Sunday Homilies with Fr. Mike Schmitz - 05/22/22 The Gift of the Church

Episode Date: May 23, 2022

Homily from the Sixth Sunday of Easter. The great temptation to stay in our own "version" of the Church. God has given us the gift of the Church. The Church is His Body...the Church is His Bride. And we cannot have Jesus without His Church. Mass Readings from May 22, 2022: Acts 15:1-2, 22-29 Psalms 67:2-3, 5-6, 8Revelation 21:10-14, 22-23 John 14:23-29

So this is the season, when summer rolls around, and this is summer for us right now. I know it's still May, but I get to help out with parishes throughout the course of the, around my diocese, which is really great. It's a gift because there are so many in our diocese. We have so many priests who are just really phenomenal. They just give a lot. And people who work on staff and parishes and just incredible people in the pews, they do so much good. And there's so much like life.

I love our diocese. There's so much life happening. But also reminds me, going to parishes, also reminds me why I love working with college students, not because it's like, get me away from those people, but because it's such a critical age. I mean, working with in college young adults, that age, it is such a critical age. In fact, you might know the statistics. These statistics are roughly around this. They're roughly 90% of young people who are raised Catholic in this demographic of the age that we work with on campus,

roughly 90% of them leave the Catholic faith. They stop practicing the faith in which they were raised. This is just that's deadly. Think about this, nine out of ten. Nine out of ten. I know that that's a huge weight on so many parents' hearts because they're looking at their family saying like, oh my gosh, like what can I do?

What can I do to help my children have a living relationship with the Lord in such a way that they want to continue living that relationship out in the Catholic Church? because is it just because God wants everyone to be Catholic. I'm going to say it right now. God wants everyone to be Catholic. And yet not only are, is there 90% this 90% of Catholics not practicing their faith when they become adults, but also there's what they call the rise of the nuns, the N-O-N-E-S,

those who said when it comes to religion, I have no religious affiliation. So rather than check the box of am I Protestant Catholic, mainline, whatever, it's none. No, I have no religion. In fact, I think it was maybe three years ago that the number of nuns in the whole country tied the number of Catholics in the whole country. That 23% of Americans are Catholic and now 23 and climbing percent of Americans have no religious affiliation. Or even they'll say things like, oh, I like Jesus but don't like the church. and I think about like why is that?

What is happening in our culture? What's happening in people's hearts that get them to the point where they would say that's okay, that's fine by me? And I think there's a lot of reasons. I think it's really easy to say I love Jesus but not the church. I don't want to be affiliated with any religion.

Why? Because there's less baggage. I mean, really truly, if we think about it, there's no history. All you have is just Jesus as opposed to the church which has a 2,000 year history of messiness. It has a 2,000 year history

of incredible transformation of culture. I mean, I don't want to go overstate my case, but virtually every amazing thing in our culture has its source in the Catholic Church, but also we have 2,000 year history of baggage. We have 2,000 years of messiness. And so it's super easy. I want to check the box that says none.

I have no religious affiliation because I don't want to hold on to that baggage. I'll just take Jesus, thanks. Or another is because I talk to this a lot. This comes up a lot with our students is the label. Like when they identify themselves as Catholic, Like, there are some people who say, well, I know.

Then I know all I need to know about you. And so rather than just simply saying, well, I don't want to have a label, then you just assume that you know me, then maybe I'll just check the box this is none. Because if I can avoid affiliating myself with the religion, if I can avoid affiliated myself with the Catholic Church, then I also get to avoid the label. So those are two reasons. One, less baggage.

