The Twenty-sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time [C]
Amos 6:1,4-7 + 1 Timothy 6:11-16 + Luke 16:19-31
St. Anthony’s Catholic Church, Garden Plain, KS
September 28, 2025

“When the poor man died, he was carried away by angels to the bosom of Abraham.”

It’s been my experience that brothers and sisters do not like to share.  Of course, parents, through the virtue of prudence, try to teach their children to share.  When I was growing up, one of the ways my parents did this was interesting.  Our parents had us share names.  Our parents gave the same middle initial to all five of their children.  They gave the same middle name to both their daughters:  Marie.  Then they gave the same middle name to each of their three sons:  Michael.

In CCD when I was a boy, whenever we were asked to study one of our patron saints, I always chose my first name.  Maybe I didn’t want to learn about the patron saint that I had to share with my brothers.  Not until I was older did I become more grateful to my parents for giving me St. Michael the Archangel as one of my patron saints.

St. Michael’s feast day is Monday, September 29th.  St. Michael is a saint many of us do not turn to often enough.  He’s a saint that many of us might not know much about.  At the end of today’s homily we’ll pray together the Prayer to St. Michael, asking his protection, and asking him to help us imitate him.  But first, we need to consider some of the Church’s teachings about this great saint.

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Sacred Tradition identifies St. Michael as the one who—at the beginning of creation—led the good angels against the evil angels, banishing the evil angels to hell.  Sometimes those who don’t understand Jewish and Christian tradition, especially those influenced by New Age teachings, think of God and satan as opposites, similar to the Eastern notion of yin and yang.  Maybe these people have watched too many Star Wars movies, and think that God and the devil are equal in power, balancing each other as light and dark forces in the universe.

The truth is that God transcends all of creation, including all of the evil angels and all of the good angels.  If the devil as the chief fallen angel has an opposite, it would be St. Michael the Archangel.  You know, the literal meaning of the name “Michael” is actually a rhetorical question.  The name “Michael” is a question which means, “Who is like God?”  The answer, of course, is “No one”, yet all the fallen angels in their pride refuse to accept this truth.  Each of the fallen angels believes that he can be the equal of God.  Unfortunately, each of us does the same every time we choose sin over and above God.

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So why is the Prayer to St. Michael the Archangel an important prayer for us to pray?  There are at least two good reasons for praying the Prayer to St. Michael, whether you pray it after Holy Mass, at the end of your Rosary, with your night prayers, or at any time day or night when you are in need.

The first reason is to ask for St. Michael’s protection.  Each of us individually, and our families and our parish family collectively, need the protection of the holy angels.  That’s one of the chief reasons why God created the angels in the first place:  to protect God’s chosen People. (Two other reasons are to praise God in the Heavenly Liturgy, and to serve as messengers to those on earth.)

For several decades now in the Church, the angels have been largely ignored.  Some even consider a belief in angels to be a quaint custom from the Middle Ages that’s best left forgotten.  However, you may have noticed after the new translation of the Roman Missal started to be used in 2011, that the holy angels are more prominently mentioned again in the prayers of Holy Mass.  For example, in several of the Prefaces to the Eucharistic Prayer, right before we sing the “Holy, Holy, Holy,” the priest concludes his prayer to God the Father by saying:  “And so, with Angels and Archangels, with Thrones and Dominions, and with all the Hosts and Powers of Heaven, we sing the hymn of your glory….”

Every Christian ought to know about the nine Choirs or Orders of angels.  Every Christian ought to pray to the holy angels, including St. Michael and each person’s Guardian Angel.  But in addition to praying to St. Michael for the sake of his protection, we also ought to pray to him because each of us ought to imitate those holy angels who serve mankind.  This leads to the second reason to pray to St. Michael:  in order that we might imitate his example.  As an illustration, consider today’s Gospel passage.

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In the parable we just heard, Jesus preaches what’s commonly called the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus.  But that name for the parable, like all the names of the parables in the four Gospel accounts, are modern inventions.  Jesus never gave a name to any of His parables.  In the case of today’s parable, the common name for the parable is misleading.

In the first line of today’s Gospel passage, the evangelist tells us that Jesus preached this parable to the Pharisees who surrounded Him.  This is important for understanding this parable.  The Pharisees are not symbolized by either the rich man or Lazarus.  Who in today’s parable symbolize the Pharisees?  The five brothers of the rich man symbolize the Pharisees.  When Abraham declares, “If they will not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded if someone should rise from the dead”, the clear reference is to the Pharisees not being persuaded by Jesus’ future resurrection from the dead.

