Twenty-Third Sunday in Ordinary Time Yr C 2025
Ordinary Time • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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· 8 viewsWe need divine wisdom to change our worldview, for the worldview of the world is in the water, so to speak. We are called to give ourselves to that wisdom and follow Jesus against the culture. In our readings Paul calls Philemon to a countercultural stance of receiving Onesimus as a brother, as Paul himself. This would cost Philemon dearly in Colossi. Jesus says to “hate” one’s closest relatives and to take up on’s cross, dying to honor, feeling shame, power, etc. to follow Jesus. We need to count the cost so that we do not turn back. But that is our path until we hear Jesus say, “Well done, now lay that cross down and live with me here.
Notes
Transcript
Title
Title
Marching to the Beat of a Different Drummer
Outline
Outline
It’s in the water, I am wont to say
It’s in the water, I am wont to say
There are some things that are literally in the water, such as agricultural chemicals that we may filter out or nano particles of plastic (millions in every plastic water bottle) that we do not. People don’t choose to absorb these things, but they express their effects anyway. The average human brain in the USA has a teaspoon of those plastic particles in it, including in the nuclei of the neurons (compared to none in 1919). People do not choose their worldview but absorb philosophies they do not even know exist through cultural media and interactions. They may reject God’s wisdom, but do so because, even in Protestant and Catholic Churches they do not know the real God, whom they reject and are accepting a distorted image of God, like in a crass way, the mural of Mr. Trump as the Messiah Christ on the cross dying for us. It takes God’s wisdom to turn one’s back on one’s culture and grasp, even in part, the real God and his counsel.
But that is what the readings call us to do
But that is what the readings call us to do
Paul calls on Philemon to abandon his cultural standing that demanded that he punish Onesimus and to receive Onesimus as a brother. That undermined public order, his training might tell him. Paul tell him, “Welcome him as you would me,” and he gives him the potential “out” of manumitting him and sending him back to Paul.
Jesus calls on us to “hate” family, which is what some of you may have done in saying “yes” to religious life and why Judy and I are glad that our parents were dead before we entered the Catholic Church. And he says that to be his disciple one must “carry his own cross,” which meant death to one’s hopes and dreams, death to honor, acceptance of shame for the sake of Christ, death to power in this world and so forth. And many people do not count that cost and either turn back from following Jesus or twist Jesus into a Jesus of our culture.
Sisters, this should characterize our lifestyle
Sisters, this should characterize our lifestyle
We recognize that the world around us and even the religious world too much of the time cannot understand us for it has not submitted to him and received his wisdom.
We ourselves have to keep soaking ourselves in the great doctors of the church and especially in Jesus’ presence to keep straightening out our minds in conformity to his.
And we rejoice knowing that eventually, certainly soon for those of us who are older, our way of the cross will be over and the way of the world will be sufficiently behind us so that Jesus says, “You have followed me carrying your own cross, now come be with me beyond the cross” and we will start to live the fourth and fifth of the glorious mysteries of the rosary upon which we have meditated over the decades.
Amen
