Sermon on the Range with Fr. Bryce Lungren
(August 17th Sunday Homily)
Readings:
Reading 1 — Jeremiah 38:4-6, 8-10
Psalm — Psalm 40:2, 3, 4, 18
Reading 2 — Hebrews 12:1-4
Gospel — Luke 12:49-53
Transcript:
A rather fiery gospel this morning. You can hear the passion in our Lord’s words. I’ve come to set the earth on fire and how I wish it were already blazing. I don’t think I’ve come to establish peace on the earth. I tell you not peace, but rather division. He goes on to speak of that reality. It’s a passionate fiery gospel and you get kind of caught up in the drama of it.
There is one line that really stands out to me that we kind of maybe just brush over a little bit within this. It’s a little bit of a key to the rest of our readings today. That’s where our Lord says, there is a baptism with which I must be baptized and how great is my anguish until it is accomplished. We’ve heard that language before and it’s easy to deduce what our Lord is talking about, you know, His passion, His cross.
He speaks of that as a baptism in different ways. Think of James and John, I want to sit one to your right, one to your left. Can you be baptized with the baptism I am going to be baptized? They say yes, right? He’s pointing to his own suffering and passion and theirs as well. That’s the baptism he’s talking about, his cross. Jesus is passionate about the cross, but he’s also filled with anguish.
How great is my anguish until it is accomplished? We forget our Lord is human. He’s on a mission, but he has the human emotions of struggle, despair to some degree. I wouldn’t say despair, that’s going probably too far. Distress, the distress of what lies ahead of him. Even as he’s passionate, he’s struggled. He’s got this anguish going on within him, this tension.
Our Lord handles this well, but I think he can show us how to handle the whole anguish in our lives as well when we’re just not sure how to roll with life. Jeremiah is another guy who’s stuck in anguish. They’re the first reading. They lowered the guy into a cistern and his feet were stuck in mud. He was stuck in the mud. There was not a lot of hope for Jeremiah in that scene. If I’m in a cistern stuck in the mud, I’m in anguish. I don’t have a lot of hope for what’s gonna come around.
How do we have hope in the middle of human anguish, the midst of distress, with struggles in life? I think it’s a good thing right now, because we’re in this Jubilee year of hope, and that whole theme is to not trust in human optimism, but to trust in divine providence, that providence always prevails. That’s hope, that’s Christian hope. We want to have that.
How do we have it in the midst of being Jeremiah and our Lord in this kind of uncertainty stuff? Our Lord shows us the way, as the book of Hebrews says, Jesus is the pioneer and perfecter of our faith. When we focus on our Lord, he can show us how to handle these different dispositions in life, such as anguish and have hope through them. So again, the letter of the Hebrews, super clear letter, helps us in a lot of different ways.
Here’s the key. the sake of the joy that lie ahead of him, Christ endured the cross. Jesus in this anguish, he wasn’t focused on his death. He was focused on the resurrection. That’s the whole key, to look through the anguish to the hope on the other side, whatever that is. Jesus is God, he had the full picture. It says, even this line, how great is my anguish until it is accomplished.
He’s has full knowledge. I’m gonna suffer, die, all this, but I’m gonna be raised. He’s got that knowledge. There’s not an uncertainty of how the outcome is gonna be. He knows it. That’s a key that he has that we don’t, but we do have faith. All so Jesus, he looks through the cross to the resurrection. That’s what we’re after. In English, we can have hope that God will bring us through this. How this looks, I don’t know. I don’t know what Jeremiah thought stuck in the mud. I don’t know if he knew how this was going to turn out, but I bet he had hope that God will prevail in some way, shape or form. Even if he died, justice will prevail. Eternal life awaits us who have faith. We can always find hope if we look through the suffering to what lies ahead, which we might not even know. So again, think about last week, again, letter to the Hebrews. What the author say faith was?
Faith is the realization of what is hoped for. I’m sitting here stuck in the mud, I’m despairing, I don’t have hope. That’s the situation we can find ourselves in. What do we do? I don’t know what the outcome is, but I choose to have hope. I choose to have faith. I trust, Father, you will bring me through this. I don’t know what it looks like, I trust you will, and then all of a sudden, hope comes back in my life. I can be stuck in the mud and still have hope.
That’s what faith does for us. I’d say too, faith is a choice. It’s actually an intellectual virtue. It’s a choice. I choose to believe right now when I don’t feel like it. If I do that in the middle of anguish, in the middle of struggling, I can have hope. The Lord can give me hope that he will bring us through it. Anyone here bid on the struggle bus? We all have. Did God pull you through? Yeah. He’s faithful. He’s done in the past and he can do it again.
If we find ourselves in anguish and distress, choose to have faith. Choose to believe that God will bring me through this and then hope comes in my life and we’re good, whatever the situation is. Our Lord shows us he’s perfect, he’s fully God, fully man, but yet he wrestled with human emotions like anguish and he shows us how to get through them. Again, it’s that faith for the joy that lie ahead of him, Christ endured the cross. If we have faith in time of anguish, trusting that God’s providence will prevail. Then we can have hope in the present moment, whatever our situation is.
