Does God listen? Homily for Sunday, October 5, 2025

We pray for peace in Gaza, but violence continues. We see people suffering from hunger and malnutrition, and yet the hungry remain despite our prayers. We pray and pray for illness to be healed, relationships to be reconciled, but brokenness remains. Readings for today.

Does God listen?

Increase our faith. Imagine the situation of the apostles in today’s gospel. They have just heard Jesus admonish them not to be the person that causes another to sin. He tells people that it would be better to have a millstone around their neck and to be tossed into the sea.

Now a millstone was used to grind grain. It was actually two stones, a larger stone on the top that did the grinding and a smaller one who helped the larger stone to turn. Millstones were heavy and very hard to use.

As a result, a millstone is a good metaphor for the challenges that come when we examine the world in which we live. The question for each of us to consider our personal witness to being a disciple of Jesus. But our witness is a paradox. On the one hand, we are to help those around us by challenging them when their witness is one that leads others to sin. That is not easy.

In religious life, there is a part of our life that is called fraternal correction. In my experience of religious life, limited as it is, I have found we face two unhelpful extremes. On the one hand, and I think it’s particularly true of Dominicans, we are very likely to avoid any confrontation. On the other hand, when we become too focused on confronting, only focusing on those qualities in others we find unpleasant in our own life, we are unhelpful.

In fact, we need to remember that all good we can do depends on God’s grace. In every way, we are dependent upon God and God’s goodness. And so to walk the extremes of this paradox, when to challenge and when to forgive, we must have open hearts ready to hear the voice of God.

But this dependence upon God is manifest in our own lives in another way in the readings today. All around us, we seem to have the very things mentioned in today’s first reading from Habakkuk.

“How long, O Lord? I cry for help, but you do not listen. I cry out to you, ‘Violence!’ but you do not intervene. Why do you let me see ruin? Why must I look upon misery? Destruction and violence are before me. There is strife and clamorous discord.”

We probably know feelings just like this in our own lives, too. We pray for peace in Gaza, but violence continues. We see people suffering from hunger and malnutrition, and yet the hungry remain, despite our prayers. We pray and pray for illness to be healed, relationships to be reconciled, but it can appear that God does not listen.

What is the advice of Habakkuk? To remember the vision. To remember the plan that God has set before us. We are beloved sons and daughters of God. Our life here, while important, is not the final destination for any of us. We long to see the vision realized where lion will lie down with lamb, child will play safely in the cobra den, those days when the hungry will have their fill.

Habakkuk reminds us of the following very important statement, “For the vision still has its time.” Think of that. The promise of God is the vision of the kingdom of God, and this vision still today has its time.

Do you believe this? Does the vision still ring true for us in our lives, despite the challenges of everything around us that seems difficult and wrong?

One hundred years ago today, October 4th, the first mass was celebrated in this church building. One hundred years. One hundred years of Mass. One hundred years of baptisms, weddings, and funerals.

Why do church buildings matter? Why do we invest in them? Why is it that for centuries churches have been places where we come to be reminded of God? To bring ourselves in happy times and in sad times, to bring ourselves to a church building to remind ourselves that everything does not depend upon us.

When parents brought babies to be baptized, it was a reminder of the closeness of God, the promise of vocation, and the guidance to form a child into a disciple.

When couples arrived at the church to answer their vocation to make real, through total self-gift inspired by God’s love for the church, to be married, the Christ who gave himself totally on the cross was the goal of every married couple.

When we remember those families who came here sad when they were called to bury a loved one, we remember the importance of a church building. When questions arose about what it meant now that the loved one had died, we gathered here to be loved and supported by others so that we could once again realize we are not alone.

This church was the place where we sought to hear and understand what it is that God wants from us. To know so deeply that we are loved by God that we can love others. To take the lessons learned here in this building out into the world by the way we live.

Habakkuk today describes a world not much different than our own. Wars, acts of terrorism, examples of our inhumanity to others, poverty, illness, brokenness.

But 100 years of faith in this church building reminds us that above all else, we can be forgiven because we are loved more than we can know. We can be saved and we can experience and know the love that God has for each one of us.

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