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There are two important themes that are very clear to me in our gospel. I’d like to share them with you.
First – Do what you say – Walk your talk. Connect what we do here in worship with our rituals to our everyday lives and our actions.
A chaplain on a battlefield came across a young man who was lying in a shell hole, seriously wounded, “Would you like me to read you something from this book, the Bible? He asked. “I’m so thirsty; I’d rather have a drink of water,” the soldier said. Hurrying away, the chaplain soon brought the water. Then the wounded man said, “Could you put something under my head?
The chaplain took off his overcoat, rolled it up, and gently placed it under the man’s head for a pillow. “Now,” said the suffering man, “if I had something over me – I’m cold.”
The chaplain immediately removed his jacket and put it over the wounded man to keep him warm. Then the soldier looked the chaplain in the eye and said, “If there’s anything in that book that makes a man do for another all that you have done for me, then please read it, because I’d love to hear it.”
What effects people most is often caught rather than taught.
Having God on our lips is not enough – we need God in our heart.
2nd Theme: Even if we said NO to God it is never too late to say yes, to change.
A man turned to drink
He also turned from God and his family.
One day while walking along,
Thinking about how his life turned out,
He saw a bent, rusty nail in the gutter.
It reminded him of himself and his life.
So he picked it up and took it home.
Placing the nail on an anvil, he began
To straighten it out and clean it up.
An hour later, it looked almost new again.
Then it occurred to him.
He could straighten out and clean up
His own life in the same way.
That thought triggered his conversion.
He turned away from drink and back to God
And his family.
Today, he keeps that nail,
Straightened and cleaned, in his wallet.
Was there a time when I was almost like that bent, rusty nail?
It is never too late to change.
I close with this story. Someone once called a pastor to say he wanted to join the parish. He went on to explain, however, that he did not want to have to go to Mass every Sunday, study the Bible, be a lector or an usher, visit the sick, or help out with CCD classes.
The pastor commended him for his desire to be a member of the parish, but told him that the church he wanted was located across town. The man took the directions and hung up.
When he arrived at the address the pastor gave him, he came face to face with his own apathetic attitude. For there stood an abandoned church and several other buildings, all boarded up and ready for demolition.
1) Walk your talk 2) It is never too late to change 3) Live your faith 4) Lord help us – help ourselves

When the first crews of firefighters and police raced to the World Trade Center on that horrible day ten years ago, they had no idea of the enormity of what they were about to see. In those first few hours, not one rescue worker could find the words to describe the carnage and devastation. When asked by news reporters what it was like, all anyone could say was, “It was hell…I have seen hell…I have been to hell”.

And we wondered then and continue to wonder ten years later: How cold God create such a hell? How could God allow such a hell to even exist?

The answer is perhaps too simple to grasp. The reality is that God does not create these hells. Human beings do. Our hatreds and self-centeredness from the foundation of hell’s walls; our fears and angers are its gates. Hell can perhaps best be described as where God is not: When we allow the worst of our human nature to triumph, where we have torn down and dismantled the compassion and justice of God, we have created a new hell.

And the breadth and width of the hells we create can be breathtaking.

So where do we go to escape these hells? Is God’s heaven out of our grasp and beyond our vision?

In the wake of the September 11 bombings, Rabbi Harold S. Kushner was asked those very questions. The author of the acclaimed When Bad Things Happen to Good People and such later books as The Lord is My Shepherd: Healing Wisdom of the Twenty-third Psalm and When All You Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough: The Search for a Life That Matters responded:

“Where was God? I have to believe that God was at the side of the victims, hurting and grieving with them so that they would not be facing death alone. I have to believe that God was at the side of the firemen and rescue workers, inspiring them to risk their own lives in an effort to save others. I don’t believe that God was on the side of the terrorists, no matter how fervently they may have invoked God’s name as they set their fiendish plan in motion.

Why didn’t God stop them? Because, at the very outset of the human experiment, God gave us the free will to choose between good and evil. Without that free will, humans could be obedient but could not be good”.

We believe that God is not the God of the dead but the God of the living. God is not placated by the destruction of sinners but rejoices in the return of the prodigal. God does not condemn us to hell; God wishes all of us to be saved. God will love us for all eternity, but there always exists the possibility that we will refuse that love. That rejection and the refusal to respond to such love are precisely the meaning of hell. Hell is not a place where God puts us—it’s a place where we put ourselves. Christ comes to show us how to dismantle the hells we create and set in their places the justice, peace and forgiveness that are the building stones of the kingdom of the Father.