Sunday Homilies with Fr. Mike Schmitz - 2/12/23 Homeless: Freedom

Episode Date: February 11, 2023

Homily from the Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time. Our hearts are enslaved...exile can be the cure. There are so many circumstances that are beyond our control. But no matter the situation, one thing that cannot be taken away from a person made in God's image is the freedom to choose how one responds to those circumstances. Our hearts can be enslaved in any situation, but they can also be free in any situation. Mass Readings from February 12, 2023: Sirach 15:15-20 Psalms 119:1-2, 4-5, 17-18, 33-341 Corinthians 2:6-10 Matthew 5:17-37

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 Matthew. Chapter 5 verses 17 through 37. Jesus said to his disciples, Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have not come to abolish but to fulfill. Amen, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or the smallest part of a letter will pass from the law until all things have taken place.

Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do so will be called. least in the kingdom of heaven. But whoever who obeys and teaches these commandments will be called greatest in the kingdom of heaven. I tell you, unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven. You have heard that it was said to your ancestors, you shall not kill. And whoever kills will be liable to judgment. But I say to you, whoever is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment. And whoever says to his

brother, Raqha, will be answerable to the Sanhedron. And whoever says you fool, will be liable to fiery Gehenna. Therefore, if you bring your gift to the altar and there recall that your brother has anything against you, leave your gift there at the altar. Go first and be reconciled with your brother and then come and offer your gift. Settle with your opponent quickly, well, on the way to court.

Otherwise, your opponent will hand you over to the judge and the judge will hand you over to the guard, and you will be thrown into prison. Amen. I say to you, you will not be released until you have paid the last penny. You've heard that it was said, you shall not commit adultery, but I say to you, everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away.

It is better for you to lose one of your members than to have your whole body thrown into Gehenna. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one of your members than to have your whole body go into Gehenna. It was also said, whoever divorces and his wife must give her a bill of divorce. But I say to you, whoever divorces his wife, unless the marriage is unlawful, causes her to commit adultery. And whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery. Again, you have heard it said to your ancestors, do not take a false oath, but make good to the Lord all that you vow. But I say to you, do not swear at all. Not by heaven for it is God's throne,

nor by the earth, for it is his footstool, nor by Jerusalem, for it is the great king's city. do not swear by your head for you cannot make a single hair white or black let your yes mean yes and your no mean no anything more is from the evil one the gospel of the lord so i don't know if you remember last week i mentioned a man from austria named blessed franz yagerstetter who had his life turned upside down because of the nazi occupation of austria there's another austrian man i just want to mention you at the beginning of this homily. Whereas no one really knows, Blessed Franz Yagrstater, everyone knows Victor Frankel. And whereas Franziagrstater was a Catholic who had the opportunity, he had the opportunity to lay down, he had the opportunity to capitulate and to cooperate with the Nazi regime.

Victor Frankl didn't have an option. He was a Jewish man. In fact, he's an incredible, world-renowned psychologist, psychiatrist. Victor Frankel got his PhD when he was 25 years old, which I just think is impressive. And he practiced medicine for a good 13 years before he was going into a prison camp. In fact, one of his emphases when it came to practicing medicine was the study of meaning and the study of how some people, some people can face tremendous trials in their lives and still have purpose, still have, like, it doesn't crush them. And others, many of us, just the ordinary ins and outs, ups and downs of lives can lead us to a place of despair, a place of wanting to give up. So we're studying this, as I said,

for at least 13 years teaching this and working with people. When he was 37 years old, he had a wife, he had three kids, and they were all rounded up because they were Jews, and they were brought to a concentration camp. His wife, and three children were brought to Auschwitz, where they were quickly murdered. Victor Franco went to a different concentration camp, and while he survived,

he discovered something in this prison camp, in this concentration camp, that only someone who's gone through that kind of horror and that kind of terror could discover he found that there were some people, even in the prison camp, who seemed not to thrive, but they seemed to be able to survive in a way that the prison camp couldn't touch them, that the behavior of the guards couldn't break them, no matter how horribly they were treated, that they were able to stand. And one of his conclusions, he just looked at this behavior and realized in a human being,

he said this, he said this quote, he said, forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you'll respond to the situation. That no matter how awful the situation is, no matter how terrible circumstances, he says, like once again, forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you'll respond to the situation. Now, you're in a concentration gap, Victor Frankel, he was powerless, right? Basically, the worst place imaginable.

