Twenty Second Sunday in Ordinary Time: September 15th, 2024
Dear Brothers and Sisters,
As we come to this Sunday in Ordinary Time, we are presented with a topic that has caused division among Christians for over 500 years – I speak of the topic of “Justification.”  The issue of faith and works.  Martin Luther weighed the confusion found in the Western Christian world about the apparent, but mistaken, teaching that believers might appease God through their works.  Martin Luther inserted himself into the dialectic of the faith/works controversy with an astonishing psychological depth.  In 1999, Saint Pope John Paul II and the Lutheran World Federation issued a Joint Declaration on the       Doctrine of Justification which, in essence, confirmed the primacy of God’s gift of salvation.  Our initiation into our faith is a gift from God.  We can do nothing to make God save us. So, our faith leads us to a personal relationship with God.  This personal relationship moves us to a relationship with God’s Church, that is to say moving us to not only love God, but our neighbor as well.  This is also a part of the Baptismal Ritual – after the parents are asked – “What do you ask of God’s Church for your child?”  When the parents answer – “Baptism,” the priest addresses the parents with these words – “In asking for Baptism for your child, you are undertaking the responsibility of raising him (her) in the faith, so that, keeping God’s commandments, he (she) may love the Lord and his (her) neighbor as Christ has taught us.  Do you clearly understand what you are undertaking?”  Martin Luther taught that we are saved by faith alone.  But as we have been hearing from the Apostle James that “Humbly welcome the word that has been planted in you and is able to save your souls.  Be doers of the word and hot hearers only, deluding yourselves.”  James goes on to say – “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God and the Father is this: to care for the orphans and widows in their affliction and to keep oneself unstained by the world.”  Today James says – “if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him? …  and I will demonstrate my faith to you from my works.”  So, as we hear in today’s Gospel, Peter declares that Jesus is the Christ.  To declare this demands a response as Jesus summoned the crowd with his disciples and said to them, “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.  For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and that of the gospel will save it.” Brothers and sisters, all this is to say that our personal faith is lived out in relationship with the Church, whom we walk with while we are in the world and to love our brothers and sisters as Jesus has taught us to do, even as He has loved us.

Blessings,
Fr. Steven J. Guitron