Sunday Homilies with Fr. Mike Schmitz - 10/18/20 Roadmap: Be A Saint

Episode Date: October 20, 2020

Homily from the Twenty-ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time. The roadmap begins with “Who.” There is one true goal in life: to be a saint. Many of us believe this, but is there a path? Without a plan, we will certainly fail to hit the goal. Without a roadmap, we will spend our time on this planet wandering as if we neither know where we are or where we are going. Mass Readings from October 18, 2020: Isaiah 45:1, 4-6 Psalms 96:1, 3-5, 7-101 Thessalonians 1:1-5 Matthew 22:15-21 View the "Your Life in Weeks" Chart Download the Homily Study

So that question at the beginning of mass, what's one thing you want to be true about you soon? And I don't know. I love goals. I love having a vision. I love trying to like accomplish a task, accomplish a plan. And I think it's really important for us at some point to have that, to have like a vision that's big enough, a goal that's big enough for your life. Like a goal that's big enough to actually devote yourself to. So, I mean, I don't know what you guys said you wanted to do.

I think that, you know, someone could say, I want to, you know, by the time I turn whatever age, I want to run a marathon. Or I want to have read the classics, right? I want to read great books. By the time I turn 30, I want to have, like, all the great classics read. Or I want to play the guitar by the time I'm 25. That kind of thing of like, maybe I want to travel somewhere. Like, I want to go to Africa.

Or I want to go to the Holy Land. I want to walk the Camino by the time I turn, you know, 55 years old. That kind of situation. Maybe it's better. Maybe it's bigger. Maybe it's, I want to be the youngest. vice president of whatever company. By the time I'm 30, I want to be a millionaire.

You know, I want to be a mom by the time I'm whatever age. We have all these goals and it's so interesting because are these things we'd like to be true about us, but in your bulletin, I don't know if you opened it up yet, but there's this sheet. This is the reason why you pick up bulletins on the way in you guys. Because you know, you don't have a sheet. You can't look at it like I can. I'm going to hold it up for you. Basically, this is the life of a typical American broken down into every square here is a different week.

A different week in the life of an American. And so there's some moments like this section is the early years before school. This is, this college section is, this is the weeks you spent in elementary school. These are the weeks you spent in middle school. These weeks you spent in high school. This big section in the middle is your career. Basically, the average American, this is where they spend. They start their career right here and they end it right down here.

And so what I like to do is I printed this out a couple years ago. And just this week, I wanted to find my square. Like what's this week? So for me, this is my square. week. Like this is this is where I am right now in life. And it is past halfway. It's quite a bit past halfway, actually. And I realize like I invite you, if you didn't take a bulletin on the way in, take one on the way out. And sometime tonight, sometime this week, find your square, find your week. And it's one of those situations where I look at this and I'm convicted by this because

it's one thing to have a dream, it's one thing to have goals. Like, you know, at some point I want to do X, Y, or Z. But it's another thing to look back and say, oh my gosh, okay, I do not have unlimited time. Actually, next week is not even guaranteed. But to also be able to look back and look at all these weeks that I've been freely given. If this is where I'm right now, look at all these weeks, I was freely given. And I have this, there's this convicting question that kind of rises up. Whenever I look at all these weeks, I was freely given.

That convicting question is this, what have I done with what I've been given? Look at all of these weeks. I didn't do anything to deserve any of these weeks. And so I have this question, what have I done with what I've been given? And yes, we could jump into the thing of like, you know, accomplishments, like what have I achieved or what kind of degrees have I gotten or what kind of awards have you gotten? What kind of accomplishments have you done? But there's deeper things.

Like there's a man named David Brooks. He wrote this book called Road to Character. And at the beginning of his book, he talks about two different kinds of virtues. He talks about resume virtues and eulogy virtues. And he says that a lot of us, we spend our entire lives. on resume virtues. Resume virtues are the, they're exactly that. They're the virtues that we acquire to be able to pat a resume.