He couldn't fight against, he couldn't give up, he couldn't capitulate, he couldn't run away. But in this place, he discovered this. Again, this is part of his quote. He said, the last of the human freedoms, he discovered. The last of the human freedoms is to choose one's attitude in any given circumstance, to choose one's own way. And there are always choices to make. That even when you're absolutely powerless, even when all of your other freedoms are taken away,

there are always choices to make. You know, we started this series called Homeless, a bunch of weeks ago. We have one more week next week. We're looking at this reality in the Bible that there's this, this, that we are homeless, all of us, we are in exile. In fact, we know the story begins with us, here's a good God who makes a good world. He puts us in this world, that's supposed to be home, but what happens is we rebelled against God. And from now on, our experience of living in this world is that this isn't home. But we have to figure out how to live here. This isn't where we belong. We have to figure out how to live here. That we can be

tempted to give up. And we can be tempted to just say, I don't want to be here. I want to be somewhere else. I would rather not be in this place. But we have to, every one of us has to figure out, how am I going to live, though? How am I going to survive? And here's Victor Frankel who says, no matter what your situation, the last of human freedoms is to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances. I got a letter, I mean, within the last year from one of my good friends in college, one of my best friends in college. And I had lost touch with him. I hadn't talked with him in 25 years. And he wrote me this letter and he said, in his letter, he says, as you can probably see from the stamp on the front of this letter, I'm in prison. He was in a federal

prison for I don't know how long. He said, basically, I made a series of decisions after we graduated college that led me to this place where I was arrested and I stopped praying, I stopped talking to God, I stopped listening to his voice, I stopped doing what I knew God was asking me to do. He said, I found myself here in prison. But he said, in prison, I have been doing all the things I should have been doing when I was free. He said, in prison, I've begun praying again. He said, in prison, I've begun reading my Bible again. I've been listening to the Bible podcast.

He says, in prison, there's even a chapel. And I've been spending time with Jesus in Eucharist. In prison, I'm finally doing all the things that I neglected to do when I was free. And he said this. He said, even in prison, I can choose how I respond to my circumstances. I don't know if you know this, but we do a recorded mass that's like, or a, or a, mass online. It's basically it's for anyone who can't go to mass in person. That's the whole point of it. So virtually everyone we talk to online at least virtually every single week are people

who are sometimes going through the worst season of their life. They're sometimes people who they're incapable, they're unable to get to mass. They're homebound. They're shut in. They're sick. Many of them are again going through like the worst season, worst circumstances where they feel absolutely powerless. Many of them are in the worst place imaginable. And so I'm reading this thing from Victor Frankel like, okay, I can't, this is, I don't have the authority to be able to say, hey, you always have the ability to choose. I have to point to this man, Victor Frankel, who lived through this and says, hey, you always have the ability to choose. Because Victor Frankl, this is true. Even when he had lost everything, he had not lost everything. So the question is, how can I be free

when I'm trapped? Because you might find yourself trapped here tonight. How can I, how can I really live? How can the person I'm called to be when I'm stuck here. We have to look at this. And we're going to look at it by looking at the book of Daniel. We've been camp out with Daniel for a while now, the last few weeks. Especially Daniel and then the three friends, right, Hennon and I, Azari, Mishael. I don't know if you remember this from last week. I mentioned that Daniel, Hennon, I, Azari, Mishal, all four of them were teenagers.

They grew up in Jerusalem, and there were teenagers when they were brought into exile. And so they got to be brought up, they had some privilege, they had some potential. They had the world at their fingertips. I mean, they had every, all of the promise in the world in Jerusalem, and then all of a sudden Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, came in and took it all away. And they found themselves in the place of complete powerlessness, not being home, but being forced to find a way to live in exile.

But it was really fascinating because I was doing some more research in the scriptures. And one of the things that it meant is if Daniel Hennoniah Ezra and Michael were teenagers in Jerusalem, that would have meant that their lives overlapped, the life of a man named King Josiah. So if you know anything about Josiah, here's what happens. The people of Israel, the story, if you're in the Old Testament, it's like, it's all broken, it's all backwards. Basically, here are God's people, and God says, I want you to be faithful to me. And they're all like, yeah, never mind. And they're just, like, constantly, the life of the people of Israel is constantly turning towards other gods, constantly turning towards other idols,

constantly abandoning and worship in the temple and turning to, like, even building pagan temples. So when King Josiah became the king, he set about to do this thing, he just basically, He did his reforms, and the reforms were he tore down all of the public temples to pagan gods. All the public temples to pagan gods, he eliminated, and he rededicated the temple to the true and living God. Basically, he reinstituted worship of the true and living God. So it was supposed to be this time of renewal, but it was only partly a time of renewal because he had removed the public worship of pagan gods. He had renovated the public worship of the true God, but privately, see, privately something else was happening.

