The Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time [A]
Zephaniah 2:3;3:12-13  +  1 Corinthians 1:26-31  +  Matthew 5:1-12
St. Anthony’s Catholic Church, Garden Plain, KS
February 1, 2026

The Bible is not a single book.  The Bible is a library.  Just as a library has many different types of books in it, so also the Bible.  When you visit a library, you find different sections in the library, and each section has different books.  If you visit a library, and visit four different sections, and take from different shelves a cookbook, a collection of poems, a presidential biography, and a science fiction novel, you don’t read those four books in the same way.  For example, if you open a cookbook expecting it to read like a science fiction novel, you’re going to end up with a very strange supper.

The Bible is the same way, and this variety among the books of the Bible is important to remember during Holy Mass.  As you know, the first chief part of the Mass focuses upon passages from the Bible.  But when we listen to them, if we don’t understand the differences among the Old Testament Prophets, the New Testament letters of the Apostles, and the four Gospel accounts, we’re not going to get the most out of the Scripture readings.

What’s more, when it comes to the four accounts of the Gospel—written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—we need to recognize the many differences among these four books of the Bible.  One way to understand these many differences is to think of your own life.  Let’s say that I myself wanted to commission a biography of your life.  I hire four different journalists to write four different biographies of your life.  But each of these four journalists interviews a different person.  One journalist interviews your spouse.  Another interviews one of your bosses from the jobs you’ve had over the years.  Another interviews one of your sisters, and the last journalist interviews one of your high school friends.  Do you think that those four biographies are going to say the same thing?  Or are these four biographies going to illustrate different aspects of your life?  In fact, they are going to illustrate four different aspects of your life.  In a similar manner, each of the four Gospel accounts illustrates Jesus’ life, death, and Resurrection from different vantage points because the four different authors had four different sources.

I mention all this because we are early in the Season of Ordinary Time, and have just heard today one of the most important passages of the Bible.  Before reflecting specifically on this passage—from Matthew 5—we need some context.

Lent starts early this year, on February 18.  So including today, we only have three Sundays in Ordinary Time before Lent begins.  On these three Sundays, the Gospel passage comes from Matthew Chapter 5.  This chapter is the first of three chapters that give us Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.  If you’d like a recommendation for spiritual reading during these next three weeks before Lent begins, I’d encourage you to read the Sermon on the Mount from the Gospel according to St. Matthew.

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Today’s Gospel passage is the first twelve verses of Matthew Chapter 5:  the very beginning of the Sermon on the Mount.  In our own day, preachers often begin a sermon with a story or a joke.  Jesus decided to begin His Sermon on the Mount with the Beatitudes.

However, before he starts giving us Jesus’ sermon, St. Matthew the Evangelist mentions a few interesting details about Jesus.  The evangelist mentions that when “Jesus saw the crowds, He went up the mountain, and after He had sat down, His disciples came to Him.”  Consider just two points here:  that Jesus went up the mountain, and that He sat down there.

Why did Jesus have to go up a mountain in order to preach a sermon?  Obviously, He did not have to.  Jesus preached many sermons during the three years of His public ministry, and most of them were preached in all sorts of settings.  But in St. Matthew’s account of the Gospel, the Sermon on the Mount is Jesus’ first sermon, so Jesus is teaching us here not only by His words, but also by the setting that He chose, and by the choice to sit down.

So why did Jesus choose a mountain to be the site of His first sermon?  St. Matthew clarifies this throughout the course of his Gospel account.  Through the words and works of Jesus that St. Matthew includes, and in the way he structures his Gospel account, St. Matthew portrays Jesus as a “New Moses”.  One reason St. Matthew does this is that unlike many other New Testament writings, Matthew’s Gospel account was written for converts from Judaism.

So here you need to notice another difference among the four accounts of the Gospel.  The four accounts of the Gospel differ because the four evangelists were writing for four difference audiences.  Imagine again the biography of your own life.  Instead of myself commissioning four different journalists to write four biographies, imagine that four different persons commission four biographies of your life.  Furthermore, imagine—and granted, this will take quite a bit of imagination—that the four persons who commission these four biographies are four very different persons.  The first of those who commissions a biography of you is a farmer from Kingman County.  The second is a businessman from New York City.  The third is a tribesman from the Amazon of South America.  And the fourth—again, use your imagination—is an astronaut from the 26th century who lives in a colony on Saturn.

When those four different biographies of your life are written for those four very different people who commissioned the biographies, the authors are going to have to write differently.  The author writing for the tribesman from the Amazon is going to have to explain details and circumstances about your life that the farmer in Kingman County is not going to need to have explained.  The audiences of the books shape the way that the same story is told.  It’s similar with the four accounts of the Gospel. 

Matthew’s Gospel account was written for converts from Judaism.  This is why Matthew “refers to Jewish customs and institutions without explanation” of their backgrounds, because the original Jewish audience of Matthew’s Gospel account would already have known those backgrounds.  That’s also why St. Matthew “works nearly two hundred references to the Jewish Scriptures into his narrative”.[1]  That’s also why St. Matthew draws parallels between Jesus and Moses.