The virtues that we say, I've done something meaningful, I've accomplished something significant. Those are the things we typically live for. But he says, ULG virtues are incredibly different. Ulogy virtues are the kinds of things people will talk about at your funeral. It'd be incredibly unlikely that someone at your funeral would say, yeah, and they were the youngest vice president in the history of this company.

great human being. You'd want it to say, this is what David Brooks says. He says, these eulogy virtues are deeper. They're the virtues that get talked about at your funerals. They're the ones that exist at the core of your being. He says, they're the virtues of whether you're kind, the kind of person who's brave, if you're faithful, if you're honest, what kind of relationships do you have? And here's one of the problems is we spend our lives, again, living for resume virtues, but we're remembered for our eulogy virtues. I saw an example of this not too long ago. I was on the internet surprise,

and there's this photo this woman had taken of her husband. Her husband was lying on the bathroom floor next to the toilet, next to their 13-year-old daughter. And he was in his pajamas, and he had mismatched socks on and kind of out of shape and kind of ragged, kind of haggard.

And they did not pick up. He did not pose for this photo for the gram, right? This was, what was happening was, it was the middle of the night, and their 13-year-old daughter couldn't keep any food down. And so her dad just laid down on the bathroom floor with her, just to be there next to her. And this mom, this wife, she wrote this, this is the caption, she said, Young Ladies, it's addressing young ladies.

Young ladies, when the season of life comes and you're starting to pray for a spouse to spend your life with, pray for the kind of man who will lay next to your future a 13-year-old on the bathroom floor, praying over her because she can't keep a drop of water down. Pray for a man that will carry her down the stairs to the car and spend all night in the hospital by your side. Pray for a spouse that will consistently put you and your children first above himself, but not above the Lord.

She said, pray for a spouse that will wake up at 6.30 a.m. on Sunday. and gather his family around him and take them to the house of God, because if he can wake up at 4.30 a.m. on a Saturday to hunt, then he can wake up at 6.30 a.m. on Sunday to lead his family to salvation. Like, that's a eulogy virtue. That's the kind of person that you want to be. And this is the thing. Men, here's the thing. If that appeals to you, ladies, I know what appeals to you. But guys, if that appeals to you, the question we have to ask is,

how can I live today so that when that day comes, that's the kind of dad you are? If that's the kind of eulogy virtue you want to have, that's the kind of person I want to be. Question, how can I live then today so that when that day comes, that's the kind of person you are? Because it's one thing to have a vision, right? One thing to have a goal for life, it's one thing to have a what, but we need to have a how. It's one thing you have a, we need to have a big, big what. But if we have a what that's important, if we have a what that's valuable, then we absolutely definitely need a how. We need a plan.

I mean, think about this. Anything important to us, we plan it out. Like if anything has value to us, we plan it. There was a wedding here yesterday. That's why Father Joe is in town. And it wasn't like the bride and groom showed up. They said, I don't know, let's get married today. Do we need to dress?

I don't know. They've been planning this thing because it matters to them. They had a what. Now, how are we going to do this? I mean, think about, we go on vacation. You plan the vacation because it matters to you. Someone pointed this out to me. They said, you even plan out baking a cake.

Like no one just goes into the kitchen and just starts baking a cake. you have a plan, this is how you're going to make a cake because you want the cake to be delicious and not awful. If it's something important to you, if there's a what that's important enough to you, then we have a how. And David Brooks, who wrote that book, wrote the character, he says, we look in ourselves and we realize that there's this humiliating gap between my actual self and my desired self, that I know the person I want to be, but there's this humiliating gap between who I am now and who I am called to be. So I need to have a plan.

In fact, that's what we're going to do for the next basically month and a half. We're going to have a new series. And that series is not just the what. What's the vision that unites our lives? What's the vision that can drive our lives? But we're going to talk about what's the plan? What's the plan to live this life that is worthy of living? What's the plan that gets us from the person I am to the person I want to be?