And we know this. We know that what happens privately matters a lot. In fact, that's what Jesus is talking about in the gospel today, right? Jesus, in the gospel of Matthew, oh, man, it's so frustrating. It's so good, it's so frustrating. I remember when I, my own first reading of Matthew's Gospel, like the readings we heard tonight. And I remember, so when I was a teenager, I was raised Catholic, and I didn't really care about it at all, but I had an encounter with Jesus that had changed my life. So I'm like, oh man, I need to pray. I need to read my Bible.

So I went to the Crowing County Fair, and they were giving out free little Gideon Bibles, like those little green ones, you know, they're just New Testament, Psalms and Proverbs. And so I have a real Bible, not just a comic book Bible. And so I sat down, I'm going to read my real Bible. So I started reading Matthew's Gospel because it's the first book in the New Testament. Once I got past the genealogy, which was like, okay, Abraham became the father of Isaac, Isaac, the father of Jacob. Like, is this what's all about?

I finally got to like the action was happening. Finally got to the sermon on the Mount, this teaching today. And I was like, here we go, let's move. And then I heard today's readings. And it was so disappointing. It was so discouraging. Because here's Jesus. You heard it was said, do not murder.

I'm like, yeah, check, no problem. I can probably make it to the end of my life without murdering anybody. But then Jesus says, but I say to you, anyone who grows angry with their brother will be liable to judgment. And I'm like, Lord, listen, you don't know my brothers.

Like, you said this long before they were born. Like, how am I going to do that? And then Jesus goes on to say, you know, you've heard it was said, do not commit adultery. I'm like, yeah, no problem. 16 years old, piece of case. It says, but I say to you, whoever looks at another lustfully commits adultery. I'm like, are you kidding me, 16 years old? This is not happening.

I'm not just like, how in the world is that going to happen? Because here's Jesus who's basically saying, we know, you all have your public persona. Every one of us has our public persona. But what Jesus wants to do is he wants to get to our private heart. Because it can't just stop with the outside. It has to come all the way deeply. It has to actually get to our heart. and that moved. That's what, you know, John Paul II, he had a term for this heart, this inner world.

He called it the ethos. He said every person has an inner world and it's ethos. And I think about this all the time. I mean, imagine, or the reality is, right now, every one of us in this church, we're all hearing the same words. But the inner world, the ethos of every human being in this church is hearing those words differently. We have different pasts, we have different experiences, we have different emphases, we have different things that you're here, we're all hearing the exact same thing, we're all doing the exact same thing, but every one of us is doing it in a different way. I don't know if you've ever just passed them in the hallway. You're like, yeah, another human being just like me, and they're like, yeah, but they are, and they're not. Every person we pass has, they have their own past, they have their own history, they have their own hopes, they have their own fears, they have, even if you're still, look, I don't know if you've ever done this, I try not to creep on people too much, but, Like just someone sitting on a bus, like staring blankly out of a window. And it looks like they're doing nothing, but something is happening. Like there's this inner world in every single one of us. I remember hearing there's a study they did on men and women

and how men and women's brains kind of are different and whatnot. And they did this thing, this is not a joke, this is a true thing, where they hooked up men to their brains to like something that could read their brain activity. It turns out that when a man is just sitting there, silently doing nothing like looking out a window, that his brain activity is at the level where he's just basically keeping his body alive. That basically his brain function is just keeping the heart beating, keeping the digestion going, keeping the breathing going in and out. So ladies, if you ever have your boyfriend, your husband, you're like, hey, you're just sitting there thinking, what are you