Moses was, for the Jewish people, the greatest Old Testament Prophet.  His life as a prophet including working signs and wonders during the Exodus.  But during that Exodus came the most important event of Moses’ life as a prophet.  During the course of their Exodus from Egypt to the Promised Land, God’s People stopped at Mount Sinai.  There, while the rest of God’s People remained below, Moses alone ascended Mount Sinai to receive from God His Ten Commandments.  Moses then had to descend the mountain to give to God’s People this Law.  This Law was the means by which His People could—we might say today—“keep right” with God.  That key truth about Moses is reflected in how St. Matthew records his account of the Gospel, portraying Jesus as a “New Moses”.  Jesus is like Moses in many ways, but also fulfills and completes the ministry of Moses.

In today’s Gospel Reading, it’s not only Jesus who ascends the mountain.  Jesus draws His disciples up with Him.  And it’s not a voice from the heavens that speaks there to a prophet.  Instead, the New Moses—God in the Flesh—speaks to His people face to face.  And Jesus gives to us, His people, not ten commandments, but nine beatitudes.

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Jesus put the Beatitudes at the start of the Sermon on the Mount in order to put the most important lesson first.  Likewise, the first of the nine Beatitudes is the key to understanding and living out all nine.  So we ought to consider the first of the nine beatitudes as being the first for a reason.

“‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.’”  St. Augustine preaches about this first—this key—beatitude by asking what “poor in spirit” means.  He answers that it means “[b]eing poor in wishes, not in means.  One who is poor in spirit, you see, is humble; and God hears the groans of the humble, and doesn’t despise their prayers.  That’s why the Lord begins His sermon with humility, that is to say with poverty.  You can find someone who’s religious, with plenty of this world’s goods, and not [because of that] puffed up and proud.  And you can find someone in need, who has nothing, and won’t settle for anything. … the [former] is poor in spirit, because humble, while [the latter] is indeed poor, but not in spirit.”[2]

The Lord Jesus has given us what we need to reach Heaven.  He has given us life; grace to strengthen us for the journey; and the roadmap in these nine beatitudes.  The first, upon which all the others rest, is humility:  poverty of spirit.  Ask the Holy Spirit to help you to make a concrete resolution regarding the practice of humility, maybe by serving those in need through either the Corporal or Spiritual Works of Mercy, or by giving up something that you have and do not need.

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[1] “Introduction to the Gospel according to Saint Matthew”, in The Ignatius Catholic Study Bible (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2010), 4.

[2] St. Augustine of Hippo, Sermon 53A, in The Works of Saint Augustine, Part III, Vol. III, 78.

The Third Sunday in Ordinary Time [A]
Isaiah 8:23-9:3  +  1 Corinthians 1:10-13,17  +  Matthew 4:12-23
St. Anthony’s Catholic Church, Garden Plain, KS
January 25, 2026

This Sunday’s Gospel Reading is a good reminder to pray often for one member of our parish who—God willing—will be ordained to the priesthood at the end of May.  Deacon Peter Bergkamp is nearing the finish line of the long marathon called “seminary”.  Of course, in the spiritual life, where one spiritual marathon ends, another begins.

It’s not an easy road to enter the seminary.  Before being admitted, the young man has to take intelligence tests, a  psychological examination, and a physical.  But the most grueling requirement is saved for last:  the candidate has to play a round of golf with the Bishop, and shoot under 80.

There are many things about a young man entering the seminary that are misunderstood.  One important point that many people are not clear on is why exactly a young man enters the seminary.  He does not enter the seminary because he’s decided to be a priest.  A young man enters the seminary to find out if he’s being called to the priesthood.

To put this differently:  the Lord calls out to every young man, “Come after me….”  What differs from one young man to another is the phrase that follows “Come after me….”  To some young men, the Lord says, “Come after me, and I will give you the grace needed to be a strong and virtuous husband and father.”  To other young men, Jesus says those words by which we hear him calling Simon and Andrew:  “Come after me, and I will make you fishers of men.”  Through a seminarian’s prayers while in the seminary, the Lord clarifies just which call the Lord has made to him.

“Fishers of men”.  This is a metaphor, of course:  one that Simon and Andrew readily understood, since their livelihood was being fishermen.  Regardless of the kind of life which they had chosen for themselves, Jesus called them to a very different way of life.  They had no idea what to expect, and if Jesus had tried to explain what following Him would mean, they still would have been largely in the dark.  That’s why following Jesus demands the virtue of faith.  Following Jesus is not for those who insist on controlling everything, or knowing exactly what’s coming down the pike.

The fact is that Jesus can call men from any sort of livelihood, at any age in their lives, to serve His Church as priests.  For the last four years of my formation in the seminary, Bishop Gerber sent me and another young man named Sam Pinkerton to Mundelein Seminary in Chicago, which at the time was the largest seminary in the United States.  It served forty-five dioceses throughout the world, educating men from the countries of Uganda, Zaire, Colombia, Poland, China, Vietnam in addition to U.S. dioceses from Paterson, New Jersey to El Paso, Texas, and of course a large contingent of native Chicagoans, who are a breed all their own.

