Sunday Homilies with Fr. Mike Schmitz - 10/04/20 It's Not Your Vineyard

Episode Date: October 5, 2020

Homily from the Twenty-seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time. God has made you for freedom from anxiety over the unforeseeable future, the unchangeable past, and your present responsibilities. Many people are overwhelmed by anxiety. Anxiety over all the things that need to get done and over all that they have been through. But God calls us to have no anxiety at all. And to surrender our past, present, and future to His dominion.. Mass Readings from October 4, 2020: Isaiah 5:1-7 Psalms 80:9,12,13-16,19-20Philippians 4:6-9 Matthew 21:33-43

So I recently came across the story of these two men who played in the NBA back in like the 50s One of them his name is Jack Twinen Jack was he grew up in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania and Kind of a remarkable story that even in high school he didn't make the team He he went on this kind of situation kind of a Michael Jordan-esque kind of situation where he was cut from the team his freshman year His sophomore year his junior year and then finally after like all this practice he had this regime where he would get up and he'd do you know a hundred jump shots he did 200 free throws. He did this kind of like, you know, 300 shots from the three point line. Finally, his high school senior, made the team, and then played basketball in college, and then finally got drafted by the Cincinnati Royals after college. He and Wilts Chamberlain

tied to be the, they're the first people ever in the NBA to average over 30 points a game. So, like a remarkable guy, he is in the Hall of Fame. Jack Twine is his name. He had a teammate on the Cincinnati Royals, whose name was Maurice. Stokes and Marie Stokes, if Jack Twainan had to work for stuff, like Marie Stokes was incredible. It's remarkable. He was probably, he was alleged to be at least the, in his era, the best player that had ever up to that point played. He grew up outside Pittsburgh, I think I said.

When he was drafted for the Cincinnati Royals, his first year, he was rookie of the year for the entire NBA. And his second year, he set a record in rebounds for the NBA. And three years, he was nominated to the United. All-Star team. So like phenomenal players, both these guys on the team, teammates. But then in 1958 in the final game of the regular season, Cincinnati Royals was playing against the Minnesota Lakers. That's a team that back in the day. So they're playing at the Minnesota Lakers and Maurice went up to grab the ball and he

got undercut or whatever, however it happened, but he when he came down he landed on his head and he was knocked unconscious for a bit, came back, came to, and got back in the game. He finished the game. They thought, okay, just he just rung his bell whenever, no big deal. On the plane back to Cincinnati from Minnesota, he, Maurice became like violently ill and had to be brought to the hospital. A couple days later, he became permanently paralyzed. What happened was there was blood that formed on his brain

as like encephalopathy, I think is what it's called, and he became permanently paralyzed that I think he could swallow and he could blink. Because his family couldn't take care of him, Jack, his teammate, basically decided that's what I'm going to do. And this is the era of the NBA where everyone who was a player had two full-time jobs. They played in the NBA and they had some other jobs. So here's Jack.

He's 24 years old. He's a wife, he has kids. He's a salesman. He has a second full-time job. But he realizes that Maurice, his teammate, can't pay for any of his bills. And so Jack went about with some other teammates doing all these fundraisers just to be able to pay Maurice's bills. He became a regular visitor.

He became a regular visitor of his teammate Maurice, and he devised this thing where he had alphabet numbers, alphabet letters, letters of the alphabet, on a piece of paper, and he point to the letter, and then when he was at the right letter, Maurice would blink and then he write down that letter, and that's how they could kind of communicate with each other. Jack ultimately became Maurice's legal guardian and visited him every day, basically almost every day,

until he died 12 years later, until Maurice died 12 years later. And when he's asked about it, Jack just said this, he said, things had to be done and no one else was there to do them but me. And I just want to pause on this right now. Just think like, oh my gosh, here's this 24-year-old young man with a family, with two jobs and a teammate, just a guy on his team, and he just says things had to be done. And no one else was there to do them but me. And I just cannot imagine how overwhelmed he would feel. I want to pause on this first second. And just the fact that all of us, at some point, maybe even right now, can be completely overwhelmed.