Yet second one is I don't get labeled. But I think the third reason is maybe the most compelling, maybe the most, the one that goes down deepest in our hearts. And it's because I would rather have Jesus and not the church. I'd rather be spiritual but not religious. Why? Because the truth is there's fewer demands. That the teachings of Jesus in many ways are more easily dismissed. I remember I had his email exchange for a long time,

a number of years ago with this man who was writing to me from another country and a pretty intelligent guy who was raised Catholic. And he wanted to be faithful in so many ways. But his questions, he said, but I can't accept these three teachings of the Catholic Church. I'll accept everything else. But I can't accept these three teachings of the Catholic Church. And back and forth, as he explained what they were,

I kind of tried to highlight to him, you realize that all three of these teachings have something in common. They all have to do with sexual morality. Like everything else. I mean, think about, that should reveal, that should be a spotlight to every one of our consciences. That could have been a spotlight to his conscience that would say, oh yeah, I completely 100% accept everything

the Catholic Church teaches, except these three things. and they're all of the same kind that might reveal something. So I remember him saying something like, well, I don't have to believe in this. I don't have to act this way. Because when did Jesus ever say anything about fill in the blank? One of those teachings.

So basically in our correspondence, it asked him the question. I said, well, so if Jesus did say something really clearly on any one of these topics, would you believe him? Like, would you, you know, if Jesus is God and he said something on this topic, would you accept it? And he said, of course. One of his topics was he didn't believe that he didn't accept the church's teaching, Christ's teaching, that if you were divorced, you can't get remarried.

And so I said, well, there's three times in three different gospels where Jesus says that if you divorce and marry another person, you're committing adultery. And here are the quotes and here's the text and here's the text and here's the reference and here's the whole thing really, really clearly. Jesus said it super clearly. And he was like, wow, hmm, took it away, came back and he said, well, I went online and I found that there's other Christians who say, that's not really what he meant. And I was like, oh my gosh, this is like what happens to us all, right? It's like, well, no, gee, I can't believe this because Jesus never said anything specifically about this. And then when he does say something

specifically about this, we say, but that's not what he meant. And that's not, that's not meant to just make fun of this guy. A little bit make fun of this guy, but it's not meant to just make fun of them because that's all of us. I mean, the truth is, what's one of the lines in scripture is, we are no better than our ancestors. And that's the truth of every single one of our hearts. We all want to do this. Even those of us in the church, we are often so tempted to do exactly the same thing. We are no better than our ancestors. What did our ancestors do? What's the temptation that is deadly as any throughout the entire Bible? It's the temptation towards idolatry.

Idolatry is this primary temptation. Every single one of us faces every single day of our lives. This is consistent. Why? What I mean? I don't even just mean the temptation to leave the church and to go somewhere else. I mean the temptation to stay in the church, but to worship my own version of God.

So if you go back all the way to Exodus, this is one of the stories that I keep highlighting because I remember when I understood it, it was just, it changed everything. We know the story of the golden calf, right? Here's God, who is, he has set his people free from slavery in Egypt, and he's led them through the Red Sea, and here they are. Base Mount Sinai, Moses is up the mountain, and then they get tired of waiting for God. So what did they say?

They turn to Aaron and say, make for us a molten calf, golden calf, to worship. So Aaron does this. And then they turn to the golden calf and worship him. And I always used to think this was just the people of Israel, quickly abandoning the God who saved them. But that wasn't exactly what they were doing, what they were doing, what they would say as they bowed down before this golden calf saying, here it wasrael, this is the Lord, this is the God who saved you from slavery in Egypt. So they weren't fully turning away from God.

They were just turning towards a God of their own making that they could approach on their own terms. And this is the sickness, this is the wound every single one of us has. This is the temptation every one of us has in the church and out of the church that we worship a God of our own making that we get to approach on our own terms. So the question, of course, is how do I escape that? Like, how do I get free from that? And the answer, I would say, is scripture. The answer is the Bible.

One of the things I found over the course of this last year, last year and a half now, I guess, are doing the Bible in a year, is that there are so many Christians, there are so many Catholics who are raised Catholic, lived their whole life in the Catholic Church, and they never really read the Bible. And so their vision of God was the vision of their priest back home,

who kind of shared who God was. And so they kind of cobbled that together, plus maybe the nun who taught them, plus maybe their parents, plus maybe the religious ed teacher, whoever it was, the kind of things they just kind of put together over the course of time, that's the version of God. But then they read the Bible and they realize, oh my gosh, this is how God has revealed himself. This is who God has revealed himself to be. And they come face to face with this choice. And choices, do I continue to embrace my own particular version of God or do I accept

God as he has revealed himself through Scripture, because I think this is the only real remedy is taking God at His Word. The only real remedy is being willing to listen to God as he's actually revealed himself. So basically having a biblical worldview, but here's the thing. This goes even further.