Among the 150+ men with whom I studied at Mundelein, I can guarantee you that no two of us had traveled along the same path to get to the seminary.  I can also guarantee that the Lord did not use exactly the same words to call any of us, to help us understand the need we had to enter the seminary.

Before entering the seminary, I had spent only one year at Kansas State.  Many young men enter the seminary the summer after graduating from high school.  But some men enter the seminary after graduating from college and starting careers.  At the seminary I attended in Chicago, one seminarian had graduated from law school and practiced law before entering the seminary.  Another seminarian had finished medical school and practiced medicine before entering the seminary.  No two young men have the same path to the priesthood.

It’s also important to realize that God calls young men of many different temperaments and with many different outlooks on life to enter the seminary.  Some years ago there was a book published that illustrated this truth.  It offers portraits of about a dozen different priests, one of whom—Father Ned Blick—is a priest of our diocese.

Father Ned’s words in this book ring very true.  He states:

“Since I have been ordained, I have been surprised, no, astonished, by the effect on people of things that require such a small effort on my part.  …  I had no idea such small things would be so much appreciated.  Why that happens to priests is interesting.  It may be because we confront the spiritual dimensions of people, while most other professions do not.  People have deep spiritual needs.  When they see them met, however inadequately, they respond.”

To me the key of this quote is Father Ned speaking about the spiritual nature of man:  a dimension of human nature that’s often ignored.  Again, Father Ned states:  “we confront the spiritual dimensions of people, while most other professions do not.  People have deep spiritual needs.  When they see them met, however inadequately, they respond.”

This spiritual side to human nature is where the great gift of the priesthood rests.  We need to pray for vocations to the priesthood.  But we also need to encourage young men to offer themselves to the spiritual nature of man that gives our lives their final and ultimate meaning.

The Baptism of the Lord [A]
Isaiah 42:1-4,6-7  +  Acts 10:34-38  +  Matthew 3:13-17
St. Anthony’s Catholic Church, Garden Plain, KS
January 11, 2026

“Childhood” is a key theme of Christmas.  First, we focus on the Christ Child.  But like everything in Jesus’ earthly life:  Christ’s childhood is for us.  Christmas also focuses upon you and me being called to adoption as God’s very own children.  In St. John’s first New Testament letter, he writes about this divine adoption, proclaiming:  “See what love the Father has bestowed on us that we may be called the children of God.  And so we are. … Beloved, we are God’s children now” [1 John 3:1-2].

That’s not just a mystery.  It’s also a profound paradox.  It’s hard enough to imagine how a tiny baby could be the All-Powerful Creator of the universe.  But it’s even harder to imagine how a sinner such as you or me could become, not just a saint, but a very child of God the Father!  But “so we are”, St. John proclaims:  “we are God’s children now”.

The Sacrament of Baptism is how we become God’s children.  But our own baptism was made possible by the Baptism of the Lord Jesus in the Jordan River.  This is the sacred mystery that the Church celebrates on last day of Christmas.  Today we reflect on the mystery of Jesus’ baptism in order to understand your and my baptism.

So what difference does being baptized make to the life of a Christian in this world?  St. Paul gives an answer in his New Testament Letter to the Romans.  He explains to the first Christians in Rome that “we were buried… with [Jesus] by baptism into death, so that… we too might walk in newness of life” [Romans 6:4].

What is St. Paul saying here about your daily life as a Christian?  What does it mean to “walk in newness of life”, and how does that connect to being “buried… with [Jesus] by baptism into death”?

Imagine someone baptized as an adult.  What is different about the way that that adult walked through life before baptism, over and against the way that he walks through life after baptism?  The answer is that after baptism, the Christian walks through life by means of death.  But what exactly does that mean, that by virtue of your baptism, you are meant to walk through life by means of death?

One way of explaining it is that your life is not about your self.  Your life as a Christian is about God first, your neighbor second, and your self third.  The living of the Christian life means loving God and loving your neighbor, and living for God and living for your neighbor.  This is instead of rooting your life in your love of your self, and living for the good of your self and your comfort:  in a word, the Christian life is the process of becoming “self-less”.

To live a “self-less” life means to live your daily life through the strength of your baptism, by means of death.  If this seems abstract, the saints of our own day and time give us clear examples.  Take St. Teresa of Calcutta.  If you’ve never watched a documentary of her life in Calcutta, watch one on YouTube.  Watch Mother Teresa in the slums of Calcutta, loving God at the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass and in Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament early each morning.  Then, during the rest of the day, through the strength she received in Adoration and Holy Mass, she loved the “poorest of the poor”, as she called her neighbors.  She tended to their needs by carrying out the corporal and spiritual works of mercy.

Saints like Mother Teresa are easy to admire, but how does the average Christian go about opening her or his life to God’s grace more fully?  One simple question that helps is to ask yourself whether you can name from memory the seven corporal works of mercy and the seven spiritual works of mercy.  If not, find them listed in the Catechism, write them down on a sheet of paper, and pray over this list of fourteen simple actions:  two columns of seven works of mercy.