And I think we all know the experience. Here's, here's Jack overwhelmed by, like, what am I going to do here? Maurice overwhelmed by, like, what am I supposed to do here? And I can even think about this, how Jack could be overwhelmed by all the things that need to get done to take care of his teammate, to take care of his family, take everything. And Maurice being overwhelmed by all that he's been through. You know, again, when we talk about being overwhelmed, I think that we again, we think, again, we, think I'm overwhelmed by all the things I have to get done, or I'm overwhelmed by all the things that I've experienced, all the things that have happened to me.

I don't think those are the things that overwhelm us. I think what overwhelms us is we're overwhelmed by our anxiety. Overwhelmed by our anxiety over all the things that need to get done. Or we're overwhelmed by our anxiety over what we've been through. I would say it's maybe like this. Maybe we're anxious over the responsibility that's been entrusted to us. Because again, all of us, so it's just busy lives. Just there's so many responsibilities that have been placed on us.

It's like the gospel. Here's the landowner, right? He has this vineyard and he hires these tenants and says, okay, go to work. And he gives all of those tenants responsibilities. They have a responsibility to care of the land. They have responsibility to take care of the grapes. They have the responsibility to harvest the grapes, basically to make the wine. They have the responsibility to produce fruit.

And they know that the landowner is serious about this and he's seriously given them some serious responsibilities. You can imagine that they would be anxious and over- overwhelmed by like, what if this doesn't happen, maybe I should have done this in the past? Again, think about here just in our day and age, what are the things that cause us anxiety? Like all the things I have to do for class, all the things that I have to do for work, my family, just the obligations that so many of us have right now, and not to mention the obligations we have as Christians. Like, okay, the Lord, he's entrusted us with the responsibility of taking care of our prayer life. We have to be praying people on a regular basis that he's given us the responsibility of serving people around us,

to keeping our eyes and our hearts open to where there's a need around us. The responsibility of bearing witness to Jesus, being willing to share the gospel, we've been given the responsibility to bear fruit. And again, this pause on this, we've been entrusted with so much responsibility that it's incredibly easy to be overwhelmed by anxiety.

And yet I want to note this. I think anxiety is never, or almost never, about what's needed now. Anxiety is almost always over an unforeseeable future and an unchangeable past. Said that again, anxiety is almost never about right now. Anxiety is almost always about an unforeseeable future and an unchangeable past.

And it never contributes to this moment. It contributes nothing to this moment. It almost always steals. In fact, there was a psychologist who said, here's a quote, she said, interestingly enough, most people who harbor feelings of anger, resentment, regret unhappiness, like they have anxiety,

are not actually experiencing anything negative in the moment. But we harbor these thoughts, we harbor these feelings, we harbor this anxiety over an unforeseeable future, or an unchangeable past. It steal, again, it adds nothing, it steals everything from this moment. That's one of the reasons I think that St. Paul, it says in his letter to the Philippians, makes it so clear in Philippians 4. He says, have no anxiety at all.

Now, we might sit back and think, oh, that's easy for Paul to say. I mean, he's a saint. He's a holy person. He probably had a cushy life. No, St. Paul is writing the letter to the Philippians from jail. And he has no idea where this will they get free? Will he not get free? Maybe he shouldn't have done this.

Maybe you should have done something differently. If anyone could have had some anxiety in this particular moment, it is St. Paul. And yet in this particular moment, he says, have no anxiety at all. How can he say that? I think the reason is because he knows. He knows anxiety is almost never about what is needed now. It's always anxiety over the unforeseeable future and the unchangeable past.

Yes, okay, obviously. It's necessary to consider the future in order to know what to do now. I need to look ahead in order to say, okay, what do I need to do now? Here's what's coming. And yes, it's necessary to learn from the past in order to be wise right now. But too many of us live in the what if. That's what anxiety is. Anxiety is all about what if.

It's all about the unforeseeable future. What if I get the job? What if I don't get the job? And this is the crazy thing about anxiety, about looking to the unforeseeable future, is we can be anxious about anything. I mean, just think back to high school. I just was thinking about this. Like when you maybe ask someone out to prom or you were asked out to prom,

will they ask you to prom? Should you ask this person to prom? And you have the anxiety over, like, what if they say no? Like, oh, I'd be heartbroken, I'd be crushed. What if they don't ask, I'd be heartbroken, I'd be crushed. But then there's the question. But what if they say yes? Like then, I have a whole new set of problems in my life.

