“For where your treasure is, there also will your heart be.” Those are some challenging words. What do we value most in our life? Most of us have ready answers, and many will say that our relationship with Jesus is the most important thing. Our actions though, reveal to us what is most important. What is the first thing we do in the morning? Do we begin the morning with Jesus? Or do we grab the cell phone to see if our games are ready to play or look for texts or likes? Is our goal for this life to spread the Gospel? Or do we want to be famous? Is being rich enough to stop working our focus? Maybe for some of us we have a list of goals that go something like “When I finish doing this, then I can be happy.” Or if “I could just win that lottery, then I could do the things that bring me joy.”
Joy begins right here. At the Altar of God. If our focus is on anything other than Jesus, if our daily goals don’t include Him first, we are like the stewards who weren’t prepared. We all fail at it, but we aren’t supposed to give up or just ignore it. We are supposed to begin right then. Because our body is the temple of God. Our hearts are His home. He is going to come again to judge the living and the dead. How will he find the state of that house? Will it be clean and filled with love and mercy? Or will it harbor all the other things in life we think will make us happy?
Part of the problem is we have this idea that the world gives us that we have to do all of these things each and every day to be happy and healthy. Take some time to meditate. Sleep at least 8 hours. Drink 8 glasses of water. Exercise 30 minutes every day. Go for a walk. Spend time with friends. Work to put food on the table. Cook all your meals because fast food isn’t healthy. That means you have to shop too, produce goes bad quickly so you need to get fresh fruit and veggies every few days. Spend quality time with your family. Eat dinner at the table. Read a book. Learn something new, another language or a useful skill. The list goes on and on. There are so many wonderful things to do, which aren’t bad in and of themselves, but they become so consuming that it is becoming popular to make bucket lists of the ones you just need to do before this life is over.
By the time we put all the things we want to do in there, there isn’t room for the things that are preparing us for Heaven. Prayer. Daily communion. Frequent confession. Holy reading. Pilgrimages. Sacred Silence. Morning and evening prayer. A daily examine. How do we schedule all of it? That is where it is revealed to us where our treasure is. Do we put the things of God in there and then work in the things we must do in this world? Or do we do it the other way around putting in the things we “want” to do, and then squeeze in a few minutes with God in between?
I think the better answer is that we need to begin to include God in every single thing we do. God doesn’t want us to stop living, and He doesn’t want us to be sour pickles frowning and full of misery. He just wants to be with us, in relationship with us, to journey by our side and help us when we struggle. Our day should reflect that. Beginning with a simple “good morning Jesus” before we do anything else can be a powerful reminder to the flesh that our life revolves around Jesus. Morning prayer just before we go for a walk, and then conversing with God as we travel to the store. Spending time with friends but also using it as a moment to show God’s love and mercy to them. That doesn’t mean we have to be ‘preaching’ at them the whole time, but steering our conversations away from gossip and toward uplifting thoughts and themes. And sometimes it means walking away when the conversation is taking a turn for the worse, letting them know we aren’t going to be a part of that.
Make no mistake, God will come again. For some of us, it could be today. We are not guaranteed tomorrow and with all the darkness in the world around us, all the diseases and viruses that the media tell us are going to get worse and worse, our hearts need to be prepared to meet Him. The greatest piece of advice I’ve ever been given, one that has been very hard to live up to, is a short statement. One that reminds us each day to put God first. One that reminds us that Jesus Christ will be coming as the Just Judge and that we need to be prepared for His arrival is simply this: Get ready. Be ready. Stay ready.
A homily for the 19th Sunday in Ordinary Time: August 7th, 2022