Episodes
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The reality is in all of our lives, we sometimes wander from the trail of life, in this journey of life, we do miss a sign or two. We get thrown off, and we follow a path that takes us to a place where we may sometimes take us a little time to figure out that we were down the wrong path. But then all we have to do is work our way back to that sign, the sign that points to God's love, and that sign is Jesus Christ in the world. (Read more…)
Here is my homily email from the Third Sunday of Easter. This was the First Communion Mass for our children, so I was preaching to the children directly in the first part of the homily. Please keep these children in your prayers and please feel free to share it with others.
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No matter what, it is always better to be a person of the truth, and if you make mistakes, to tell the truth, to hold yourself accountable to that. It is not always easy to tell the truth or be a person of the truth because there is a certain amount of shame. But believe me, there is greater shame that comes from a lie when you do not tell the truth. (Read more…)
Here is my homily email from the Second Sunday of Easter. Please feel free to share it with others.
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Missing episodes?
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Pope Francis called the whole church with that sense of calling us back to the roots of who we are. He kept on bringing us back to Jesus. He kept on calling us back to primarily God’s mercy, his love, and his joy. I always remember his first letter to us, the Gospel of Joy. He talked about how important it is to be men and women of joy. And he has lived that in his papacy over these long years. He brought us back to the heart of Jesus. (Read more…)
On Monday we learned of the passing of Pope Francis and we held a memorial Mass for him here at St. Simon. So here is a special edition of my homily email from that Mass. Please feel free to share it with others. And stay tuned for more events as we move this this transition of our Church.
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We are called to let the light of Christ shine not only on us and within us, but from us, so that others can see that they have the grace, the gem of grace within them. These luminous minerals that we have in rocks are like the luminous grace of God within us. We are called to shine the light of Christ on others. It is not enough that we just celebrate here together with all of us who believe, we have to become the light in the world. (Read more…)
Alleluia! He is risen! - Here is my Homily from the Easter Vigil. Please feel free to share it with others!
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To watch a hopeless death is one to be avoided at all costs. But Christianity has a response. It may not be the answer we want, but it does have a response. Let me offer it to you because it is about what happens today. This is the response: it says first of all that not only God recognizes the suffering and the pain, and he does not remain at a distance. He enters into the suffering and the pain. He becomes one of us, and he accompanies us. He becomes one of us to the point of death on a cross. (Read more…)
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My friends, tonight is about service. Can we find a way to serve some other person in our community who feel completely left out? Some neighbor who feels estranged, maybe have lost a spouse, there is nowhere else to go. Can we love them where they are and get down low and serve them and realize that this is a new perspective for us. (Read more…)
Here is my homily for Holy Thursday - Evening Mass of the Lord's Supper. Please feel free to share this with others.
Join us tonight at 7:00pm here at St. Simon for the Living Stations of the Cross and Communion Service.
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The scriptures are a collection of defining moments for the Jewish and the Christian people. They have been put together for the most defining moments of our history. The Gospels are collection of defining moments of Jesus' life. And today's Gospel is a bevy of collective and of defining moments. We have multitude of them, not only just for Jesus, but for others. (Read more…)
Here is my homily for Palm Sunday of the Lord's Passion. Please feel free to share this with others.
Many prayers for all of us as we enter the holiest week of our church year.
God Bless,
Fr. Brendan
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Today, more than ever, we need to be people who are willing to show up, to show up and not save people, not to rescue them, but to be present to them in the midst their suffering. Whether it be from a divorce or whether it be from a rejection of their family, or whether they are immigrants and they feel no longer welcomed, or whether they feel left out on the sides of society. Our job is to show up, to show the loving presence of God to them. (Read more…)
Here is my homily for the Fifth Sunday of Lent. Please feel free to share this with others.
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All of us have made mistakes. We have all done something that was wrong, whether a little thing when we were a child or something older. We will always remember how we were treated in that moment of shame, that moment of being caught. That moment can shame us and maim us, or it can transform us into something much better, something more profound. (Read more…)
Here is my homily for the Fifth Sunday of Lent. Please feel free to share this with others.
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Our lives have become so busy and even about the good things, we can be so busy, we miss God speaking to us at these liminal moments where God is trying to say something different than what we want to hear. It might be saying something challenging that we do not want to hear. It is those moments when we are called to pause like Moses and approach it and take courage to lean in and to move closer to this space. (Read more…)
Here is my homily for the third Sunday of Lent. Please feel free to share this with others.
