Fr. Shane Mathew Homily February 27, 2022

[Music] hallelujah [Music] [Music] hallelujah shine like lights in the world as you hold unto the word of life [Music] hallelujah [Music] the lord be with you and with your spirit a reading from the holy gospel according to luke jesus told his disciples a parable can a blind person guide a blind person will not both fall into a pit no disciple is superior to the teacher but when fully trained every disciple will be like his teacher why do you notice the splinter in your brother's eye but do not perceive the wooden beam in your own how can you say to your brother brother let me remove that splinter in your eye when you do not even notice the wooden beam in your own eye you hypocrite remove the wooden beam from your eye first then you will see clearly to remove the splinter in your brother's eye a good tree does not bear rotten fruit nor does a rotten tree bear good fruit for every tree is known by its own fruit for people do not pick figs from thorn bushes nor do they gather grapes from brambles a good person out of the store of goodness in his heart produces good but an evil person out of a store of evil produces evil for from the fullness of the heart the mouth speaks the gospel of the lord before we start talking about planks and splinters and beams a few notes for your prayer first i would be grateful if you would remember bishop troutman in the lord to the lord in your prayers the bishop passed away last night after a lengthy illness funeral arrangements will be forthcoming places and times and everything takes there are a lot of moving parts so recognizing the difficulties of covid recognizing the difficulties of the fact that half of the cathedral is currently under renovation which causes all kinds of practical difficulties if we could bypass those issues and offer a prayer to god for the repose of of the bishop's soul i would be most grateful as i imagined the bishop would be as well and having remembered bishop troutman in prayer we might also remember the people of ukraine i don't want to turn this into a geopolitical homily we're going to talk about planks and beams here in a moment but i'll be honest i honestly thought that this kind of land war that we finally realized that this doesn't work that this is not a way to achieve change or development or growth or prosperity and apparently we haven't learned that lesson yet and what frustrates me even more is that russia and ukraine are in their heart and tradition not only christian countries very christian countries and we the people of god should know better apparently we have planks and beams that we have yet to remove from our eyes so if we could remember not only bishop troutman but also the ukrainian people in our prayers that would be i think a grace-filled thing for us at the risk of pulling your splinters without recognizing my beam i'd like to take this on a little bit because i think there are two parts to this that are important and i think the second part especially is often overlooked if we take all of the images together the splinter in your eye and the beam in mind the good fruit from your good trees and the bad fruit from my bad tree the good words that come from your good hearts and the bad words the evil that comes from my evil heart if we take all of them together there's a consistent thread that weaves them together one is that we have to be mindful of our development of growth and grace we have to be attentive to the fact that we are in fact sinners now i've been called to task for many things that i've said in my homilies over the years but when i quoted from saint paul's letter to the romans and said to a crowd all have sinned and all are deprived of the glory of god i had somebody come rather aggressively after me thanks be to god it wasn't here who was frankly offended that i included us in that word all and i really wanted to say first of all i didn't do it saint paul did and this is the word of god so if you have a problem your problem's not with me i'm just quoting the book but on a more fundamental level how can we hope to expect to remove the beams of sin from our own vision if we refuse to see that they're there in the first place now i don't know about this but and i don't know if you have to do this but but every year or two i have to go to the ophthalmologist and get a fields test if you've ever seen spaceballs and the big white round helmets that they wear that's the field test you put your head in the bowl it's this big white bowl and there are these little tiny pin pricks of light scattered around at random locations around this this bull and they turn it into a video game because the idea is you've got this clicker in your hand and every time you see a light you have to stare at the middle and every time you see one of these little blinky lights blink you're supposed to press a button and what it's testing is peripheral vision you keep your vision focused on the center and then when you see the little pinpricks of light around the edges you're supposed to press the button as a way of testing and fine i do what the doctor says because if i don't i get yelled at by my father the physician at home so it's better for me if i just do what i'm told but the question is well why would we have to do that test wouldn't we know if we couldn't see and it turns out the answer is no we don't know we do a really good job compensating when we start to lose our peripheral vision so much so that we might have areas in our field of vision that we can't actually see that we think we can see we don't notice it it's not like there's a black patch here we just don't notice it and in our eye motion we can compensate for it nevertheless it's a kind of blindness that indicates glaucoma and all sorts of other problems it's far easier than we might think to make ourselves blind to the wooden beam that jesus uses as the symbol of sinfulness in this story it's easy for us to just simply pretend as if it's not there we become blind to our own blindness so to speak we might not recognize the different kinds of rot that might settle into our trees we might not recognize the kind of fuel that we're putting into our hearts a good person out of the store of goodness in his heart produces good we might not be paying attention to what we're putting into the store we might not be noticing the things that we're putting in the kind of media that we consume the kind of news that we trust the kind of reading that we do and the quality of thought that goes into it we might not be paying attention to the quality of the fuel that we're putting in and jesus calls us to task on this fill up for yourselves stores of goodness remove the beam from your own eye first take care of the quality of the tree tend to the tree that it might be good now a lot of people recognize this and they see that first part of the lesson and they think to themselves this is perfect mind my own business i take care of me you take care of you it's all good as if we have no responsibility for each other you fool remove the beam from your own eye first and then the thought stops because okay this is a self-improvement exercise i do me you do you we do us and it's all fine and we forget the second part and then you will see clearly to remove the splinters in your brother's eye jesus does not allow us the indulgence of thinking that this is a project of self-improvement we have a responsibility toward each other not only to be mindful of our own planks and beings i'm sorry i keep alternating between planks and beams because i had a professor in the seminary who was very disappointed in the translation so he would and he was a pretty animated guy so he would get talking fast and start bouncing around a little bit and he'd be uh i keep planks and beams and beans and planks and i don't know why they didn't who talks about beans it's a blanket should be a plan so i in honor of father tony may he rest in peace i tend to alternate between them it's not enough for us to attend to the planks and beams of our own it's important for us to recognize that we can and do have a responsibility to help each other isolate and remove the splinters in the eyes of our brothers and sisters i for you and you for me we are responsible to each other and we are responsible for each other and i would add that if we're honest it is god's grace that builds up the store of goodness within each one of us i suggest to you that god gives the grace that fills our stores of goodness to each other we refill the stores of goodness for each other with god is the common source i think it's important i think it's important for us to recognize that that the grace of god reaches us through each other that my store of goodness is filled by you and your store of goodness is filled by me and that we're in this together again not to return to geopolitics but how do we wage war without an us and them mindset how can we wage war if we don't first sever responsibility for the stores of goodness how can i wage war against you if i still think i'm responsible for filling your store of goodness i don't think we can i think the path to war begins with breaking this up of removing responsibility for each other we are responsible to each other and we are responsible for each other god fills our stores of grace and goodness together i in you and you and me that is the story of our faith and that is i hope the lesson jesus leaves for us in this passage

Channel: St. Jude the Apostle Parish

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Length: 14min 58sec (898 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 27 2022