So here are three action items for this coming week.  Choose just one of these, unless you feel really enthusiastic about doing all three.  (1)  Find out, if you don’t already know, the date of your baptism, and put a note in your 2026 calendar to observe your baptismal anniversary with prayer and maybe even going to Mass.  (2)  Watch a documentary about St. Teresa of Calcutta.  (3)  Write out longhand the seven corporal works of mercy and the seven spiritual works of mercy, and choose one out of those fourteen to focus on during the rest of this month.  Pick a different work of mercy for each month.

Albert Einstein is supposed to have stated that genius equals 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.  Something similar is true of holiness.  In the case of holiness, God the Holy Spirit offers us the inspiration.  Your work after accepting that grace is the 99% of perspiration through acts of love for God, and acts of love for your neighbor, dying to your self, so as to live completely within the Mystical Body of Christ.

The Fourth Sunday of Advent [A]
Isaiah 7:10-14  +  Romans 1:1-7  +  Matthew 1:18-24
St. Anthony’s Catholic Church, Garden Plain, KS
December 21, 2025

Christmas, of course, is a time for giving gifts:  gifts which are signs of our love.  Spiritually, Christmas is a time for us to give gifts to God.  Christmas is a time for us to give God signs of our love for Him.  So naturally, we want to give God our best.

After all, that’s what He did for us.  God the Father gave us His only Son.  His most precious possession did God the Father give us as the first Christmas gift.

Spiritually, because God is a loving Father, He doesn’t want us only to give Him gifts.  He wants His children to shower each other with gifts, also.  Just as Jesus summed up what it means to be His disciple in two great commands—to love God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself—so our own gift-giving during Christmas must also bear this two-fold mark:  giving gifts to God, and giving gifts to our brothers and sisters.

Advent is a season that helps us to do just that.  During Advent, there are three key figures who show us how to prepare for the birth of Christ:  that is, the Father’s gift to us.  Whether and how we accept this Gift from the Father determines how well we can give gifts to God and our brethren.  These three key Advent figures and St. John the Baptist, the Blessed Virgin Mary, and St. Joseph.  Today’s Gospel passage focuses our attention on the last of these three.

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Saint Joseph is a curious figure in the Gospel.  You may actually have heard people at times dismiss the significance of St. Joseph’s vocation.  After all, they ask, how hard could Joseph’s life have been?  His wife was sinless, and his foster-child was the Son of God!  What husband and father could possibly have it easier than Joseph?

But that sort of dismissal of St. Joseph overlooks one very important principle of the Christian spiritual life.  On this Fourth Sunday of Advent—just days before the start of Christmas—the Church wants us to reflect upon St. Joseph, and ponder his vocation within the Holy Family, so that you and I can see how that same principle needs to be observed in our own spiritual lives.

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St. Joseph was a very blessed man.  He was blessed to have Mary as his wife, and he was blessed that God gave him and Mary custody of God’s Only-Begotten Son.  But with God’s gifts inevitably come challenges.  The two cannot be separated.  In God’s way of living life, God’s gifts and God’s challenges cannot be separated.  This is a bedrock principle of our Christian faith.

Put another way (which might sound a little strange at first), God’s gifts are equipment.  God’s gifts are equipment.  What does that mean?  It’s to say that when God gives us gifts, His gifts equip us to carry out some work on God’s behalf.

So it was with St. Joseph.  Yes, Joseph was greatly blessed by God with tremendous gifts.  But these tremendous gifts were given to Joseph because God had tremendous plans for him.  Joseph’s vocation involved tremendous sacrifices (perhaps the greatest example of which was the flight to Egypt because of the threat to the life of the infant Jesus).  God was calling Joseph to tremendous service on God’s behalf, and thanks be to God, Joseph was a “just man” (or “righteous man” as today’s Gospel passage puts it).  Joseph knew that it’s in giving God His due that any of us find peace in this life and in the next.

In today’s Gospel passage, what we hear gives us only a small idea of Joseph’s vocation.  Here, as in all four Gospel accounts, Joseph is never recorded as saying a single word.  You might say that Joseph is the “strong, silent type”.  He prefers actions to words.  He’s a man of just deeds rather than a man of just words, like so many of us men are:  just words.

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We might ask, then, “Where does that leave us?”  What does St. Joseph have to teach us?  As a teacher, he will have to teach us by his example, since we have none of his words to learn from.  Although God issued Joseph great challenges, Joseph faced many smaller ones, also.  Joseph’s small challenges, and his corresponding small sacrifices, can be a mirror for us to look into, to see what our daily lives might look like with greater faith.

It is as the spouse of the Blessed Virgin Mary that we honor Saint Joseph.  When Matthew, at the beginning of his gospel account, introduces Joseph, he calls him “the husband of Mary.”  It is the spousal nature of Joseph’s life that mirrors in the sort of fidelity that God asks of us.  The life of Saint Joseph is one of silent fidelity to the Lord.  In him, we see that we are called to be people of faith even when appearances suggest that we should give up on others, ourselves, or even God.

