Who is pursuing you?

Homily

1st Sunday of Advent A2

30 November 2025

St. Ann Catholic Parish Prairie Village

AMDG

Who is pursuing you?

The first question I put on our missionary discipleship worksheet was this one?  How and why is God pursuing you?  It's pointless to start one's spiritual life anywhere else.  God's desire to visit you is infinitely greater than your desire to make your way toward him.  But why is God pursuing you?  And how?  It's a primary question for the spiritual life - it's the perfect way to start Advent.

When someone surprises you by knocking on your door or calling you, what's your initial reaction usually - it is one of excitement or fear?  Perhaps a bit of both.  This question goes deeper than whether you are an introvert or extrovert.  It's an attitude of faith.  Faith loves surprises and interruptions, because it's nice to be wanted, chosen and desired.  If you are living life as a gift, the most likely response to someone interrupting you is that they have a gift for you!

It's why God is pursuing you, by the way.  He's a giver and gets great joy out of making a gift of Himself.  You are made for God, not as a robot or slave to an owner or master, but as a child who is fit to receive the gifts your Father most wants to give you.  

My initial inspiration to the priesthood, Msgr. Vincent Krische, lived life in just this way.  He received every phone call, every interruption, every surprise knock on his door, as a gift.  Not as a threat to his privacy, but as a gift.  In fact, he left the front door of the rectory open in case someone wanted to leave a gift for him.  Now, he did get a lot of things stolen, but his security was in knowing everyone and trusting their generosity.  He received so much more than was ever stolen; and if something was stolen, he figured the person needed the gift more than he did!

Your very existence and certainly your future is secured by the weight of God's affection and attention bearing down upon you.  Your growth in faith this year will not come from what you are able to privately master and control, but in how ready you are to respond to the surprises and interruptions in life with faith.  For at the moment you least expect, the Son of Man will visit you to make the gift of His presence known.  

Happy are those whom the Lord finds vigilant upon His arrival.  This is Advent - awaiting with eager expectation the greatest news of all time - the Lord will not leave us to our own devices.  We are not alone and He will not leave us alone.  The Lord has come in history, he is coming now in mystery, he will come again in majesty!

Advent is about sensitivity, awareness and readiness to respond.  We begin again our celebration of the Christian mysteries not by plotting, planning and tinkering with our own self-improvement projects, but by daring God to come faster, and to come sooner, and to actually mean it.  

Come, Lord Jesus, come!

Who is pursuing you right now?  Better yet, how and why is the Lord pursuing you?

Have I ever been stranded?

Homily

Solemnity of All Souls

2 November 2025

St. Ann Catholic Church - Prairie Village

AMDG

Have I ever been stranded?  Most of us have.  In this do-it-yourself world where privacy and self-reliance mask as true security, being stranded and not knowing how you're going to get home, or who is going to help you, can be a terrifying experience.  Such is purgatory.  Most of us can relate.  Whether it was an accident, a canceled flight, a storm or natural disaster, or a breakdown, sooner or later, most of us find ourselves stranded, in need of help to survive and make it home.  

You're the good Samaritan in this scenario, at least in today's liturgy of All Souls. Eternal rest grant unto them O Lord, and let the perpetual light shine upon them.  May they rest in peace.  May their souls, and the souls of all the faithful departed, rest in peace.

This solemn duty of the Church militant - that's YOU btw - is highlighted today and carries through the end of the liturgical year, as the Church fixes its attention on the eschaton, ultimate things, and the Catholic final four of death, judgement, heaven and hell.  Black vestments are recommended, along with the spiritual maxim to keep death daily before our eyes, so that we may gain wisdom of heart.  What is more, today we resolve as part of our faith, prayer, and holy work, to never forget our beloved dead, and to always offer the best of anything we do that in pleasing to God in union with the saving sacrifice of Christ, to those most in need of his mercy, to the most forgotten soul in purgatory. We do this in union and through the heart of our blessed mother, who received the dead body of Her son from the cross, and prepared the body to return to the dust from which it came.  Her 'pieta' is the symbol of our prayer for All Souls day.

