spirit of cowardice” but rather a spirit of “power, love and self-control.” He wanted Timothy, in the face of muscular, rich, and well-connected opposition, to remember the power of God that had wrought the miracles in Egypt, Jesus’ wonders in the Gospel, and St. Paul’s own astonishing feats of faith. In the face of those who were making sex a god, he wanted him to buttress him and the other Christians in “love and self-control.” He also wanted him to be confident in the truth of the Gospel. “Do not be ashamed of your testimony to our Lord,” he said, as if the Gospel were not good news of liberation from sin and even death. He urged him to “bear your share of the hardship of the Gospel with the strength that comes from God,” namely the courage God imparts through faith, to take as his rule of life the “sound words” he had heard from Paul in the “faith and love that are in Christ Jesus,” and to “guard this rich trust,” this treasure of faith, with the help of the Holy Spirit.
• We’re not in ancient Ephesus, but there are obviously many challenges that Christians face in New York in general, not to mention on campus. Many Christians allow the fire of faith to grow cold. God wants to help us instead to fan our faith into a flame that can illumine and warm others. He wants to give us through faith the spirit of power, love and self-control, to make us strong in testimony to the Lord, capable of bearing hardship in fidelity to the one who carried and died on the Cross for us. He wants us to live by the “sound words” of the Gospel with faith and love and to guard the gift of God with the help of the fire of the Holy Spirit. He wants, in short, to increase our faith, like he strengthened the apostles, St. Paul, St. Timothy and so many Christians, including here at Columbia, throughout the centuries.
• What does it mean to grow in faith? What are we asking him to fan into a flame? It means three things, because faith means three things.
• It means, first, to grow in an obedient trust in God. We see this type of trust in Abraham, our father in faith, and in Mary, our mother in faith. Abraham trusted in God and left his native place at 75 and journeyed to a far away land. He trusted when God promised that he and Sarah in their old age would finally conceive a son and still trusted when God made him wait almost 25 years to fulfill that promise. He trusted in God even 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. 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. 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. 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, lovingly obey him in everything, but especially in the most difficult times and circumstances. God responds to our prayer by infusing within us this gift, but he also often puts us in circumstances — like he did with Abraham and Mary, like Habakkuk and Paul — in which we are able to grow that moral muscle because we’re forced, like Timothy in Ephesus, by those circumstances to trust in God more.
• 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 praying Sacred Scripture, by studying the Catechism, by reading what the Holy Father and the bishops write to us, 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 student’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. 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, seek to live according to our baptismal promises, and bring our children to be baptized at the earliest instant. We believe in the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist and so come to Mass and adoration. We believe in the need for the forgiveness of sins and so we humbly approach 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 Catholic faith and morals. To ask God to increase our faith is to desire, with God’s help, to grow in steadfast practice of the faith.
• A great and powerful example of the life of faith, of a young person who allowed the gift of faith to be fanned into a big beautiful bonfire, is found in the shrine in the back of the Church, St. Therese of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face, also known as the Little Flower or St. Therese of Lisieux. Yesterday was her feast day and Friday was the 125th anniversary of her death, at the young age of 24, in a Carmelite Convent in northwest France. In a couple of weeks, we will mark the 25th  anniversary of St. John Paul II’s naming her, by far, the youngest doctor of the Church, because of what she taught us about the life of faith even though she never even attended high school. Devotion to her has grown so rapidly over the last 125 years because her teaching has made the life of faith and the pursuit of holiness so practical. Saints are always living commentaries on the Gospel and hence it’s fitting for us, on the cusp of her feast, with a beautiful shrine to her in our Church, to focus on what she called her “little way of trust and love,” the way she taught us how to grow in faith and spiritual maturity while remaining spiritually childlike.
• The first element is a mature Christian dependence on God the Father. Often, as we grow up, we cease to relate to God the way we should, as beloved children. We may not act quite as poorly as the prodigal son in the parable, who treated his father as if he were dead, but we often just want to “grow up” and leave home, to do things on our own, to be less dependent on him than we were before and more self-reliant and self-sufficient. St. Therese’s little way of faith and love begins with grounding oneself in who the Father is, how much he loves us, and responding with affectionate trust like a child does to loving parents. She linked two passages of the Gospel together to arrive at an important truth. Both passages point to a condition to enter into the kingdom of heaven. The first is, “Unless you convert and become like little children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.” The second is “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for the kingdom of heaven is theirs.” To be spiritually childlike is to recognize that everything ultimately comes from God and to open our hands to receive his blessings. Dependence on God in this way is the first means to grow in faith.