Because, there's a big butt here, because revelation, like when it comes to God revealing himself, revelation is more than just the Bible. Like as Catholics, we realize that there, About 500 years ago, there was a man who came along, and he said, actually, the only source of faith, the sole rule of faith is Scripture. The only source of data for our believing in the Lord is the Bible. So there's an idea called Sola Scriptura, or Scripture alone. And that's actually not what Christians have believed for 15, now 2,000 years.

Because we believe that there are three sources of divine revelation. One is the Bible. The second is tradition. In fact, that's even in First Thessalonian, St. Paul's writing. to Christians and he says, I urge you to hold fast to the traditions that you were taught either by word of mouth or by letter. Because we realize there is not only the written scripture, the written tradition, there is also the verbal tradition. And this is, again, it was all the way back to the very beginning. But also, we don't just have scripture and don't just

have tradition. We have this thing called the Magisterium. Magisterium comes from the Latin word Magistra, which means teacher. And so basically, we need this thing because why? We need this teaching office of the church. Because there are some things, like my email friend said, there are some things that Jesus didn't teach. There are some things that the scripture didn't cover. In fact, we see that one of those in the gospel, or in the first reading today. The evidence in the gospel today is that here's the problem. You have people who are Christians. The first Christians, all Jews, which meant that every person, who was baptized had already been brought into the old covenant. If you're a man, how are you brought

to the old covenant? You're brought into the old covenant through circumcision. So great, if you brought in the old covenant, now here's the fulfillment of Judaism and Christianity. Awesome. No problem. Now of a sudden, Paul and Barnabas and some others are going out and they're evangelizing non-Jews. And the question is, okay, so when the Jews became Christian, they were brought into the fullness of the covenant. when non-Jews or Gentiles become Christian, do they first have to be brought into the old covenant, like circumcised, and then be baptized? Because that's how it happened for us.

That's how it happened for 100% of the first Christians. They were first Jewish, meaning they were first brought into the old covenant and then finally brought into the fulfillment of the covenant. So the big question, and Jesus never said anything about this. So what are you going to do? Because the stakes are super high on this. Because if, if someone needs,

needs to be circumcised and then be baptized and they're not. Salvation is lost. So it's a big question. What are they going to do? So what happens in Acts chapter 15 is they come together. In fact, remember, we remember this. It says there was no little dissension among them about this topic. Now, no little dissension is really nice, polite speak for saying there was a lot of

dissension about this question. What happened? They gathered with the church, the elders, the apostles, all of them came together and they argued, like they literally fought, discussed this whole thing. And at the end of the day, essentially, they said it seems to the, seems right, to the Holy Spirit and to us, and then stated, here's what you need to do. You don't need to get circumcised in order to be baptized. Now, we all look at that and say, of course, that duh, who made the decision, though? Because it wasn't clear in scripture. Who made the decision? It wasn't clear in tradition.

Who made the decision was what they called the magistrate, the teaching office of the church, the visible and authoritative, the living teaching office of the church that's able to declare definitively, this is right, this is wrong. And every single Christian has embraced that. In fact, that magistrate, that was the first council, first ecumenical council in Jerusalem, like the year 50, 80, something around along there. But since then, there are things that every single Christian believes that doesn't necessarily strictly come from scripture.

