29th Sunday Ordinary Time, 10/19/2025

Watch the Homily

Listen to the Homily

Join Father Chas as he delivers our annual State of the Parish message — a heartfelt reflection on faith, perseverance, and community at St. John Parish. In this inspiring homily, Father Chas shares updates on parish life, our mission to witness Christ in a changing world, and the call to be steadfast disciples amid today’s challenges. Discover how our parish continues to grow in faith, hope, and love while serving the people of Jackson with joy and purpose.

Read the Homily

Father Chas: Good morning. All right. There’s some who got to Mass late last weekend and did not hear our important announcement. You know, many of our parishes around the diocese are now taking safety and security precautions. And so our safety and security committee, made up of a few parishioners who work in law enforcement, made recommendations that we began implementing last weekend. The decision wasn’t made lightly, as of course we want our parish to be as welcoming as possible. Excuse me. But given the recent hostility that radicals have had to people of faith, we need to take reasonable measures to diminish the risk of even events that are highly unlikely from occurring.

Father Chas: So to review, we’re locking the doors of St. John and St. Joseph churches five minutes after the start of each weekend Mass.

Father Chas: And then after that, there’s only one door in which you can enter, and that is the ramp door over here at our south transept entrance. And someone will be at that door until about 15 minutes after Mass starts. And after that, please catch a later Mass, as we’ll be well into the Liturgy of the Word by that point anyway. So for those who are chronically challenged to be on time, please try to be prompt for mass, right? Being on time means less work of opening doors for our ushers, and the families who use the cry room will really appreciate it, not only because it’s less distraction from the liturgy, but there will be less cold gusts of wind blowing into that cry room once we come into the colder months beginning November, right?

Father Chas: In fact, I invite you all to try to make it on time for the Bishop’s Weekly Be My Witnesses message, which we play about 10, 15 minutes before Mass begins. I know a few folks have mentioned a couple of considerations since we began this last week. Thank you for your input. Know that our Safety and Security Committee will be continually assessing these measures and will update the measures as needed. So now on to the homily.

Father Chas: For this State of the Parish weekend. Father Mike Schmitz was asked, what do you hope students take away from their time at the Newman Center? And the Newman Center is that Catholic student parish in a given university community. And Father Mike Schmitz is assigned to the University of Minnesota in Duluth.

Father Chas: And Father Mike responded with a realization he came to years ago during one of his evening masses with the students. He said this, I was looking out at the students and I was just really convicted by this reality that up until now, I just wanted them to be good Catholics, good disciples of Jesus. But then it dawned upon him that evening mass, given the day and age in which we live, that among the students it might very well be true that God is calling them to be martyrs. So he said that that became a new paradigm for his approach to ministry. Quote, we’re here to prepare you to be martyrs. And what I mean by that is to be witnesses to your faith in every situation, in every season, whatever you’re called, no matter what it costs.

Father Chas: So how do you help young people or anyone with that formation that no matter where I go from here, I have been prepared to be a witness to Jesus no matter what it costs. And that’s the goal, end of quote. So in ancient times, the word martyr was a Greek word that literally meant witness. It simply meant that you were a heroic witness to the faith despite persecution. But then the meaning developed and became associated with paying the ultimate price of being a witness to the faith, that it would cost you your own life here on earth, as it did Jesus. But we know what’s more powerful than death itself. And so Father Mike was referring to that ancient meaning of martyrs, to be witnesses no matter what the cost was.

Father Chas: But as Father Mike Schmitz himself realized in his own home state of Minnesota, less than two months ago at the Church of the Annunciation in Minneapolis, it can very well mean the modern sense of the word. And we here in Michigan have even felt that religious persecution with what occurred in Grand Blanc. And you may have seen in the news that Christians are being martyred in large numbers in Nigeria.

Father Chas: And so likewise, just like the Newman Center or student parish, all parishes should have the goal in today’s cultural milieu to prepare its parishioners to be martyrs, witnesses to Jesus, no matter what the cost. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the need for the work of the church and our parish has become all the more evident with all that’s going on in our society today.

Father Chas: You know this—the cultural turning away from God in these last couple of generations has really taken its toll on our national psyche. Increasingly foreign to our social consciousness are those two foundational tenets of love of God and love of neighbor—two foundational tenets that have held been held up in Western Christian civilization, often ill-observed for sure, but held up and idealized nonetheless.

Father Chas: Love of God above all things and love of neighbor as oneself. But without those two imperatives held up as ideals in society, we begin to lose the mutual respect that we owe to one another, no matter our background, right? It makes me think of the words of John Adams, who said that, quote, our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

Father Chas: We know that forcing people to be moral and religious doesn’t work, right? And it’s obviously not right since faith is a relationship of love with God. And there is no compulsion in love. We must freely desire to live God’s commandments. And so that makes all the more urgent the mission of the church, the work of evangelization, the work of the church in proposing, not imposing, and the work of St. John Parish to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ and invite people into Christ’s healing and saving presence.

Father Chas: If we’re one of those who are still indifferent or anxious or afraid, which can be all of us after a traumatic event, right? The message of both today’s gospel and the first reading is for us. And the common theme of both is perseverance and persistence. Persistence in prayer, persistence in fighting the good fight.

