A Homily on the Word "No" | Fr. Mike Schmitz | St. John Bosco Conference

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so it is um really good to be here i'm really glad i'm just honored to be able to be with you all um for a number of reasons but one of those reasons is um it is just remarkable to be in the presence of people who just give and serve one thing i noticed though is is that uh maybe when you're in a gathering like this a gathering of people who consistently give and you're someone who consistently gives um there's a number of things we can do one one is we can have that posture of like yeah that's right i do give so give to me now that's kind of a thing right that's like yeah i'm or it's looking around the room saying i put on retreats let's see how you guys do like that kind of thing but there's also there's also this temptation a lot of times that temptation that is as i look around the room all i can see is my own failure i just want to start off with this just this is the first point there's a couple the first one is this just to kind of get kind of the context um i've had the honor to be able to go to israel a number of times and one of the things that we'll typically do is we get to cana and if there's any couples in the group uh the couples get to renew their wedding vows and and it's one of those things in fact i just did this recently in my hometown this couple came up and said it's our 29th wedding anniversary can we re uh today can we renew our wedding vows like that's great yeah number 29 very special um but what happened with them was what happens with all these couples in well in cana no not not every couple but many of them as they come before each other and they're holding each other's hands and they're repeating their vows one of the things i've noticed is that it is incredibly rare that they actually look at each other when they say their vows which is so different because i do a lot of weddings and at weddings i mean they're just right in each other's eyes i mean like they're like yes gazing like this is it we're saying this i jack take you jill you know i jill thank you jack but then when they're renewing their vows it's hijack do this jill hi jill do the jack and and and that doesn't shock me and it also doesn't i don't look i don't think negatively about that because i just i guess last month like a lot of the priests had my ordination anniversary and when people make a big deal about it i i really i hate it i hate when people make a big deal about my anniversary because when it gets brought up all i can think about is how i failed hey congratulations on the happy anniversary all i can think about is all of the times that i've failed to be the priest that i want to be that i know god called me to be i think this is the same reason why these couples as they're holding each other's hands they don't look each other in the eyes because on their wedding day it's like yes i promise all these things and now here we are five years later 10 years later 29 years later i'm gonna say the same words but you know the truth now and i want to do this thing i want to honor you and love you and all these things but you now know the truth yes on our wedding day you knew that i was a broken person an avoiding day i knew you were a broken person but now we really know in which ways we're broken people and it's sometimes hard look each other in the eye and say okay i'm still here so i take all of that and bring it to here to a place like this the you know the bosco conference where there's all these people who serve and all these people who like are faithful i look around and like oh my gosh but i try so hard and i just fail so much and so one of the things we can do is we can focus more on our failure than we can on the lord i see a lot of times you say focus more on our failure than we do on our victories that's not the point focus more on our failures than we do on the lord we'll get back around to this in a second but over last weekend not this weekend the weekend before i was able to get his fourth of july weekend and i was able to go home uh to be with my my parents and a bunch of my sisters and their husbands and their kids and my brother was back there with his wife and their kids and it was so funny because like the age ranges are from i think 22 down to two of my my nieces and nephews and so you can see this development level uh as it's they have developed this is super good um and because because uh the the young oh my gosh lucy lucy is great lucy is a of a particular i think she's five somewhere in there um she's my sister sarah's daughter and lucy at one point lucy had done something with with her plate this was that separate time lucy done something their plate and um her mom said because all the kids this is great sorry i'm gonna make a point at some point um so my brothers-in-law are like really good cooks and so they take care of all the food i'm like can i help like no you're good i'm like okay i'll send my beer and then my nieces nephews are so trained that they clean the dishes so like can i help like no i go have my beer i don't have to do anything it's amazing again that wasn't really a point either but we're getting back to this because the kids have to do something so lucy five or so at one point her mom said lucy put your plate back on the table you need to clean clean up and she did one of these things where she slammed her plate on the table and they had a bunch of i don't know like you know juices from fruit and stuff it was red and it banged off the table and it on the white carpet because yeah that makes a lot of sense how about you put white carpet in your dining room good thinking mom and uh and it flipped over landed upside down all this over and she started walking away like in a huff like i don't care about this she's i'm leaving and her mom was like lucy you know it was really bad lucy got back here and she did that kind of like side like do i get back i'm mad but i'm in trouble like as she's walking away like no i'm not gonna walk back and and i just like this panic that she had because she knows yeah i'm gonna i'm gonna keep walking because i am mad but also i should turn around right now but mom is mad i don't know what to do so i'm gonna settle into my into my mad that's what i'm gonna do i'm gonna settle into my mat i'm gonna do my thing because her mom told her no this is one of those interesting things when it comes to growing we have to learn how to do a number of things one of those is we need to learn how to manage our emotions obviously another thing is we need to learn how to hear the word no and not be crushed by it we need to learn how to hear the word no how to be told no and that doesn't destroy our relationship and i think about this