thinking about? And he looks at you and says, nothing. He's probably telling you the truth. What is he thinking? He's thinking, breathe in, breathe out. Heart, don't stop. That's all he's thinking. But they also have done studies again on the human brain, the human mind, that, you know, the average human being, the average human being has an average of 35,000 conscious choices every single day. That's 2,000 conscious choices that you make every hour. That is a conscious choice you make every second. Sorry, every two seconds. Math, it's hard. It's a conscious choice you make every two seconds. Because why? Because we all have this interwe. We all have this interwe. world, right? We all have this ethos. This thing, John Paul II, he says, that ethos is, it's what

attracts us, it what repels us. It withdraws us to something. It's what pushes us away from something. It's what we love and it's what we hate. And so that can be really tough for us, I think, because most of us, I think there's probably often a battle going on in our ethos, right? What is drawing us? What is repelling us? And that battle inside, so many of us, I don't know if you've ever felt like this, but it's really easy to feel powerless. It's really easy to feel trapped in that. It's really easy to feel like what St. Paul said is a letter to the Romans chapter 7. He says, look at myself and why do I do the things I hate? Why do I not do the things I want to do?

He expresses the Romans. He says, I set out to do the good and then I don't do it. I set out to avoid the bad and I keep falling into it again. And he says, what am I going to do? And that's my question. When I was a high schooler, then college age person and now I'm like, God, what am I going to do? So I remember as a high schooler, I was really torn by this question of like this battle. world, between good and evil, it seems like.

And he came across this Native American parable that just, it spoke to me, and it was the idea this young brave went to his elder, and said the same thing that I was experiencing, same thing that St. Paul was talking about. He says, it seems like there's this war happening inside of me. And the elder says, yes, there is. Inside of every human being, there's a good wolf and a bad wolf, and they're battling it out for the soul of that individual. I remember, I don't know if you've ever felt like that, but I'm like, yeah, that's how

it feels. So what do you do? And that the brave said, great, so what do I do? and the elder looked at him and he said, do just one thing. Feed the good wolf. We know that's what happens. If we feed the good wolf, he gets stronger.

If we starve the bad wolf, he gets weaker. That's what the first reading is, right? Syrac chapter 15. The Lord God says this, he says, listen, before us all of us is life and death, before every single one of us is good and evil. And whichever one, to whichever one we stretch out of our hand, to whichever one we choose, we get.

So the more and more I chose good, the more and more I become good, the more I choose good, the stronger good becomes in me. And the more I starve evil, the weaker evil becomes. And not just in our outward, like, public choices, but even in the battle for our hearts, even the battle for our ethos. So back to Jerusalem, right, King Josiah, his reforms, he eliminated public worship of pagan gods. So the public worship of pagan gods ceased. It stopped almost immediately when King Josiah did these reforms.

but there's this remarkable thing that happened. Modern archaeologists have made this pretty incredible discovery that at the same time that King Josiah was eliminating public worship of pagan gods, there was a proliferation and an explosion of small idols and pagan objects that were found in people's homes. So Josiah, he eliminated the public worship of pagan idols, but this was deeply rooted in people's private lives. Like, we all know the truth, right?

You can pour all the booze out of an alcoholic's house down the drain. But until it touches this, until it touches the heart, until it touches the ethos, the inner person, they won't be free. But the truth is, God wants you to be free. And the truth is, God wants you to be free no matter your circumstances, no matter where you live, no matter where your home is, even in exile. And sometimes even exile can be the cure. Sometimes even exile can be the thing that sets you free.

So here's Hannah and I Azraa Mishal, right? They were in Jerusalem when they were teens. They were in Jerusalem when Josiah took away all public worship of pagan gods. The problem was that removing that public structure didn't change their hearts. So what did God do? He took away the structures to get to their hearts. He brought them in exile to get to their hearts. Josiah, he was right to do the reforms.

That was the right thing to do to tear down the pagan gods to pagan temples to restore worship in the tree. true temple, but it didn't reach their hearts. It didn't reach their hearts until they were in exile. So in Daniel chapter 3, there's this prayer. The three young men stand up and they pray this prayer. And we'll talk about this next week, but the context for this is where they pray this prayer, they're in a fiery furnace. When they pray this prayer, they're about to say, I'm about to read, they have been found guilty of something and they're experiencing. the consequences of their guilt. And in the firing furnace, the first things they say are,

