Homily for 26th Sunday of Ordinary Time

Homily for the
26th Sunday of Ordinary Time
Oct. 1, 2017
Ps 25: 4-8
Nativity, Washington, D.C.

On Friday afternoon, I got an email that was perhaps a bit desperate. Our old parish in D.C., Nativity, needed a priest for the Saturday vigil Mass. Would a Salesian be available? We have Cooperators in the parish, and I’ve already helped with some weekday Masses, so it wasn’t that Salesians were on the bottom of the pastor’s list. Not at all. And the parishioners tell me they miss “their” Salesians very, very much—and they name some of their favorites: the late Fr. Steve Schenck, Fr. Paul Grauls, Fr. George Hanna, Bro. Tom Sweeney.

Herewith, my 1st Sunday homily since moving to Maryland in June!

“The sins of my youth and my frailties remember not; in your kindness remember me, because of your goodness, O Lord” (Ps 25: 7).

Teenage Girls (Pixabay)

Hip-hop (Pixabay)

I suppose most of us have fond memories of our youth.  I also suppose most of us remember some pretty dumb things we did when we were young—too young to know much better; or old enuf to know better but not knowing better because we thought our parents were the dumb ones, and our “knowledge” was sharper than their old-fashioned experience; or when we were young adults—maybe in college, maybe just running around with a bunch of “cool” people.  And now we remember words and deeds we wouldn’t want our children or grandchildren to know about.

In the Responsorial Psalm we beg the Lord not to remember those regrettable sins or indiscretions or foolishness of our youth.  When the Lord forgets something, it no longer exists.

The psalm also asks the Lord not to remember our frailties.  We’re not talking here about the frailties of age, all too familiar to many of us—like stiff joints, shuffling walks, wider girth, memory loss.  No, we’re talking about our spiritual frailties—our weak faith, perhaps, or our weak convictions, or our fears.  We’re talking about our moral frailty, our sinfulness, our constant inclinations toward the dark side of our human nature, our very specific sins:  our impatience, our anger, our gossiping, our lust, our reluctance to forgive, our rash judgments, our lies, our envy.  These, too, we beg the Lord not to remember, to consign to oblivion, to non-existence.

The psalm continues:  “in your kindness remember me, because of your goodness, O Lord.”  If the Lord remembers us kindly, he takes us to himself.  The goodness of the Lord overwhelms all our badness, if we humble ourselves by confessing that badness; if we humble ourselves, as St. Paul says today that Jesus our Lord did:  “he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave” (Phil 2:7)—humbled himself not in the sense of confessing moral guilt, for he had none, but in the sense of descending from the purest heights of heaven to live with us sinners and to offer himself as a sacrifice of atonement for our sins.

When’s the last time you humbly confessed your sins in the sacrament of Reconciliation?  When’s the last time you brought your sins and your frailties and your moral foolishness to our Lord Jesus?

By Giuseppe Molteni

In the 1st reading, we heard that the Lord receives the wicked person who changes behavior.  In the interpretation of Jesus’ parable, we heard that God is pleased when the tax collectors and prostitutes respond to Jesus’ preaching and seek forgiveness and moral renewal; and Jesus is harsh toward those who talk about God and his commandments but don’t own up to their sins, especially their self-centeredness, their unwillingness to humble themselves by coming to Jesus.  For our part, both Ezekiel and Jesus call for action, not just an exercise of the mind.  The wicked who repent, in Ezekiel’s prophecy, change their behavior.  In Jesus’ parable, the son who said, “No,” not only changed his mind but actually went to work in the vineyard.

Confession is the 1st action step we have to take toward renewing our lives with God.  If you haven’t been to confession for quite a while, what’s holding you back?  Not the goodness of the Lord, surely!  Not the compassion of the Lord, which is from of old (Ps 25:6)—which has such a long history in the lives of sinners, from Abraham and King David to Simon Peter and St. Paul to St. Augustine and St. Ignatius and the Servant of God Dorothy Day.

“Good and upright is the Lord; thus he shows sinners the way,” the psalm proclaims (25:8).  The Collect (or opening prayer) extolled the Lord for using his “almighty power above all” to pardon and show mercy, to bestow his grace “abundantly upon us.”  How much “gooder” toward us could the Lord be?  He is eager to forgive us.  He longs to forgive us.  He is waiting for us to come to him and say simply and humbly, “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” so that his priest can comfort us with forgiveness and the assurance of his everlasting love—and can cast our sins into oblivion, where he will never remember them again.