27th Sunday in Ordinary Time--Liturgical Cycle C

Lectionary Readings
Reading I: Habakkuk 1:2-3; 2:2-4
Responsorial Psalm: Psalm 95:1-2, 6-7, 8-9 (8)
Reading II: 2 Timothy 1:6-8, 13-14
Gospel: Luke 17:5-10

Homily
Today is the first Sunday of our parish Renew 2000 and the first week of our small group prayer meetings. As a community of God’s people, all of us in this first phase of six weeks are called to a meditation on our relationship to God, to one another and to all creation.

Our Liturgies for the four Sundays of October focus on the virtue of faith, which is another way of saying “on our relationship with God and all creation.” In fact, I like to call it an “Octoberfest” of Faith. Each Sunday we will be presented with various aspects of our Faith, of our relationship with God, with one another, and all things.

“Good (just) people,” the prophet Habakkuk writes today, “are vital people because of their faith,” are alive with zest because of their relationship with their God and His creation. And Paul states, “Guard the rich deposit of Faith,” that rich gift which has been passed on to us, which makes a person “strong, loving and wise.” And in the Gospel the prayer of the apostles rings in our hearts, “Lord, increase our Faith,” increase our getting along with God, with one another, and with all of God’s wondrous works.

Sometimes we get the word “faith” mixed up with what rather than who we believe in. We tend to think that the virtue of faith is all those things we recite, like in the Act of Faith or the Apostle’s Creed or Mass on Sundays and the like. But the virtue of Faith is a relationship with our God, how God fits into our lives—or rather how we fit into God’s life.

The faith of the scriptures is an affair of the heart before it can ever become a matter of the intellect. A person can get “A’s” in all their religion classes and never really come to commune with God as Creator or Jesus as one’s Lord and Savior or the Spirit as Life.

We come to really know someone by living with them, as in a family. Knowing about someone is not the same thing as knowing the person. It is through the family of the Church that we come to experience God and to be in a relationship with him. And this is what we mean by the virtue of Faith, our relationship with God and one another.

In the second reading today, Paul reminds Timothy that this faith experience began in his life when he, Paul, acting in the Spirit, ordained him by the laying on of hands. Paul touched him. Timothy was touched, was influenced, thus teaching us that Faith is not only a faith in the person of Jesus but that very faith, that very relationship, is to be passed on through a faithfilled people. We are called to touch one another with the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Jesus.

As we stand on the threshold of a gigantic religious revival, a renewal effort beginning today, to which all of our nearly 200,000 Catholic people in this central part of Kentucky are called to participate.

Like the apostles who prayed “Lord, increase our faith,” we pray for an increase, a deepening, of our relationship with our God by increasing, by deepening our communion with one another. Let your hand touch our hearts, O God, that we might fulfill our role of “giver of the Spirit” as well as “receiver of the Spirit.”

Through our “faith sharing,” the sharing of our relationship with God and one another, we will be the instrument for others coming to deepen their faith, deepen their relationship with the divine persons, and they in turn shall lay their hands, shall touch, us so that the spirit will mold and form us all into a people who are “strong, loving and wise.
--Fr. Pat

Excerpt from "A Catholic's Companion: Liturgical Cycle C" (c)2000 C. Patrick Creed
Published by Watchmaker Press. Maggie Hettinger, editor