{"id":17734,"date":"2019-07-19T09:04:50","date_gmt":"2019-07-19T13:04:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/catholicpreaching.com\/?p=17734"},"modified":"2019-07-23T04:29:51","modified_gmt":"2019-07-23T08:29:51","slug":"taking-seriously-the-details-of-gods-plan-of-mercy-fifteenth-friday-i-july-19-2019","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/catholicpreaching.com\/wp\/taking-seriously-the-details-of-gods-plan-of-mercy-fifteenth-friday-i-july-19-2019\/","title":{"rendered":"Taking Seriously the Details of God&#8217;s Plan of Mercy, Fifteenth Friday (I), July 19, 2019"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Fr. Roger J. Landry<br \/>\nSacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan<br \/>\nFriday of the Fifteenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I<br \/>\nMass for the Deceased, Hugh Collins, father of Sister Naomi Collins, SV<br \/>\nJuly 19, 2019<br \/>\nEx 11:10-12:14, Ps 116, Mt 12:1-8<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><em>To listen to an audio recording of today\u2019s homily, please click below:<\/em><\/p>\n<audio class=\"wp-audio-shortcode\" id=\"audio-17734-1\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio\/mpeg\" src=\"https:\/\/catholicpreaching.com\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/07\/7.19.19-Homily-1.mp3?_=1\" \/><a href=\"https:\/\/catholicpreaching.com\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/07\/7.19.19-Homily-1.mp3\">https:\/\/catholicpreaching.com\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/07\/7.19.19-Homily-1.mp3<\/a><\/audio>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><i>Because of the death of Mr. Hugh Collins in Ireland the night before, I preached briefly according to the following outlines: <\/i><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>&#8220;Precious in the eyes of the Lord is the death of his faithful ones.&#8221; These words from the Psalm help us to recognize that death is not just an act of biological finality, but truly a precious act in our communion of life with God. It is meant to be a passage from entrustment to God in this life to final entrustment with him in eternity.<\/li>\n<li>In today&#8217;s first reading, we see just how much God did to save the Jews from slavery and death in Egypt. Those actions all foretold what Jesus himself would do for us, to lead us on the new and eternal passover from death to life. That is what gives us such hope at the precious death of any of our brothers and sisters, like the father of Sister Naomi last night in Ireland. Jesus desires mercy, he reminds us in today&#8217;s Gospel, and his mercy is everlasting.<\/li>\n<li>Every morning we call upon that mercy as we enter into that new and eternal passover, as we make present Jesus&#8217; celebration of the Passover Rite, and his updating it on Holy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter Sunday. This is the greatest way we can pray for Hugh Collins, and the greatest way we can prepare, God willing to be with him again. &#8220;How shall I make a return to the Lord\u00a0for all the good he has done for me?,&#8221; we asked in the Psalm, before responding, &#8220;The cup of salvation I will take up,\u00a0and I will call upon the name of the Lord.&#8221; We drink the chalice of Jesus&#8217; blood for the remission of sins as we call upon his name \u2014 Emmanuel, God-with-us, and Jesus, God saves. God is with us at this very moment seeking to save us. And we pray that Hugh Collins had those names on his lips and in his heart at his precious death.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><i>The homily I had prepared would have attempted\u00a0the following points: <\/i><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Today\u2019s readings give us the opportunity to focus on two essential realities in the Christian faith. The first is about God\u2019s pedagogy, the way he trains us in the faith, the way we\u2019re called to grow. The second is how to live that reality with regard to the way we are to unite ourselves to Jesus\u2019 worship to the Father.