LATEST HOMILY
22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time
August 31, 2025

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Focus: It is only fitting to take the lowly place to be seated on High with Christ. 

Function: Practice learning to take the lowest place not only for an eternal reward in Heaven, but as obligation to be Christ for others.  

Am African Proverb on Heaven and Hell

Humility is a beautiful thing. And it always sounds good when we talk about. Or ask for it in prayer, but when we put it into practice we realize, the reality we thought we had was only the ideal. Humility out of all the virtues given to us by Christ, is one of the hardest to follow. Because in becoming humble, we are called to put away our pride and take the highroad of humility. And humility is a high road because we are called to rise above the self. But to rise above the self we have to become poor and lowly. Not compromising our human dignity. Jesus never vouches for this. But we are challenged to become servants and receivers, to both situations and people that may challenge us. And that is where Jesus makes it hard. When we have to give or be open to situations or people, that just rub us the wrong way. 

Low Road = High Road

Here is the catch or the question we must place before us? What do we lose in being charitable and humble to a person we may not like? Nothing but rather we gain everything! But what do we lose in being prideful and arrogant and, close minded to those persons Jesus challenges to love. Everything and it may be too late to gain anything! When we decide to be cold, prideful and arrogant, and walk about with a superiority complex. God will do more than humble us. He will show us that with each prideful step we make, we walk further and further away from Him. How can someone who is pride and arrogant and also, suffer from delusions of Grandier, think that they are in communion with the God, who decided to become weak and be brutally murdered, like a criminal? How can someone who does not regard the poor and the broken hearted and not just on the street but in their own homes and families. Claim to know Christ. When Christ is fully present in those hurting individuals they don’t speak with? It does not make sense. That is why Jesus separates the sheep from the goats in Mathew’s Gospel. Because the goats are the ones who misunderstood Jesus or though they got Him!

Thinking that the word GOAT: Greatest, Of, All, Time, as we hear in so many sporting arenas is the way of God. But this is not of the Lord my friends and it never has been. Though it may sound wonderful. It is a dangerous acrimony to live by. Because it sets an individual on a pedestal that could fall at any time. Humility is the highest road to take because, lowliness of heart elevates the mind and heart to God. It removes earthly thinking by becoming as low, as the earth. Putting into reality that we dust and to dust we shall return. But even though it is to dust we shall return. We are welcomed into God’s Kingdom with Glory. That when we take the lowly road. We are at the same time ascending on High Road too.

Rags to Riches. 

The reason we are called to take the lowly place. To serve others and not to be served is because that, is what we are made for. The only way we know our true potential, and to come to encounter the goodness that, God placed in us is if we humble ourselves, and let God bring out the beauty that was planted, in the soul. Humility is the core value behind the African proverb my friends. When we humble ourselves to feed others, Even if we don’t want to feed them. Then God will feed us to the grace to do more, then we could ever imagine. But when we starve the soul of humility and feed it, with pride. Then the soul will grow weak under the burden of worldly character, and eventually die of spiritual famine. See it this way. What is consider rags in eyes of world is riches in the eyes of God my friends. And what is considered riches in the eyes of the world will leave us in rags. 

Amen!