Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time Yr A 2026
Ordinary Time • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
0 ratings
· 1 viewIn a world full of people focused on self, Zephaniah calls us to humility and justice or righteousness, and Paul reminds us that all we have is gift and that our background and social status do not matter. Jesus teaches his disciples to rejoice in not having because if they trust God he will provide in the end, and to rejoice in using their gifts for God, because while the world may reject them God will honor them in his presence. So we should rejoice in honesty and gratitude, in honoring our humbles brothers and sisters, in seeing suffering as a gift. and in demonstrating to the world that God’s kingdom is not people turned in on themselves but with eyes raise in trust to God.
Notes
Transcript
Title
Title
Walk Humbly Before God
Outline
Outline
Augustine defined original sin as incurvatus in se
Augustine defined original sin as incurvatus in se
That is what we see in the world today: people focused on themselves or their abilities or else self-rejecting and depressed. There is the star who clams, “I’m the greatest,” or the person who makes sure that you know that their degree is from Oxford or Harvard or the business person who measures their worth in billions. And often people look down on others who do not have their accomplishments, even calling them losers. Most of us are less extreme.
God calls us to be humble and to seek justice
God calls us to be humble and to seek justice
That is the way that Zephaniah put it. This is not a denial of the gifts that God has given us in out birth, out intelligence, our skills, our education, or our formation, but a recognition of these things as gifts and an honoring of those without such gifts whom God has chosen as his headliners, his saints. That is what Paul is writing about: we should be boasting in what God has done, whether it was in our background and development (as he did with Paul) or in his using us despite our background (as he did with Peter). Both of them boasted, not about themselves, but, using the motto of my bishop, “Great are the works of the Lord” (Ps nr 111:2).
So I praise God that he could take a Plymouth Brethren boy with hangups and who did not know that one could study Bible other than in a church Bible study, call him (out of the blue), form him through college and seminary and university graduate program, and through all sorts of twists and turns that he had nothing to do with eventually make him a Catholic priest. Great are the works of the Lord.
Matthew depicts Jesus teaching this to his disciples
Matthew depicts Jesus teaching this to his disciples
Blessed are those who don’t have, for God will provide what they don’t have: the poor who have the proper spirit of the poor, those who mourn, those who are meek rather than defending or avenging themselves, those who hunger for justice or righteousness.
And blessed are those who have and use their gifts for God: the merciful, the clean of heart, the peacemaker, those persecuted for righteousness. They are blessed, not because the world will honor them, but because God will reward and honor them in his presence.
These are for our learning, our slow learning, lest we become proud.
These are for our learning, our slow learning, lest we become proud.
They are so that we accept what we have with honesty and gratitude, not as our earnings.
They are that so that we accept and honor our humbler brothers and sisters, even the handicapped ones, as equal bearers of God’s gifts to them.
They are so that we take our suffering and see it as a gift permitted by God for our future reward.
They are so that we demonstrate to the world that the kingdom of God is anything but incurvatus in se but rather eyes raised to God in trust, that it is the world that is upside down and God’s kingdom in which all is upright before him.
