Father Dom Homily: Exploring a Child's Curiosity: Nurturing Faith and Encouraging Religious Education

The name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, good morning. It's good to be with all of you today as we celebrate the holy sacrifice of the mass. Obviously, being a priest, god calling me to the priesthood this is the most wonderful, beautiful thing that I get to do, and so I get to see my family, so it's just good to be here with you. Another thing that I love about being a priest and being here at OLC is that on Fridays, father Danny and I we get to visit the school, so we get to visit various classrooms. The reason why it's just so wonderful is just the inquisitive, innocent minds of the children, and I don't know about Father Danny what he prepares for when he goes into the classrooms. I don't know. Maybe he gives a theological exegesis. He's good at that. I'm just a simple blue collar priest. I just show up and I say, hey, kids, do you have any questions? And that is so fun. It's amazing to hear their little minds speak their little minds. I mean, it's any question from what's your favorite food? What's your favorite color? Father Dom, you have a cool truck, I know, or it could be. Father, what happens after death? What's heaven like? Why did Jesus have to die on the cross? Why did he have to wear that crown of thorns? I heard just a hierarchy of angels. Can you tell us about that? What are the seraphim? They can get deep. I mean anywhere from kindergarten all the way up to eighth grade, though some of the kindergartners ask deeper questions than eighth graders. Sorry, eighth graders, it's so much fun. I love it. God loves questions. I think one of the most devastating things a Catholic can do in pursuit, continued pursuit, of the truth is to stop asking questions. So many adults think they have it all figured out and that religion is just for children. No, you can never reach the limits of God's mind. Keep searching, keep digging, keep asking questions. You will continue to be fulfilled. Well, father, there's some questions that I don't even want to go down. The doctrines and dogmas and morals and teachings of the Catholic Church on sexuality and gender. Go down those paths. You have to, especially the adults. Why? Because you have to teach your kids. Well, father, that's your job. And the teachers? No, it's not. We supplement that. We're secondary. The parents are our primary children. Keep asking questions. Well, there's a question asked to Jesus in our gospel today, isn't there? Very interesting question. Jesus is God Full stop. He conquered death. No one else did. No one else can. That makes Jesus God, the only God, the one true God, the God of all creation, no beginning, no end. The Creator of you died for us, loves you. The Creator of time, space, laws of physics, essence, energy, powers, pure spirit, omnipotent, omnibenevolent, omnipresent that's Jesus and he's speaking, he's saying something, so we need to listen. So he's asked a question. When the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together and one of them, a scholar of the law, tested Jesus. Well, if you read the chapter before, you will find out how Jesus silenced the Sadducees. Read that. It's a powerful move on Jesus. Well, there's a difference between the Sadducees and the Pharisees. Yes, they're all Israelites. They are, they're all Jews. The Sadducees came from a wealthy family. They were a temple priests. They had a lot of power and influence in Israel, very, very smart and very powerful. The Sadducees did not believe in the resurrection of the dead, nor the soul or angels. Pharisees came from the middle class. They taught in synagogues. They believed in the resurrection of the dead and the immortality of the soul and angels. So there's a difference here. So there's a little tension between the Sadducees and the Pharisees. So when the Pharisees hear that Jesus silenced the most powerful people in Israel, well, they're saying hey, come on, guys, let's gather together, let's, let's go after Jesus, let's give it a crack and see what we can do, see if you can silence us. There's pride all over this gospel. So one of the Pharisees of the group that came to Jesus, probably one that stood out the most, is being the most learned and educated. He goes up to Jesus and he says teacher. Well, first he says he tested him Pride. Then he says teacher. He doesn't even call Jesus Messiah, he's just some guru, some teacher. This is God. He tests him and says which commandment in the law is the greatest of them? Law is the greatest. Now, in the Jewish law tradition there were over 613 laws, varying degree of hierarchy, some serious all the way down to some not so serious, and so what they're hoping is Jesus to kind of maybe screw up so that they have reason to condemn him, possibly stone him, because he's going to break one of the laws. Now he's talking to Jesus and he doesn't even know that. See, this is the epitome of the love that Jesus has, because Jesus could have said oh you stupid Pharisees call down fire and brimstone from heaven to consume them. But like a good father to a child who's asking a question, he responds in love. He doesn't destroy them, he answers their question in full. You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and this is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is like it you shall love your neighbor. This is huge. Jesus says. The first is to love the Lord with everything and then love your neighbor. In order to love your neighbor in the way God wants you to, you have to fall radically in love with God and follow all his commandments. When you give everything to him your heart, your soul, your mind then you will know how to love the love your neighbor as God wants you to. That's key. You have to love God first and then you can love your neighbor. There's so many people out there they get the God thing right and then they hate people. But there's so many people out there that love people and they just don't get the God thing. But you have to love God first so that you can be rightly ordered to love your neighbor as yourself. So God says we are to love him with our whole heart, our soul and our mind. That's very interesting. What is the heart? Well, in the Hebrew sense of the word, and what still plays To the humanity today, the heart is the center of our body. It's the center of our essence, it's the center of our being, it's a center of our, our spiritual spirituality. It's the center of everything. Our hearts are guarded because it's a very sensitive, powerful place. Right, we hear it all the time. My heart is broken, my heart is filled with joy, my heart is filled with courage. I these euphemisms in metaphors. They, they're powerful and we can't really pinpoint the heart in that way. We just we use it in such a powerful way because it is powerful. It's a throne, and guess who sits on that throne? God. That's why we hear in our second reading today that Paul said I knew who you once were. He says in other writings, in 1st Corinthians, he says you were once Gentiles and pagans who