At every funeral Mass we wish our beloved dead to have a safe trip, and to come home safely!  When we ask people to pray for us, and promise to pray for them, we mean it most of all once they have passed from this world.  It's when our beloved ones die that we really start praying for them to have a good trip, and to let them know we're here if they need anything!

Today we solemnly remember that it is a complete waste of time to presume that nice people go to heaven.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  The Gospel is just the opposite!  Nice guys always finish last, and the lukewarm are always cast out of the kingdom of heaven, unless they passover in Christ to the fullness of love that constitutes who God is.  Man has just one proper end - to become like God, who is perfect, sacrificial and heroic love.  That passover process must be completed, sooner or later, in every person.  The transformation and divinization of the human person from good to holy is the most dramatic and improbable change of all.  It is only possible through fervent prayer and through fear and trembling!

Again, I say that canonizing nice people is a complete waste of time, and totally misleading.  Of course we live in the hope that God desires each of us to be saved and to lose nothing of what belongs to Christ, but to equate myself with a saint like Maximilian Kolbe, and to pretend there is no substantial difference, is to do the most absurd thing of all. To equate my friends to Mother Teresa, or my family to St. Therese of Lisieux, and to pray like they are close enough and ready instantaneously for heaven, is to truck in nonsense.  

The God of justice and love is too good and too loving to shove us into a new reality that does not correspond to the state of my soul.  Hence purgatory, the doctrine of justice and love and great hope, which is highlighted today and celebrated as a solemn duty and corporal and spiritual work of mercy for the Church militant.

I'm so glad it fall on a Sunday this year, so we can all mark this feast together.  It's not about earning out way to heaven, but praying our way to a worthy participation in the passover mystery of Jesus, a cooperation with the one saving sacrifice that infinitely pleases the father, and a sharing of these graces won by love with our beloved dead, especially the forgotten souls in purgatory most in need of God's mercy.

+mj  

Is holiness easy or hard?

Homily

27th Sunday in Ordinary Time C

St. Ann Catholic Church - Prairie Village

5 October 2025

AMDG

Is holiness easy or hard?

I bet your first answer is that holiness is really hard.  Really hard.  And you're not wrong.  Or perhaps your first response was that holiness is neither easy nor hard.  Maybe you sniffed our a false dichotomy.  When considering matters relating to God, paradox oftentimes prevails, and both . . and answers are much better than either . . . or answers.  So maybe holiness is both easy and hard.  

The right answer is the last one though.  Holiness is easy.  Holiness is simple.  My yoke is easy and my burden is light, says the Lord.  All it takes is the smallest amount of faith.  Then holiness, a complete sharing in the love and power of God that overcomes all things, is the fruit.  

Holiness is easy.  It is simple.  It is expected.  It is at hand.

Don't believe me?  Look at the three honorees who receive the Ave St. Ann award this weekend.  They make it look easy.  What's the key ingredient, the common thread between these St. Ann heroes of faith?  They pray.  They have faith. They put themselves simply at the the service of God's plan. They live not an ego-drama of trying to get, but the theo-drama of simply giving.  The result of this trusting relationship of faith is powerful indeed; the fruit is a heroic love the endures and prevails and bears fruit that lasts.

None of the three honorees - Dick and Martha Taylor, Al and Pat Kolarik, Jim and Patti Lisson - think they deserve these awards. Which is why we are so happy to give them to them.  Each would in their own way say they are the least deserving, that they are only unprofitable servants, doing what life requires.  Yet in trusting God and serving His plan and not their own, they have truly moved mountains.  

Faith obtains all things.  Perseverance obtains all things.  Prayer obtains all things. Chastity obtains all things.  Service obtains all things. Being pro-life obtains all things!  It's all utterly simple, and just takes a mustard seed of faith.  

It's hard when you make your life about you; when your life is about you, the simple demands of holiness seem impossible.  Yet they are easy for God, and easy for one who just has a mustard seed of faith.  

