Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time (C), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, August 13, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Twentieth Sunday of Ordinary Time, C, Vigil
August 13, 2022

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday as Jesus tells us emphatically in the Gospel why he left heaven, became man, lived, preached, suffered, was murdered, rose and ascended. It’s something every Catholic needs to ponder deeply, prayerfully and frequently. “I have come to set the earth on fire,” Jesus says, “and how I wish it were already blazing!” Just like the Holy Spirit was sent down as tongues of fire to ignite the members of the early Church with the passion to live and preach the Gospel until the ends of the earth, Jesus came down with the same holy ardor, the same white-hot love, to make us his torch bearers and set the world ablaze with the light of his truth and the fire of his mercy. He wants to do to us in life what happens symbolically at our baptism and is renewed every year at the Easter Vigil, when Jesus, like the flame of the Paschal Candle, comes to light us — symbolized by a taper or baptismal candle — on fire with true Christian combustion and make us living tapers, who receive the flame of faith from him and then pass on that passion to those around us.
• Ten years ago, Pope Benedict, commenting on Jesus’ words from this Sunday’s Gospel, spoke about the fire of faith and how important it is for each of us to allow the Holy Spirit to melt whatever in us is cold or frozen. In doing so he pointed out the greatest danger for us as Christian disciples and the biggest obstacle to our proclaiming the faith and bringing people to Christ. “There’s a passion of ours,” Pope Benedict said, “that must grow from faith, which must be transformed into the fire of charity. Jesus said: ‘I came to cast fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled.’ Origen [the great third century theologian] has conveyed us a word of the Lord: “Whoever is near me is near the fire.” The Christian must not be lukewarm. The Book of Revelation tells us that this is the greatest danger for a Christian: not that he may say ‘no,’ but that he may say a very lukewarm ‘yes.’ This being lukewarm is what discredits Christianity. Faith must become in us a flame of love, a flame that really fires up my being, becomes the great passion of my being, and so that it fires also my neighbor.”
• It is crucial for us to understand what Pope Benedict underlined. First, to be near Christ, he said, is to be near the fire. If we’re truly drawing close to Christ in prayer, in the Sacraments of the Eucharist and Confession, in charity toward others, in the communion that is the Church, then we can’t help but get fired up. The problem is that often we try to draw near to God with asbestos around our hearts. We say our prayers, but rush through them without love. We show up to Mass but leave our enthusiasm at home. We should be more passionate about God speaking to us and feeding us at Mass than the biggest baseball fans rejoice to be at their home park for the World Series.  The fact that few of us behave this way in God’s presence is a sign of tepidity.
• Second, Pope Benedict said that lukewarmness is the “greatest danger for a Christian,” that in response to God and the gift of his love, we give only a half-hearted yes with a shrug of our shoulders. In the Book of Revelation, Jesus said to the Church in Laodicea, which many commentators have said seems to bear much in common with the United States today: “To the angel of the church in Laodicea write: … ‘I know your works: you are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were cold or hot! Because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew you out of my mouth.’” Then Jesus said why: “For you say, I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing; not knowing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked. Therefore, I counsel you to buy from me gold refined by fire, that you may be rich, and white garments to clothe you and to keep the shame of your nakedness from being seen, and salve to anoint your eyes, that you may see.” We’ll return to an explanation of Jesus’ words in just a second, but before we do, I want to point out the third thing Pope Benedict mentions.
• Third, our Pope Emeritus says that the lack of fire is what discredits Christianity more than anything else. It’s like a contagious cold of the faith that we pass on to others. People expect that Catholic clergy, religious and faithful will take the faith seriously and passionately love God and neighbor. They expect that Catholics who profess that Sacred Scripture is God’s holy word will hunger to know that word inside out. They anticipate that Catholics who proclaim that Jesus Christ is really present in the Holy Eucharist, will never place something else on Sunday above God. They anticipate that Catholics who believe in the importance of all seven sacraments will take confession seriously and go regularly, take confirmation seriously and not delay it, take marriage seriously and not live as others do, take the anointing of the sick seriously and call the priest whenever they or others get in danger of death. They expect that Catholics will go way beyond the call of duty to cross the road and care for others as good Samaritans. When non-Catholics, or Catholic kids, encounter lukewarm Catholics, however, they easily lose respect for Church teaching and for Catholics in general.
