Readings: Psalm 25 Your ways, O LORD, make known to me; teach me Your paths,
guide me in Your truth and teach me, for You are God my savior….because of Your goodness, O LORD.
show us poor sinners the way… In our humbling ourselves, find your just servant to be taught to live Your Way. Philippians 2 Father: Help us to the same attitude that is in Christ Jesus… Who emptied himself, taking the role of a servant. Matthew 21 Jesus said — A man had two sons. He came to the first and said, ‘Son, go out and work in the vineyard today.’ He said in reply, ‘I will not,’ but afterwards changed his mind and went. The man came to the other son and gave the same order. He said in reply, ‘Yes, sir, ‘but did not go. Which of the two did his father’s will?” They answered, “The first.”
Today I talk to you first of the reluctant-in-spirit people in the sheepfold, and then, secondly, I mention who are the five USA Catholic men named “blessed” by the Church, in our 250 year history–who were men far from reluctant but all in with faith for the Church and Jesus.
We are not meant to be reluctant disciples of Christ, but rather to be ones much more in a practice of faith. This means learning to be more agreeable to God’s will in us for holiness in our own person, and then also being agreeable for His good purposes to serve a Church striving to be holy. That’s the Vineyard plan, but The Lord has to deal with our reluctance for this holiness in us. + Matthew chapter 21’s parable gives us an example of a reluctant disciple, as Jesus’ story tells us of a “first son” who is quite reluctant to do His Father’s work in the vineyard, but then it points out that this son would change his mind and go and do The Father’s work. That’s better than a promise made by the second son to work, but who never carried it out. The lesson here is that The Lord knows He has to deal with the reluctance, hesitancy and even some lack of faith with His disciples—like this first son of the parable—or with most of us—for when we are not all so fast and ready to follow and do His will. The parable teaches that God will wait on us, prodding our will, to help turn our attention and trust back to Him. + God then waits on our response. He will take and accept what openness we do offer Him for His primacy in our lives. We just must get to this agreeable spirit with God. (Help us, O Spirit!) God’s plan is for our becoming His saints in Light.
Reluctance often is there due to fear, of being afraid to make a good surrender of trust to God. In the Bible, this is the area called “timidity.” A Bible verse that has spoken with conviction to me about this through the years is 2 Timothy 1:7. Do you know it? I first learned it in the New American Standard Bible version: “For God has not given us a spirit of timidity, but of power and love and discipline.” That Scripture should get personalized by every disciple of Christ. For God calls us out of fear and into faith. In the spiritual realm, we are not to be of the timid manner, or worse, of not to be of the cowardice manner (which is how the NAB bible names it in 2 Tim. 1:7 “God does not give us a spirit of cowardice.”) We are to be the son (or daughter) who wholeheartedly says “Yes” to God. Reluctance may be a weakness we have—but it is meant to be dealt with—for conversion of our lives. Without getting too scrupulous about it, can you pray to God to show you any reluctance that’s going on in your life with Him—that needs a holy change? St. Paul wrote to the Romans on this topic, saying: “Are you selling out to a spirit of fear and slavery to sin again, when you have been adopted as sons/daughters by Abba Father?”(8:15) So today’s gospel tells us that the highlight of the parable is the change of mind and action by the first son. He left his reluctant attitude and went to a faith one. A good change.
Indeed, God does not want milquetoast disciples, for it is an oxymoron—that those He has given power, love and discipline in their hearts would go weak and wimpy. God does not want a milquetoast Church. As you heard in the Philippians reading today, we are meant to each encourage one another all the better as we go along.”)
Let us go to part two of the homily. I’d like to provide models of great faith. I’ll use one prophet and then take 5 great Catholics born in the USA over our 250 years to be of models of faith for us.