<\/li>\n<li>Let\u2019s talk first about God\u2019s wise teaching and training us in the faith. There would seem to be at first a great contrast between what God was instructing the Israelites in the first reading and how Jesus opposed the scribes and the Pharisees in the Gospel. In the first reading, God gave extraordinarily detailed instructions to the Israelites about how they were to prepare the Passover meal not just the first time but every year thereafter. He told them when they needed to prepare the lamb, how they needed to cook it, how they needed it eat it, what they were to do with its blood and so on. This was meant to help them to take little things seriously and to receive the type of discipline in little things that can help us in big things. With any discipline this is the way things work. When we first start speaking a foreign language, we have to learn how to \u201cdo\u201d everything \u2014 conjugate, perhaps decline, use prepositions and possessives appropriately and so forth. If we don\u2019t know how to do that, then it will be very difficult for us to use the language to write love poetry.\u00a0The problem over the course of time is many Jews stayed at the level of that detail and rather than passing to its real transformative meaning began to become so obsessed about the details of the liturgical and moral law that they were suffocating their spiritual growth and that of others. After the Babylonian Captivity in particular, the Jews realized \u2014 accurately \u2014 that the reason for their exile was because they had been unfaithful to God\u2019s law, and in an excess of precaution began to become so obsessed about the little details of the law that many missed the forest for the trees, they missed the Legislator because of the legislation. The class of scribes, the scholars of the law, arose in order to study every word, and then, in order to prevent Jews from violating it, began, as many scholars like to analogize, draw fences around the law so that they wouldn\u2019t possibly violate it. With regard to the Sabbath, if the point of the Sabbath was to keep it holy, to keep it as a day of freedom apart from enslaving work, then they would make all types of regulations so that they wouldn\u2019t get anywhere close to violating it. So they determined in minutiae what would be the minimalist form of work and invented rules that many Jews began to take as seriously as the commandments. For example, they said that on the Sabbath you couldn\u2019t lift anything that would weigh more than two dried figs, they described how far you could walk, they said that you couldn\u2019t prepare food, and so on. They had missed the point. Rather than a gift of God giving us a chance to set the reset button in our relationship with him and others, rather than a day of love and freedom, the Sabbath became a day of a more intense form of slavery.<\/li>\n<li>That\u2019s one of the most important things that Jesus came to fix. In today\u2019s Gospel, we begin the Twelfth Chapter of St. Matthew\u2019s Gospel which is all going to be about how Jesus\u2019 bringing the Sabbath back to its original meaning would get people to begin plotting to kill him. His critics will go from observing and confronting him in today\u2019s Gospel, to observing whether he\u2019d heal (do an act of love), to outright plotting to kill him to persecution. Today Jesus is walking through the fields of grain with the disciples on the Sabbath. They were hungry because they really hadn\u2019t eaten anything. So they plucked the heads of grain and began to eat what it. In doing so, it\u2019s important to state, they weren\u2019t stealing because Deuteronomy explicitly gave those who were traveling the right to do this. But in order to eat the grain, they needed to pluck it, winnow and thresh it in their hands, and it was this type of minimal work in order to eat that the Scribes and Pharisees said was contrary to God\u2019s will. God evidently wanted his children to starve rather than have that meager raw material for what most civilizations would call food! Jesus defended his disciples, and showed the Scribes&#8217; erroneous interpretation, by two references to Sacred Scripture. The first was what David did with his troops as they were serving the Lord and had nothing to eat. They entered the temple area and ate the showbread \u2014 the bread that was symbolically placed in the Temple before the Lord for a week until it was replaced and the priests would eat it. Jesus was saying that there was a higher principle involved and that there was no sin in David because what was eaten was to strengthen them to do the Lord\u2019s work. Likewise he pointed out to the work that the Temple priests do on the Sabbath, lighting candles, burning incense, sacrificing animals, and it\u2019s clear that they were not violating the Sabbath by doing this work that was part of their praise and homage to God. Jesus was stressing that he and his disciples were glorifying God by doing what they were doing, not sinning against God. Jesus had just finished calling those who were burdened to come to him to be refreshed and he was giving that refreshment, something that the Sabbath was intended to do, to remake us according to God\u2019s image in love.