Like his wife Mary, Joseph has an open ear.  He listens for the Lord to speak to him.  As we make our final spiritual preparations for the Christmas season, we should rest in the fact that the Jesus whom God invites us to receive in our lives is indeed Emmanuel:  He is God, who is with us, who is born for our salvation, and who has Good News for us to listen to.

The Third Sunday of Advent [A]
Isaiah 35:1-6, 10  +  James 5:7-10  +  Matthew 11:2-11
St. Anthony’s Catholic Church, Garden Plain, KS
December 14, 2025

In today’s Second Reading, the apostle Saint James encourages us to:  “[t]ake as an example of hardship and patience … the prophets who spoke ….”  Then the Gospel Reading sets before us the greatest of the prophets:  Saint John the Baptist, whose life reveals the wisdom of what St. James encourages us to take up.

“Hardship and patience” don’t come easily to most of us.  Of course, most people can see the value of patience more easily than the value of hardship.  We know from daily experience how much we need patience in order to get along in this world (not to mention in order to have a shot at Heaven!).  As we grow up, we need patience with our brothers, and with our sisters.  Parents need patience with their children, and children with their parents.  Employees need patience with their bosses, and bosses with their employees.

We even need to have patience with God!  Maybe that sounds strange.  Of course, the reason for needing patience with God is very different than why we need patience with our children, parents, boss, and so on.  For the most part, we need patience with our brothers and sisters because of their imperfections, faults, and sins.  But with God we need patience for different reasons.

We need patience with God first of all because His time is not our time.  God looks at us and our lives from the perspective of eternity, while we—like children—look only at a very narrow span of time.  In other words, our field of vision is restricted by blinders that we have placed upon ourselves.

Or we might say that we need patience with God because God is a farmer, while for our part, we—all too often—only want to reap what we have not sown.  So patience is one of the key virtues of Advent, and we beg God for an increase in the virtue of patience, with both God and neighbor.

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But on the other hand, do we really need the hardship that St. James speaks about in the Second Reading?  Or is hardship just something that has to be tolerated?  Is hardship actually of value, or should we instead work to cultivate a soft, comfortable, easy, restful life?

We know, of course, that some penance is inevitable in this world where we live.  In His Sermon on the Mount, Jesus reminds us that God makes the rain to fall on the just and the unjust.

Saint John the Baptist speaks about the hard fact that hardship is necessary.  In fact, hardship is not just necessary.  Hardship has great value.  Saint James says the same.  Both saints point our attention to Jesus, who shows us repeatedly that hardship is a precious means by which to draw closer to the Father.  Hardship is a means of allowing Him to embrace us as a father embraces his little child.

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Of course, another word for “hardship” is “penance”.  But the word “penance” is not always fully appreciated.  For some Catholics, the word “penance” suggests only the Sacrament of Penance, with all of the examination of conscience, confession, and amendment of life that are part and parcel of that sacrament.  For other Catholics, the word “penance” suggests a medieval monastery, where monks use whips and cords, a diet of hard bread and cold soup, and allow themselves three hours of sleep on a hard floor in order to tell God, year after year, how sorry they are for being such miserable wretches.  Unfortunately, false caricatures of “penance” such as that medieval monastery lead some Christians to the opposite extreme, where the grace of Christ, which has already won the victory over human sin, leads them to reject penance as having any place within the spiritual life.

Holy Mother Church, however, not only teaches her children to practice some penance on Fridays in honor of that Good Friday when Jesus carried His Cross and died upon it for us.  The Church not only offers the Sacrament of Penance every week of the year so that sins, both large and small, mortal and venial, can be washed away by the Blood of Christ.  In fact, the Church goes further in sowing the seeds of penance in our spiritual lives.  The Church each year sets aside two seasons of the year as seasons of penance.  Advent and Lent are seasons of preparation:  Lent prepares us for Eastertide, and Advent prepares us for Christmastide.  Penance, then, is one of the tools with which to prepare for the great seasons of Christmas and Easter.

However, although Advent and Lent are similar in many ways, they focus our hearts and minds differently.  Lent will come again in a few months, and during Lent we can reflect on how Lent is unique in calling Christians to penance.  But Advent’s unique “take” on penance has its origin in the experience of new life:  new life, of course, being what lies at the heart of the Christmas mystery.

Those of you who are mothers can recall all the sacrifices involved in bearing new life, and bringing it into the world, not to mention the countless sacrifices involved in shepherding your child through the first decades of his or her life.  New life and sacrifice are part and parcel of each other.  New life and sacrifice go hand in hand.  You can’t have one without the other.

But you will still find some Christians who insist that new life in the spiritual life is different:  they insist that because grace is free, that it demands no sacrifice of the one to whom it’s given.  As Catholics, though, we know better, because the Church leads us in the practices of penance throughout the year, but especially during Advent and Lent.

Along with the practices of poverty and silence, the practice of penance helps us prepare to celebrate Christmas in a deeply spiritual manner.  If you’d like an image to reflect on throughout this third week of Advent, here are three images:  picture our Blessed Mother at the Annunciation, during the journey to Bethlehem, and in the stable after Jesus’ birth.  Reflect on our Blessed Mother practicing poverty, silence, and sacrifice, and give thanks that through the grace of her Son, you and I can draw closer to God the Father.

The Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary
Genesis 3:9-15,20  +  Ephesians 1:3-6,11-12  +  Luke 1:26-38
St. Anthony’s Catholic Church, Garden Plain, KS
December 8, 2025

The Blessed Virgin Mary needed a Savior.  This is important to recall when reflecting upon the Immaculate Conception:  that is, Mary being conceived by her mother, St. Anne, without inheriting Original Sin.  This is important, among other reasons, because some of our separated brethren within the Body of Christ make a false claim about Mary.  They argue that believing in Mary’s being preserved from Original Sin means that the salvation that Jesus won for fallen man on Calvary was not universal:  in other words, that Mary had no need for salvation.  She was sinless, so Jesus did not save her:  that’s the false claim that we have to be able to answer.

In truth, we have Mary’s own testimony in the Bible.  The scene of the Visitation of Mary to her cousin Elizabeth is recorded in the first chapter of St. Luke’s Gospel account.  In that scene, Mary proclaims the hymn called the Magnificat, which starts with Mary declaring:  “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has regarded the low estate of his handmaiden” [Luke 1:46-48; see Acts 4:12].

Mary speaks of her “Savior”, because Mary was saved by God from sin.  But she was not saved from sin like you and I, through the grace of Baptism and Confession.

Consider an example of what it means to be saved.  Imagine this:  imagine that you’re standing at the edge of a very large lake.  In front of you is a pier that extends a long way into the lake.  At the end of the pier, the water is fifty feet deep.

Now imagine that two friends are with you.  These persons are both blind, and unable to swim.  Now you’re setting up your campsite, when suddenly you hear a splash:  one of your friends walked all the way to the end of the pier and fell into the water.  Naturally, you run to the end of the pier, dive in, and drag the friend to safety.  You have saved your first friend from drowning.

The next day, you’re scavenging near the campsite for firewood.  At one point you pause, and look up.  Your other friend has walked down the pier, and is close to its end.  You make a mad dash for the pier, and you reach its end just as your friend is about to step off and fall into the fifty-foot deep water.  You grab your friend by the back of his shirt and pull him back to safety before he can fall in.  You have saved your second friend from drowning.

That second friend is like the Blessed Virgin Mary, who was saved by preventing her from ever falling into sin.  The rest of the human race is offered salvation in the first way, by being pulled out of sin after having already fallen into it.  Mary was never stained by sin, but she was saved from it.

So that analogy helps us understand how God saved Mary.  However, it’s far more important to understand why God saved Mary in this unique way.

The Blessed Virgin Mary was immaculately conceived, and filled by God with grace, for the moment of the Anunciation.  In fact, Mary was “full of grace” for the sake of her entire vocation, which began at the moment of the Annunciation, and then extended throughout her earthly life, and continued (and continues) after the end of her earthly life and her assumption into Heaven.

However, the rest of her vocation—the Visitation, the Nativity of her Son, the Sorrows of Jesus’ infancy and public ministry, her intercession at the wedding at Cana, her fidelity at Calvary, and her motherly care for the Church starting on the day of Pentecost—was entirely dependent upon this moment of the Annunciation.  This moment was for Mary what the decision in the Garden was for Eve.  But Mary’s choice was the opposite of Eve’s.  Through Eve’s choice, sin entered the world, while through Mary’s choice, the Word of God became Flesh and dwelt among us.

This is why throughout history, the Church has addressed the Blessed Virgin Mary as the New Eve.  Mary is our Mother, and also our model.  She is “full of grace”, and the first of those graces was the grace of her Immaculate Conception.  By means of God’s graces, Mary models for us the way of discipleship, the way to accept Christ into our lives.  The first step upon that way is for us to say at the start of each day:  “Behold, I am the [servant] of the Lord.  May it be done to me according to your word.”

The Second Sunday of Advent [A]
Isaiah 11:1-10  +  Romans 15:4-9  +  Matthew 3:1-12
St. Anthony’s Catholic Church, Garden Plain, KS
December 7, 2025

The Old Testament prophet Isaiah, who lived seven centuries before Jesus, prophesied about a day that was to come.  Isaiah preached about that future day on which the Messiah—the Savior of the Jews—would appear and set things right in the world.  But Isaiah’s prophecy is a little strange.

Isaiah begins his prophecy with the words:  “On that day ….”  That day, Isaiah foretells, will be a day of unexpected sights and sounds.  The images that Isaiah describes seem to be contradictions:  the lion eating hay, and the wolf as the guest of the lamb.  But then comes the most disturbing image, especially if we think of the manger in Bethlehem:

“The baby shall play by the cobra’s den, and the child lay his hand on the adder’s lair.”  We would never expect to see this image in real life.  In fact, if you are a parent, it’s the last image you’d want to see. 

