This Sunday’s first reading, from the Book of Proverbs, contains an invitation that anticipates the great gift which Jesus will make to the Church in the gift of His Body and Blood— “Come, eat my food and drink of the wine….” Since the pandemic, throughout the world, it seems that people have lost sight of the importance of this great invitation. I regret to say, some of the changes in attitude towards the importance of the obligation to attend Sunday Mass, had to do with the message that people might have interpreted Church closures and restrictions in numbers, during these extraordinary conditions, to mean that attendance at Sunday Mass in normal circumstances was not important. However, as we hear Jesus say categorically in this Sunday’s Gospel, “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink of His Blood, you do not have life within you,” it is important to emphasize just how crucially important our reception of the Eucharist at Sunday Mass really is to our faith life and our relationship to Christ and His Church. Continue reading →

I always like it when I can start a homily with a good story. I like it even more when I can start a homily with a really good Bible story; and when it comes to Bible stories, they do not get much better than the story about the prophet Elijah.

At a very difficult time in the history of Israel, Elijah was called by God to be a profit and bring God’s message to the people. At the time Elijah was called, the nation was being ruled by an evil King and Queen by the name of Ahab and Jezebel. They had brought false gods into the worship of the country and had taken to worshiping the false god Baal, who was thought to be the god of rain, thunder, lightening, and dew. Elijah was called to tell the people of Israel that there would be a drought for as long as they were unfaithful to the true and living God. Because Baal was thought to be in charge of the rain, for Elijah to claim that the true God had power over it, was a direct challenge to Baal’s authority. Continue reading →