Sunday Homilies with Fr. Mike Schmitz - 06/23/24 True Surrender

Episode Date: June 22, 2024

Homily from the Twelfth Sunday in Ordinary Time. Rebellion, Resentment, or Rejoicing. We are called to surrender to God's will. But how do we surrender? Is it a matter of feeling or is it a matter of something else? Surrender is an active, dynamic thing. And it is the opposite of rebellion and resentment. Mass Readings from June 23, 2024: Job 38:1, 8-11 Psalms 107:23-26, 28-312 Corinthians 5:14-17 Mark 4:35-41

Welcome to Sunday homilies with me, Father Mike Schmitz. I hope today's homily inspires and motivates you, and I also hope that it leaves you hungry for the one who gave everything to feed you. If you want to get this in other Sunday Mass resources sent straight to your inbox, sign up at ascensionpress.com slash Sunday, or by texting Sunday to 33777. You can also follow or subscribe on your podcast app for weekly notifications. God bless.

The Lord be with you. He reading from the Holy Gospel according to Mark. Chapter 4 verses 35 through 41. On that day, as evening drew near, Jesus said to a disciples, let us cross to the other side. Leaving the crowd, they took Jesus with them in the boat just as he was,

and other boats were with them. A violent squall came up, and waves are breaking over the boat so that it was already filling up. Jesus was in the stern, asleep on a cushion. They woke him and said, Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?

He woke up. rebuked the wind and the sea and said, Be quiet, be still. The wind ceased, and there was a great calm. Then he asked them, why are you terrified? Do you not yet have faith? They were filled with great awe and said to one another, Who is this then, whom even the wind and the sea obey?

The gospel of the Lord. Wait you to have a seat. So a number of months ago, during Lent, we did a series, and the series was based off of this book called He Leadeth Me. You probably know this already. Father Walter Chizek, like his story of being a Catholic priest who had been, he became a Jesuit missionary to Russia, was captured in Russia, was interrogated, solidity confinement, lived in the gulag, all these things.

It was incredible. One of the themes, though, of the whole story is the theme of surrender. And so the reason I'm bringing it up now here in the middle of summer is like so many years, so many months after Atlanta's over is because a lot of people journeyed with Father Walter. And they're like, this is great. I love this. I love the idea of surrender. I have no idea how to do it.

And I think it's probably a lot of us, right? This sense of like, oh, no, yeah, it's great. I want to be a saint like Father Walter. I want to be a saint like all the other saints. And one of the commonalities, one of the common factors, the common denominators of almost all these saints, all of these saints is, I surrender. So the big question is, how do you do that?

In fact, you can look at this. The verse reading, Job. Question, here's Job, the righteous man in Scripture, right? The righteous man in the Old Testament. How does Job surrender? Or even the apostles in the boat today. How did they, Jesus told them, get in the boat, they got in the boat, went into a storm. How did they surrender?

And we have to, right off the bat, right out of the gate, have to remember that surrender is not the same thing as giving up. So one of my least favorite country songs, I have a lot of least favorite country songs. Now, I do like country. Country's great. But one of my least favorite country songs is by a wonderful artist. Her name is Carrie Underwood. Everyone loves Carrie Underwood.

My niece loves Carrie Underwood. And so I hesitate to even say this. But Carrie Underwood has a song that in her early career talking about this mom, driving with her baby in the back, driving to her mom and dad's house on Christmas Eve. You know another song? So she hits some ice and starts spinning around. And the car starts spinning.

So then the next line is, so what she do? She takes her hands off of the wheel, throws them in the air and says, Jesus take the wheel. So annoying. Because that's what you think. And that's the whole song. Yeah, no, that's great.

That's what a great prayer. Jesus, take the wheel. Like, no, no, no. You guys, that's not a good way to drive. It's not a good way to pray. So a better way would do this is you probably know the story of Captain Sully. You know Captain Sullivan who landed the plane in the Hudson. So Captain Sully, right?

He's a Christian. He's a man of deep faith. He's a man of prayer. And at one point after he had landed the plane of the Hudson, you know, saving hundreds of lives, they asked him, like, so did you just, how did you rely on your faith to, like, land this plane in the Hudson River and save all these lives? And he said, okay, three things happen. Number one, I realized something was wrong. Number two, I prayed to the Lord, God help me.

And number three, I got to work. I mean, that's surrender. We have to understand this. I realize something's wrong. I said a prayer. God help me. and then I got to work. Surrender is not giving up.

Surrender is something completely different. It is not taking your hands off the wheel and saying, Jesus, you drive my car. It is giving access. Surrender is not giving up. Surrender is giving access. So how do I know that I'm giving God access? How do I surrender?

So the couple things. First thing is this. Surrender is not a one-time thing. Surrender is not a set it and forget it. There's no such thing as a crock pot Christianity, like where you just kind of, again, set it and forget it and just let it. Surrender is like balance. So everyone talked about like, oh, I want work-life balance.