\u00a0Jesus stressed that the entirety of the law, that the practice of the faith, was meant to be transformative, to change us to become more and more like the Lord, to help us to love God with all our mind, heart, soul and strength and to love our neighbor as God loves him and us. That\u2019s the whole point of the Sabbath. That is the whole point of the law, as Jesus reiterates today with Hosea\u2019s words: mercy. Mercy is so much more valuable than the sacrifice of animals, because God is merciful and wants us, in receiving his mercy, to share it. Jesus was stressing that his critics had no mercy whatsoever toward the \u201cinnocent men\u201d who had become his followers.<\/li>\n<li>This is an important principle for all of us. The initial training God gives us in faith is meant to become so much a part of us that we can pass with God to the essence of everything for which he gave us those foundations. Altar boys are trained in the minutiae of what they\u2019re supposed to do not so that at the end they\u2019re obsessing about cruets, or incense, or how they\u2019re folding their hands, but so that they can pray what they\u2019re doing and inspire others by their prayerful discipline. All of us are trained in what to do during Mass, from taking holy water and blessing us to genuflecting, blessing ourselves before the Gospel, kneeling, standing, processing, and so forth, not so that we can stay at the level of those gestures, but really love God and others through them. There is an issue that many times we, like the ancient Scribes and Pharisees, can remain at the level of rubrics rather than pass from the sign to the signified. We can see someone fail to genuflect and wonder what\u2019s wrong with the person rather than be glad the person has come into the presence of the Lord.\u00a0For those of us in the priesthood or the religious life, we can sometimes become so narrowly focused on smaller aspects of the rule and customs, and upset at someone not taking care, for example of the way to fold napkins, than we identify lovingly with the person using the napkin. Postulancy and the novitiate are times in which we\u2019re trained in lots of particular things, but they\u2019re meant to pass into a life in which, with good ingrained habits, we\u2019re able to live fully according to the way the charism incarnates the greatest commandment and the one like it. The whole point of divine pedagogy is to help the disciple become like the Teacher, the slave like the Master, the son or daughter like the Father. The little things are important in terms of our training, but they are meant to be ingredients in a much bigger offering to the Lord, means rather than ends in themselves.<\/li>\n<li>As we think about training, I&#8217;d like to focus on the training the Lord gives us all in today&#8217;s first reading, and how that divine pedagogy is meant to impact what we do every morning here, as we enter into Jesus\u2019 new and eternal fulfillment of what God trained the Jews to do in the Passover. The Lord wants to give us a discipline throughout the Old Testament so that we would be able to appreciate the meaning of this sacrifice, enter into it fully and live it. I\u2019d like to pull out several elements from the training given in the first reading in preparation for the first and then annual celebration of the 14th\u00a0of the Month of Nisan for what we need to grasp and do to celebrate its fulfillment daily in the Mass.\n<ul>\n<li>The first element is the preparation for the celebration. God has the Israelites procure an umblemished lamb on the 10th\u00a0of the month, on the \u201cMonday\u201d of the week when it would be sacrificed on the \u201cFriday.\u201d Why wouldn\u2019t have God just told the Jews to get a lamb the morning of the sacrifice? He evidently wanted them to spend time with the lamb. He wanted them to have the lamb around them. He wanted them to be thinking about the sacrifice for a good deal of time before it would be sacrificed. Likewise for us as we prepare for the fulfillment of the Passover rite, God wants us to spend time with the Lamb to be sacrificed. That\u2019s why our prayer, our adoration, is so important for our properly celebrating the Mass. God doesn\u2019t want us just to show up. He wants us to show up after a period of contact. He wants us to know the one we\u2019re sacrificing. He wants the sacrifice to be dearer to us than just sacrificing a lamb with whom there\u2019s no relationship at all. We won\u2019t appreciate it nearly as much.