The series is called Roadmap. because, gosh, if you want to get anywhere, what do we need? We need to have a plan. We need to have a roadmap. Because we know this truth, this hard truth. All of us knows this. We all know this. After all that we've been given, right?

After what have I done with what I've been given? After all I've been given, I am still currently not the person I could be. After all you've been given, you are not currently the person that you could be. And the heartbreaking making reality is I'm not even the person I want to be. And I think the reason is because I don't have a big enough vision.

I don't have a big enough what and I don't know how. I don't have a plan and I need both of those things. I need a big enough what that can overcome all of my, all my interior, we'll say, differences, all my interior divisions because isn't our life kind of marked with division right now? I mean, I know personally I marked, relationships are marked by division. Our country, I don't know if you've noticed. is kind of marked by some division.

And I think it's so interesting, fascinating. I know so many people who are no longer friends with their friends because they simply disagree with their friends. Since when did disagreement equal division? I was thinking about this for a long time because at the end of August, all my siblings were back together. And I will not name names, but I have a sibling who is, a couple siblings. I have like four or five medical people in my family,

and then the rest of us schmucks are kind of, just we do what we can do. So one of these was a physician. And this physician was having a, we'll say, I wouldn't say fight and I wouldn't say argument, because in my family we say, we say discussion. They were having a discussion. The physician was having discussion

with another sibling who has spent the last eight months of their career, not in the, not medicine, but having to do contract tracing for COVID stuff. I'm sure you've heard of the coronavirus. Do I need to go over that? Okay, you got it. So the physician was all about, like, like, listen, I'm done with masks.

I'm over masks. Let's not do the mask thing. And the person who has to do the contact tracing was like, are you kidding me? You're wrong. And they were at each other's throats. No, they were having a discussion. It was lively.

It was emotional. You would think like, wow, I think some, just put the knives away, all these kind of things. 20 minutes after they were done with the discussion, you would have never known that they disagreed so thoroughly with each other. Because for us, what do we do? I have a disagreement, now we're divided, and that division means we disintegrated. We just break down.

We can no longer be friends. We can no longer talk. You don't want to wear a mask? You want to kill grandma? You want to wear a mask? You want to be a slave to the totalitarian government? What is it that kept my siblings so they could have not just siblingness, but friendship after this discussion is because of this important thing.

They were united by something more important than what divided them. They were united by something vastly more important. than their differences. And if we are united by something that's more important and bigger, this single unifying principle, meaning we can disagree all we want and we're not still not divided. And that's, I think it's one of our problems right now as a country. Like when it comes to politics, politics are important and whatnot. But just the reality, of course, is that we're meant to be, I mean, think about this, on the right side, left side, Democrat, Republican, doesn't matter. Because those are differences. Those don't need to lead to division. I'm not talking politics

And I'm just like giving me an example, because there was a time when we were united by our belief in America. Because we know this, right? America is not an ethnicity, America is not a race. America is an idea. America is a creed. America is an experiment. And everyone coming to this country, we all believed in the same idea. We all believed in the same creed. We all believed in the idea of America. And that was the single unifying principle that you can think we should do this. And I can think we could do that. We can be, we can have differences. We can disagree. But we're still not divided because we have a single unified. principle that unites us. But you know something far more important than politics? Far more important than our country is you. You are, you know this, you are more

important than this country. Because countries end, you will not end. Every country that exists will some, at some moment cease to exist. Listen, you will never cease to exist. At some point in the future, the United States will no longer be a thing, but you will always, you will always be a thing for all eternity. You are more important than our country. You are more important than any country. Not only that, well, again, while politics are important, and yes, you want to make your vote and you want to make your voice be heard,

all these kind of things. In our country, your vote is just one vote among many. My vote is just one vote among many. But in your life, your vote is the only one that actually matters. When it comes to how your life goes, your vote is the only one that actually matters. No one else decides, just you. And yet we find ourselves what? We find ourselves even inside of ourselves divided.