That's part of the reality. We are anxiety-producing machines. We can be anxious about anything because the unforeseeable future has an unforeseeable amount of dangers. In fact, so my best friend Nick, we were talking about this recently, and he has three adopted kids, and he has three, I guess, biological kids.

And when they adopted their first son, and they were praying, like, God, like, please let us have this son. Like, they had met their son Davy, and they're like, please, God, let us be Davy's parents. Let Davy be our son. And they were afraid of this anxiety over, what if God says no? Like, oh, we'd be heartbroken because he loved this little boy. But then they also had that anxiety.

But what if God says yes? What if God says no, it would be heartbroken? What if he says, yes, we're terrified? Because that's what happens when we live in the unforeseeable future. We simply create worry for ourselves or if we live in the unchangeable past. We can ask the question, we can say like, what if I, what if I hadn't chosen a different major? How different would my life be? What if I, what if I hadn't driven over the speed limit? We could say things like, you know, what if I hadn't done this thing, I regret? Where

would I be right now? Or what if that person who hurt me so badly? What if they hadn't hurt me so And living back there, it damages us. In fact, this man named James Pennebaker, he's a professor at University of Texas in Austin. And he says that that anxiety over the future, over the past, it actually can damage your health. But those people who wrote about those things, wrote about those things in their past, even the traumatic events in their past, their health actually improved. That when basically the kind of research comes back, it says when you sort out your past, like when you write out your past, past, like when you write out your past and look at the, these are things that happened

to me in my life and write about the emotional impact and write about some of the consequences, like, and this is what it did, this is how it changed me, this is how it hurt me, this is how it helped me. When you write about what you've learned, you're able to move forward. That we actually, this is like demonstrated, psychologically proven that when, yes, we remember our past in order to gain wisdom, that the what ifs, the things, the things, the The anxiety of what if thrives in trauma that hasn't been grasped and understood yet. Because that trauma, it's like fire, right?

It's like it can burn us. And so we don't want to look at it and it just keeps burning us. I heard of one psychologist, he said like this, he said, the brain looks at that trauma, looks at the fire and says, don't go there, there's fire. And he said, well, maybe you can master the fire and then you will be a wielder of fire. St. Paul, he is incredibly wise and he has the Word of God, or the Spirit of God on his side. And he says it slightly differently. He says, what we heard today, he says, have no anxiety at all, but in everything.

In everything, past, present, future, in everything. By prayer and petition, with Thanksgiving, make your request known to God. So what's he saying? He's saying, okay, when it comes to your unforeseeable future, by prayer and petition, like, let your prayers, be known to God. You're asking God, God, I'm going into this future and I'm praying about it. And I'm handing it over to you. Basically, what you're doing with that prayer and petition is I'm saying, God, I have this anxiety over the unforeseeable future. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to entrust to you the unforeseeable future. That's what St. Paul is saying by when he says,

by prayer and petition, you're entrusting to God, your unforeseeable future. And it says, with Thanksgiving. So what you're doing there is you're looking back and you're entrusting to God, your unchangeable past. And that's the thing, it's like, he says, in everything. And regardless of what happened in that past, I'm looking back and saying, okay, God, I can actually even thank you for everything, in everything. I can entrust to you my unchangeable past. What we're doing in those situations is we're, another way to say it is we're surrendering.

Now, not surrendering in the terms of giving up, but it's an act of surrender by saying, okay, God, my unperseeable future, you get to be Lord of that. You get to be God of my future. And by surrendering our past, what we're saying is, God, I give you permission. You get to have dominion over my unchangeable past, those things that are awful things I hate,

the things that I'm proud of, the things that I rejoice in. You get to have dominion, God, over my unforeseeable future. You get to have dominion over my unchangeable past. And even this, even this, even the current moment, because this is crucial. Remember, we have responsibility. You have responsibility. You have stuff you got to do.