<\/li>\n<li>The second element is the preparation of the lamb. God says that it is to be \u201croasted whole, with its heads and shanks and inner organs\u201d and prepared with \u201cunleavened bread and bitter herbs.\u201d There\u2019s great symbolism in all of this. God wants us ultimately to join in the sacrifice fully. He wants the entirety of us to become part of the entirety of the sacrifice of Jesus. He doesn\u2019t want us holding anything back, neither the stuff we like or the stuff that\u2019s hard, the stuff that\u2019s bitter or sweet. He wants all of it to be integrated into the sacrifice. The unleavened bread not only points to the fact that we shouldn\u2019t be too focused on the bread (in contrast to the lamb) but that we want God to provide the leaven.<\/li>\n<li>The third element we can mention is how we are to eat it. He tells the Israelites, \u201cThis is how you are to eat it: with your loins girt, sandals on your feet and your staff in hand, you shall eat like those who are in flight.\u201d He wants them to eat it not as a feast that it meant to last, but as a Passover starter, as a means by which they can be ready for the exodus. Many times we are tempted to eat the Feast at the Top of Mt. Tabor just wanting to build booths there to keep the ecstasy going. But God wants us to eat with our tunics rolled up, with sandals on our feed and ready to move to the bottom of Mt. Tabor to serve God and serve others. Is that the way we approach Mass? Ready to receive God\u2019s strength so that we can then hastily move to take him to others? Or do we think that God wants us to ignore the words at the end of Mass where he says, \u201cGo [in peace] to announce the Gospel of the Lord, [glorifying God with your life]\u201d?<\/li>\n<li>The fourth element is about the blood. God tells the Israelites, \u201cTake some of [the lamb\u2019s] blood and apply it to the two doorposts and the lintel of every house in which they partake of the lamb.\u201d This was essential for the avenging angel to pass by their home and their first-born sons be spared. If they didn\u2019t do this, their first born sons would be dead on the morrow. We can sometimes look at all of this with a sense of horror, that God took the first born sons of all of the Egyptians, and there was obviously great wailing at the death of children. The reality is that even in doing this God was being merciful for not taking the lives of everyone present. The avenging angel was an angel of justice. The Egyptians deserved to die for their sins. God limited himself to just the first born son, who was the heir, who was the one in whom so often everyone would place their hope. And it\u2019s not just the Egyptians who deserved to die in their sins, it\u2019s the Israelites and all of us. In the new and eternal Passover, we don\u2019t take Jesus\u2019 blood and wipe it on the lintels of our Churches or Chapels, we don\u2019t wipe it on our foreheads, we take it within so that we might have the Father\u2019s firstborn Son who was sacrificed for us flow totally within us. And we need to grasp that we need his blood to be saved. In the consecration of the Precious Blood, Jesus said that his blood was being given \u201cfor the forgiveness of sins,\u201d and to appreciate what\u2019s happening and celebrate it well, we need to recognize that we\u2019re sinners who ought to die but who have been saved through the blood of the Lamb whose blood is meant to mingle with our own such that together with him we might \u201cpour out\u201d our blood for the salvation of others.<\/li>\n<li>The final element is about the need to eat the Lamb. It was crucial for the Jews to consume the Lamb, to become one with the sacrifice. If they didn\u2019t, as Scott Hahn made famous in his tremendous teaching on the Fourth Cup, their first born sons would have been dead on the morrow. Likewise, we need to eat the Lamb. Jesus stresses for us in his Bread of Life discourse that unless we eat his flesh and drink his blood we will have no life in us, but if we eat and drink Him we will live forever. This consuming of the Lord is meant not to be a magical act, but one of communion, helping us to become whom we eat, but in our freedom we need to hunger for this transformation, for us to learn how to love like the Lord.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>Today as we celebrate this Mass, we have prepared in prayer, we are ready to be sacrificed whole with the Lord, we have girded our loins and put sandals and shoes on our feet, and we are about to become one with Jesus\u2019 saving blood and nourishing body. We grasp that we are to become one with his mercy as we offer this sacrifice together with him. \u201cHow shall I make a return to the Lord for all the good he has done for me?,\u201d we asked with the Psalmist today. And we replied, \u201cI will take the cup of salvation and call on the name of the Lord!