His Excellency,
The Most Reverend Edward K. Braxton, Ph.D., S.T.D.
Diocese of Belleville
Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
August 10, 2025, 11:00 AM Mass
St. Theresa Parish
“Our Faith in God and God’s Faith in Us”
(This is the text as originally written. During the actual delivery, some passages were omitted and other comments were added spontaneously. Nota bene: This text has not been thoroughly proofread. Therefore, there may be errors in spelling, grammar and punctuation.)
Dear Sisters and Brothers in Christ,
“Don’t you think it’s harder to have faith these days than it used to be?” Without introducing herself to me, the grey-haired lady sitting next to me in the crowded economy section of a night flight from Washington to Paris, continued, “I’m sort of a fallen away Catholic and since you are obviously a priest, I thought I would ask you this question based on my personal experience.” (Unlike many priests, I almost always travel dressed as a priest wearing my Roman collar.) I folded up my Sunday New York Times and braced myself for a long night of questions about the Christian faith, with little hope of getting much sleep.
Christian faith is the concern of our second reading from Hebrews 11:1-2, 8-12. We do not know who wrote the letter. Nor do we know exactly who “the Hebrews” are. Scholars have rejected the view that it was written by St. Paul. The letter, written in eloquent Greek, was probably written to a group of educated Jewish converts to Christianity who were beginning to doubt their faith in Christ. The author sets out to show that Christianity surpasses the faith of Judaism. It may have been written to persuade Jewish Christians to persevere in faith at a time when some believers were considering turning back to Judaism to escape being persecuted for embracing Jesus as the Messiah.
This morning’s reading begins with the words, “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, and evidence of things not seen.” These words stress that faith is a confident expectation that the teachings of Jesus will be fulfilled and a firm belief in realities that we cannot see with our human eyes. The writer is telling Jewish Christians that by faith believers can grasp and understand spiritual realities that are not obvious. He argues that true faith leads to trusting in God so completely that a person strives to live a life following the teaching of Jesus Christ, no matter what!
The women on the plane seemed to think faith was mainly about praying to God for things she needed and expecting a positive answer to her prayers. Sadly, her son was addicted to heroin. She went to Mass daily praying that God would give him the strength to overcome his addiction. Periodically, he would stop using drugs and when he did, she would rejoice thanking God for what seemed like a miracle. But he relapsed again and again until he died from an overdose leaving behind his wife and two young children. His mother’s sadness led to depression; depression led to anger with God for not answering her prayers. Eventually, she concluded that either God would not or could not answer her prayers. Gradually she drifted away from her faith.
Are some of you like my companion on the plane? You pray and pray every day for good things to happen in the world. But most of the time your prayers do not seem to be answered. Does this force you to conclude that miracles are very rare, that God does not ordinarily intervene and fix the world? But unlike my companion, you persevere in faith. Or is faith for you primarily a personal relationship with God through Jesus Christ giving you the confidence and the assurance that God is journeying with you through life so that no matter what happen to you, your family, your country, or the world, God never abandons you and God did not abandon the grieving mother whose son overdosed. Did she abandon God? Still, there is no easy answer to her question.
It is almost impossible for a person to grow in faith all alone. Faith in Christ flourish with others, in a holy communion. As Jesus said, “Where three or more of you are gathered in my name, there am I in your midst.” These words remind us that Christian faith is primary born of a personal relationship with Christ. As Catholics, we affirm doctrines like the divinity of Christ, the mystery of the Trinity, the resurrection, and the hope of eternal life. But our faith is not primarily a matter of sitting down with a book of arguments about these beliefs and thinking very hard about the arguments and convincing ourselves that they are true. Because no matter how many books we read about the truth of Christianity, there are just as many books arguing that Christianity is NOT true. This exclusively intellectual approach to faith can easily get us entangled in the false opposition between faith and reason. Faith is as much a matter of the heart as it is a matter of the mind.
One of our reasons for gathering for Sunday Mass is to grow in faith by meditating on the scripture and receiving the Body and Blood of Christ united with others who believe as we do. Your children and grandchildren will only grow in faith if you do all you can to encourage them to join you for Mass regularly. They need your example if you want them to go to confession often. You must talk to them about your personal faith and why living each day as a Christian is important to you. It is unlikely that our young people will live authentic Christian lives as adults if parents do not show their children that their family truly is a domestic or household church. This is done by simple things: Praying before and after meals, praying night prayers, reading scripture, learning about the lives of the saints, praying the family rosary, and insisting that family members treat all people with love and concern as Christ Himself did. These practices were once common in Catholics homes. But, today, not so much.
Your children and grandchildren will also learn about and experience the Christian faith by your example of reconciling differences in your family. Jesus teaches us, “If your sister or brother acts in a way that harms the Christian community, then go to them and point out their wrongdoing, just between the two of you. If they listen to you, you have won them over. But if they will not listen, take one or two others along, so that every part of the situation can be established by the testimony of witnesses. If they still refuse to listen, tell it to the church community.” (Matthew, 18: 15-17) Jesus does not say if you think someone has harmed the community, ignore that person and go and tell other people about it so that others may falsely judge the person. Jesus tells us to speak to the person privately and seek reconciliation one on one. It takes faith to trust the workings of the Christian community, to trust that Christ is present in your honest conversation with the person who may have harmed the community. Christ is not present in gossip! Christ is not present in slanderous conversation behind the back of a member of the Christian community!
What if, paradoxically, faith is as much about what God believes about us as it is what we believe about God? What if God’s faith in us is His call to each of us to live our faith as fully as we can in our individual life journey? Could it be that faith is mysteriously as much about God’s faith in each of us as it is about our faith in God? Perhaps it was God’s faith in Abraham that enabled him to set out for a new homeland even when he did not know where he was going.
Dear Sisters and Brothers in Christ:
Do you think that God has faith in you? Do you think that God has faith in your family? Do you think that God has faith in St. Theresa’s Parish? Does God have faith in the human race?
As you know, Wednesday, August 6th, the Feast of the Transfiguration of the Lord, was the 80th anniversary of that terrible day in 1945 when the United States, in an effort to end the Second World War, dropped the first atomic bomb on the Japanese city Hiroshima and yesterday, August 9th on Nagasaki causing unspeakable suffering and death for hundreds of thousands of innocent people. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the genius physicist who led the Manhattan Project which developed the bomb, pondered what he had wrought, “Now I am become Death. I am the destroyer of worlds.” (Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita) After the war, President Harry Truman conceded, “These bombs are not military weapons but weapons of mass destruction that destroy life indiscriminately.”
Many people of faith may pray to God asking that our fierce modern conflicts will not lead to World War III, a nuclear war of mutual mass destruction. But in the light of history, it seems unlikely that God will intervene and prevent nuclear war any more than he intervened and prevented the son of the woman on the plane from overdosing. God is not God the way we would be God if we were God. What if God has placed His faith in the human race? What if God is counting on us to be peace makers? Has God not given each of us a conscience to discern good from evil, right from wrong? Has God not given a conscience to the president of Israel, the leaders of Hamas in the Gazza, the president of Ukraine, the president of Russia, the president of the United States? Has God not given the nations of the world the knowledge and the skills needed to engage in dialogue, to compromise, to be reconciled, and to resolve conflicts peacefully, without deadly violence. Has God not shown His faith in us by already giving us in Jesus Christ all we need to create peace on earth?
Are we human beings willing to live not only by our faith in God but also by God’s faith in us?
Are you and I willing to live not only by our faith in God but also by God’s faith in us?
Praised be Jesus Christ. Both now and forever. Amen.