I'm not saying that the Taylors, Kolariks and Lissons have had comfortable lives.  Far from it.  They have just learned a very simple secret.  That trusting God and serving Him redounds to their own benefit.  Trusting in God's plans makes them strong.  The just one is not one who has life figured out, but the one who lives by faith.

In honoring our Ave St. Ann inaugural award winners, we honor all of us, just as when we honor the saints, a new path to holiness opens up for each one of us. Thank you Lissons, Kolariks and Taylors, for showing us the way.  Holiness is for everyone.  And for the one who has faith, it's not hard at all.

+mj  

What's your favorite paradox?

Homily

Exaltation of the Holy Cross

14 September 2025

St. Ann Catholic Church

Prairie Village, KS

AMDG

What is your favorite paradox?

Before we answer that question, let's make sure we understand paradox.  A paradox is an expression that seems contradictory, but is actually true, and in so being, pushes the limits of what we can know and experience.  

Jesus plays in paradox all the time, and so consistently reminds us that as far as the heavens are from the earth, so far are God's ways about our ways.  You know some of the simplest and maddening paradoxes.  Love your enemies.  Do good to those who hate you. Bless those who persecute you.  Give to those who steal from you.  Then, and only then, will you understand what love fully and really is, what love is capable of.  

Paradox is a key feature of the Gospel.  It's the secret sauce of the beatitudes, what it means to be truly happy.  It is constitutive of heaven, where our narrow categories, judgments and ways of thinking give way to deeper and greater truths and realities.

Another way to think of it is remembering something that you were most sure about, that you were wrong about.  Last weekend I was in Columbia, Missouri, and I was horrified.  I hated it.  Yet I loved it.  The last thing I would ever need are Mizzou friends, and now I'm getting lots of them.  I hate it, but I don't.  I joked that the worst thing that could ever happen to me was to be made the bishop of Jefferson City, and have the University of Missouri as part of my flock.  That would be the worst day of my life, but paradoxically, maybe not.  

A parent said at a kindergarten parent party Friday night - my last kid is starting kindergarten. We have a long way to go, but it will be over too soon. How can it both be true that I can't wait for it to be over, but I'll miss it too?  Cue paradox.

Another paradox is that we are safest not when we are in lockdown, but when we face our fears with courage.  Another is that the greatest way to defeat evil is not to defend against it, or even eliminate it, but to suffer it with courage in love.  No has greater power than this, than to surrender one's life for one's friends.  

There's so many!  

Jesus paradoxically says that I am happiest when my suffering and pain is greatest, for it is precisely at that point when I am most threatened, that my faith, hope and love are stretched to the limits, and my security is placed in them not in self-preservation.  

It's when it's most dangerous to go to Mass and stand up for what I believe, that people are motivated to go. When it's cheap and easy, it's not worth anything.  

Fast forward the paradox of the cross, a reminder that that punishment due to sin is also mysteriously, in Christ, the cure.  When I embrace the thing I least want, or can change, I rob it of it's power.  When I kiss the most threatening thing in my life, I overcome that thing.

The cross is re-presented to us in the middle of ordinary time, as the reminder I need is that the paradox of the cross is my only glory as a Christian.  The glorious cross, the ultimate paradox which reveals fully the power of God and the wisdom of God.  

+mj  

Is life just a potluck dinner?

Homily

22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time B1

St. Ann Church - Prairie Village

31 August 2025

AMDG

Is life really just a potluck dinner?

The more I pray over the dinner stories in the Gospels, the more I think the answer is yes.  

What did Jesus do all the time?  Well, lots of things, but He was accused of being a glutton and a drunkard, hanging out with tax collectors and sinners.  In today's Gospel, He's at a fancy dinner again, and observing things carefully.