I'm living for this, but I'm living for that. I'm going all these directions. What do I need? I need what relationships need. I need what countries need. I need a single unifying principle that actually can unite my life. Basically what I say is like this. Something big enough, a vision of what?

Big enough. that's worthy of your life. A what that's big enough that's worthy of you spending your entire light in pursuit of this thing. What would that be? Like, what do you want to be?

There's a man his name is Thomas Merton. And Thomas Merton, he lived and died in the last century. At one point, he spent most of his life, most of his young life as an atheist, as a committed atheist, and then he encountered Jesus, and he had a conversion, he became Catholic. And at one point, Thomas Merton was walking down the street with a friend of his, who is also a Catholic. And his friend's name is Lax.

And Lax said, Thomas, what do you want to be? Like you have this whole life ahead of you. You've got all these weeks coming up, maybe, God willing. So at the end of this, when he ate their last square, what do you want to be? And Thomas C. said, he said, I know I couldn't say I want to be Thomas Merton, the well-known writer of all those books. Or I know I couldn't say I want to be Thomas Merton, the adjunct professor of literature at such and such a college.

He said, I know I needed to give a more spiritual answer. This is my Catholic friend. I got to give a Catholic answer. So the best answer he came up with, he says, I don't know. I guess what I want to be is a good Catholic. He later on says, I know that was a lame answer. But the guy said, what do you mean a good Catholic? Thomas says, the explanation I gave was lame enough and expressed my confusion because

it betrayed how little I had really thought about it at all. And my friend didn't accept it. And I think that's not worth accepting either. To be a good Catholic, is that something like, I want to be a good Catholic? something big enough to unite your whole life? That's a big enough what to give everything for? I don't think so. So his friend looked at him and said, no, no, no, don't, you shouldn't say, I want to be a good Catholic. What you should say instead is, instead what you should say is, I guess I want to be a saint. That's the thing that's big enough. That's, that, that's that,

that's that what that's worth spending everything you have and giving everything you are in pursuit of that what. Thomas was like, a saint. That strikes me as a little bit weird. I thought I'd just like try to stay out of mortal sin and get to heaven. But his friend was like, that's not good enough. It's not big enough. I don't know if you guys hear that and you're like intimidated because it's like, oh, shoot. Seriously, that seems impossible. That's what Thomas Merton said.

That's why I want to turn to a saint. His name's St. Francis de Sales. St. Francis de Sales was known as one of his nicknames was the saint maker because people spent time with him and they became saint. So if there's anyone who knows about becoming a saint, he would be St. Francis de Sales. St. Francis de Sales, he wasn't intimidated by this high call. He wasn't intimidated by this big what. In fact, he made it simple.

He said, here's what you need to do to be a saint. It's very simple. Be who you are and be that well. That's it. To be a saint, just be who you are and be that well. So to move forward in this, I have to ask the question. Well, we have to ask the question. Who are you?

Who will you become? It's in the gospel today, the answer. We know the story. We just heard it like, you know, 15 minutes ago. And here's the Herodians and the Pharisees, they team up to go against Jesus. Is it lawful to pay the census tax, it's easier or not? And I love this moment. You might have missed it, but Jesus says, show me a coin.

And what had to happen was one of the Pharisees had to have one of the coins in their pocket, which we've been like, ha, busted, you've got one of the coins on yourself? You think you're against the moment? Anyways, going back to our story. Jesus says, whose image, whose inscription? On those coins, there was an image. The image was of Tiberius Caesar, a picture of his head, basically. On the back of the coin was an inscription, were words written into the coin,

and the words were, son of divine Augustus. So Augustus Caesar had adopted Tiberius Caesar. And so Augustus Caesar had claimed to be God. And so here's Tiberius Caesar, who would then therefore be the son of God. So the image on there is the image of Tiberius Caesar, and the inscription is Son of God. So Jesus, again, he goes on, so give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and then he has this line, and give to God what belongs to God, and this is the great, Jesus is genius. I mean, that's my compliment to God himself.