Let’s go to Micah the prophet. I love how Micah the prophet spoke of his growth of faith—to stand up as inspired in the Lord and say: “But as for me, I am filled with power, with the spirit of the LORD, with justice and with might; (and I will) declare to Jacob his crimes and to Israel his sins—you who abhor justice and prevent all that is right.” It’s in Micah 3:8-9. Micah spoke with daring clarity and conviction to a sin-crazed people who were supposed to be the holy Jewish nation + This Micah of 735 b.c. could be equally speaking to Christians in 2026 who are not acting as disciples of The Lord, but who have fallen to some sorry, compromised life—taken in by more fears followed than by faith. Who, then, are mostly out of the mission of Jesus and The Church “Vineyard.” They can be known as persons hard to get a commitment from.
Five great “blessed” men of the Church, who were born in the USA, are those handful of men who are at that rank heading to canonization. They are Blessed Solanus Casey, the humble Capuchin porter of Detroit….then, Blessed Michael McGivney, the parish priest who founded the Knights of Columbus up in New Haven. Two more were USA Catholics martyred in Guatamala. There is Blessed Stanley Rother, the Oklahoma priest, trained at Mt. St. Mary’s Seminary in Emmitsburg, who was a heroic missionary martyr in Guatemala, as well as was Blessed James Alfred Miller, the Wisconsin religious brother who also was killed in Guatemala while serving young people. You should learn about four “blesseds.” They could encourage you, and now as of a few days ago, the fifth “blessed” USA-born American named by the Church has become Fulton Sheen. He was an Illinois man who’d become a priest in 1919, then go on to be a scholar, then was a teacher at Catholic University in DC for 23 years, and then became greatly involved in Catholic broadcasting, much of it in his life as a New York bishop.
I’ll just share a few brief things about Sheen. I saw much of the mark he made on our society. He was for a long time America’s greatest evangelist– even on NBC Tv for a while. As he preached and lived the gospel, I think that he definitely had a charism of being encouraging to others, and he always gave them the true teaching of The Faith—no compromised, watered-down type. I felt uplifted when watching or listening to his famous live programs and recorded ones. I also saw him in person a few times, since he was the bishop of Rochester N.Y. at the time I lived there at St. Joseph’s parish and school. He was inspiring! Sheen had some influence later in my youth to choose radio-tv-theatre as a college major and high-school prep interest. I went into that field. I also wanted that path because of how I could be of encouragement to others, like him, but in whatever way God used me in it. Surely I was not to become a coast-to-coast evangelist priest, but in what I did end up doing, getting directed to priesthood, I wanted the zeal that I saw in Sheen and others. The epistle today exhorts: “If there be any encouragement in Christ that you can live and do, then live it firmly.” Sheen did not let reluctance side-line him at all. He lived by faith. He learned his Catholic faith well, and His Lord Jesus well—and encouraged and taught a nation to be good disciples of The Lord. ###
I like what a person said of Sheen this past week: “He may have been the first great Catholic influencer. Not in the cheap sense of chasing attention or cultivating a brand, but in the nobler sense: he converted attention into evangelization. He demonstrated that a microphone, a camera, a chalkboard, and a printing press could become instruments of grace. He wasn’t a comedian, movie star or political animal—but someone pointing to Jesus Christ, as THE hope and light for the world. And the USA listened and watched. When he won an Emmy award for the tv work, Life Is Worth Living, he famously thanked his four “writers” for the show: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Sheen was humorous that way, but has there ever been better use of tv than Sheen’s communications?! I think maybe not. Not yet. Many months ago, Father Virginus and I took to a beach house for a Sunday night through Thursday, for a self-directed retreat from Bishop Fulton Sheen’s recordings. I was a stirring week of ten hour-long audio talks. Here’s a quote from Sheen we heard: “In almost nine cases out of ten, those who have once had the Faith but now reject it, or claim that it does not make sense, are driven not by reasoning but by the selfish sinful ways they are living.” Yes, it’s true. Reluctance to be a disciple of Jesus, via timidity or cowardice, is a retreat from faith and the stepping smack into the filth of fear.
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