What do priests do all day?  Well, we're just like the rest of you.  We live hand to mouth.  We gotta eat.  We survive meal to meal.  It's the one thing we all have to do.  How we do it, and with who, makes all the difference.  All of life and all of reality pass through dinner.  It's how heaven is described.  If you're paying attention, it's how Jesus set it up.  All of life and all of reality pass through this wedding banquet right here.

How do we do it?  Jesus says make sure you have the right four food groups.  Did you catch them?  Make sure you have the poor, the blind, the crippled and the lame.  Remember it's not only what's for dinner, it's who for dinner.  Make sure you're eating with people who can't pay you back.  Invite people who are broke, and sick, and stuck, and lost.  It shouldn't be that hard.

Life is just a potluck dinner, when you never know what you're going to get.  Jesus teaches us that we worry way too much about our rank and place at the table, seeking security in people who have the same status as us.  To hell with that, says Jesus.  Dinner is much more exciting when there is risk, vulnerability, and unpredictability.  

That's true for Mass too.  There has to be something at stake, some risk in it.  Ironically, the more dangerous it is to go to Mass in history, the more people come to Mass.  The more comfortable we are, the less we value Mass.  

That is not to say that we should be reckless or throw out all precautions for Mass.  Far from it.  We have entered a time when we will probably always be adding security to Mass.  I don't know if we can ever go back to the way things used to be.  

But if we let fear scatter us, then evil wins and has the last say. That can't be so.  There has to be some risk, and vulnerability and unpredictability to Mass, or it's not worth coming to.  

All of life and all of reality pass through this wedding banquet, and this sacred meal. Jesus set it up that way.  And in the end, He really just wants it to be a potluck dinner.

+mj  

Am I the underdog?

Homily

21st Sunday in Ordinary Time B1

24 August 2025

St. Ann Catholic Church - Prairie Village

AMDG

When it comes to salvation, am I the underdog?  Is anybody here tonight really comfortable with the question, are you saved?  If you died today do you know where you would spend eternity?  

On the one hand, the question should not make us uncomfortable at all.   Jesus has already answered it!  When asked if many or a few will get into heaven, a question everyone always wants to know, Jesus doesn't answer it!  So when I am asked the question, am I saved, I am free to answer as Jesus does.  It's the wrong question!  He simply answers with a verb - strive!  Strive to enter through the narrow gate!  It's the easiest answer, and you can't be wrong, because it's Jesus answer!

On the other hand, though, the question should always make me uncomfortable!  For Jesus says clearly that when it comes to salvation, I am the underdog.  Who could possibly boast that they have already become what heaven is - perfect, consistent, sacrificial, unselfish, merciful, and heroic love that strong as death?  Certainly not me!  Jesus says to never presume on salvation - always act as the underdog!

This does not mean of course that the opposite response of presumption - despair - is the right response to the question.  What can I be certain of?  That God desires my salvation, that I become even now what heaven is, fully alive through perfect love.  For God, 1 person lost is too many and 99 saved is too few!  I am certain that He desires my salvation and all the means are there, for nothing is impossible for God.  The pattern for my salvation is that of the Blessed Virgin, who believed that what was spoken to her by the Lord would be fulfilled!

I can be certain of God's desire that I be saved, but not that I have fully cooperated in this desire!  Even as I have accepted the paschal mystery of Jesus Christ as the only means of salvation, and the only sacrifice infinitely pleasing to the Father, still my life has to be fully processed within this mystery, this passion of Jesus.  Strive! Strive!  Strive, Jesus says, taking nothing for granted ever!  Work out your salvation with fear and trembling.

To put it another way, the process of my salvation is the same as Jesus.  His passion, and my being incorporated into his body through baptism, initiate me into the process, but like Him I am in anguish until it is accomplished!  God desires all people to be saved, but is in anguish until and unless it is accomplished.  Such is my attitude!

While enjoying great protection and the many great things God has done for me, still the Gospel is clear that my entire being must also be processed and reformed through the passion, the paschal mystery, and the heart of Jesus.  Nothing less than heaven gets into heaven, and God is too loving to save me without myself, without my being capable of experiencing what heaven really is!

