HOMILY Commandments, Not Suggestions! Father Larry Richards Moderator, Bread of Life Community Homily for Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time Cycle A READINGS: Sirach 15:15-20; 1 Corinthians 2:6-10; Matthew 5: 17-37 There is so much to preach about today! Let's go first to Sirach Chapter 15:15. It says, "If you choose, you can keep the Commandments. It is loyalty to do His Will." That's what I want to focus on. Then we go to Matthew, Chapter 5:17 ff. Jesus says, "Do not think that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets, I have come not to abolish them, but to fulfill them. Of this much I assure you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter of the law, not the smallest part of a letter, shall be done away with until it all comes true. That is why whoever breaks the least significant of these commands and teaches others to do so shall be called least in the Kingdom of God, but who ever fulfills and teaches these commands shall be great in the Kingdom of God. I tell you unless your holiness surpasses that of the scribes and the Pharisees, you'll never go to heaven." Mmm...that's a lot to chew on! Sometimes I think we as Christians pick and choose what we want to hear when we hear Jesus Christ. That's very nice if we can pick and choose to follow Jesus the way we lay down the terms, not the way He's laid them down. If you listen to the gospel today, He says if you look lustfully at a woman, you are committing adultery. Oh, come on, I mean listen to that! So, I must take my life and place it up against the Gospel. He says, "No divorce." Do you know how often I have to listen to, "When is the Church going to get up with the times and allow people to get divorced and remarried?" Well, the answer is "Never." If we do, we go against what Jesus says, and that means He's no longer Master. Now, we deal with that in different pastoral ways, with annulment, but when someone says, "Yes, I've been divorced and I want to remarry, but God
understands..." Well, does He? Is that what it says there in the Word of God? Sometimes I think we have to take our life and place it next to the Gospel of Christ. Jesus says He did not come to get rid of the law, but to fulfillit. Ultimately, it's our choice. Sometimes people say, "Oh Father, I can'tchoose, I'm this way because I grew up in a bad family etc." Oh, get over it! We make excuses for our sins, but we've got to look and call sin what it is. SIN IS SIN. IT'S A CHOICE I MAKE IN MY LIFE TO GO AGAINST THE COMMANDMENT OF GOD. You can rationalize it any way you want to. You can get priests who will agree with you, but sin is sin. You and I have to look at it and place our lives against it. Let's very briefly go through the Commandments. The First Commandment: "I am the Lord your God, you shall have no other god before Me." I hear confessions every week. Very rarely do I hear someone breaking the First Commandment. What that means is, is God first in your life? If there is anyone here who thinks God is first in their life, we have a lack of self knowledge, because that means that everything I do, I do for love of Him. Everything. Consciously. Teresa the Little Flower, when she picked up a piece of paper off the floor, said, "Jesus, I do this for love of You." Is that what you think about when you pick up a piece of paper off the floor? Is the first person you think about when you wake up in the morning Jesus? For some of you, it might be yes. Is that what you give your most time to - your prayer time? Do you ever build your day around God, or do you fit God into your day? Any time you fit God into your day, He's not first in your life. If you're not committed to prayer every day, there's no way God is first in your life. You're breaking the First Commandment! Second Commandment: (Don't you hate me...it gets worse)! "You shall not take the Name of the Lord your God in vain." That means you can't take God's name! I hear charismatics and Catholics do it all the time - "Oh my God, oh my God." That is using God's name in vain. Do you know what they did to you in the Old Testament? They killed you. Just for saying God's name. "God." You're dead. That's reality. Again, let's take our life and place it against this. "Father, it's a habit." Yes, it's a habit you need to get out of. Third Commandment: "Keep holy the Sabbath." Some people think you can choose whether you want to follow the commandments. It is a mortal sin to miss Mass on Sunday. If you die in mortal sin, you go to Hell. How many mortal sins does it take to go to Hell? ONE! That is the teaching of the Church. That has been taught for 2,000 years. We sometimes think, "Well, if I don't feel like going, I don't have to go." It's not the "Ten Suggestions." They are the "Ten