• The second is to trust in God and in his merciful love. Once we grasp that we are poor little children, then we learn how to relate to God and particularly to his mercy. At an age in which the Jansenist heresy made people fear God and his wrath and obsess about sin, she taught us how to trust in God’s mercy. She said: “I have long believed that the Lord is more tender than a mother. I know that a mother is always ready to forgive trivial, involuntary misbehavior on the part of her child. Children are always getting into trouble, falling down, getting themselves dirty, breaking things – but all this does not shake their parents love for them.” Nor do our faults shake God’s love for us. She was able to have this child-like confidence in God’s love because she understood the whole meaning of the Incarnation. She once wrote that she could not understand how anyone could be afraid of a God who became a child. God became small precisely so that we shouldn’t be intimidated by him, so that we wouldn’t be afraid. The way of spiritual childhood is a way of meeting, learning and imitating the child Jesus, who teaches us in a very concrete way to relate to God. To trust in God’s unending and infinite mercy as a beloved son and daughter is the second way to grow in faith.
• The final way I’m mention that taught us how to increase in faith is by nourishing our sense of divine filiation through life according to the Holy Spirit. St. John Paul II wrote in 1997, in a document explaining why he was declaring her a doctor of the Church, that “the most authentic meaning of spiritual childhood” is “the experience of divine filiation, under the movement of the Holy Spirit.” When he visited Lisieux for the first time as Pope in 1980, he said that it was precisely the Holy Spirit that led St. Therese on this “little way” and helped her to walk it with great generosity. He said that she grasped the “fundamental mystery,” the “reality of the Gospel,” that we have truly received “a spirit of adoption that makes us cry out ‘Abba, Father!’ The “little way,” he continued, is the way of “holy childhood,” adding that nothing could be more fundamental and universal than the fact that God is our Father and we are his beloved children. “To be a child, to become like a child, means to enter into the heart of the greatest mission to which Christ has called each of us. This way of divine filiation, made possible by the work of the Holy Spirit, is a way of love in the heart of the Church our mother. Life according to the Holy Spirit as children of God is the third way we grow in faith.
• Late in her short life, she adopted two missionary priests as her spiritual brothers. They had written the Carmel asking for prayers and the superior entrusted them to her prayers. After telling one of them, “my way is all confidence and love,” she continued, “I hope that one day Jesus will make you walk by the same way as me.” Today, St. Therese is praying for all of us to walk by the same way as she did, the way in which our faith grows, in which it’s stirred into a flame, the way that it’s power, love and self-control radiates. I’d urge you, every time you look at her beautiful statue, to know that she is praying for you to grow in faith just like she did as a young Catholic, just like St. Timothy did, so that your flame of faith may contagiously bring many others to the Source of that fire.
• One last thought. At the end of this Sunday’s Gospel, Jesus says that the faithful servant is one who, after plowing or tending the sheep, enters the house, puts on an apron and continues to serve. Well, as we prepare to do what Jesus commanded, name “do this in memory of” him, we remember that Jesus, at the Last Supper, didn’t have the apostles wait on him, but rather girded himself with an apron and washed their feet. He promised elsewhere that if he finds his servants vigilant and faithful, he will again gird himself, have them recline at table and proceed to wait on them (Lk 12:37). That is what happens at every Holy Mass. Even though we come to serve him, he serves us. From the inside Jesus can and wants to help us live our faith, love our faith, give witness to our faith. After he has made our hearts burn during the Liturgy of the Word like he did for the disciples in Emmaus, so that we might recognize him in the Breaking of the Bread, we approach the altar to receive him within like a seed, knowing that he wants to help our faith grow like an Everest, as he we see in the lives of the apostles, St. Timothy and St. Therese. They are all praying for us that we may live by faith, grown and faith and stir into a flame that rich trust and gift of God that those around us, and indeed the whole world, may be ignited!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download