Sunday Homilies with Fr. Mike Schmitz - 12/26/21 Be Careful

Episode Date: December 26, 2021

Homily from the Feast of the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph. Family is the School of Love. Everyone is part of a family in some way. Be careful with each other. Mass Readings from December 26, 2021: Sirach 3:2-6, 12-14 Psalms 128:1-2, 3, 4-5Colossians 3:12-21 Luke 2:41-52

So obviously, as we said, like five times already, today is the Feast of the Holy Family. And one of the things that's so important, I think, I think something we've forgotten maybe as a people, as a culture, as a civilization, is that what I said is that the family is the fundamental building block of society. So Christianity, what is Christianity done? Christianity has elevated the individual. Christianity and it alone, Judeo-Christianity, has highlighted the fact that individual human beings have inalienable rights, that the dignity of the person is actually belongs to the person, right? So before Judeo-Christian perspective, human life was of whatever value they could offer, contribute, of utility, or whatever someone preferred. So it was

preference or utility. And then the Judeo-Christian revelation is that, no, actually every single human life is of inestimable value. you worth the death of God himself. And so you're more important than the group. The individual is more important than the group. That's kind of like one of the secrets that Christianity revealed to the world. The individual is more important than the group. At the same time, we recognize that the fundamental building block of society is the family. It's not the individual. I remember when I first came across that, it was like this statement. I was like, oh, that kind of sounds right. But at the same time, like it doesn't. And then I realized as it was explained

me that you have, if you just had individuals, you would have a collection of individuals who would be loosely assembled. But once you get family, you have this, you have something you can construct a society out of. Why? Because why do husbands and wives? Why do men and women commit their lives to each other? Not just because they love love and why do we like that? Not just because we love love, but because that particular relationship makes more human beings. And those human beings thrive when the two human beings that made them stay together in a stable loving home. The family becomes. the building block of society. And so when it comes, you know, especially in our culture right now,

where there is so much confusion over the family, we have to be careful. And that's kind of the word I just want to offer today. That we have to be careful. When it comes to the family, we have to be careful. Because every one of us is part of a family. Like you might not be married, but that doesn't mean you're not part of a family. You might not have any siblings, but that's mean you're not part of a family. You might have parents who have passed on, but that doesn't mean you're not part of a family because every one of us has been part of a family. So we have to careful. This is the job of all of us. In fact, when it comes to couples, when it comes to parents, and when it comes to just relatives, comes to siblings, every one of us, we just have to be

careful. I was reading an article the other day by my name Martin De La Torre, and he was describing how his wife had been asked to go to a youth group by the pastor to talk about their marriage, talk about family, talk about, you know, what is the sacrament of matrimony. And so he went along because he said, he said, I wanted to hear what my wife had to say about me. I wanted to hear what she had to say about our marriage. And at one point, one of the young men asked him, the husband, right, the groom, this question, and this question is just fascinating because I've been in this place a lot. So when I'm part of weddings, one of the things I'll do is I'll typically walk in with the groom and then I'm standing at the top of the key right there and here's the

groom right there and then all the wedding party comes down and I'm kind of like there as I feel really weird when I'm standing there because they're all looking at him and I'm just smiling, you know, like I'm part of it but I'm not part of it, right? He's the one everyone's focused on. I just want to like slide out of the frame and just like let them all focus on. Because all these friends are walking down. They're all her friends are walking down. And then the big moment where she walks down. And I'm like, I just shouldn't be here.

Like that's the one time. I don't care if they're kissing at the end. Like that I'm like, I'm fine here. But it's that moment when she's at the end of the aisle and he's at the top of the key. I'm at the altar. Right. And they see each other as she keeps walking closer and closer and he gets down off that step and walks closer and closer to her.

Like that moment is so, I feel like. like an intruder because it's so unique. So this young man asked Martin and said, what did you think when you saw your wife? We told them all these stories about your marriage. What do you think when you saw her at the end of the aisle? And he said, I stopped for a second. I looked at my wife and our kids and I told them the following. He said, this is immediately what he thought.

You will now be responsible for this soul. This is God saying, my beautiful daughter will now be a entrusted to your loving care. You must spiritually and physically protect her and nourish her. You must stand by her and not lead her to sin. You've been entrusted with a gift created in my image and likeness. He said, that's what I thought when I saw my bride at the end of the aisle. And he said, as I shared these words with the entire group, there was a collective, oh no, you did not say that. And he said, no, actually, I did. I explained, he said, I explained to him that the one thought that came to me was, remember, you made a vow to guard her soul.