Commandments." God isn't saying, "If you say it's ok, then come, if you want to stay home, it's ok." That isn't what God says. God calls us to obey HIM, not obey ME. Fourth Commandment: "Honor your parents." Do we honor our parents, or do we drive them crazy (I'm speaking to the children). I don't care if you are an adult, if you have parents who are still alive, do you honor and respect them? Do you respect them and love them? Or do you drive them crazy? "Father, they drive me crazy." That's not the commandment. The commandment is that you honor and respect your parents. This is the only commandment that promises that if you follow it, you will have a long life. It's the only commandment with a promise. Fifth Commandme: "You shall not kill." "You can't get me on that one Father, I've never killed anybody." Oh yeah? Anger. Anger kills more than anything else. Anger is like taking a dagger and putting it in someone's heart. When was the last time we confessed the anger of killing other people, or making fun of people? Do we gossip? Catholics are great gossips, and they sit there and justify their own way of doing things, because they are right and everyone else is wrong and they do that by tearing down others behind their back. You kill them when you do that, and you are breaking the commandment of God. The Fifth Commandment. Do I kill other people with my words, my actions, my anger? Sixth Commandment. Sins of the flesh. Sins of the flesh are what the Gospel deals with today. All sins of the flesh begin in our heart and in our mind. Every one of us has them, I have them every day, the temptations. Jesus had temptations of the flesh, but He never gave into them, so He never sinned in His Heart. Every one of us are going to have sexual thoughts and temptations. It's a matter of whether you say yes to them or not. Once you've said yes to them, that's when they become sinful. When you start using people for your own pleasure. That happens by spending a lot of time in the fantasy life - looking at pornography, being impure with yourself, being impure with someone else before marriage, being married and being impure outside of marriage, outside the marital bed with someone you're not married to, using artificial birth control in marriage. Having sex with someone of the same sex. That's all under the Sixth Commandment. Again we say, "I'm a weak person." Yes, but we have to be striving and making choices to live the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Remember, when I'm talking about all of this, Jesus came to set us free - not to
put us in bondage. We need to make a choice that we want to be set free and, ultimately, we have to take responsibility for our sins. It's our choice. Jesus can give us the grace to continue to make that choice. Seventh Commandment. Have you lied, have you cheated, have you stolen? Eighth commandment. Have you gossiped? I talked about that. Nine and Ten, have you been jealous? Jealousy is where it's at. Now some people will say, "Father, I broke every one of those Commandments, and I feel very bad right now." Well, we all have in one way or another, haven't we? But Jesus came to give us the power to obey Him - not to make excuses for our lives. So often we do that, don't we? We make excuses for our sin. Jesus died for our sins. There has to be a time that we know what Sirach says. "If you choose to you can obey the Commandments." What we have to know is the first word that came out of Jesus' mouth and what we're going to enter into this Wednesday. "REPENT." Repent! What Lent is about is taking our lives and putting them up against the Gospel and we think of things that are not yet fully submitted to the Lordship of Jesus in our lives. We look at things in our lives that are not yet obedient to Christ. When you and I decide what we are going to do this Lenten season, we don't just sit there and think, "I'm going to give up Pepsi because I really like it." Or, "I'm going to give up chocolate." Every time I hear that I think I hear God in heaven saying, "Ooooh, look at that, they're going to give up chocolate." Don't waste God's time! Look at your life and put it to the Commandments of Jesus Christ, and see what you are not obedient in yet. That is what you should give up for Lent! Some people spend WAY too much time watching TV. Give it up! Some people spend WAY too much time gossiping and talking about others. Give it up! Some people spend WAY too much time taking care of themselves. Give it up! Die to self! You ask the Spirit of God to reveal to you today before you leave here what it is in your life that still needs to be under His Lordship and obedience. Now again, please, there is no condemnation for you. Don't walk out of here condemned, walk out of here convicted - that yes, this is part of my life, yes I have been disobedient, and yes, I'm going to change. One of my best students ever is in college now. We had a Tech retreat last weekend. He wasn't there, but he made it before and I'm his spiritual director. I found out he was at a party during the time we were praying at the retreat. I learned this on Thursday. Thursday night I called him and said to him, "I heard you were at a party while we were praying this weekend." "Uh, uh...yes Father, but I just wanted to have fun." I said, "When is it that you are going to decide in your life that you are going to obey Jesus in all things, and stop this double
life?" Catholics are very good about leading a double life. They can go out and get drunk on Saturday night, and go to Communion on Sunday, and not even think twice about it. I said to him, "When are you going to decide that if you're going to follow Jesus, you're going to follow Him." He said, "You're right, Father." The next day I got an e-mail from him. He said, "Father, thank you for kicking me in the butt last night. That's just what I needed." Sometimes that IS what we need - just to be challenged. My friend said that he's come to a deeper conversion. That's the challenge to all of us here - that each of us would come to a deeper conversion to the Lord Jesus Christ, and say yes to His Will, and no to sin. "If you choose to, you can keep the Commandments." That's what the Word of God says. DO YOU CHOOSE TO? Got it? Get it? Good! May each of you know his love today and forever. Amen.