Twenty-Ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time (C), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, October 15, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Twenty-Ninth Sunday of Ordinary Time, C, Vigil
October 15, 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 will ask us a haunting question, “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” The question seems to be more than rhetorical. Jesus asks it, it appears, because he’s not convinced that when he comes he’s going to find faith. We are living in an age and culture in which many seem to be drifting away from the faith. Recent surveys have shown that 65 percent of American adults say that they’re Christian, down 12 percentage points in just the last decade. Those who describe themselves as atheists, agnostics and “nothing in particular” are now at 26 percent of the population, up from 17 percent in 2009. Catholics are just now 20 percent of the adult population, down from 23 percent a decade ago. We have all seen the consequences of these trends, which have led to the shuttering of some Churches, schools, convents and seminaries. We’ve seen it among our family members and friends whom we know and love who are no longer practicing. We’ve seen it in empty seats in many Catholic parishes. This is all a result ultimately of spreading secularism in our culture and within our homes. Secularism, as Pope Benedict once incisively defined it, is living etsi Deus non daretur, living as God does not exist. One may still believe in God, but one lives like everyone else, like those who do not believe. We watch the same programs and listen to the same podcasts. We make the same choices on Monday through Saturday, and eventually start making them on Sunday, too. We start making them at the beginning of life, at the end of life, in the middle of life. And even though we never consciously made a choice against God, our life is structured almost entirely without him. That’s why Jesus’ question is so timely: “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”
• Jesus’ point in asking the question is certainly not to get us afraid of the future or frightened of his ambushing us unawares at a moment we least expect. It is meant to help us never to take our faith for granted. Faith is a gift of God but it’s also a virtue, a moral muscle, that we’re called to exercise and make stronger. Jesus wants to fortify our faith. This Sunday he shows us how to buttress it in the parable of the persistent widow seeking justice against an unjust judge. If even an unjust judge finally heeded the request of a persistent widow for justice, how could God the Just Judge refuse the persevering request of a beloved son or daughter?
• Jesus says that the real test of whether he will find faith in us is whether, when he comes, he will find us persevering in prayer. That does not mean necessarily we’re going to be on our knees, or fingering the Rosary, or lingering in Church. It means that he is going to find us seeking to unite our whole day and life, our mind, our heart and our soul to God. Prayer is faith in action. We live as we pray and we pray as we live and if we’re going to be found faithful, we will be found prayerful. That’s why Jesus teaches us through the parable not about the “suggestion,” or the “helpful idea” of “praying always without growing weary,” but about the “necessity” of doing so. He seeks to show us how to “cry out to God day and night.” He wants to train us to live that way so that no matter what time he comes we will be an existence-made-prayer, united to the Lord in a prayer of our whole life.
• The reality is that many people do not pray with the grit of the importune woman in this Sunday’s Gospel crying out for justice. Many Catholics don’t persevere in prayer. They’re content on praying “a little,” saying a Hail Mary or two at the beginning or the end of the day. Others would like to pray more but think they don’t have time, because they’re prioritizing so many other things in life to a life-changing time with God. Others, because of a bad experience or other reasons, stop praying altogether as an ordinary activity of life, only turning to prayer in times of crisis. Even priests and religious sisters and brothers can sometimes begin cutting corners on their prayers, just getting them in as a duty, and eventually not getting them in at all except at times when they “professionally” have to pray as part of their duties. In short, many Christians don’t persist tenaciously in growing in communion with God in prayer. To all of us Jesus is speaking about the persevering faith he wishes to find in our prayer, hoping to open us up to receive his graces precisely so that we can pray in that way.
• Jesus wants to help us learn to pray with persistence because he knows that is the best means to form us to persevere heroically in life. Pope Francis once explained that Jesus’ words about the necessity of praying always without giving up “leads us to deepen a very important aspect of the faith. God invites us to pray with insistence, not because he doesn’t know what we need, or because he doesn’t listen to us. … But the fight against evil is hard and long, it requires patience and resistance… There is a struggle to carry on every day; but God is our ally, faith in Him is our strength, and prayer is the expression of this faith.” We can’t win the battle to remain faithful on will-power alone. We need to be praying continuously to the Lord. And God wants to train us to recognize this, because the stakes can’t be bigger. When we persevere in prayer, when we regularly turn to him for help, when we’re conscious of his desire to live in communion with us, then we open to receiving and responding to his help to confront and overcome the challenges we face each day. When our hearts, however, grow weary, when we distance ourselves from the Lord, when we try to do things on our own, we’re at risk of giving up the good fight of faith altogether. To persevere faithfully in life we first must learn how to persevere faithfully in prayer.
• One of the biggest reasons why people give up on the faith is precisely because they’ve never learned how to pray, how to hear God speaking, how to receive his light and strength in their daily life. This Sunday we can focus on several of the means God has provided to train us.
• The first is practice in what the saints have called mental prayer, which is having a quiet, one-on-one conversation, treasuring that time as the most important appointment of our day.
• The second means of training is by learning how to pray Sacred Scripture, so that we are able to tune in better to God’s voice and say, with the young Samuel, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.” This is the whole process that’s called “sacred reading” or in Latin lectio divina. Mike Schmitz’s Bible in a Year podcast has helped millions to learn how to pray with Sacred Scripture.
• The third means is the Holy Rosary. In this month of October, dedicated to Our Lady of the Rosary, we focus on this great tool of prayerful perseverance.
• The fourth means is the Mass, which is the great persevering prayer of the Church from the rising of the sun to its setting.
• The fifth training ground for perseverance in prayer is praying insistently for loved ones and their needs. Sometimes one of the most helpful things that can happen to us is to have a family member in need of prayers, because if we pray for them with loving perseverance, God, while attentively listening to our petitions, will transform us, too.
• The sixth exercise is praying our daily work. To pray always means that we need to turn all we do into a prayer. To pray our work involves, first, offering everything we do to God, as an acceptable sacrifice of Abel. We can unite our work to Jesus on the altar. We can explicitly offer our work for someone who has requested our prayers.
• The seventh and last training ground is praying with others. For us to pray unceasingly, we often need help, and similarly need to give help to others. That’s why it’s important for us to pray together, because we can help each other persevere. Jesus incentivized praying with others, promising us that when two or more of us gather in his name, he will be in our midst. He taught us to pray not the “My Father,” but the “Our Father,” to encourage us to come together. The more we pray together with others, the stronger our prayer will be and the strong our faith will be in life.
• When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth? This Sunday is a grace-filled opportunity for us to recognize that God will give us all the help we need to respond to his love. He will give us the grace increase our prayer, to persevere in our prayerful union with Him so that we may persevere in the good fight for his kingdom. He will give us the help to make time for prayer, to hear his voice in Sacred Scripture, to enter Mary’s contemplative school of the Holy Rosary, to pray the Mass the way he did the first Mass, to pray for those in need, to pray our work, and to pray with others. This Sunday the Lord Jesus will come to pray with us to the Father. God the Father will send the Holy Spirit so that we may pray with living faith, so that when Jesus comes from heaven to the altar, he may find us truly faithful, ready to persevere in prayerful union with him through the valleys and mountains of life all the way until, God-willing, we join the saints in the eternally persevering prayer of the heavenly Jerusalem! God bless you!

The following text guided the homily: 

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