You have to be careful. Because you made a vow to guard her soul. You know, this is St. Joseph, right? He's the guardian of Mary and Jesus. What happens that in two ways, at least, first is he guarded their marriage. When he wanted to leave, the angel Gabriel said, no, no, no, do not divorce her. You stay with her. Guard her this way.

And then in today's gospel, we hear that the angel again appears to Joseph in his dream and says, no, no, guard this woman, your wife, and this child by taking them to Egypt and then bringing them back home to Israel. When it comes to couples, that's their job. Their job is to be careful with each other. I don't know if you know this, the goal of marriage is the good of the spouses. There's two goals of marriage, two ends of marriage. The first is the good of the spouses, or it's kind of the second, because the primary goal of marriage is children. like the reason why people get married, well, they get married for a bunch of reasons,

but the church says looking at the world, looking at the sacrament of matrimony, the main reason is children. And while that might be the point, obviously, it's not guaranteed, obviously. Why? Because children are gifts. Kids are gifts. And no one has ever owed a gift. You can never force a gift. You can never demand a gift.

And so while children are the end of marriage or the point of marriage, they're not guaranteed. And I know that so many people were praying with us, and so many people have prayed with us over the last year. I've expressed that they want that gift more than anything else, that they actually walked into marriage with that, with that longing, that saying like, no, actually this is why we wanted to be married. We want to have kids.

We have this love for each other. We don't want it to end with ourselves. In fact, I remember talking with a couple and they expressed this agony, this deep ache. They said, we see all these teenagers having accidental pregnancies and we're trying so hard to have children and we can't. and it can break a person's heart. Because you know at the point of marriage is that new life.

And then when you have that new life, this is the second part, when you have that new life as parents, you're not owners of that new life, right? It's been entrusted to you, you're a steward, so you know you have to be careful. And this is the thing is when it comes to family, just have to be careful.

Be careful, guard her. Remember, be careful. You made a vow to guard her soul, but also when these kids are given, you know, it's so interesting when families, couples bring their children to be baptized, There's a couple questions that a priest or a deacon, whoever it is, asks and says, first, what's the name of your child?

And then they say, you know, our child's name is whatever. And then the second question is, what do you ask of God's church for your child? And there's three possible answers. One is baptism, because that's very direct. The other is faith. The third is eternal life. I remember having a dad say, I'm asking that to the intercession of the church,

my child becomes God's child. And that's the truth. In baptism, your children become God's children. So in response to this, whether it's baptism or faith or eternal life, or that my child becomes God's child, the priest then says, you've asked for your child to be baptized. And in doing so, you're accepting the responsibility of training her or him in the practice of the faith.

It will be your duty to bring her or him up to keep God's commandments as Christ Christ taught us by loving God and loving our neighbor. Do you clearly understand what you're undertaking? And they say, we do, and they don't. They say, we do. And like, no, I have no idea. Because no one does.

How could anyone, at the day they're promising this thing, actually know how much they're going to have to fight for this? You've asked for your child to be baptized. Therefore, it'll be your duty to bring her up, to bring him up in the practice of the faith, to guard her or his soul. Because his child has been entrusted to you. So you've got to be careful.

What happens right after that is then the parents are invited to trace the sign of the cross on their child's dad. I remember I baptize almost every one of my nieces in that. The first one, she stepped by. She was too old and I was not ordained yet. But I remember I actually baptized one niece and one nephew at the same time in the same day, Max and Molly. And Max, that's his full name, it's not Maximilian, but I remember talking to the families, my siblings and their spouses and whole family saying, like, here's Max and Molly. And there are these two namesakes that I kind of, even if they weren't named after them, I'm like, I'm going to claim them for them.

St. Maximilian Colby and Molly Margaret is her name. And so St. Molly is a derivative of Mary, so I'm stretching this, but I made it point that St. Margaret Mary Alacoke is another saint. And both of their lives are marked by the cross. It's Max Malian Colby. He was a Franciscan priest who went to Auschwitz and he volunteered, voluntarily gave up his life so he could save the life of a man who had a wife and children. And he said, I don't have wife and children, I can die. They said, who are you? And he said, I'm just a Catholic priest, that's all.

And here's Max. I remember on the day, both Molly and Max is a freshman in college and Molly's a sophomore in college right now. But on the day of their baptism, tracing that sign of the cross and telling, his mom and dad saying, like, I'm tracing the sign of the cross on your son, Max. And what happens is not only is Jesus claiming him, not only is the father claiming him, but you're marking him with the sign of the cross. And same with Margaret Mariela Koch.

She was the person who, earlier a new devotion to the sacred heart of Jesus, the pierced sacred heart of Jesus, and making the sign of the cross on Molly. And telling her parents, making the sign of the cross, on your daughter, Molly, and you're saying that her life will be marked with the cross. So you have to be careful. Because these children have been entrusted to you. You're not their owners. You're their stewards.