• We need to confront why Catholics can become lukewarm. Very few of us are lukewarm on the day of our First Communion, just like very few priests are tepid on the day of their ordination. But something happens to us. We lose the fire we once had. We lose the passion. We can specify three reasons why Catholics become tepid in our prayer, sacramental life, charity, and whole Christian existence.
• Jesus gave us the first reason in the passage from the Book of Revelation we considered a little earlier. We lose the sense that we really need God in our life, or need him very much. “You say,” Jesus tells them, “I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing” and we begin to prioritize our relationship with mammon rather than God. Materialism, what Pope Francis calls “spiritual worldliness,” makes us lukewarm.
• The second reason why many of us are resistant to allowing Jesus truly to light us on fire is because we’re afraid that if we draw too close to Him who is the Fire of the Father’s love, we’ll lose something essential about who we really are. “The fire of God,” Pope Benedict said, “is a flame that burns but does not destroy, that, in burning, brings forth the better and truer part of man. … Nevertheless, it causes a transformation, and it must for this reason consume something in man, the waste that corrupts him and hinders his relations with God and neighbor. This effect of the divine fire … frightens us, we are afraid of being ‘burned,’ we prefer to stay just as we are. … There is the fear of giving up something nice to which we are attached; the fear that following Christ deprives us of freedom, of certain experiences, of a part of ourselves. On one hand, we want to be with Jesus, follow him closely, and, on the other hand, we are afraid of the consequences that this brings with it.”
• The third reason is because we’re afraid of what others will do or say if we really live the faith with fire. In the Gospel this Sunday, right after telling us that he has come to light us and the whole world on fire, Jesus says that because of him, families will be divided two against three in various ways. This is not because Jesus came to bring division, but because when some in a family put him first, to love him above other loves, and to treat him as God, others who want to be first, who want to be in God’s place, get jealous — and it’s that pride and envy that sever the bond. Lukewarm Christians hate when someone converts and really gets lit on fire, because that exposes everyone else’s tepidity. When the temperature of a family member’s or parishioner’s faith increases, or when a new priest arrives and starts confronting lukewarmness and its various disguises, many people will start to complain and some will even leave, because they prefer a place that allows them continue to be stay the same, rather than challenges them to become the Good Samaritan, Good Shepherd and the saint God wants them to be. Pope Benedict, however, encourages all of us in this circumstance. He says: “We must know how to recognize that losing something, indeed, losing ourselves for the true God, the God of love and of life, is in reality gaining ourselves, finding ourselves more fully. … So it is worthwhile to let ourselves be touched by the fire of [God]! The suffering that it causes us is necessary for our transformation. It is the reality of the cross: It is not for nothing that in the language of Jesus ‘fire’ is above all a representation of the cross, without which Christianity does not exist.”
• The greatest way of all God has established to inflame us is at Mass. As Origen said, whoever draws near Christ draws near the fire. Whenever we receive Holy Communion we ingest the one who said, “I have come to set the earth on fire,” Christ has come to ignite that fire and how he wants each of us to become truly enkindled! St. Catherine of Siena used to say in the 1300s, “If you are what you should be, you will set the world ablaze!” Mass is the place where Christ helps us to become who we should be. As we prepare to receive him this Sunday, we beg him to help us be enveloped by fire, always burn with love to his glory, and bring that flame of faith out to warm others hearts and fill our families, our cities and towns, our schools and workplaces, our parishes and the whole world with the fire of God’s amazing love. God bless you!

The Gospel on which this Gospel was based was:

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