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Sometimes the darkness in our lives can be in fact our friend, because it allows us to focus only on what we need to focus on.Today we have this reading, this classic reading of the man born blind in his blindness. Here is the irony. Here is a man who is born blind, who cannot see, and yet he sees Jesus for who he really is and calls him the son of God. The Pharisees and the scribes can see, but they do not see Jesus for who he really is. (Read more…)
Here is my homily for the Fourth Sunday of Lent for the Second Scrutiny. Due to the Scrutinies, this is a bonus homily for this week. Please feel free to share this with others.
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Sometimes we find it hard to accept that God would forgive us for our mistakes. Sometimes when we hurt somebody who we really love and we know we have hurt them and we ask for forgiveness from the Lord, we ask in a sense why did I do that? And we want almost to be punished a little bit because we know we were wrong. So we find it hard to sometime accept. But hopefully we will finally accept God’s forgiveness for us. (Read more…)
Here is my homily for the Fourth Sunday of Lent. Please feel free to share this with others.
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We are called to take the living waters, take the bread of life that we receive from here, and to share it with those who so desperately need that fresh living water. You and I might be the only person this week who offers it to them. If you get an inkling to be kind and gentle and not judgmental to someone in any of those categories, then this is your moment. (Read more…)
Here is my homily for the third Sunday of Lent. This homily was given at the First Scrutiny for our OCIA candidates for this year. Please feel free to share this with others.
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“Who do people say that I am?” The apostles first say, you are Elijah or John the Baptist, or one of the other prophets. But then he asks them, he says, “Who do you say that I am?” And Peter, the one who confesses says, “You are the son of the living God. You are the Messiah.” Jesus must say, yes, finally he gets it. He must be delighted after all these three years. So he takes him up a mountain with his two closest apostles, James and John, and reveals himself to them. He assures them that he is the son of God. (Read more…)
Here is my homily for the Second Sunday of Lent. Our own Lenten journey has begun and our Parish Lenten Retreat is now available for replay on Livestream (watch videos).
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How we refocus ourselves this Lent is not about our will. It is not us trying to will ourselves back and pushing away the devil in some dramatic fashion. Just come back to who we are. Come back to the fact that we are children of God and that God is our father. (Read more…)
Here is my homily for the First Sunday of Lent. Our own Lenten journey has begun. I hope you can join us this year. Please feel free to share with others.
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What we do today is put ashes on our forehead. Not to have a badge of honor that says, “Look at me. I am one of the Catholic ones.” We put ashes on our forehead to remind us to say, “I am a sinner. I am a hypocrite.”But we do not stay there. We do this at the beginning of this Lenten journey. Then the rest of this Lenten journey, we focus on turning back to the Lord, (Read more…)
Here is my homily for Ash Wednesday. Our own Lenten jpurney has begun. I hope you can join us this year. Please feel free to share with others.
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Jesus reorders life. He quotes the golden rule. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” That was in the Book of Deuteronomy as one of the laws of the Lord. But he takes it a step further. He deepens it and calls his disciples, the ones who call themselves Christian, to have a higher standard, a deeper reality. He says it is not enough, to love just your family. (Read more…)
Here is my homily for the Seventh Sunday of Ordinary Time. Please feel free to share with others.
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Pope Francis has declared 2025 a Jubilee Year of Hope, a timely reminder that even in the face of immense suffering in our world, we are not abandoned, Jesus always accompanies us and most especially in our times of suffering. The cross stands at the center of our faith, not as a symbol of defeat, but as a sign of ultimate hope. (Read more…)
Here is my homily for the Sixth Sunday of Ordinary Time. I apologize for the lateness of this which I delivered while on a pilgrimage to Rome. I hope you can still enjoy it and please feel free to share with others.
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You can hear a sense of frustration in today’s gospel with Peter. Peter has been working hard all night with his friends, he says they were up all night and caught absolutely nothing. Then here comes Jesus. Remember, Jesus is a carpenter and he is telling the fishermen what to do. You can see how outrageous this sounds. So you can imagine what Peter is feeling, “Like really ? Put out again? Really! I have been working hard and I know my job. I know this Sea of Galilee pretty well and I have been doing this fishing thing a while.” (Read more…)
Here is my homily for the Fifth Sunday of Ordinary Time. This weekend we launche the Annual diocesan Appeal as well a Baptism. Please feel free to share with others.
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Mary watched her son suffer greatly. This prediction by the prophet Simeon is very real. The climax of that suffering for her was at the foot of the cross. We have to examine this because it is very important how Mary suffered. It was not just that she suffered but how she suffered and gave witness to us. (Read more…)
Here is my homily for the Presentation of the Lord. I am sorry this is later than usual as I was away giving a retreat at Sts. Peter and Paul in Rocklin, CA on From Here to Eternity: How to Live and Die Well. Please feel free to share with others.
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