In fact, the gospel today, Jesus says this really problematic and troubling line, he says, the father is greater than I. So one of the things Christians did was they read this and said, wait a second. So we know that Jesus has said that he's God, but he also says the Father is greater than him. So what's that mean? Does that mean that he's like a demi-God? Does it mean that he's like, here's the Father, but then here's the son who's slightly

less Gody than the Father? What does that mean? And there were Christians. In fact, there was a man named Arias who was a pretty big heretic who started teaching that Jesus was God, but he wasn't fully God like the Father was. And that became the number one version of Christianity for a really long. time. So why is it that every Christian now says, no, Jesus is fully God, just as fully God is the Father and the Holy Spirit? Well, because there was a church council in Nicaea in the

year 325 where the Pope and the bishops came together just like in Acts chapter 15 where the Pope and the bishops came together and they said, after much, after no little dissension, they said, it seems right to the Holy Spirit and to us, Jesus is fully God and fully man. What about the Holy Spirit? Well, in 381, in the Council of Constantinople, they made it very, very clear that the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are co-equal, co-ectoral, co-divine. And every single Christian accepts this. Every single Christian believes us. Why? Because of the Magisterium, the teaching office of the church.

And even the fact that we know that there's 27 books in the New Testament. Why do we all agree on this? Because the teaching office of the Catholic Church has declared this. So one of the things we just realized is that, I cannot just have a God of my own creation and approach him on my own terms. I have to either accept God as he's revealed himself and how he's revealed himself. How has he revealed himself? Through scripture, through tradition, and through the magisterium of the Catholic Church.

We need this. You guys, we need this. If we're going to walk through this complicated world with any kind of certainty, with any kind of stability, of any kind of light. We need this. Why? Because I don't want to say it like this, but I'm going to say it like this. Because the Bible's not enough.

To not have the Bible is even worse. But to just have the Bible is not enough. Why? I would say because I believe this is an infallible book. I believe that all 73 books in the Bible are infallible. They're without error. I believe that they are the Word of God. This is the Word of God.

At the same time, without an infallible interpreter, this is a worthless book. And also, just even think about this. Think about what sense would it make? I always take our students to this whole, like, do this mental exercise. Like, imagine, imagine your God.

Imagine that you want your people to know you. You want them to know your goodness and your truth and your justice and your mercy. You want them to know your heart. And so what you do is you begin all the way back with Abraham and you slowly reveal yourself over the course of time and you guide the writing and the translation and the copying of all these scriptures and then finally in the fullness of time you got himself

become one of us here in Jesus Christ and you don't just kind of rain over the land. You actually live a humble life. Why? Because you want people to know who you are. You want people to know the depths of your heart. And then finally, you give yourself, you give your life, you conquer death and you send your Holy Spirit to guide the Apostles. to write these next 27 books in the New Testament,

and then you guide the church to compile them so that here they are, all 73 books, and over the course of years, you preserve them from corruption, you preserve them from being mistranslated, you preserve them from being miscopied. Because why? Because it's very important to you that your people know who you are.

If that's you as God, and you've gone to all that trouble of making sure that this is, an infallible book, how much sense would it make for you as God to then just say to the people, hey, listen, here it is, take it, read it, hope you understand it. That will make any sense. Because there are, as even Peter says, there are some parts of the scriptures that are really difficult to understand. God didn't do that. Yes, he did go through this and the whole story of 2,000 years of compiling and writing the scriptures. But then he did not leave us to interpret it for ourselves. He left us. He left us,

with an infallible interpreter, and that infallible interpreter is the Catholic Church. Jesus even says it in the gospel today, because I'll give you the Holy Spirit, and he will lead you into all truth. Jesus says it in Luke chapter 10, where he says, those who hear you, hear me, those who reject you, reject me, not Christians in general. He was talking to the apostles, those original bishops, the visible and authoritative and living church. And this is what we need. This is what we need. We need Revelation. We need Scripture and tradition and the Magisterium. We need the Catholic Church. Why? Because we are no different. We are no better than our ancestors.

Every single one of us is tempted to have a God of our own making that we approach on our own terms. But you and I are called to more. You and I are called to love Him. You and I are called to be His. And this whole world is called to His Church. church. This entire planet is called to belong to his church. And you and I are all called to be Catholic.