There's things that have to get done. And that's why we don't stop here. We don't just stop with saying, okay, God, I surrender my unforeseeable future. I surrender my unchangeable past. But go back to the gospel. Go back to the gospel where there's these tenants and the landowner. And the landowner says, okay, it's time to give me the fruit

and they're unwilling to give him the fruit. One of the points of this parable that Jesus tells in today's gospel is this. Yes, you had a lot to do. You had a lot of responsibilities. You have to produce fruit. But here's the deal. It's not your vineyard.

That at the end of the day, yes, You have this work to do, but at the end of the day, it is not your vineyard. That what we're saying is, okay, God, what we're called to say is, God, this life, my past, my present, my future, all of these responsibilities, God, that's your vineyard. So I don't have to have anxiety. Because God, it's your vineyard. God, you're the Lord of all of it. No, I know that the temptation right there is to be like, well, then I just sit back and be like,

okay, I have no worries and no anxiety and no to do anything. I don't have any action, and that's not it at all. It's the furthest thing from it. One of my favorite stories is in Second Samuel, it's the end of Second Samuel, it's Chapter 23. It's at the end of David's life, David, the King, the King, the Shepherd Boy, he's on his deathbed. And what he's doing is he's recounting the incredible people in his life. He's recounting the incredible people that he fought with. And there's a section in Chapter 23 where he talks about David's mighty men.

There's three people who get singled out. And the last one who gets singled out is a man named Shaman. Here's what it said about Shima. Again, all the people David fought with over this entire career of like incredible heroics, he singles out these three people and this is one of those three people, Shama. This is Second Samuel chapter 3. He says, next was Shama, the son of Aghi, the Herarite. The Philistines had assembled at Lehigh where there was a plot of land full of lentils.

And when the other soldiers, the other Israelites, fled from the Philistines, Shama took his stand in the middle of the plot and defended it. He slew the Philistines and the Lord brought about a great victory in such with the deeds of the three warriors, including this last one, Shama. So what's the deal? Here is Shama and he's defending a plot full of lentils, a field of beans. He's defending against every single one of the Philistines that is coming up against him, even though every one of his brothers in arms has abandoned him. And here's Shama, he's standing there and he's fighting.

He's willing to, he's not willing, he's risking his life. He's laying his life on the line. He is giving everything for a field of beans that doesn't belong to him. It's someone else's field of lentils. But he's giving everything he has and he's willing to give the last drop of his blood for a field that is not his. A field that after he bleeds for it, he's going to give it back. I've seen this happen so many times.

Like in our day and age, I say, I've seen so many people do that. Or they know that, no, I only have been given this thing temporarily, but I'm going to give everything I have for it. In fact, I know over a number of couples who, when they first got pregnant, at some point in the pregnancy, the doctors said we have some tests

and we've found out that your child will either not live to term or will die, will have so many complications that he or she will die shortly after birth. And I know a lot of couples who said that, said that as we're meeting with the doctors, they said, you know what, just spare yourself, just have an abortion, the baby's going to die anyways. And you can start again and you can try new and just why go through all of that pain for

the next nine months plus however long your child lives. And I just, again, I know a number of couples who've been in that exact situation and what happens is they give birth to this child and they know that they're not going to be able to take her home with them. That for the next however long, whether it's a day or four or four, you know that they're not going to be able to take her home with them. months, they're going to be with her in the hospital until she dies. And what I've seen is these couples who are willing to love heroically, they're not holding something back, like, well, we only have this child for three months so we're

not going to love her like we'd have her forever, but they will pour out everything they have in three months. Knowing that after they give their baby everything they have in their heart, they're going to give their baby back to the Lord because it's not my vineyard. This is where the Lord has given me this. responsibility. It's kind of like Jack Twinen and Marie Stokes, the basketball players. I mentioned that Marie Stokes had a heart attack 12 years after this accident happened. He died when he was 32 years old the entire time here's Jack

and he's taking care of him and years later Jack said he said I didn't think it would last 12 years. He said but now I wish it would have lasted 50 because that was responsibilities when we surrender them to the Lord. They're transformed because it's not just, again, it's not just about surrendering the unforeseeable future and the unchangeable past. It's not just about, like, Lord, I make this act of the will. This is about what St. Paul has said. He says, when you do that, prayer and petition, Thanksgiving. It says, then the peace of God that surpasses all understanding will guard your minds and your hearts in Christ Jesus.