So be careful. Because that's the reality, of course. We say this a thousand times. I'm going to keep repeating it because it's so true, is that the world is dangerous, right? And as parents, our job is not to make the world less dangerous because you can't. But you can make your children more courageous. You can make your children stronger even if you can't make the world safer. And so here at the from the moment of the baptism, my brother and his wife and my sister and her husband,

these parents of these children, making the sign of the cross saying, listen, everywhere you go, there will be a cross. In life, there will be a cross. We're actually tracing that on you right now from some of the first days of your life. But they're careful to say your life is not only marked by the cross, but your life is marked by the love of the one. who embraced His cross. That it's not just a dangerous world. It is a beautiful gift of a world.

It's not just death. It's also resurrection. It's not just a bare cross. It's not empty. That cross has our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ who will not abandon you in the midst of your cross. We have to be careful to not only communicate the cross and make people stronger,

but also to communicate the very love that kept our Lord Jesus on that cross. Because we have to be careful. And thirdly, we're careful with our siblings, or relatives. You know, John Paul II, he said that, he said marriage and family is the school of love. You don't graduate and become part of a family. You actually learn how to love by being part of a family.

And it's so interesting right now, especially, and it seems like, I don't know if this is true for you, but it seems like in our day and age, our family, there's more division. There's not only division in our culture, in our country, in our world, but also even division in our families. And Jesus promised that that would happen. But our families are also that place where in so many ways, these are the people, have to love, even dysfunctional families. In fact, there's no such thing as a functional, barely functional. Every family is dysfunctional. Some are functioning fine, some are dysfunctionally awfully, but every family is still a school of love. Every family is the place where we

learn how to forgive. Every family is where we learn how to move on when someone's not willing to say they're sorry. Family is the place we learn how to get hurt and keep moving forward. Family is the place where we're surrounded by people we have to love, whether or not we like them. Some wisdom here. That's not the same thing as enabling. Keep that in mind. It's actually loving, not enabling, but loving. And what's loving?

Loving is willing the good of the other. I came across some folks from friends of mine who are in corporate training or educational, academic training, and they said that one of the things they were instructed to do in their corporate training or in their academic training is, you have to treat people as they want you to treat them. Treat people as they want to be treated. And I think that's a good impulse in some ways, but it is not correct. Because there are some people who don't want to be treated well.

There are some people around us who don't want to be loved. They actually are content to be used. And so the church says, our Lord says, no, no, don't treat people how they want to be treated. Treat people better than that. To actually love them. To will the good of the other, even when they don't want to be loved.

Now, we can look at that and we can say the same thing Cain said. This is almost the last thing. We can look at that, we can say the same thing Cain said. What did Cain say in chapter four of Genesis? At one point, God is looking for Abel and he said, where's your brother? And Cain responds by saying, am I my brother's keeper? And that can be so often, so often we can think like, why do I have to love my brother? Why do I have to love my sister?

Why do I have to love this family? Am I my brother's keeper? And the answer is no, you're not your brother's keeper. You're your brother's brother. You're not your sister's keeper. You are your sister's sister. And you have to be careful. to love her.

You have to be careful to love him. And this is the last thing, for real. On the Feast of the Holy Family, I think it's worth being reminded that we have to be careful with each other. Whenever I meet with couples as they're preparing for marriage, one of the things that comes up regularly is, you guys, again, just this reminder,

you need to be careful with each other. Because you get so, what happens in families is you get so comfortable with each other that we begin to be careless. I actually told a couple of this just last weekend And I mentioned this, you'd be careful with each other. And he kind of had this look of like, I don't like that idea. Because, and I read his mind and said,

you're thinking right now, you have to be walking on eggshells around her, right? He's like, yeah, that's what I was thinking. I'm like, no, no, no. There's two extremes here. One is being on eggshells, always defensive. The other is being reckless with the other person and careless. In the middle is I'm just being careful. That I said that thing, I did that thing, and they just wilted a little bit.

This has happened for all of us. Maybe even yesterday when it came to Christmas Day. Said that thing or did that thing and that person next to you just wilt it a little bit. To be careful means you noticed it. To be careful means you might have said something about it or even said you were sorry. To be careful simply means not being careless. It's not walking on eggshells. It is actually just noticing the people next to us and loving them.

The fundamental building block of our society is the family. And the family is the image of the Trinity. It's meant to be an image, an icon of the Trinity, which means we have to learn how to love not just our friends and not just the people around us. We have to learn how to love our family members. And the best way we can do that, I think, is we can start by simply being careful.