I want balance between my studies. Our students, like, I want balance between my studies and my social life and my sports and all these kind of things. You can never have balance. This is really, we have to understand this. No one has balance. Even the people who have balance, they don't have balance. They're balancing, which is very different than having balance.

Having balance, we imagine is like, okay, you're on one foot and just like, boom, done. I got into a position. Now I'm just on one foot. I'm balanced. But if you ever gone on one foot, You're never balanced. You're constantly balancing. So you're constantly making these little adjustments.

Sometimes something big comes along. You have to make a big adjustment. But no one's ever balanced. We're always, always balancing. Same thing when it comes to surrender. No one's ever just, oh, I'm surrendered now. It's a matter of, no, I'm constantly surrendering. Why?

Because life keeps happening to us. And as life keeps happening to us, it's like, oh, there's another thing the Lord is asking me. There's another thing. He's just asking me to adjust. And so if you want to say, like, no, I'm surrendered. you will never be surrendered. You will always be surrendering.

And that's good news. Why? Because it means that you're still alive. I guess there's one time you'll be surrendered. That's in heaven. But if you're surrendering, that means you're still alive. That means that there's still an opportunity. That means life's still coming at you.

That means that there's still choices to make. There's still decisions to make. That means that you still have the opportunity to say, God, you can have this. Again, surrender is not giving up. Surrender is giving access. It's saying, God, you can have this. So, number one, it's an action. It's going to be ongoing.

Number two, how do I know if I'm surrendered? Well, what's the opposite of surrender? Are you doing that? So with the opposite of surrender, I think you have two things. The opposite of surrender is rebellion or resentment. And so you can ask, okay, am I surrendered? Well, question, are you in rebellion? Or are you resenting?

Now, sometimes rebellion is really, really overt, right? Sometimes rebellion is that shaking the fist at the Lord and say, I defy you God. Sometimes that's what rebellion can look like. But I would say rebellion, the kind of rebellion we have to be on guard against is a more subtle kind of rebellion. There's the kind of rebellion that, no, I'm going to reject God's word. I'm going to reject the church as teaching. But how about this?

How about the rebellion of God says, do this and I do anything else? That's rebellion. Procrastination, you guys, is not a sin you necessarily need to bring to confession. You might. But if God says do this, and I do anything else other than that, that's rebellion. If God says, here's the next step, I want you to take. And I want to take another step, and I do take another step, that's rebellion. And that does something to our hearts.

In fact, that kind of posture of rebellion of just like, again, not even raising the fist to the Lord and saying, I defy you, I will not do this, but just kind of ignoring the Lord, it does something to our hearts. You know the book of Exodus? We know the story, that God sends Moses to Pharaoh to tell Pharaoh, let my people go so they can come worship me. What happens? Pharaoh's heart gets hardened.

Pharaoh knows, this is so important for all of us. Because we look at Pharaoh and think, that's ridiculous. That's the dumbest thing in the world. There's all these plagues and Pharaoh's like, nope, I'm still not going to do this. After the first plague, I'd be like, fine, leave, go. But what happens? It says that God hardened Pharaoh's heartened Pharaoh's heart. Now we have to understand this because that's not the same thing as God took away Pharaoh's free will.

Pharaoh always had a free will. Pharaoh allowed his heart to be hardened because, why? Because Pharaoh chose to ignore the very call of God. God said, do this thing, set my people free. And he did anything else but what God was specifically asking. That's what hardened their heart. In fact, God's not responsible for hardening Pharaoh's heart any more than, well, I say it like this.

This is the analogy. Pharaoh is still free. But his heart, in our hearts are either made of one of two substances. Our hearts are either made of clay, and God is like the sun, and when God is present and he tells us what he wants, our hearts become hardened. Not because the sun's bad, but because I've chosen to let my heart be clay. When I ignore what God asks me to do, I've chosen let my heart be clay. Or our hearts can be wax.

And when God's presence is there, it's like the presence of the sun that softens the wax, that melts the wax. And so the big question is this, is, am I ignoring God's voice to such a degree? that I'm in a place of rebellion so much so that my heart has been hardened. Again, that can be us when I don't want to pay attention to what God is asking me. I know what is the word is says. I know what the church is teaching me. I know the church teaches X, but I'm going to live as if God has never said anything about this. That's living in rebellion.

I'm going to live as if God has never said anything about this. That's living in rebellion. And again, it can be so subtle. It can be so subtle that it just looks like this. It looks like staying distant from God. It looks like this. It looks like this right now is the only time you and I have talked to God or thought about God in the past week.

