Sunday, June 15, 2014

Homily: Trinity Sunday 2014 - The family business


I am very honored and grateful to be able to celebrate my first weekend Mass here at St. Clare on this Trinity Sunday and on Father’s Day—I’m very happy that my own father is able to join us today, making the trek from Geneva, along with other family members, coming in from Madison, my home town.  After five years assigned to parishes on the west side, I’m so glad to be home.

One of the hallmarks of living in this part of the country, is that you can still see signs of the many great family businesses upon which our country was founded.  Family farms, family-run construction companies, restaurants, funeral homes, landscapers.  In fact, I grew up working alongside my parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins in a family business out in Madison. 

Family businesses pride themselves on professionalism, fine-tuned craftsmanship, fidelity to their customers, and extensive experience spanning generations.  It’s not unlikely to see utility vans driving down Mayfield Rd with names of family businesses like “DeFranco and Sons, McBride and Sons, DiCicco and Sons”.

The Father and Son business is one of the great institutions.  The father passes on not only his name, but his trade.  And the son is proud to have the name of his father because that name stands for something great.  I think the happiest moments in a child’s life are when he is able to share in his family’s work: going to the work place, learning the tools and the skills, the meaning of hard work.

Jesus, not only practiced the trade of his foster-Father, Joseph the Carpenter, but the work for which he became one of us, was the trade of his heavenly Father: salvation and holiness.  We heard in the Gospel today: God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.”  From the moment of man’s first sin in the garden, when he rebelled against God, when he took the gifts God gave him for granted, when he disobeyed the heavenly Father’s command, God, in his mercy was at work to redeem man, to restore man’s divine sonship.  And God sent his only Son to bring that work to completion. 

If God’s work is the salvation of souls, what are the tools of his trade?  Truth and charity!  Jesus preaches the Gospel and pours himself out on the cross for our salvation to restore our lost communion with God.
Through the great gift of the Holy Spirit what Jesus won on the cross is available to all men.  Through Christian Baptism, the Holy Spirit brings us back into right relationship with God, making us adopted sons of the heavenly Father through Jesus Christ.  We can truly call God Father because we have been brought back into right relationship with God through Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit.  Saint John Paul II said we are made “sons in the Son.”  Being adopted children of God, John Paul said, “is the culminating point of the mystery of our Christian life. In fact, the name 'Christian' indicates a new way of being, to be in the likeness of the Son of God. As sons in the Son, we share in salvation, which is not only the deliverance from evil” but is also to share in the very goodness and life of God.

Heaven is not just playing golf for all eternity, but sharing in the very life and glory of God, which begins in Christian baptism here on earth.

Yet, baptism is not a guarantee of heaven.  We must remain in right relationship with God through a life of prayer and charity.  Christians get in a lot of trouble when we take our sonship for granted.  We must constantly be about our Father’s work in order to remain in right relationship.  To be a Christian is to work in the family business—the family of the trinity.  The business?  The glory of God and salvation of souls.  Our lives, our work, our daily decisions, are to all be at the service of God’s glory and the salvation of man.

And here’s the real kicker: just as God the Father of love desires us to learn and practice his trade, so too does the Father of Lies.  The enemy, the devil, is all too ready to teach us his trade: arrogance, disobedience, lies, the pursuit of power and inordinate pursuit of possession and pleasure.  “All these things I will give you, if you call me Father.”  He tells us the same lie as he told Adam and Eve in the Garden, “you will be happier if you ignore God, follow your own feelings, be your own person.”  He teaches us to love video games more than prayer, booze more than worship, sin more than virtue.  The enemy is a liar, but his lies are convincing, just look at our culture.  80% of Catholics aren’t coming to Mass because they think what they have to do is more important.  They have swallowed the lie.  They have forgotten the face of their Father.  In the end, the family business of the father of lies brings unhappiness, exhaustion, and if we do not break away from his dysfunctional family, we will inherit not eternal glory and happiness, but damnation, the loss of eternal life with God in heaven.

So we must remain in right relationship with God through prayer, attendance at Mass, study of Scripture, and works of charity.  We must engage in the Lord’s work of going out into the world, filled with the zeal and fervor of the Holy Spirit, to call those who have fallen away back to right relationship with God.  That is what Christ did, that is what we are to do.  He sends us out to draw the fallen back to God.  That’s the family business, that’s the work of the Father, to draw men back to God through the preaching of the Gospel and the embrace of the cross.

In the end, there is nothing that will bring us more earthly joy or eternal joy than being in right relationship with Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and sharing in his work.

On this Trinity Sunday, let us rededicate ourselves to fervent perseverance in the family trade, and relinquish our disordered desires of doing anything but, for the glory of God and salvation of souls.


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