\u201d That\u2019s what we do as we enter into this new and eternal Passover every morning, an exodus meant to lead us not from Egypt into the promised land but from life into the eternal promised land of heaven.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><em>The readings for today\u2019s Mass were:<\/em><\/p>\n<div class=\"bibleReadingsWrapper\">\n<h4>Reading 1\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.usccb.org\/bible\/exodus\/11:10\">EX 11:10\u201412:14<\/a><\/h4>\n<div class=\"poetry\">Although Moses and Aaron performed various wonders<br \/>\nin Pharaoh\u2019s presence,<br \/>\nthe LORD made Pharaoh obstinate,<br \/>\nand he would not let the children of Israel leave his land.<br \/>\nThe LORD said to Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt,<br \/>\n\u201cThis month shall stand at the head of your calendar;<br \/>\nyou shall reckon it the first month of the year.<br \/>\nTell the whole community of Israel: On the tenth of this month<br \/>\nevery one of your families must procure for itself a lamb,<br \/>\none apiece for each household.<br \/>\nIf a family is too small for a whole lamb,<br \/>\nit shall join the nearest household in procuring one<br \/>\nand shall share in the lamb<br \/>\nin proportion to the number of persons who partake of it.<br \/>\nThe lamb must be a year-old male and without blemish.<br \/>\nYou may take it from either the sheep or the goats.<br \/>\nYou shall keep it until the fourteenth day of this month, and then,<br \/>\nwith the whole assembly of Israel present,<br \/>\nit shall be slaughtered during the evening twilight.<br \/>\nThey shall take some of its blood<br \/>\nand apply it to the two doorposts and the lintel<br \/>\nof every house in which they partake of the lamb.<br \/>\nThat same night they shall eat its roasted flesh<br \/>\nwith unleavened bread and bitter herbs.<br \/>\nIt shall not be eaten raw or boiled, but roasted whole,<br \/>\nwith its head and shanks and inner organs.<br \/>\nNone of it must be kept beyond the next morning;<br \/>\nwhatever is left over in the morning shall be burned up.<br \/>\n\u201cThis is how you are to eat it:<br \/>\nwith your loins girt, sandals on your feet and your staff in hand,<br \/>\nyou shall eat like those who are in flight.<br \/>\nIt is the Passover of the LORD.<br \/>\nFor on this same night I will go through Egypt,<br \/>\nstriking down every first born of the land, both man and beast,<br \/>\nand executing judgment on all the gods of Egypt\u2014I, the LORD!<br \/>\nBut the blood will mark the houses where you are.<br \/>\nSeeing the blood, I will pass over you;<br \/>\nthus, when I strike the land of Egypt,<br \/>\nno destructive blow will come upon you.<\/div>\n<div class=\"poetry\">\u201cThis day shall be a memorial feast for you,<br \/>\nwhich all your generations shall celebrate<br \/>\nwith pilgrimage to the LORD, as a perpetual institution.\u201d<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"bibleReadingsWrapper\">\n<h4>Responsorial Psalm\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.usccb.org\/bible\/psalms\/116:12\">PS 116:12-13, 15 AND 16BC, 17-18<\/a><\/h4>\n<div class=\"poetry\">R. (13)\u00a0I will take the cup of salvation, and call on the name of the Lord.<br \/>\nHow shall I make a return to the LORD<br \/>\nfor all the good he has done for me?<br \/>\nThe cup of salvation I will take up,<br \/>\nand I will call upon the name of the LORD.<br \/>\nR.\u00a0I will take the cup of salvation, and call on the name of the Lord.<br \/>\nPrecious in the eyes of the LORD<br \/>\nis the death of his faithful ones.<br \/>\nI am your servant, the son of your handmaid;<br \/>\nyou have loosed my bonds.<br \/>\nR.\u00a0I will take the cup of salvation, and call on the name of the Lord.<br \/>\nTo you will I offer sacrifice of thanksgiving,<br \/>\nand I will call upon the name of the LORD.<br \/>\nMy vows to the LORD I will pay<br \/>\nin the presence of all his people.<br \/>\nR.\u00a0I will take the cup of salvation, and call on the name of the Lord.<\/p>\n<h4>Alleluia\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.usccb.org\/bible\/john\/10:27\">JN 10:27<\/a><\/h4>\n<p>R.\u00a0Alleluia, alleluia.<br \/>\nMy sheep hear my voice, says the Lord,<br \/>\nI know them, and they follow me.<br \/>\nR.\u00a0Alleluia, alleluia.