That's actually living in rebellion. Living as if I'm hiding from the Lord. That is actually, or even this. I do go to pray, but I'm hiding the thoughts of my heart. I'm hiding the desires of my heart. I'm hiding what I actually want. I'm hiding myself. You guys, we can actually be people who pray on a regular basis,

pray every single day. But if I'm actually not revealing to the Lord, my thoughts, my feelings, my desires, I'm not actually revealing to God my wounds, then I might actually be praying in a spirit of rebellion. And then this is, again, you have Pharaoh, right, who harden his heart. Here's two other characters.

Here's King Saul in the Old Testament. Or even Judas in the New Testament. Both of these men, right, King Saul, he had God very clearly said through Prophet Samuel, do this thing, Saul didn't do that thing, and he knew he didn't do the thing, and he felt bad about the thing because he was going to lose the kingship. Judas, he was not called by Jesus to betray him. That was not a call that God had asked of him, but he did it, and afterwards what happened?

He felt badly. But what's the one thing that both King Saul and Judas failed to do? They didn't fail to feel bad. They both felt really badly. What they failed to do, they failed to surrender, meaning they failed to come before God once again and say, God, my heart is broken. I'm sorry. How often do we come to prayer? And we talk to God about everything but the pain in our hearts. We talk to God about everything except I'm frustrated with you, God. You guys, Job didn't do that. Job didn't hide his frustration. Job did, I mean,

when you say, curse the day I was born, you're not holding anything back from the Lord. I mean, when you say, it would have been better for me if I'd never seen the light of day. you're not holding much back from the Lord. When you say, God, I can't even get enough saliva to spit, this is how bad I'm feeling, this how horrible this life is? Like, you're being pretty honest, we're being pretty frank.

That's one of the great things, is that quest we have to ask is there are any thoughts, feelings, emotions, or anything that I'm not allowing God access? If that's the case, I'm not surrendered. If that's the case, I'm in rebellion. So it can be that rebellion, but there also can be resentment.

This is all subtle, right? Rebellion can be subtle. resentment can be even trickier. Because resentment is this, it's like, okay, God, no, fine, I'll do what you want. But don't expect me to like it. God, yeah, oh, yeah, I'm serving your Lord. I am going to serve you. I'm doing exactly what you tell me to do.

I refuse, though. I refuse to find joy in it. I know a lot about resentment. I know a lot about resentment. I actually, I found this in my heart within the last year. actually almost a year ago. I was a... So here's what.

I've been on campus. I finished my 19th year on our campus just this last spring semester. Awesome. Praise the Lord. So good. But for those 19 years,

we have been in this little garage. We're in a garage right now. This is a garage. It has a chapel. Our Lord is here. He's present in my garage. No big deal. But we haven't been able to get any bigger

than this garage. There's been no land around the campus. There's been no opportunity to grow. and what happened was, praise the Lord, two years ago, we were able to close by the entire block that we're on here. And this door opened up that made what was previously impossible, it made it possible, that here we are. We have this little house, this little garage,

and there's no place for students to come. You guys, our missionaries on this campus have been amazing. What they've done with just reaching so many students, we have students every single day who come to this chapel to come to the garage and have a holy half hour, they come to math. but there's no room for them. And so the bishop said, okay, listen, buy this land, we bought the land.

He said, okay, Father Mike, now your new job is you're going to keep being the chaplain at University of Minnesota, Duluth, but you're also going to raise a bunch of money. No, you're going to try to raise a bunch of money. And then you have no experience in fundraising and you have no experience in like design. You have no experience in church architecture. You have no experience like other than just doing this, living in a garage. It's your job to do all this stuff. And so it's clear that God has asked me to do this.

because Bishop, Bishop's asked me to do this. And so I'm like, no problem. Okay, Bishop, yes. Because I promised the bishop, you know, I'll do whatever you ask me to do. And promise God, God, I'll do whatever you ask me to do. But I'll tell you this, if you were to ask me, hey, Father Mike, how's it going? How's that fundraising? Are you traveling again this weekend?

How'd the travels go? Like, you know, oh my gosh, you guys, I can talk your ear off about how much. I'm like, I don't want to do this. And I was convicted by this. I was convicted by this because I was convinced that I'm doing God's will. God has asked me to do this. Oh, yes, Lord. But if you were to ask me, how am I doing it?

I'd be doing it resentfully. Now, I believe this project. I believe we need this. I believe this is absolutely necessary. But will I put my whole heart into it? No, my heart belongs to the students. I have to leave them every time I go try to raise money. I don't like that.

Last August, I was reading 2nd Corinthians, our second reading today, 2nd Corinthians. A little bit later in 2nd Corinthians. And St. Paul is writing to people who are like me, writing to people who are, oh, God, I'm do what you want, but they're going to do it in a different way than he wants. And he says this, he says, I thought it was necessary to urge to the brothers to go on ahead of you and arrange in advance the gift you've promised so that your gift you give may be ready as a willing gift, not as an extraction, or not as an exaction. I wanted them to go ahead of you

because what I wanted your gift to be is, I wanted your gift to be willing, not in exaction. This isn't a penalty. You're not being punished, but you're asked to give. And I was like, I feel like that sometimes. I feel like this is a punishment being asked to give. He goes on to say, he says, the point is this. Whoever sows sparingly will reap sparingly.

