The Emmaus Pastorate’s Podcast

Homily from 11-3-24

It's National Vocations Awareness Week in the United States, and it's a good thing too!  We need to think about from where our next priests, brothers, sisters, and deacons will come.  In your house, do you talk about the lack of priests and the decreasing numbers of religious brothers and sisters?  Without priests especially, there will be no Eucharist!  But take the question a bit farther, and mix it with our Gospel reading today about the greatest commandments.  If we love God with our whole heart, soul, mind, and strength, we must also love our neighbors as ourselves.  What does that look like in your world?  Loving God more than anything else can be very tricky in today's world with so much competition for our time and energy.  And the polarization and division in our culture make it very easy not to love our neighbor as we should.  So how is God calling you to serve him today and in your life?

All Souls Day Homily 2024

Death does not have the final word.  We as Catholics, like anyone else in the world, mourn the loss of our friends and family members.  Grieving is a human thing to do - even Jesus mourned when Lazarus died!  But we also remember that St. Paul writes that our baptism is a death in itself; we who are baptized in Christ are baptized into his resurrection.  So while life on this earth will eventually end and with that comes sadness, we have a promise of a life everlasting thanks to the sacrifice of Christ on the cross and his resurrection.  So we gather every All Souls Day to remember those who have died, to pray for them and the repose of their souls, and to pray for us who long to join them.  And we remember that the final word is not death's but rather Christ's, and his word is "Alleluia!"

All Saints Day Homily 2024

Many of us think All Saints Day is time to worship or pray to the saints.  Others think  there's no way we could ever be as holy and worthy of heaven as those saints were, so why bother trying?  But actually the Solemnity of All Saints is a time to examine the lives of all the saints, both those bearing the title Saint and those who also reside in heaven but who haven't been given the title, and ask ourselves what we can learn from their lives.  Every saint shows us the way to eternal life and provides an example of how to live here on earth in God-fearing ways.  Those ways boil down to two words that we don't usually like in today's culture: sacrifice and surrender.  If we sacrifice our lives for the sake of others' and surrender the things we want to the things Jesus wants for us, heaven's gates will surely be open to us when we arrive!

What do you want me to do for you? Homily from 10-27-24

In the Emmaus Pastorate this weekend, we celebrated the Sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick after hearing the Gospel story of Jesus curing the man born blind.  All he wanted was to see, and when Jesus asks him pointedly, "What do you want me to do for you?" the man plainly replied, "Lord, I want to see."  Today, though many of us are not blind, Jesus asks us the same question, "What do you want me to do for you?"  What's your answer?

Be the GOAT!

They wanted to be the GOAT!  The Greatest Of All Time!  Or at least they wanted to sit next to him when he's the GOAT.  The problem is that to become the greatest, we first have to go through a series of trials, tribulations, sufferings, and hardships.  Jesus calls these "drinking the cup he will drink" and "being baptized with the baptism with which he will be baptized."  As we see in Jesus' final days of mortal life, becoming the GOAT is not easy task!  We can't just ask for it; it won't just be given to us.  He even went through beatings, crucifixion, and death for it!  But that's the way we become great, isn't it, enduring all the pain and suffering of life for Jesus' sake?  And of course the reward is totally worth it in the end!

Homily from 10-13-24

Sacrifice.  It's a word we don't like to hear and one that many of us probably misunderstand.  What does it mean to sacrifice?  What have we sacrificed for our faith, for Christ?  Make no mistake: Christ sacrificed everything for us, even dying so that we might have eternal life.  What can we do in return?  Let's reexamine what it means to sacrifice for him, those around us, and our faith in 2024.

Homily from 10-6-24

Intimate and affective.  That's the kind of relationship Christ wants with his church.  It's the same kind of relationship a bride shares with her groom for the whole of their lives.  As we begin Respect Life Month and hear readings of marriage this weekend, Fr. John Haugen gives us an overview of the Church's teaching on marriage and annulments.

Homily from 9-28-24

Homily on 9-22-24

Great vs. Greatest?  Who's the greatest, Jesus?  Well the disciples were too ashamed to actually asked him the question, but they were thinking it!  And, honestly, we think it sometimes too (maybe more often that we'd care to admit).  But trying to rank ourselves against each other doesn't exactly sew seeds of peace.  St. James reminds us that "the the fruit of righteousness is sown in peace for those who cultivate peace."  So if you want tranquility, greatness, unity, or peace, sew some peace!

Homily & Music from the 175th Anniversary of St. Joseph Parish - 9/15/24

"Who do you say that I am?"  Jesus asked his disciples that question, and they had some legitimate answers.  But then Jesus asks them personally, individually: Who do YOU say that I am?  Catholics in Elkader, Iowa have been asking themselves that for 175 years this fall.  From the earliest beginnings in the 1840s and the establishment of the parish to the building of two rock churches, from the construction and deconstruction of schools to the many outreach ministries present today, the Catholic Church in Elkader has seen good times and bad.  Throughout its storied history though, and in a myriad of ways, St. Joseph has demonstrated who Jesus is: the center of our community.  Happy 175th anniversary to St. Joseph Parish!  Ad multos annos! 

Also included in today's episode is the St. Joseph Choir singing Jubilee Song, a piece written by St. Joseph's former pastor, Rev. Paul Peters, on the occasion of the Year 2000.  Becky Gundacker is featured playing the organ.  Ending today's episode is the Choir singing Is He Worthy? by Andrew Peterson and Ben Shive, arranged by Heather Sorenson.  It features soloist John Uhal.  Both pieces are accompanied by Kristin Fitzgerald and conducted by John Uhal.