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"bibleReadingsWrapper\">\n<h4>Gospel\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.usccb.org\/bible\/matthew\/12:1\">MT 12:1-8<\/a><\/h4>\n<div class=\"poetry\">Jesus was going through a field of grain on the sabbath.<br \/>\nHis disciples were hungry<br \/>\nand began to pick the heads of grain and eat them.<br \/>\nWhen the Pharisees saw this, they said to him,<br \/>\n\u201cSee, your disciples are doing what is unlawful to do on the sabbath.\u201d<br \/>\nHe said to the them, \u201cHave you not read what David did<br \/>\nwhen he and his companions were hungry,<br \/>\nhow he went into the house of God and ate the bread of offering,<br \/>\nwhich neither he nor his companions<br \/>\nbut only the priests could lawfully eat?<br \/>\nOr have you not read in the law that on the sabbath<br \/>\nthe priests serving in the temple violate the sabbath<br \/>\nand are innocent?<br \/>\nI say to you, something greater than the temple is here.<br \/>\nIf you knew what this meant,\u00a0<em>I desire mercy, not sacrifice<\/em>,<br \/>\nyou would not have condemned these innocent men.<br \/>\nFor the Son of Man is Lord of the sabbath.\u201d<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><a href=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/catholicpreaching.com\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/07\/image.png?ssl=1\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-medium wp-image-17736\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/catholicpreaching.com\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/07\/image.png?resize=300%2C172&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"172\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/catholicpreaching.com\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/07\/image.png?resize=300%2C172&amp;ssl=1 300w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/catholicpreaching.com\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/07\/image.png?w=620&amp;ssl=1 620w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Fr. Roger J. Landry Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan Friday of the Fifteenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I Mass for the Deceased, Hugh Collins, father of Sister Naomi Collins, SV July 19, 2019 Ex 11:10-12:14, Ps 116, Mt 12:1-8 &nbsp; To listen to an audio recording of today\u2019s homily, please [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[11309,1063,3,5],"tags":[8010,1899,8531,4901,11590,8534,8535,8533,3193,8532,5464,2394,5473,574,4354,2395,11591,3183],"class_list":["post-17734","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2018-2019-year-i","category-audio-homily","category-homily","category-year-i","tag-eating-the-lamb","tag-eucharist","tag-ex-1110-1214","tag-exodus","tag-hugh-collins","tag-i-desire-mercy-not-sacrifice","tag-jesus-blood","tag-lamb","tag-loins-girt","tag-mt-121-8","tag-passover","tag-pharisees","tag-preparation-for-mass","tag-ps-116","tag-sabbath","tag-scribes","tag-sr-naomi-collins","tag-the-mass"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.4 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Taking Seriously the Details of God&#039;s Plan of Mercy, Fifteenth Friday (I), July 19, 2019 - Catholic Preaching<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/catholicpreaching.com\/wp\/taking-seriously-the-details-of-gods-plan-of-mercy-fifteenth-friday-i-july-19-2019\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Taking Seriously the Details of God&#039;s Plan of Mercy, Fifteenth Friday (I), July 19, 2019 - Catholic Preaching\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Fr. Roger J. Landry Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan Friday of the Fifteenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I Mass for the Deceased, Hugh Collins, father of Sister Naomi Collins, SV July 19, 2019 Ex 11:10-12:14, Ps 116, Mt 12:1-8 &nbsp; To listen to an audio recording of today\u2019s homily, please [&hellip;]\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/catholicpreaching.com\/wp\/taking-seriously-the-details-of-gods-plan-of-mercy-fifteenth-friday-i-july-19-2019\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Catholic Preaching\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2019-07-19T13:04:50+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2019-07-23T08:29:51+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/catholicpreaching.com\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/07\/image-300x172.png\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Fr. 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