Father Chas: In today’s gospel, that parable Jesus shared is the story of the widow who would eventually receive a just verdict even from an unrighteous judge who loved neither God nor neighbor. That judge only cared about himself. And she received a just verdict even from him because of her persistence. Because she kept on asking. She kept on seeking. She received justice in the end. Seek and you will find.

Father Chas: So note that Jesus isn’t saying that every earthly injustice in this world will be immediately vindicated. And if that’s what we think Jesus meant, then we’ll be sorely disappointed. Were that the case, Jesus wouldn’t be calling for the virtue of fortitude and persistence because there would be no need for that virtue. But Jesus assures us, what he does assure us, is that those who remain faithful will be victorious in the end.

Father Chas: We will get that just verdict, just as the widow did. We will get that vindication. But that vindication to which Jesus refers is the final judgment at the end of time, which is quick in God’s sense of time, right? From an eternal perspective. So make no doubt about it, love will triumph.

Father Chas: But at the end of today’s gospel, Jesus asks us this unsettling question. It’s the very last line of today’s gospel. Jesus asks, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth? Our Lord is concerned that people won’t persevere in the faith. We can get tired. We can get fatigued in life. And so the Lord is encouraging us to persevere in the struggle. The heavenly host and the communion of saints are cheering us on. Keep fighting the good fight.

Father Chas: And that’s where the lesson of the first reading comes in. When the Israelites were in this battle against the Amalekites, Moses, he had to persevere in raising up his arms in prayer. And when Moses’ arms grew weary, he had Aaron and Hur help him keep his hands up in praise of God, in prayer. And the great lesson behind that is that we often need one another in persevering in prayer, in continuing to fight the good fight. This is why we need to live our faith in community.

Father Chas: We can’t let the distractions of this world and the fatigue that we suffer from being so entrenched and even enslaved by the things of this world, good as they may be, keep us from fighting the good fight. And so we let our arms down, we let the sacraments slip away from our lives, and we just kind of do our own thing. It’s so easy to do, but that’s where the church and the parish come in.

Father Chas: We as members of Christ’s body, his representatives in the world, are meant to be for the people in our lives what Aaron and Hur were for Moses. We are meant to help keep the hands of our brothers and sisters here in Jackson lifted up in prayer and praise of our God. So what does that look like concretely? It means walking with people who are far away from God, befriending those who are far away from God.

Father Chas: It means praying daily for the people God has placed in your life. It means revealing to them that God’s mercy is real through the spiritual and corporal works of mercy that you do for them. Being Aaron and Hur for others means inviting and reminding people that God is calling them to something bigger than themselves, that God loves them and desires this intimate, regular, and sacramental relationship with them.

Father Chas: That God wants them to not give up fighting the good fight against the evil in this world that can so often seem it has the upper hand in the battle for souls, especially amongst our young people, right? It’s actually the young people now that are leading the surge back to the church.

Father Chas: The Barna Research Organization’s most recent results reveal, quote, millennials and Gen Z Christians are attending church more frequently than before and much more often than our older generation. Yes, you all are here, but what about your peers? So many of our peers are not here, present every Sunday.

Father Chas: You know, with religious observance thrown to the side, those generations have suffered much, those younger generations have suffered much in their youth, in their confusion of not knowing who they are as sons and daughters of God. So that’s partly why we’ve made our parishes rally card to joyfully accompany our young families. A hurting world, and specifically the people of Jackson, truly need this work of St. John Parish.

Father Chas: As the mother church of Jackson, God has entrusted to us the proclamation of that gospel that brings peace to hearts in a way that only Jesus can do. As we become what we consume here at Mass, the body of Christ, right? We are thus called to be Christ to the community around us.

Father Chas: As Jesus reminds us, the harvest is plenty, but the laborers are few. And that work necessitates that we dedicate both our human and material resources towards that noble cause.

Father Chas: I encourage you then to look through our State of the Parish Bulletin after Mass. Pick one of these up. I, as your pastor, you know, well, what’s the State of the Parish Bulletin? It’s a message from me, and then updates on parish life, three pages of parish life, our parish finances, the capital projects update, updates on what’s going on behind me and at our school, right? Faith formation, and two pages on St. John’s School, and more. So pick one of those up.

Father Chas: But I, as your pastor, am so grateful to our parish family for another successful year of meeting the budget, right? We celebrate that we’re on budget this past fiscal year, thanks to your generosity. But part of making that budget also meant having to make significant cuts in the last three years straight to make that happen also.

Father Chas: Inflation has really caused havoc over these last several years on the cost of doing ministry. And moreover, our parish ministry team members, who are already spread so thin, have become even more underpaid as well. And so we really want to retain the awesome team that we have. So to meet that need, let’s respond generously to the 541 challenge and beyond, right?

Father Chas: To respond as a psalmist does, here I am, Lord, I come to do your will. This is a blessed and exciting time to be Catholic. It is always when the church is undergoing rough times and even persecuted that God raises up saints to take up the mission of building up God’s kingdom anew.

Father Chas: It’s when we’re too comfortable and overly, that we become complacent in the proclamation of the kingdom. It takes this struggle to bring out the best in us, right? So joyfully join me in rededicating not only our resources, but our lives to the healing, the salvation, and the eternal happiness of the people God has placed in our lives, in our parish, and in our beloved city of Jackson.