Of course, Jesus is wanting the Pharisees to accept now the graces that God is offering them, even if God’s graces come to them through simple and humble messengers sent by God.  Just as the rich man during his life on earth failed to lead his five brothers to God, so each of us has a choice about whether or not to be a simple and humble messenger to others.  Or in other words, each of us needs to be a human angel—metaphorically speaking—because the word “angel” literally means a “messenger”.  Whether we intend to or not, we send messages to others all the time.  But do the messages that we send to others communicate God’s kindness, mercy, compassion, and forbearance?  Or their opposites?

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Today’s parable illustrates the second reason to pray to St. Michael:  as a reminder to us to be angels in our own place in life.  God calls us to be messengers of God’s goodness, as the rich man in today’s parable failed to be.  St. John Henry Newman wrote a meditation stressing this calling that each of us has.  Here are just two sections of it:

     “God has created me to do Him some definite service; He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another.  I have my mission—I may never know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next.

     “I am a link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons.  He has not created me for naught.  I shall do good.  I shall do His work.  I shall be an angel of peace, a preacher of truth in my own place while not intending it—if I do but keep His Commandments.”

With that in mind, please join me in kneeling and praying the Prayer to St. Michael:

St. Michael the Archangel,
defend us in battle.
Be our defense against the wickedness and snares of the Devil.
May God rebuke him, we humbly pray,
and do thou,
O Prince of the heavenly hosts,
by the power of God,
thrust into hell Satan,
and all the evil spirits,
who prowl about the world
seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.

St. Michael Vanquishing Satan by Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino [1483-1520]

The Twenty-fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time [C]
Amos 8:4-7 + 1 Timothy 2:1-8 + Luke 16:1-13
St. Anthony’s Catholic Church, Garden Plain, KS
September 21, 2025

“You cannot serve both God and mammon.”  This sentence is sometimes falsely thought to mean that you cannot have both God and money in your life.  In other words, this false interpretation says that there’s a sort of competition in your life between God and money which is a zero-sum game.  To use a visual metaphor:  this false interpretation says that there’s a see-saw in your life, and that God and money are sitting at opposite ends of the see-saw.  If one goes up, the other goes down.  The holier you are, the less money you will have, and the more money you have, the less holy you must be.  This interpretation of Jesus’ words is false.

In fact, our spiritual well-being and our financial well-being are not in competition with each other.  Rather, when Jesus plainly tells you that “You cannot serve both God and mammon”, the key is the word “serve”.  “You cannot serve both God and mammon.”  You can serve God, or you can serve mammon.  But you cannot serve both.  You can have both in your life.  You just cannot serve both.  The key is that simple word “serve”.

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One of the most recited prayers cited by Jewish people throughout the centuries is called the Shema.  It’s from the fifth book of the Old Testament, the Book of Deuteronomy.  This brief prayer is only three sentences long.  Here is the Shema:  “The Lord is our God, the Lord alone!  Therefore, you shall love the Lord, your God, with your whole heart, and with your whole soul, and with your whole strength.  Take to heart these words which I command you today” [Deuteronomy 6:4-6].  This prayer helps us understand that to love someone is to serve her.  This is true in our relationship with God, as well:  to love God is to serve Him.

The beautiful thing about serving God is that through this form of love, we become more like Him.  After all, “God is love” [1 John 4:8], St. John taught the first Christians.  So when we love God by serving Him, the more we serve Him faithfully, the more we love, and so the more we become like God. This is true because of a basic metaphysical principle: a person becomes like that which he loves.

By contrast, what happens when you try to serve money?  One simple way to get at an answer is to ask yourself whether your self-image goes up and down with the amount of money that you have.  Do you feel worse when you lose a significant amount of money?  Do you feel better about yourself when you gain a significant amount of money?  If so, then there is a certain likeness between your money and you.  As the money in your possession grows, so you grow.  As the money in your possession diminishes, so you diminish.  This is a false form of love, and a false serving:  a false servanthood.  It is a love of something that is beneath you, and so when you love money you debase yourself.

So we need to ask:  what is financial wealth for?  The answer is:  financial wealth is a means by which to serve others:  the Other who is God, and the others around us on earth, who are our neighbors.  That doesn’t mean that the wealthy person has to give it all away, like St. Francis of Assisi.  Despite what some socialists might say, there’s nothing inherently immoral about the action of accumulating wealth.  The sin lies in not using one’s wealth for others, especially within the setting of one’s vocation.