Now, here's how I've been living, and this is maybe you too. Like, oh, I'll sow. God, you told me to sew? There. Here's a seed. Here's a two seeds. Here's three seeds. who sows sparingly will reap sparingly,

whoever sows bountifully will also reap bountifully. And then this is the last sentence that I just like, oh, okay, God, I get it. He said this, each one must give as he's decided in his heart, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver. One must give as he's decided in his heart, not reluctantly or under compulsion,

for God loves a cheerful giver. I was doing it. But not with a cheerful heart. I had a resentful heart. And that's the problem. You know, what is surrender? Surrender is doing what God wants. Because God wants, and also as God wants.

And how does He say? Do this cheerfully. But I did it with a spirit of complaint. Can we live without a spirit of complaint? Now, remember, God has access to your heart, right? So God gets to know your thoughts, feeling, desires. God gets to know if you're frustrated. God gets to know if you're like, God, I'd rather

be doing something else. I mean, even Jesus approached his father with complete honesty. Job approaches God with complete honesty. The apostles, Lord, save us. That's honest. That's an honest prayer. Here's a problem. The reality. Job complained, but he wasn't defined by his complaint. How often are we defined by our complaint? The apostles complained, but they weren't trapped by their complaint. You know anyone who's trapped by complaint? I mean, do you know anyone who is defined by complain, I think this happens a lot. I think it happens a lot with people who are givers. I see this happening. A lot of our students go on to be nurses. A lot of our students go on to work in the medical field in other ways as well. A lot of our students go on to be teachers. And I've

heard from those students that some of the worst places in the world are the teachers lounge. So even though they love their job, teachers lounge is a place to just people just complain and complain and complain in nurses and other medical professionals love their job. They're there to serve people, but they find themselves together. And so they tell me, they just complain, complain, complain and you realize this can happen even with people who want to kiff, even with people who want to live for others, as I get caught in this trap of complaint. I've become defined a complaint. You might have relationships with people that your relationship is based off the fact that you mutually complain with each other. So how do we escape? Like how do we escape rebellion? How do we escape

resentment? How do we escape complaint? We escape through death. How do you get surrender? The reality is through death. T. Paul makes it really, really clear. We're convinced that since one died for all, all have died. Therefore, he says, you must live no longer for yourselves. Like how in the world? Do I avoid that spirit of rebellion or the spirit of resentment, the spirit of complaint, how do I actually live a spirit of surrender, is to realize I have died. And a dead person doesn't care anymore about their will. A dead person doesn't care anymore. Like my life is actually, my life is no longer my life. And this is one of these key things,

these key truths that we have to hold on to. Your life is no longer your life. If you're a Christian, your life is no longer your life. If I'm a Christian, if I'm really going to belong to the Lord, then my life is no longer my life. I no longer can live for myself. because the Holy Spirit has been given to me. So how do I get this? And this is the last thing. How do I start that? How do I walk into this?

Well, there was a man way back in the day. His name was Saint Ignatius Loyola. Before he was a saint, he had a strong will. Before he was a saint, he had vision for his life. Before he was a saint, he had a very big plan for his life. And then he encountered Jesus and he realized, man, Lord, I want to surrender everything, but I've got this rebellion.

I've got the resentment. I've got this complaint. But I want it to be yours. He came up with this prayer. and I want to invite you to pray this prayer. This is a prayer that's worth praying every morning and every night. Because why? Because we have a spirit of rebellion that traps us.

We have a spirit of complaint that can define us. We can have a spirit of resentment that can have a hold on us. But this prayer is this prayer of just surrender. It is a prayer of letting go. But it's a prayer of death. It literally is. It is a prayer that basically says, Lord God, whatever's in me that's still me, let it die.

whatever is in me that I'm holding on to and I let define me and trap me and hold on to me. Lord, let it die. And the prayer goes like this. Take Lord and receive all my liberty. Take all my memory. Take my understanding and my entire will. Whatever I have or hold, you have given me and I restore it all to you and surrender it wholly to be governed by your will. Give me only your love and your grace.

And I'm rich enough. and ask for nothing more. In our prayer today, our prayer every day, the beginning of every day, and the end of every day, how do I know I'm surrendering? How do I know I'm not living in rebellion or resentment or complaint?

Have I died? Am I willing to pray that prayer? Take O Lord and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and my entire will. Whatever I have or hold you have given me. I restore it all to you and surrender it holy to be governed by your will. Give me only your love and your grace.

and I am rich enough and ask for nothing more. Amen.