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Bishop's Homily for the Sixteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time

July 19, 2025

(godongphoto / Shutterstock.com)

Homily of the Most Reverend Larry Silva, Bishop of Honolulu
[Community of the Cathedral Basilica of Our Lady of Peace (at former Cathedral Academy)]

From time to time I have been with gatherings of evangelical Christians. This is not a Catholic church, but the people there are usually very committed to their faith in Jesus Christ.  In fact, it turns out that many of them are Catholics, but they have decided not to go to Mass but instead to attend the services of the evangelical church.  When I ask some of them why they made the decision to go to another church besides the Catholic Church, they usually answer that it is because they really feel closer to Jesus at these gatherings.  They usually do not have any serious doctrinal disagreements, but they simply never saw Jesus as particularly alive and present in the Catholic Church.

This, of course, is amazing!  It is really only in the Catholic Church that Jesus Christ is physically present in the Eucharist, not just in a symbolic manner, but truly present.  And it is only here in a Catholic Church that we are able to eat the flesh and drink the blood of our Savior and Lord. We have the gift of the True Presence of the Lord in the Eucharist.  But somehow, they do not feel that presence, but experience it more affectively in the music, fellowship, preaching and style of worship in the evangelical church.

This, of course, is a challenge to all of us who do attend Catholic Mass regularly, because we do believe in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist.  Perhaps it was the same kind of challenge that Jesus himself presented to his dear friend Martha, when she was so concerned about the serving and meal preparation that she forgot to actually spend time with her guest, which her sister Mary did.

We have music and hymns at our Masses, along with preaching and prayers. We want these to be well executed to give glory to God and to engage parishioners in the beauty of faith in Jesus Christ. But sometimes we can be so focused on these externals, that we can easily overlook the fact that all these rituals, prayers and songs are only the setting for a pearl beyond price, the presence of Jesus himself.  We are not only given the privilege of sitting at his feet to hear his word as he joins us at this banquet, but he even becomes the food, entering into the most intimate and holy communion with us that we can imagine.  And while the externals are extremely important – what a travesty it would have been if Jesus had been invited to dinner and no one did the work to prepare the meal! – Jesus points out that it is the encounter with him that is most important.

Abraham, too, was busy about preparing the meal for his visitors and engaging his wife Sarah and his servants in doing so as well, but in the end, he sat down with these three divine visitors – whom he addresses in the singular “Sir,” – sensing perhaps that the Holy Trinity itself had visited him.  If we had this same kind of attitude – preparing well like Martha, but never forgetting the person we encounter, the person of Jesus, perhaps more Catholics would stay with us and not drift away to other churches.

We have much to learn from our inadequacies – as Martha learned a valuable lesson that day she hosted the Lord in her house.  We must continue to make our hospitality welcoming, our liturgies reverent, and our music uplifting, but we must remember that we do all of this so that we can more intimately encounter the person of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior, our Brother and Friend, who truly makes himself present to us.  As we take up the mission Christ has entrusted to us to preaching the Gospel to everyone, we must avoid the temptation to invite people to join us because we have such beautiful churches, such wonderful preaching, such loving people, and such engaging liturgies.  Because if we fail in any of these things, which we often do, people will drift away.  But if we are more explicit that this is where we physically encounter the risen Lord Jesus in the fulness of his love, it is much more likely that we will catch the hearts of the brothers and sisters we hope to attract.