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So with that as a backdrop, consider the guidance of Holy Mother Church.  Consider her precept about personal finances.  As you know, there are five “Precepts of the Church”, listed in the Catechism of the Catholic Church in sections 2041-2043.  The fifth Precept of the Church is to provide for the material needs of the Church, each according to his abilities.  In a single word, this is the Church’s precept to “tithe”.  The word “tithe” literally refers to giving one-tenth of one’s income.  The Diocese of Wichita does break this ten percent down into two parts:  eight percent given to one’s parish, and two percent given to any charitable group of one’s choice (which can be one’s parish, or which can even be a secular charity that follows sound moral principles).

Some Christians are unaware that tithing is a practice not only rooted in Scripture, but also in the life of the Church and her saints.  In the Old Testament, tithing was seen among the Israelites as a giving of one’s “choicest first fruits” [Exodus 23:19].  This phrase—“choicest first fruits”—comes from the Book of Exodus.  This is an important image to consider spiritually, because it reveals to us that tithing is not merely a Precept of the Church, but also a spiritual exercise:  a practice that stretches the soul.

The image of “choicest first fruits” explains two things about tithing as a spiritual exercise.  First, what does the word “choicest” tell us?  This word, if you’ll pardon a mixing of metaphors, insists that we give God not the rump roast, but the sirloin.  Tithing is giving to God our best, not our leftovers.

But even more demanding is the call to give our “first fruits”.  If you were a farmer harvesting his crops, then your “first fruits” would be given at the beginning of the harvest, when there’s more harvesting to come.  If you were to give God your tithe from the first day of harvest, you would have no way of being sure that Mother Nature wouldn’t wipe out the rest of the crops that night, leaving you with nothing for yourself.  Nonetheless, that’s exactly the sort of faith that the Bible describes in commanding the giving of one’s “choicest first fruits”.

Here are some practical suggestions. If you don’t already know, then sit down and calculate what percentage of your monthly income you donate to the church each month. If it’s not yet 8%, increase it next month by one percent, and every so often, increase it by another one percent until you reach 8 or 10 percent. Along the way, with paper and pen look at your monthly expenditures and separate your wants from your needs, and also make sure to pay credit card balances in full every month.

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Our spiritual lives and our finances are not in competition with each other.  The chief threat that finances pose to our spiritual lives arises when we start serving money, instead of making money serve us (or more specifically, making money serve our need to give to God and neighbor).  When we make the sacrifices needed so that our finances serve our needs rather than our desires, then we’ll be more free to serve the Lord with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength.

St. Lawrence Distributing Alms by Fra Angelico [c. 1395-1455]

The Exaltation of the Holy Cross
Numbers 21:4-9 + Philippians 2:6-11 + John 3:13-17
St. Anthony’s Catholic Church, Garden Plain, KS
September 14, 2025

In the Catholic Church, some feasts fall on the same date every year.  St. Patrick’s Day, for example, is always March 17th.  Christmas Day is always December 25th.  The Assumption of our Blessed Mother is always August 15th.

Other feasts fall on a different date each year.  These feasts include Easter Sunday, the First Sunday of Advent, and Pentecost.

Today the Church celebrates a feast that is always celebrated on September 14th.  Because it’s always celebrated on that date, of course it rarely falls on a Sunday.  So the average Catholic does not have many experiences of being at Mass on this feast day.  That’s unfortunate, because today’s feast is like a magnifying glass that focuses our sight on the mystery of our Faith that’s at the heart of what it means to be saved.

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Today’s feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross has an historical background to it, apart from the historical event that took place on Good Friday atop Mount Calvary.  The actual cross on which Jesus was crucified was lost for many years after the death and resurrection of Jesus.  That’s not surprising, since pagan Rome ruled the Holy Land at the time that Jesus walked on this earth. The crosses were their “property”, which they used to kill those condemned as criminals.

However, some three hundred years after the events of Holy Week, the Roman Emperor Constantine became Christian, and by extension, the Roman Empire was—metaphorically—baptized.  Saint Helena, the mother of Constantine, in the year 326 discovered the cross on which Jesus was crucified, and she found it in the tomb where Jesus had been buried.

So the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, which you can still visit today, was then built on the site where the cross was found.  Today’s feast marks the dedication of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in 335.  Although the building was consecrated on September 13, the next day in continuing ceremonies, the cross of Jesus was brought outside the church and raised high so that the faithful could pray before it. Then the faithful came forward to venerate it.  If this sounds familiar, it’s because our Good Friday customs of the priest processing with and raising up a replica of the cross, and then the laity venerating the cross comes from that historical event in the fourth century.  However, all that’s just historical background.  The heart of today’s feast begins with what happened on Good Friday some two thousand years ago, and the means by which God achieved our salvation from sin.