So this isn't just about like finding peace within yourself. This is about saying, Lord, actually, I find peace in your lordship. I find peace in what, in the fact that your will is done, regardless of what's happening in my life right now, Lord. Your will is done. Regardless what happened in my past, your will is done. Regardless what's going to happen in the future, your will is done because it's your vineyard. This is the last thing. I know that in the past I brought up one of my heroes. His name was Father Walter Chizek.

He was a Polish American or American who was Polish. I don't know how to say that. who became a missionary to Russia during the time of the Soviet Communists. And, you know, his early life is described, he actually describes his early life even in high school seminary and college seminary, where he describes that he would get up every morning at 4.30 in the morning, and run five miles every day just to be to toughen himself up. He would swim in an almost frozen lake.

He'd swim in the lake next to the seminary through November, again, just to be just to be tough. He, uh, one lent, he said he just, he fasted on bread and water, that was it, just to see like, okay, I can do this. A year he went without meat, which some of you are like, no big deal, but for normal human beings, that's kind of a feat. And here is this man, Father Walter Chizek, that ended up being in, finding himself in Russia and he was, he was arrested for being a German spy, which is crazy.

But the moment that's so critical in his life is not how tough he was and how, like, he could, like, make it happen himself. The biggest moment of his life came when this man who thought that he would be among the martyrs, that he thought he'd be the kind of person who would be able to stand up against whatever kind of torture, the torturers broke him. And he just signed whatever they put in front of him. He told them whatever they wanted him to say. And then after they, he did this, he went back to his solitary confinement cell

and there was no one there but himself and the Lord. And that was it. And he had to be face to face, not just with his strength, not just with his dreams, he had to come face to face with this unchangeable past. I denied you, Lord. He had to come face to face with this unforeseeable future. What are they going to do with me now, Lord? What happened was he was then in Siberia, basically the next 20 plus years.

But this moment in his prison cell was the defining moment of his life. It was the moment where the peace of God that surpasses all understanding truly guarded his mind. and his heart. Because this is the first moment where he actually trusted in placing his whole life under the dominion of the Lord, where he's able to say, God, whatever happened in the past, it's your vineyard. Whatever happens in the future, it's your vineyard. And even right now, here I am, having betrayed you and being unable to do anything about it, this is your vineyard. And this is what he said. It's a long quote, but it's the end. After he did this, he said this, he said,

Now, with sudden and almost blinding clarity and simplicity, I realized I've been trying to do something with my own will and intellect that was at once too much and mostly all wrong. God's will is not hidden somewhere out there in the situation which I found myself. The situations themselves were his will for me. What he wanted was for me to accept these situations as from his hands. to let go of the reins and place myself entirely at his disposal. He was asking of me a total act of trust,

allowing for no interference or restless striving on my part, no reservations, no exceptions, and no areas where I could set conditions or seem to hesitate. He was asking for a complete gift of self, holding nothing back. And it demanded absolute faith. Faith in God's existence, faith in his providence, faith in his concern for the minutest detail of my life, faith in his power to sustain me, and faith in his love that was protecting me.

And it meant losing that last hidden doubt, the ultimate fear that God will not be there to bear you up. Something like that awful eternity between anxiety and belief, when a child first leans back and lets go of all support whatever only to find that the water truly will hold you up. And you can float motionless and totally relaxed. He says, once I did it, it seems so simple.

It's trust. All of us can be played. by this anxiety, this overwhelmed by all the things that need to be done, all the things that have happened, all the responsibilities we've been given. But the solution for that anxiety, a solution for that overwhelm, is not to throw our hands up and quit, it's not to race and just try to do it on our own, it is to say, Lord, my unforeseeable future, my unchangeable past, and these responsibilities right now in this vineyard, this is not my life.

This is not my vineyard. All of it. I surrender to you. All of it. I place under your dominion. All of it. Lord God is yours. It's your vineyard.