So Catholics, even and especially as we endure suffering that is unfair and beyond our understanding, and what we least want, always embrace the discipline of the Lord as a key part of the process of working out salvation with fear and trembling.  Training, teaching, suffering, adversity, consequences and punishment, are all part of the necessary way in which love is purified, and made ready to participate in the kingdom of Heaven.

Nothing less than heaven gets into heaven.  That's why we're underdogs, and the only story of salvation is the story of us beating all the odds and allowing our entire being to be processed in the paschal mystery of Jesus.

Am I saved?  Answer it the way Jesus does, as an underdog.  Strive to enter through the narrow gate.

+mj  

 

When's the best time to risk it all?

Homily

19th Sunday in Ordinary Time C1

10 August 2025

St. Ann Church - Prairie Village, Kansas

AMDG

When's the best time to bet it all?

You know from the urgency demanded in the Gospel what the answer is. Don't pretend you don't.

August 10th is the Memorial of St. Lawrence, who knew when to bet it all.  Martyrs are always ready for the moment.  Lawrence witnessed the martyrdom of the Pope and several of his brother deacons under the 3rd Century persecution of the Roman emperor Valerian.  Lawrence's life was spared so that he could gather all the treasure of the Church and hand it over to the Roman authorities.  You may remember what Lawrence did.  He gave anything the Church had to the poor and then presented the poor little ones to the Emperor as the Church's greatest treasure.  For this Lawrence was grilled at the stake, but with his life already given away through supernatural love, courage, faith and hope, he famously said to his persecutors - I'm done on this side, you can turn me over now!  He is the patron saint of barbecue - so feel free to honor him by having some today. 

Lawrence knew when to bet it all?  Do you?  Do I?

The biggest risk I've ever made was deciding to go to seminary.  I was set to go to medical school, and had someone I wanted to marry and have a family with.  I gave those up to go to seminary, and gave them up for good when I promised obedience and celibacy, to conform my life more closely to the one whom I represent in personal Christi capitis.  Not nearly as dramatically as Abraham giving up Isaac, did I sacrifice the chance for my own kids, as a sign of faith in God's ability to raise even from the dead.  It's a test of faith that the Church invites of her priests even today. 

I was asked in my final year of seminary if I thought celibacy would be hard.  It was a trick question, and I failed it miserably.  I thought it wouldn't be that hard, that the risk of faith was more behind me than in front of me.  Most of my classmates answered correctly, that it's a risk of faith that only gets more dramatic over time.  Harder, and yes better, but no less dramatic.  

When's the best time to bet it all?  I think you know the answer. Do I?

This week I faced the question at least 100 times - Father, are you ready for school to start?  I hate the question.  I bet you do too. So why do we keep asking it?  It's because readiness and urgency are proper to one who is good at life.  Are you ready is a favorite question for one who knows the best time to bet it all is right now, in the dramatic moment that is right before us.  Procrastination costs us everything, even the kingdom of heaven.  Life is not to be lived in regret or fantasy, but by faith.

Faith is that readiness to respond to what is being made possible right now.  New and greater things are always opening up before us.  Faith is the exploration of the more that attains to the fullness of life and the kingdom of heaven.  Faith is a readiness to respond to the faith that God has first placed in you. Through the gift of Jesus God has bet it all on you.  God got to Mass before you tonight, ready to serve you at that banquet of charity, believing in the love you are capable of.

Since becoming pastor here you all have challenged me not to be afraid of what is possible, and definitely not to settle for what I can manage or control.  Now is the time for me to bet it all on you, in a more dramatic and compelling way than I have ever risked before.  Now is the time for me to believe that each one of you is made for this moment in time, and to believe that you will all respond to the chance before you to attempt the impossible, suffer and die for what you believe, to believe in the fullness of life available in Christ Jesus, and to play your critical part in His redemptive mission.

When is the time to bet it all in faith?  If you haven't guessed it yet, you better answer now.  It's not in the past.  It's not in the future.  The time is always now.

+mj