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You know, one of the technologies that’s come to shape our world in recent years is drone technology.  Like every human creation, this tech can be used for good or evil.  In war, drones can be used by invading militaries to cause massive destruction and death.

But drones can also be used for beneficial purposes.  For example, in business drones can help in the conduct of geographical surveys by giving a view of things from above.  Likewise, you may have appreciated on a personal level drone footage taken of the Grand Canyon or the Mississippi River.

The perspective is what drones bring to the table.  Drones help us to see a familiar sight from a new perspective.

But have you ever seen drone footage of a church from above?  It can be revealing.  If you were to look, for example, at St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican, you would notice that the physical church building was designed and constructed in the shape of a cross.  St. Peter’s Basilica has a head, two arms, and a long body, just like the crucifix that hangs in your home, and just like the crucifix that hangs in this church at the top of the high altar.  Of course, only very large churches are large enough to be built in that shape, which is called “cruci-form”.  However, it’s not only buildings that are meant to be formed in the shape of a cross.

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You are meant to be formed in the shape of a cross.  You, as a Christian, are meant to be shaped by Christ into the shape of a cross.  And you are meant to actively shape your life into the shape of a cross.

This doesn’t happen in a physical sense, of course.  It happens when your thoughts, words, and actions reflect the love that Christ poured out from His Sacred Heart on the Cross on Good Friday.  Jesus did not have to die on the Cross in order to redeem fallen man.  Jesus is God, and so He is All-Powerful.  He could have redeemed fallen man in any one of an infinite number of ways.  But He chose to die on the Cross in order to forgive our sins.  Jesus chose the Cross as the means of our salvation in order to reveal the depth of His love for fallen man, and He wants you to chose the Cross as the shape of your daily life.

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Now, no matter how old you are, whether nine or ninety, God is calling you right now to shape your life in the form of the Cross.  Of course, you already make many sacrifices each day as part of your vocation:  for many if not most of you, as spouses, parents, and grandparents.  Yet in addition to those sacrifices of thought, word, and action that reflect the love of Christ from the Cross, there are other, very simple ways in which you can shape your daily life.  I only have time to mention one of them, but if there were more time, I’d also speak about the simple prayer called The Sign of the Cross, and how important it is to pray it intentionally.  I’d also speak, if I had more time, about the importance of having crucifixes that have been blessed in the main rooms of our homes.

However, since time is short, just consider Friday penance as one way of shaping your life in the form of the Cross.  A lot of Catholics have never even been taught that every Friday of the year—not just during Lent—every Catholic is obligated to carry out some type of penitential sacrifice.  In olden days, the Church specified what type of penance this was to be:  that is, years ago, every Catholic every Friday of the year was obligated to abstain from eating meat.

Today, by contrast, each Catholic gets to decide what type of penitential sacrifice to carry out on a given Friday.  It can be abstaining from meat, or praying the Stations of the Cross, or reading from one of the four Gospels the account of what happened on Good Friday.  Nonetheless, regardless of which type of penance is chosen each week, every Catholic has the obligation each Friday to carry out some type of penitential sacrifice, in recognition of what Jesus sacrificed for us on Good Friday.

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God is eternal.  He’s outside time, and so He has a divine perspective from which to see all of creation, and all of time, including what you and I call the past, the present, and the future.  From this divine perspective, as God looks “down” from Heaven, He can see the shape of your life stretched out from the day you were conceived to the day on which you will die.  He can see whether the shape of your life on this earth is the shape of the Cross. God asks a lot from you as a Christian.  He sets the bar very high when it come to what He expects from you.  To put it simply, He expects your life to reflect the life of Jesus.  He expects the love in your heart to be the love of Jesus’ Sacred Heart.  Of course, that’s not humanly possible unless God’s grace infuses your life, in order to empower your thoughts, words, and actions.  God gifts us His grace through the Cross of Jesus Christ, and none of His graces are better suited to shaping our lives to the Cross than the graces of the Most Blessed Sacrament of the Eucharist.

The Twenty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time [C]
Wisdom 9:13-18  +  Philemon 9-10,12-17  +  Luke 14:25-33
St. Anthony’s Catholic Church, Garden Plain, KS
September 7, 2025

“… when things are in Heaven, who can search them out?”

Last Sunday’s Scripture readings pointed our attention to the virtue of humility.  Today the Scriptures point to another virtue.  This virtue helps us know what’s best for us, and helps us figure out how to achieve it.  The author of today’s First Reading rhetorically asks:  “Who can know God’s counsel, or who can conceive what the Lord intends?  For the deliberation of mortals are timid, and unsure are our plans.”