The Lord probably gave Isaiah the image of the baby because of a baby’s innocence and weakness, and how it contrasts with the serpent’s cunning and danger.  But whether Isaiah knew it or not, his image also sums up the meaning of Christmas.  God the Son, who existed from all eternity with the Father and the Holy Spirit, entered this world of ours as a tiny baby.  And what kind of a world is it?

The world we live in—the world God the Son entered as a baby—is a world of sin and sickness.  The Gospel accounts make clear that the world into which Jesus is born is a world where justice is denied to the innocent, and kings are liars.  This world of ours is turned upside-down, and this is the world into which God the Father sent Jesus as an innocent baby.

Why would God the Father do that?  God the Father, who is perfect, and without any needs, chose to send His Son from Heaven to earth:  from Heaven—a place of perfection, the Kingdom where His Will is done—to earth—a place where sin has the upper hand, and a lair of the serpent where everyone gives in to his temptations.

The baby Isaiah prophesies about is the baby Jesus, and the snake is the Devil.  Isaiah’s prophecy echoes what God had warned the serpent in the Garden about after Adam and Eve had committed the Original Sin.  God said to the serpent:  “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers;  He will strike at your head, while you strike at his heel” [Genesis 3:15].

No matter how poorly you and I offer our lives to God, day in and day out, He still loves us.  God’s love is mysterious and unexpected, and is the same love that we are preparing to celebrate at Christmas.  This is the love which God the Father incarnates when He sends His only Son into this world of sin, to take that sin upon Himself on the Cross.

These truths can be hard for us to fully accept.  We may say we believe these truths of our Faith, but the Church knows how hard it is for us truly to accept not only how much the Father loves us, but also to accept this truth’s consequences.  That’s why we fallen human beings need an entire season of four weeks to prepare for Christmas.

Last week I mentioned three practices that are a good way to prepare during Advent.  We can remember them with the initials P-S-P.  These three letters—P-S-P—stand for the practices of poverty, silence, and penance.  These three practices can help us to accept more readily the gift God wants to give us, and to accept also the consequences of this gift.  That’s especially true of the practice of silence.

Silence is hard to come by these days.  A lot of people who live in the country appreciate silence.  However, with the nature of mass media today, it doesn’t matter if you live at the top of a mountain:  radio signals, TV signals, wireless Internet and more can be beamed to you, or maybe we should say at you.  To create an atmosphere of silence, you have to go on the offense.  You have to unplug, disconnect and turn off a lot of devices.

Of course, there’s also another difficulty when it comes to silence.  Sometimes we don’t like silence.  Noise has a way of blocking out, or distracting us from, our own thoughts and concerns, which at times we’d rather not face.

But maybe we need to accept silence as a gift.  In fact, in our spiritual life silence is a two-fold gift.  The first aspect of the gift of silence is that it’s a gift we give ourselves, so as to hear one’s own true self, even when that’s uncomfortable.  But the importance of silence also goes beyond our selves.

You remember the Old Testament story about Elijah, to whom the Lord God spoke, not through fire or an earthquake, but through a tiny whisper.  In the Christian spiritual life, silence is not an end in itself.  Silence is a means, or rather, a medium through which to hear the Word of God.  This is takes us to one of the most important truths of our Catholic Faith.  This truth will be proclaimed on Christmas morning in the Gospel Reading from John 1.  You might want to look it up and make it part of your Advent spiritual reading.

The Word of God is not a book.  The Word of God is a Person:  the Second Person of the Most Blessed Trinity.  In John 1, St. John proclaims that this divine Word, which was in the beginning, became Flesh and dwelt among us.  He became flesh and blood—one of us—in order to offer that Body and Blood, with His soul and divinity, on the Cross at Calvary.  His Sacrifice on the Cross is made present to us sacramentally in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.

This is a message we sinners need to hear, and we need silence to be able to hear it, to appreciate it, and to start making changes in our lives in order to accept this gift more fully.

The First Sunday of Advent [A]
Isaiah 2:1-5  +  Romans 13:11-14  +  Matthew 24:37-44
St. Anthony’s Catholic Church, Garden Plain, KS
November 30, 2025

So much of our preparation for December 25^th is made up of customs.  You have Grandma’s recipe for cookies, the family Christmas stocking to be hung up, and the Christmas tree decorations that have been passed from one generation to the next.  These customs are like well-worn slippers:  comfortable and without surprises.

However, this comfort stands in contrast to the shocks and unexpected surprises that we hear in the Gospel accounts about the nine months leading up to the birth of Jesus.  Unexpected surprises also surround His birth at Bethlehem, and also occur after His birth, as others try to learn more about the new-born king, some for good reasons, and some for ill.

Of course, we might say that that’s all ancient history.  But the mystery at the heart of Christmas—which we are preparing for in these weeks of Advent—is not just about history.  Advent and Christmas are about allowing God to come into your life, as He came into the lives of Mary and Joseph.

God wants to enter into your life throughout your days on this earth.  He wants to enter into your life often, from the day of your baptism to the day of your death.  He wants to enter your lives with specific graces, and for specific reasons.

