20th Sunday Ordinary Time, 08/17/2025

Read the Homily

Father Randy: This past week I was very blessed to go camping with all of my siblings. And, you know, I guess I should say camping more so than anything because I was sleeping in an air-conditioned cabin the whole time. But, by defense, there was a campfire on which all the food was cooked. So, you know, maybe it is camping for real. I don’t know. But it was very interesting that one of the nights while we were out there, we had a big thunderstorm came through, got a whole bunch of rain, all that stuff.

Father Randy: And in the morning, I thought for sure, you know, the fire in our fire pit’s going to be out, and we’re going to have to, you know, work really hard to get it going again. And, you know, I’m not much of a physicist, but I do happen to know that when you get a little fire and a whole lot of water, it doesn’t end well for the fire. But boy, was I wrong, because when I put my hand close to the center of the fire pit, there was still a lot of heat coming off. And those coals that had been piled together in the center of the pit were still alive.

Father Randy: And another fire was easily started despite all the rain. And there’s a good lesson for us in this. Jesus tells us that he has come to set the world on fire, that he wishes it were already blazing. If you’re going to start a fire, you need a base. You need something already burning that you can just feed more and more stuff into to grow your fire. That’s meant to be us, the members of the church.

Father Randy: We here at St. John’s, along with all the other Jackson churches, have been tasked with setting fire to our city, bringing our community to Jesus, welcoming the kingdom of God here and now in Jackson, bringing our community to Jesus. But we cannot do this on our own. Think back to the coals in the fire. A single coal is easily put out when the rain comes. But when the coals are pushed together, they can endure through. When the rain comes and passes, they burn yet again.

Father Randy: We’re the same way. On our own, we can be easily smothered by opposition, whether it’s from just the general culture, whether it’s specific people in our life. But when we’re surrounded by people who are likewise on fire for the gospel, for making the kingdom present, we can persevere through that opposition and we can offer the world what we have discovered in Jesus. But we also have to be very sober-minded about that opposition to living a Christian life, to proclaiming the gospel.

Father Randy: There’s a very real cost that following Jesus can have and we should not be surprised if we are asked to pay it one day. Jesus tells us in the gospel, do you think that I have come to establish peace on the earth? No, I tell you, rather division—father against son, mother against daughter, and so on. I don’t know about you, that’s not a passage I like to sit with. It’s not a thought I particularly enjoy. I love my family. I just spent four days camping with them.

Father Randy: I don’t really want to think about them being split and divided against each other. Yet I cannot deny that possibility. Because if we are going to be true followers of Jesus, then commitment to God is more than likely at some point going to have to trump other relationships in our lives. We have to decide what’s most important to us. Living half in and half out, it’s not good for us, and it’s not good for the person who’s challenging us. We’re never going to move them in one direction or the other.

Father Randy: Now, hopefully most of the time our families support us. They help lead us closer to God. They help us live out the faith well. But that’s not always the case. So many of our grandparents and parents, they’re really mourning the loss of their grandchildren, their children in the faith. As a priest, it’s something I hear about with some regularity. It really breaks my heart to share their pain and to have seen it firsthand in my own life. So brothers and sisters, we have to be—

Father Randy: Very realistic about what following Jesus can entail for us, but also never in the spirit of despair, always with that boundary. Because when we’re challenged by passages like this, we also need to remember to read Scripture in the light of the whole. So in this case, just six chapters later in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus offers us a balance, some consolation. In Luke 18, he says these words,

Father Randy: Truly I say to you, there is no one who has left house or wife or brothers or parents or children for the sake of the kingdom of God, who will not receive many times more in this time and in the age to come eternal life. There is a new family that we have been invited into through Jesus. A family that is made up of all of those who believe.

Father Randy: It is this family that is referenced today in the letter to the Hebrews that speaks of the great cloud of witnesses that always surrounds us, encouraging us to persevere in our faith. They are our heavenly family. They’re the ones that we will live with and get to know well in eternity. And as you may recall, as part of our sanctuary project, we have the Lamb of God in the middle. And then on either side, we have 12 sets of saints. They are meant to be an enduring reminder to us that we are not alone on this journey. Amen.

Father Randy: They are the members of our family who have gone before us in victory, and they want to be involved in our lives. Through the witness of the way that they lived and died, they encourage us. By their prayers, they strengthen us. They’re not dead. They’re alive, more alive than we are. And they are eager for us to ask for their help. We need to take time to get to know our heavenly family. But that, of course, is not the only family that Jesus has given us. Look around at the people beside you.

Father Randy: When I came to this parish, time and time again, the word that people used to describe St. John’s was family. When you look around you, you are seeing the fulfillment of Jesus’ words in John 18. Here you see parents, grandparents, siblings, grandkids, all those that he has promised that he would give you, the many times more for whatever you have lost. It has been a beautiful grace for me for this past month and a half that I’ve been here,

Father Randy: To get to know this part of my family that I never met before, to hear your stories, to share my own, to pray with you, to pray for you. Now, of course, it’s easy to use family just as somewhat of a nice buzzword, but to never really mean it. It’s not a substance behind it because it needs to be cultivated. It’s not just enough to say it. We need to live it.

Father Randy: Unfortunately, this happens to be one of our kind of great weaknesses as Catholics. It’s very easy for us just to go to Mass on Sunday and say hello to your neighbor and all those things, but you never really care about them. You don’t bother getting to know them. All thoughts of family and community just flee when you hit the parking lot and you’re racing to be the first one out and all the other cars are pulling out. But the reality is we need each other. We need to hear each other’s struggles. We need to hear each other’s successes in following Jesus.

Father Randy: We need people around us who can keep that fire burning in our hearts in the middle of the storm. It takes time. It takes vulnerability. But that’s worth it. And I know that this is something that you want. You want to cultivate this because you tell me about it. And so I think there are two things that I would really encourage you to do to help foster this sense of family, to really lean into it. The first one is to reach out to someone around your age at the parish.

Father Randy: Like families are built around relationships, about bonds. And so start getting to know someone. Encourage each other in your faith. Here at St. John’s, we’re also blessed to have multiple small groups of both men and women. And they’re a great way to surround ourselves with people who can be the support that we need, who can really help us to stay on fire. And the second and most important is probably to pray for each other.

Father Randy: This is something that we take seriously here at St. John’s. We pray for each other at every Mass. We ask each other intentions, intentionally so, to build up this culture, to build up this environment, to cultivate it. And I am so edified when I hear people say that they take the intention that their neighbor said at Mass on Sunday, and they pray for them throughout the week. That is how bonds are formed. That’s how family is made. A work of the Holy Spirit is unity, unity.

Father Randy: When we pray together and for each other, we invite the Spirit in and he unites us. He brings that deeper unity. Earlier in the homily, I also spoke about those, you know, grandparents, those parents who’ve just experienced the pain of their children, grandchildren, leaving the faith. And to them in particular, I say, pray for your children, pray for your grandchildren, pray fervently for them, but also pray for those that God is giving you here in your parish family. Let the Lord console your heart through them.

Father Randy: Ultimately, of course, our goal is to be able to pray for our spiritual family just as fervently as we pray for our biological family because we have been made one in Jesus. He has commanded us to love one another as he has loved us. And that starts here with this parish. It starts with each other here. If we can’t love each other, we can’t love anyone else out there. And so we have to put it into practice now to be cultivating the spirit, cultivating those bonds, those relationships.

Father Randy: So let us stand by one another and support each other.