Hi everyone, and welcome to Weekly Homilies with Father Mark Suslenko, Pastor of SS. Isidore and Maria Parish in Glastonbury, Connecticut. We are part of the Catholic Archdiocese of Hartford. I'm Carol Vassar, parish director of communications, and this is Episode 27 of Season 5 for the 19th Sunday in Ordinary Time: August 7, 2022. Our Gospel reading is from Luke, Chapter 12, verses 35-40.
Jesus said to his disciples: “Gird your loins and light your lamps and be like servants who await their master’s return from a wedding, ready to open immediately when he comes and knocks. Blessed are those servants whom the master finds vigilant on his arrival.
Amen, I say to you, he will gird himself, have the servants recline at table, and proceed to wait on them. And should he come in the second or third watch and find them prepared in this way, blessed are those servants.
Be sure of this: if the master of the house had known the hour when the thief was coming, he would not have let his house be broken into. You also must be prepared, for at an hour you do not expect, the Son of Man will come.”
The Gospel of the Lord
“The Power of Faith” by Father Mark S. Suslenko, Pastor, SS. Isidore and Maria Parish, Glastonbury, Connecticut
Faith is the realization of what is hoped for and evidence of what is unseen. The realization of what is hoped for and evidence of what is unseen. The more we ponder those words, the more profound they become and packed with meaning and insight as we begin to tease out the purpose and power of faith. But they direct us to an active sense of faith. That faith is just not a sterile body of beliefs, but that it does something. That faith has an effect not only in us, but outside of ourselves. That faith has power.
What is the power of faith? What does it do? Well, we can find many answers to that question, but primarily, faith orientates us to the good, to truth. Faith focuses our minds and hearts where they need to be and completes the picture of ourselves. So it orientates us to the good, the truth. We find faith embodied in the church, which is a reflection of scripture and tradition. We find faith in our lived experience of life and how our relationship with God plays out in the everyday events of what unfolds before us. But in and through it all, it orientates us to what is true and what is good.
Now we have to step back and realize that there are objective truths that are always and everywhere objectively true. And they have to do with how we see ourselves, how we view one another, how we perceive God, how we perceive the world, and the bigger journey of our life, where it's meant to end. And these objective truths help us define ourselves. And so that objective truth is rooted in God, in the way he has designed things and ordered them, and the way things play out; those essential elements of our lives that give us meaning and tell us who we are. But yet we live in a society, in a world, where that objective truth, those objective always and everywhere principles are becoming a bit flatlined, and people are defining truth as what they want or what they need or what they feel at the moment to be true.
That what is true for me may not be true for you. That ow I see myself, define myself, organize my life, live and act in the world, my truth is what I desire, what I want. And so, this flatlining of truth is being evidenced in many corners of our world. And we're losing sight of the objective always and everywhere truths about what it means to be a human being, what it means to be a human being.
As we live in this world, we can easily find ourselves with a faith that gets shaken. It's hard to be a person of faith in a world that consistently tries to reject that faith. We can find ourselves questioning what we believe, if we believe and why we believe it. Circumstances can come along our way that test the faith that pushes us into the realm of doubt.
And it's a part of the human journey to encounter those moments of question and doubt, in fact, they can be healthy. And when I find myself in that particular place, I always begin to think of a scriptural account that we're all familiar with., and it's the account of the transfiguration of Jesus. When Jesus takes his friends up to the mountain and there, before their eyes, He's transfigured into his risen, glorified self, and He dazzles in white before them.
And it's an image, an experience so brilliant and wonderful that all they wanna do is stay there. It's so good to be there, they say to him. They touch something, they touch truth. And when you touch truth, it rings true through the whole fiber of your being. And in essence, what Jesus was saying to them is what you see here is not only what I shall become, but what you shall become. We're all meant to be on this journey of brilliance, of resurrection, of oneness, eternally forever together in heaven.
So your destiny is to shine. Your destiny is to be with me. And as I reflect on that particular passage, I asked myself, why did Jesus do that? What was the big point of it? And I have to believe that a part of the motivation may have been that he knew, given the way things were gonna play out, that the faith of the disciples was going to be shaken. That once he rose from the dead, they could find themselves wavering, questioning, and wondering if this, in fact, is all true.
And so he gave them this very concrete experience that they could use as an anchor, as a harbor when life got difficult. And I truly believe that that experience had a great deal to do with the spread of the faith after Jesus ascended to the Father.
As we look at this faith that we treasure and hold dear, we begin to realize that in addition to faith orientating us to what is true and what is good, faith also is the means of salvation, of salvation. Now, when we hear that word, I think most of us begin to think of heaven, eternity. That salvation is something yet to come, but we don't realize that salvation happens now, too. Salvation begins when I realize who I really am. When I realize that my primary mission in life is to become like Christ and that I'm on this journey of oneness with Christ forever in eternity. That my soul is on this bigger journey, investing in this bigger picture of life, more than what my mind could know and my eyes can see, faith tells me there is this "more." And so this salvation realized now and fulfilled later is what faith is all about.
St. Thomas Aquinas says of salvation, three things must happen in order for salvation to be realized. He says, "we must know what we ought to believe. We must know what we ought to desire, and we must know what we ought to do." Believe, desire, and do. Now think about our world. Think about ourselves. Those three things are important to any human being: belief, desire, and doing. If you take faith out of the picture, where does that leave us? So a person living in the world without faith, what do they believe? Well, there's so many things out there that people can believe about themselves.
You look on the internet, kids can find out all kinds of information about what they need to believe about themselves, what they can believe about themselves, what they should believe about themselves, and being absorbed in all of this information that abounds. A lot of it can be blatantly false. And so belief needs to be corrected by faith. So that what I believe is not orientated in just what I want or what can be, but in what God wants and how God has designed things. So faith is the corrective to our belief.
Desire. Without faith desire can be whatever, based on passion, based on what I want based on what I think I need, based on what you have that I want. Desire can be all over the place. And without faith, it can easily be misdirected. And I can be following desires that may, in the end, be very harmful. And so faith is the corrective to desire.
And then lastly, what I do. What I do. There are many options for behavior, we see it happening all over the place, and I suppose we can justify anything if we try hard enough. But that doesn't make the behavior correct. It doesn't make the behavior right. We need faith to give us the right action, to orientate us in the proper way to conduct the business of our lives. And so, once we begin to realize just how important faith is and how it plays out in the everyday business of our lives, then it takes on a greater brilliance itself; has a greater role in how I see myself.
And now here we are, people of faith who have to go out into this world. Into a world that doesn't want to hear the message of faith. Into a world that doesn't want to be challenged by the message of faith. And it's difficult to do so, but we're not alone. This has happened before. Those early disciples found themselves in exactly the same place as they began to preach the Good News.
It is difficult to live in the secular world with a message of faith because it naturally challenges people to think differently about themselves, to break outside of the box of want and desire, and to see that there is an objective picture to which we all must aspire. And so, as we have the opportunity this week to reflect a bit, perhaps we can consider how much we allow our faith in God to infiltrate and affect what I believe, what I desire, and what I do. Because aligning those with the will of God will ultimately bring us the peace, the stillness, and the serenity of our heart and soul that we all desperately desire.
Father Mark Suslenko is the pastor of SS. Isidore and Maria Parish in Glastonbury, Connecticut. Learn more about our parish community at www.isidoreandmaria.org. And follow us on social media: Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Our music comes free of charge from Blue Dot Sessions in Fall River, Massachusetts. I’m Carol Vassar. Thanks for joining us.