So for a moment, step back and look at the big picture of your life on earth.  In your life as a Christian, God shapes your life at three different levels. The first is your baptismal vocation, which of course started on the day of your baptism.  This is the most general call that God makes to you:  it’s the call to holiness, or you might say, the call to be a saint.  The second is a more specific vocation that God asks from most Christians:  either the vocation to Holy Matrimony, or the vocation to Holy Orders, or the call to consecrated life.  Those vocations give a more specific shape or form to a person’s call to be holy.

The third is what we’re talking about today.  It’s the most specific call, and occurs often throughout the course of one’s life.  You might say that God calls a specific Christian to carry out a specific mission for God.  These are usually temporary, unlike the first two calls, which last until death.

So regarding these specific calls that God makes to you throughout your life, the challenge is that you do not know the specifics of these calls.  This is what Jesus is talking about in today’s Gospel Reading:  “… you do not know on which day your Lord will come.”

Nor do you know in what form the Lord’s grace will come into your life.  Nor do you know how, or though whom, the Lord’s grace will come into your life.  God has missions in store for you in the new Church year which starts today.  Some of God’s missions may challenge you, some may console you, some may give you needed support, while some of God’s graces may lead you to make difficult decisions.  But the Season of Advent is about fostering the virtues that help you to be ready for God, no matter where, when, how or through whom He wishes to be present to us, for us, and finally within us.

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So there are three very practical ways that you can engage with the Season of Advent, in order to be ready whenever and however the Lord wants to come into your life at specific times, for specific reasons.  These three practices can help you to recognize and accept the Lord when He chooses to come into your life.

These three are poverty, silence, and penance.  Just remember the first letter of each.  Poverty, silence, and penance:  P-S-P.  Not E-S-P:  because if you had ESP than you would know on which day the Lord will come.  The letters P-S-P stand for poverty, silence and penance.  Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition both show us how the three practices of poverty, silence and penance can help you as a Christian prepare for God.  On this First Sunday of Advent, focus upon the practice of poverty.

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We don’t usually think of “poverty” as something that’s meant to be practiced.  Usually we just think of poverty as a state of life for some persons.  Likewise, poverty is not usually something that we think of as a means of drawing closer to God.  Usually when we think of “poverty”, we think of what in fact is destitution, where individuals do not have food to eat, or shelter from the elements, or clothing to wear.  When God, in His Sacred Scriptures and Sacred Tradition, commends the practice of poverty to His children, He’s not talking about destitution.  But Jesus does commend poverty to His own disciples, saying to them:  “every one of you who does not renounce all his possessions cannot be my disciple” [Luke 14:33].

On the one hand, when Jesus ask us to enter into the spirit and practice of poverty, he’s not asking us to become destitute.  But on the other hand, we should never water down Jesus’ commendation of poverty by thinking that it does not connect in any way to our relationship with our material possessions.  That might sound like a strange phrase, to speak of someone’s “relationship with their material possessions”.  Unfortunately, some people not only have a relationship with their material possessions, but in fact have more of a relationship with their material possessions than they do with the other persons in their lives.

Our standard-bearer when it comes to poverty is Jesus Himself.  Jesus never sought material possessions as a way to grow in the sight of Himself, in the sight of others, or in the sight of His Father.  This is one of the first principles of spiritual poverty:  to realize and believe down to the bottom of our hearts how little spiritual value material possessions hold.

The second principle of poverty is trust:  trust in the providential care of God our Father.  Practically speaking, we can ask God to increase our trust not by praying a petition asking for trust, but by making a concrete sacrifice.  When we make such a real sacrifice, we’re implicitly placing our trust in God to provide what we truly need.  So we can grow in the conviction that material possessions hold so little true meaning by making a sacrifice of what we do possess.

Here’s one simple example among many that you might practice this Advent:  tithe your wardrobe.  Maybe some people have never heard of doing such a thing, but it’s a simple practice, and does not need to take a lot of time.  Tithing your wardrobe means giving 10% of your clothes and accessories to the poor.

Although that practical sacrifice is one that the whole family can participate in, I’d like to offer a second challenge just to young people, by which I’m referring to anyone who still lives at home.  This may not make me very popular with our young people, but a priest is not ordained to be popular.  Young people, when you make your Christmas wish list, put down only three gifts that you’d like to receive at Christmas.  And if, for some reason, you receive more than three gifts, resolve now—at the start of Advent—that you will choose only three of the gifts that you receive, and donate the rest to children who are poor, and who might well receive fewer than three Christmas presents if not for you.  Maybe you could donate them to St. Anthony’s Pro-Life ministry, for distribution to families that this Pro-Life ministry serves.

Regardless of how you put it into practice, starting or deepening the practice of poverty has just one aim:  to conform oneself to the person of Jesus.  In other words, poverty is practiced by Christians in order to dispose themselves to the grace by which God wants to make us more like Jesus.

Jesus became one of us when He was conceived at the Annunciation, so that you and I could become like God by opening our hearts and minds to God’s grace.  God works the change by His grace.  But we have to open our lives to God’s grace, as the Blessed Virgin Mary did at the Annunciation.  In our own lives, we accomplish this “opening” through our good works, especially virtuous practices such as poverty.