Use your imagination to picture the following scene, which can help us understand this virtue better.  Image that someone—let’s call him Mr. X—takes you to Colorado to the base of a 12,000 foot high mountain.  He tells you that nine other people have also been brought to the base of the same mountain, at different points around the base.  The person who reaches the mountain’s summit first will receive $100 million.  The person who makes it to the top second will receive $10 million, and the third will receive one million dollars.  When you agree to participate, Mr. X hands you a backpack, and leaves you there, looking up at the mountain’s peak.

The question is:  what do you do first?  Will you immediately put on the backpack and start climbing the face of the mountain in front of you?  Is that the best way to start, to “just do it”?  Or would asking yourself some questions first make more sense?

Maybe you need to ask yourself if the face of the mountain that you see in front of you is the best way to the top?  Maybe you need to ask what’s in the backpack?  Maybe there’s a set of maps inside, which detail every angle of the mountain, and reveal that if you walk along the base to the northwest for twenty miles, you’ll find a tram that offers an express ride to the top?

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Now, that mountain is just an illustration.  The point is that in this imaginary scene, like in our life on earth, the virtue of prudence helps us reach our goal.  If you were an impulsive person, and just shot straight up the mountain on your own two feet, you might be wasting a lot of time and energy.  If you were to stop first and ask yourself some questions, you might save a lot of time and energy.  The same is true in the Christian life.  The virtue of prudence is one of the chief moral virtues that can help in this regard.

“… when things are in Heaven, who can search them out?”  “Who can know God’s counsel, or who can conceive what the Lord intends?  For the deliberation of mortals are timid, and unsure are our plans.”

The answer to these questions, posed by the author of today’s First Reading, is seen more clearly in the light of the virtue of prudence.

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So to shift our attention to the Christian life, consider a question that’s related to that imaginary mountain, the top of which you want to reach as soon as possible.  Consider this question, but be careful, because it’s a trick question.

“When you pray, should you pray for a good thing?”  The answer is “No.”  Most people would answer “Yes” if they were asked this question.  But they would be wrong.  The reason why we should not pray for a good thing is connected to the virtue of prudence.

Our Catholic Faith teaches that the moral virtue of prudence enables us to do two things:  first, to see our “true good” in a given circumstance; and second, to choose the means to reach this “true good”.^[1]  The second of these is like the means by which we ascend that imaginary mountain.  There are difficult means to reach the summit of the mountain, and then there are simple means.  The moral virtue of prudence helps us choose the best means for reaching our goal.

However, what is our goal?  Is it just any old goal?  No, the moral virtue of prudence helps us choose our “true good”.

So what is this “true good”?  This “true good” is not just the good as opposed to the bad.  The true good… is the best good, out of many good choices.  The true good… is the best good, chosen from among many good choices.  That’s what the virtue of prudence is all about.

When we are little, our parents teach us to make moral choices by recognizing right from wrong; good from bad; what is holy from what is evil.  This is the first stage of moral wisdom.  This is the foundation of making moral choices.  It’s essential that we understand that difference.  In fact, to put it bluntly, this difference is the difference between Heaven and hell.  But as a Christian, you have to build upon that foundation.

The foundation of Christian morality is about good versus bad.  We build on that by hearing God call us beyond only choosing what is good.  God wants us to do far more:  He wants us to choose what is best over and above what is merely good.  It’s in this sense that God does not want you to choose a good thing:  God wants you to choose the best thing.  “Good” is not good enough.  Only “the best” is good enough for God, and for you.

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This morning at the Vatican, Pope Leo XIV canonized two new saints.  The younger of the two, St. Carlo Acutis, died at the age of fifteen from leukemia in the year 2006.  The older of the two, St. Pier Giorgio Frassati, died at the age of 24 from polio in the year 1925.

St. Pier Giorgio was a great outdoorsman.  He especially loved hiking in the mountains, and leading groups through the Italian Alps.  A phrase he often spoke became his motto in life:  “Verso l’alto!”, which you can translate into English as “to the heights”.

That motto wasn’t just about scaling the Italian Alps.  It’s about the spiritual and moral life, and seeing God as the summit of our life.  Each moral and spiritual choice of our life on earth either brings us one step closer to God, leads us downwards, or leaves us stationary, treading water, so to speak.  God desires that your whole life on earth—every day, and every thought, word, and action—is motivated by a desire for that summit.  “Verso l’alto” means recognizing that God Himself is our truest good, and that at every given moment, there is a path for us to discern which can best lead us to that truest good.

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[1] So prudence guides both our human intellect (in seeing the “true good”), and our human will (in choosing the “true good.  Prudence is really the most practical of all the virtues, because it guides the marriage of our intellect and will in daily life.