blessed are you and praiseworthy, O Lord God of our fathers, for you are just in all you have done. All your judgments are proper and all your deeds faultless and all your ways right. You've executed proper judgment. Basically, they're saying, here we are in the process of them trying to kill us, and we deserve it. Why? Because we gave you our public worship, but we did not give you our private hearts. And so we deserve this. It goes on. They go on to pray. Here we are, God. We've been reduced beyond any other nation. Right? We're exiled. We're homeless. Reduce any other, beyond any other nation in the world because of our sins. So we have in our day, we have no prince here. We have no profit. We have no leader. We have no burnt offering. We have no

sacrifice, no ablation, no incense. We have no place to offer first fruits, right? The temple is gone. Temple's back in Jerusalem. We have nothing. But they say, but with contrite heart and humble spirit, let us be received, as though it were thousands of fat lambs. Let our hearts, humbled, be received as though it were burnt offerings. Lord God, we give you our heart. He says this, we fear you, and now we fear you, and we pray to you. We follow you with our whole heart. In exile, they learned how to give their hearts in a way they never learned how to give when they were home. And you know what got them into the fiery furnace?

long story short King Nebuchadnezzar set up a statue of himself and said every time you hear the song bow down before me and worship and they said no we're going to stand King Nebuchadnezzar said no you're going to worship this false idol

and they said no we're going to stand said no you're going to fall down and they said no we're going to stand they refused to bow down at the risk of their own life and they were free because sometimes God can't reach our hearts until he brings us into a place of exile.

A couple weeks ago, I was talking with Bishop Andrew Cousins. He's the Bishop of Crookston, Minnesota. He shared that a couple years ago. He was in Belarus. And in Belarus, he visited a Catholic church. The people in this parish, for 60 years under communist rule, they didn't have a priest.

For 60 years, they did not have a priest. And they spent every Sunday, they still gathered. They still gathered in their Catholic church. And they would light the candles on the altar. They take the priest's vestments and place them on the altar, then each one of them, all the parishioners would take turns. They read from the Roman Missile, the book that the priest prays out of.

They would take turns reading a prayer, and then pass it to the next person. They read a prayer, pass it to the next person. When they came to the words of consecration that only the priest says, right, this is my body, this is my blood. No one read anything. No one said anything. They just let the silence pierce their hearts.

And in that silence, in the absence of Jesus and the Eucharist, they let their hearts ache for his presence. And they did this every Sunday for 60 years. For 60 years, they were powerless. But they could still choose. For 60 years, they were a place they did not want to be, but they could still give God their hearts. For 60 years, they lacked the ability to worship God as he had asked,

but they gave God the hearts that he had asked for. And this is the last thing. That's a weird call to do today. To give God the hearts he asked for. even in exile. There's this young woman back in the 80s. Her name is Kiara. She's from Italy, Kiarabedano. If she had lived, she'd be just a little older than me.

She was a normal Italian Catholic teenager, except she's kind of abnormal. She's normal in the sense that she liked everything other Italian teenagers would like. She played tennis, she golfed, she danced, she loved to hang out with her friends. She would sing all the normal things, right? But Kiara was different. in the sense that she wasn't just like culturally an Italian Catholic. She had met Jesus, and she was like a Catholic. She let Jesus be the heart of her life.

She was a teenager who prayed. At one point when Kiara was 17 years old, she was playing tennis, and she returned to volley, and her legs gave out beneath her, and she fell to the ground. They brought her to see the doctor, and they diagnosed her with this degenerative disease that would eat away her muscles. And over the course of months and years, Kira lost the ability to use her legs.

Then she lost the ability to use her arms. And then she lost the ability to even raise her own head on her own. People would come to visit her in the hospital to try to cheer up this 18-year-old, to try to cheer up this 19-year-old. What they found was when they visited her, she was the one who'd cheer them up. When they visited her to give her consolation,

she was the one who would consult them. When they visited her to give her some kind of joy, she'd be the one who would give, they would leave with more joy. then they arrived. And they asked her like, Kiara, how in the world, how can you possibly do this? And her answer was this. Her answer was, I have nothing left. But I still have my heart. And with that, I can always love. That she had learned what Victor Frankel had learned. There's the last of human freedoms. I have nothing left, but I still have my heart. And with that, I can

always love. And this is where we find ourselves. Every one of us is in a place of exile, right? every one of us knows no matter what the circumstances, no matter what the sickness, no matter what the suffering, no matter what the limitations, no matter how powerless we feel or how powerless we are, God wants to get to our hearts that no matter what else has taken away, we will always have that freedom. No matter what else has taken away, we will always have that heart. And with that heart, we can always love.