The Pharisees are trying to make this political, and Jesus was making this personal. Because we focus on that, we paid a Caesar, it belongs to Caesar, okay, political. He's like, no, no, no, no. Yeah, do that, but then also repay to God what belongs to God? And so we have to say, okay, well, what in this world has the image of God stamped into it? What in this world has the inscription, son of God, or child of God, inscribed onto them? I see a church full of those. Church full of people who have been crafted and created in the image of God.

who when you were baptized, you were inscribed with the cross. The cross was carved into your soul. You're marked by his cross. What's the inscription you have? The description you have is a price day. God has declared over you that you're worth his death. And because of that, you've been transformed into a child of God, that God is actually your dad.

So whose image? Do you bear? God's image? Who's inscription? What's the inscription? The description says, I'm a child of God. And St. Francis, the Hill says, okay, so then be who you are. Just be who you are. Be that well. This is the secret to become a saint. Essentially, it's so, it's so simple.

We have a big enough what to become a saint. And yes, we're going to talk about the how for the next month and a half. We're talking about the, here's how I do this. What's the plan? What's the roadmap? We don't start with how. We start with who. Who are you? Who will you become? You're a child of God. And it starts with our identity. St. Paul writes it in the second letter today. He says, brothers and sisters, loved by God, who loves you, whose image, who's inscription? See, being a saint starts here. It starts with identity. It starts with who.

It's answering the question. Again, who are you? Who will you become? Who is image? Whose likeness? Who loves you? And that's why, as we begin this roadmap, it's the what? The vision, the plan, something worth spending your entire life for.

and we're going to talk about the how, but again, this week, I'm not asking anyone to do anything extra. I'm just inviting us to remember who you are, that you're a child of God. So this week, this week, I'm inviting you every day, somehow just remember who. Every day to somehow remember just who loves me. Every day just remember whose image is stamped into your very being. And how do you do this? It's super simple. So when I was in college, we had monks living on our,

floor. Did I say the last thing yet? This is the last thing. We had monks living on our floor. And on one of my floors, I think my sophomore year, Brother Paul was the monk living on the floor. And Brother Paul always had stuff he wanted to tell us men in the dorm. But he knew if he sent us an email, we probably wouldn't read it. And he knew if he wrote it out and put it under our doors, we probably wouldn't read it. So what he did was he came up with Brother Paul's P letters. He would write out what he wanted us to know and then he would tape them over the urinals. knowing that the guys on the floor would have to show up eventually with essentially nothing else to do for a little bit

except for stare at some tiles or read Brother Paul's letters. And so I thought, this is a great idea. So what I have, just a little full disclosure, know a little something about my bathroom, right over the toilet, I have the words of God. Written on a plaque, Philippians 1 verse 21, six words. for me to live as Christ. And I got to tell you guys something,

I'm an incredibly well-hydrated individual. And I am often reminded of those words throughout the course of the day. And every time I stand in a certain place in my house, I look at those six words, and I'm reminded, that's right, that's true, that's who I am, that's who loves me. My invitation is, do that. You guys, I imagine you drink water and coffee,

and imagine you have to do something without water and coffee, why not print out that? I'm a child of God. God is my father. That's who I am. That's who loves me. And if you don't want to do that, think of it, maybe do it like when you get dressed every morning.

Everyone has to get dressed. You have to get dressed. So maybe when you're putting on your shirt, say, God, Father, you clothed me with your son Jesus when I was baptized. When you put on your socks, just, Lord, you gird my feet. because you love me. Maybe just something as simple as making the sign of the cross. This is the inscription that has been placed over me.

That you're the one who loves me. That that's who I am. That that's the inscription. This is how much I've been given. What have I done with what I've been given? This is where I am. Who knows what I could become? This is where you are.

who knows what you could become to have a big enough what that unifies all the brokenness to have a clear enough how that shows you the roadmap and it begins with knowing who, who you are,

whose inscription and who loves you.