The Emmaus Pastorate’s Podcast

Bonus: Homily from 11-17-24

Fr. Dave Ambrosy visited St. Mary Parish this weekend, and left us a message for these last days of Ordinary Time.  As we prepare for the end of the liturgical year and the coming season of Advent, are we prepared?  Are we ready for the coming of Christ at the end of time.  It's something to think about as we enter these last and first weeks!

Homily from 11-17-24

To whom are you faithful?  As we near the end of the church's liturgical year, we can ask ourselves whether or not we're ready for the end.  During these last few weeks, we hear scripture passages about the end times, the eschaton, the second coming of Christ.  We get to ask ourselves as the year ends and as a new one (beginning with the season of Advent) begins: To whom are we faithful?  Especially when the going gets tough, when life gets hard, frustrating, or maybe scary and unknown, do we keep our faith, hope, and trust in the God?  Maybe that's a good thing to think about this Advent!

Homily from 11-10-24

Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.  That was the lesson of last week's Gospel reading when Jesus gave us the greatest commandments.  (Oh, and don't forget loving your neighbor as yourself!)  This week the tables turn a bit, as have the political realities in our governments.  Now we're asked to trust God entirely, no matter what the circumstance.  Trust that he will always provide for our every need.  Why would God do that?  Because God loves US with his whole heart, soul, mind, and strength!  Will you let him?

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.