sacrificed to demons and not to the one true God. I desire you to participate, not in demons. Later he says if it's not in Jesus Christ, you worship their demons. That's how powerful our heart can be pulled to other things, or in other words idols. Our heart is God's throne. Give your heart to the Lord. He won't break it. You will have a magnanimous heart, just like an Ezekiel, chapter 36. I take from you your stony hearts and I give you my flesh. You Well, jesus, is a divine physician and sometimes we require heart surgery and sometimes that's painful. But we have to give our complete heart over to the Lord. That's why Jesus goes after the heart first, and then he goes after our soul. He says we're supposed to love the Lord with all our soul. Our souls are immortal at conception. Life begins, that's a fact. That's not a choice, it's a fact. He gives a soul that is immortal, destined for heaven in eternity. And then, when Jesus comes again, we will be reunited with our glorified and resurrected bodies. Our bodies are beautiful, our bodies are good, our soul animates the body and we're supposed to take care of our souls. Well, how do we take care of our soul? Well, jesus gave us the church in the sacraments, baptism, to wash away original sin on our soul and bring us into the family of God, the church that opens us up to what? Reconciliation, to keep our soul in union with God. And then what the Eucharist, so our souls can receive the body, blood, soul and divinity of God, so that we can be intimately connected with Him. Confirmation, a full descent of the Holy Spirit to enliven our soul, so we can be courageous and brave and bring the truth to a world filled with so much darkness. God calls you to a vocation, marriage or the priesthood, to direct your soul into what he created you to do, destined for heaven. That's your path. And then, when you're dying, the sacrament of the anointing of the sick to prepare you for your final journey and fill your soul with readiness. Our souls are very important. That's why he gave us the church, the one true church. Next, he says we are so, so loved the Lord with our mind. Minds are very powerful. It can only access a certain percentage, right. Well, god gives us a mind so that we can come to know Him. So we can come to know ourselves, our neighbors, our spouses, our children, even nature around us, with science. Science does not disprove God. Science is a tool given by man to God to discover God, not to disprove Him. To discover Him. Our minds are powerful. And Saint Paul, in all his letters, talks about the mind. If you read all his letters he's all about the mind. So much so that in Romans, chapter 12, verse 2, he says this to us even today do not conform yourselves to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, so that you may know or discern what is good and pleasing in the eyes of God. Our mind needs to order our passions. That's why we need to give our mind to God, so that the Holy Spirit can illuminate our intellect, so that we can order our emotions through our intellect, so that our emotions can give us the power to do what is right and good, to give us courage, to give us strength, to give us sacrificial love. We have to do this and our passions are gifts that give them to us. But if they're not ordered by your emotions, if you don't have God in your mind, your passions will run wild like wild stallions and cause all kinds of destruction, chaos, darkness and sin. Saint does not want your mind ordered to God. He wants you to be governed by your passions. When I was in apostate meaning I was brought into the Catholic Church and then at 15 I left and I didn't come back until I was 27,. Someone who does that is called an apostate. It's not a derogatory term, it's just something someone does. That's what I did. I was outside God's grace. One of the big things I struggle with is pride that leads to anger, or anger that leads to pride, and I sinned the greatest during that time because I didn't have God ordering my emotions and all my life's decisions were based on how I felt. So, praise the Lord for confession when I came back. We have to order our passions and our emotions with our minds. That's why Jesus says you have to give it to me, because you can't do it without me. This is all God's love for us, and then, when we give our heart and our soul and our mind to the Lord, he will show us how to love our neighbor. Saint Mother Teresa did this well Love the person next to you, love your spouse, love your children, love your neighbors. When you love God first, you'll know how to do that. In our first reading, we're supposed to give to the poor. We have Haiti, one of our wonderful ministries, here, who's being represented after Mass. You know we give to the poor. There's so many things we do here at OLC. We give to the poor. We take care of the widows, the orphans. We do these things. In the developed countries there is a poverty that is rampant and that is an intellectual poverty and a knowledge of God, his church and the truth. So many people are chasing lies, thinking their truths. So if we're going to love our neighbor the way that Christ loves, we have to do it with the very last word. He ends in with our first reading Compassion. If we do these things, god will have compassion with us. Compassion in Latin it means to suffer with. If our hearts and our minds and our souls are on fire for the Lord, we will love others like he does deeply. We will sacrifice for them. I think what we need most in this country and in our culture and here at OLC and our community, is to help those learn. Learn the faith, learn the sacraments and teachings and doctrines and dogmas. They will set you free. They will set you free. Loving someone isn't just letting them do what they want, when they want and how they want. Loving someone takes courage, because we have to call people out who are sinning in a charitable way. But we got to meet them where they're at too and then walk with them and show them the path that we walk to God. Show them God so that they can encounter Jesus, who in all throughout Scripture? When you encounter Jesus, there's an encounter, there's a transformation, and then you follow. And so all we have to do is bring people to Jesus, but people who are sinning and sexually, who are struggling with this gender and their loss too. We have to help them. When we give everything to the Lord, he will set us on fire, all of us on fire, so that we want to bring as many people as we can to the Lord. That's why the last couple homilies I tell you go out and bring somebody to Mass. If you ask 10, maybe 9 will shoot you down, but you might get one, praise the Lord. Maybe we'll plant seeds in the other ones. They'll plant seeds in us too, so we can bring them to the Eucharist, so we can bring them into the Catholic Church, so that they have access to the grace of the sacraments and they too can give their whole heart, soul, mind over to Jesus Christ. When we do that, we can bring so much light into the darkness of this world. Name the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.