not only in terms of you know as we're being raised as kids of our parents let's look at this in terms of our relationship with the lord a sign of maturity a sign of maturity is god is able to tell me no and it doesn't break our relationship a sign of immaturity is god doesn't have my permission to tell me no that i can hold him hostage because he has to do what i i want but a sign of maturity is that god actually gets to tell me no and it doesn't affect our relationship does that make sense i think a lot of us are in this place where i realize that that's what god's calling me to he's calling me to a new place in my life he's going to to a place where i mean it's not like a new place like he's going to start saying no from now on like no he's been saying no a lot but he's calling us to a place where when he says no that doesn't even affect our relationship in the slightest if he can't tell me no then we don't have a real relationship if god can't tell me no to a desperate prayer then we don't have a mature relationship so we have to ask the question if i struggle with god telling me no why if i still struggle with god telling me no what am i struggling with it could be because i really want this thing and i just really have a lot of desire for whatever that thing is it could be because i love someone else and i'm really begging god to help them that can be real but what is it that i'm really struggling with when god tells me no know in the first reading it's it's phenomenal also has a lot of names um i don't know if you tracked along with it maybe if you had your magnificat and i prayed with it five times this morning like okay i got it they're talking about three distinct people they're talking about ahaz the king of judah ahaz by the way bad king like one of the worst kings just super bad um not super bad like awesome but super terrible um a has bad and then you have rezin the king of arum which is basically syria and then you have um pika the king of uh israel right so the divided kingdom so ahaz is the kingdom of judah there's two tribes in the south and pika is the pikachu he is the he he is the king of israel the ten tribes in the north and so what happens is syria or and there's also a bunch of different names right sometimes they call it israel sometimes they call it ephraim like please isaiah just make it clear that's my job here so um you have resin and pika no i can't not think of pikachu um who who unite to attack the two tribes of judah and so here is isaiah coming to ahaz the bad king horrible king the best thing that ahaz does is he um has a son who becomes a decent king that's that's the best thing he does but here's isaiah coming to ahaz and saying okay what you're going to do what you want to do is you want to make an alliance with assyria because you think that if you make an alliance with assyria then you'll be strong enough to fight against pika and resa but i'm here to tell you this already he goes he even goes on to say they went up to attack jerusalem they were not able to conquer it for all intents and purposes to everything that that ahaz could see the kingdom of syria and the kingdom of israel monstrous kingdoms i mean monsters in in his sight they they are they're overwhelming in in their force they're overwhelming and their power overwhelming and their strength there's no way that two tribes of judah the two tribes down south where ahaz is the king there's no way that they could actually fight and defeat these two nations coming against them but god says to me jesus i love this he says let not your courage fail before these two stumps of smoldering brands like to you yeah they're massive kingdoms descending upon judah to me they're just two stumps of smoldering brands they're they're nothing what i'm gonna ask you to do is not make an alliance with assyria what i'm gonna ask you to do is simply trust me because here's here's what it is right why doesn't god get to tell me no because i don't trust him why does god not have my permission to tell me no without our relationship going into a tailspin because i don't trust him like if we truly got to that place where we were able to say lord you know the best and you will not abandon me in the worst so here is what i desire here's what my heart longs for here's what i think is the best thing for this other person but if you say no i'm still yours that's why it's not a matter of i'm just going to look to my own failures or i'm going to look to my own victories is no it's it's instead of looking at my own failures as we look around this room i'm just going to look to jesus it means it really truly we're going to land the plane right now to be able to begin this day be and continue this week with this this mentality this this mindset this this view that says this says i'm not going to measure my failures or my victories against the people around me i'm not going to even measure my victories and my failures against myself what i'm going to do is i'm going to learn from my failures and i'll look to the lord because the thing he wants the most from you is not more service than he wants the most from you is not more work the thing he wants most from you is is not more productivity or more conversions and more disciples that you make what he wants from you is your heart the most important thing most valuable thing you can do for the lord this week and when you go home with your entire life it's not given more disciples it's not given more bible studies it does not give him more youth that come to know him the most important thing you can give him is yourself is your heart is your trust now just hear jesus's voice as he's speaking to betsy's and to chorusing he says woe to you betsy woe to you christine why because if the mighty works done for you had been done in inside of gemora they would have repented the big question basically you hear jesus asking is what more do i need to do to prove to you that you can trust me and this is the question we're here today this week and every single one of us every single one of us struggles with holding on to something we struggle with looking back into the eyes of our beloved and saying jesus once again i'm yours and i promise to love you for the rest of my life knowing we're going to fail but what more do we have what more does he have to do to prove to us that we can trust him all he wants all he wants this week and all he wants for the rest of your life is that mature relationship where he can say to us yes and we say i trust you jesus and he can say to us wait we can say i trust you jesus and he can say to us i love you but no and we say i trust you jesus you

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Length: 16min 11sec (971 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 28 2022