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Bishop's Homily for the Twenty-First Sunday of Ordinary Time

August 24, 2025

(The Image Party / Shutterstock.com)

Homily of the Most Reverend Larry Silva, Bishop of Honolulu
[St. Catherine Church, Kapaa (with Installation of Pastor)]

Remember Beanie Babies? Pet rocks? Macramé plant hangers? Bell-bottomed polyester pants? Cabbage Patch kids? These were all very popular products once upon a time, such that “everybody was buying them,” as we say. They are products you could probably not find now because no one makes them any more. Advertisers know very well that people go along with trends, and they presented these trendy products successfully; then they did not and moved to some other trendy product.

It is human nature to “jump on band wagons,” to do what “everyone else is doing,” and to buy products that “everyone else is buying.” Sometimes it can even be our nature to jump on religious bandwagons. If some religious website guru says you are simply not being reverent unless you receive Holy Communion kneeling, then we see an uptick in people kneeling for Communion. If some other influential religious publication says that we should freely experiment with the liturgy, then we see more experimentation with the liturgy. If the news is constantly reminding us of the plight of wildfire victims, we become very generous in reaching out to them in their need – until the news cycle diminishes, and then they are “out of sight, out of mind.”

Jesus warns us very clearly today about the importance of following him, knowing him, listening to him, and not being diverted by notions of him that may be very popular, but are simply not who he is. He warns us to approach him through the narrow gate, and not by just jumping on a bandwagon. When the end time comes, he warns that he may simply not recognize who we are.

So let us reflect a bit on how we can often jump on the bandwagon, as it were, regarding our faith.

Prayer might be a good place to start. Prayer is meant to be an encounter with God, personal and up-close. Formula prayers are important and can be helpful, but if we simply rattle them off without really drawing close to the one to whom we are praying, then perhaps we will remain strangers to him. The rosary is a powerful prayer, as is the Liturgy of the Hours, which is mostly made up of Psalms, Scriptural canticles, and the Word of God. But we can breeze through these without actually being aware of the Lord, to whom we wish to draw close.

How we think of Jesus is also important. I must confess that one of the hot religious items lately is jewelry emblazoned with WWJD, which stands for “What would Jesus do?” I have learned not to like this very much, because it implies, “What would Jesus do, IF he were still here with us?” The fact of the matter is that Jesus IS still with us, and so the question should be “What IS Jesus doing?” When we relegate Jesus to the past, we fail to recognize that he has risen from the dead, is alive and is still with us – especially here in the Eucharist. If we simply jump on the “Jesus as historical figure” bandwagon, it is easy to see how he might not recognize us, because we do not recognize that he is the Risen One.

The source and summit of our faith is the Eucharist, which is the most important thing your pastor can provide for you. But the Eucharist is not just a series of rituals, readings, and prayers, but is a real, intimate and physical encounter with the risen Lord Jesus. We can sometimes miss this, and therefore absent ourselves from Sunday Mass because, after all, rituals, readings and prayers are not the source and summit of our faith, but the encounter with the risen Jesus that takes place in the midst of these very important elements. We can easily get bored with the setting and miss the jewel that the setting is meant to enhance, a physical encounter with someone who can change our lives, as he changed the lives of his early disciples

When Jesus warns us to enter through the narrow gate, he is not trying to simply make life difficult for us. But he is challenging us to not jump on the bandwagon of “convention” or “I have always done it this way,” but to truly come to know the one who is himself the Door to eternal life and who wants to be known as intimately by us as he knows us so intimately.