← Sunday Homilies with Fr. Mike Schmitz
Sunday Homilies with Fr. Mike Schmitz
8/17/25 Ordinary People
00:20:46
We are not surrounded by villains and heroes, we are surrounded by ordinary people. And every one of us, by our daily choices, can become a villain or hero.
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Welcome to Sunday Homilies with me, Fr. Mike Schmitz. I hope today's homily inspires and motivates you, and I also hope that it leaves you hungry for the One who gave everything to feed you. If you want to get this and other Sunday Mass resources sent straight to your inbox, sign up@ascensionpress.com Sunday or by texting Sunday to 33777. You can also follow or subscribe in your podcast app for weekly notifications. God Bless the Lord be with you. A reading from the Holy Gospel according to Luke Glory to you, o Lord. Chapter 12, verses 4953 Jesus said to his disciples, I have come to set the earth on fire, and how I wish it were already blazing. There is a baptism with which I must be baptized, and how great is my anguish until it is accomplished. Do you think that I have come to establish peace on the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division. From now on, a household of five will be divided three against two and two against three. A father will be divided against his son and a son against his father. A mother against her daughter and a daughter against her mother. A mother in law against her daughter in law, and a daughter in law against her mother in law. The Gospel of the Lord. Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ. I'd like you to have a seat. So I would argue that maybe one of the best depictions of a villain, like a real life villain in like modern media, is a man named Walter White in the TV show Breaking Bad. So I'm not endorsing the TV show Breaking Bad, but I think it is probably the absolute best depiction of how an ordinary person can become a villain. Because that's the whole story. The whole story of the series, if you want to continue to give it away, is that Walter White starts out as someone who he's a likable character. He is. He is a nice, he's a good guy. He is a high school teacher and he has cancer or there's cancer in the family. He doesn't have enough money, so he ends up cooking crystal meth in order to pay his medical bills. And then starts down this road where this ordinary person becomes a villain and it's just one choice after the next choice after the next choice that changes him. And I think it's one of the best depictions because when we look around the world that ourselves, we look around the world that we realize we're not surrounded by villains like in our life, in our daily lives, we're not surrounded by villains. We're Surrounded by ordinary people. And yet I think that's one of the reasons why, when we disagree, I think that's one of the reasons why when we find ourselves as people divided, we are so surprised. Because, like, people aren't. I'm not divided against villains. I'm divided against ordinary people. I mean, even think about when it comes to Jesus. I think about, if you encounter Jesus, like, what's not to love with Jesus? I mean, even the TV show, the Chosen, which is awesome. It's so great. You look at Jonathan Roumie, I love this. Here's what I love about this. I love the fact that there are so many people who see Jonathan Roumie portraying Jesus, and they're like, oh, my gosh, how could you not love this guy? How could you not love not only Jonathan, but how could you not love the one Jonathan Roumie is portraying? I think so many people, they got a certain version of Jesus that turn them off. But when they see this TV show, they see this program, they realize, okay, if that's who Jesus really is, then you'd be crazy to reject him. Like, only the most unhinged, almost the most extreme people would not want this Jesus. And yet in real life, what do we have? We have Jesus saying, I didn't come to bring peace. I didn't come to bring unity. I came to actually bring division. I didn't come to bring peace. I came to bring the sword. And we realized that this is so painful because this is not only Jesus dividing clans or countries or cultures. We experience this division over Jesus when it comes to families and the pain of that, that division. You know, if it was with strangers, that'd be one thing. But you know this. If you and your family, you're divided over faith in Jesus. You're divided over belonging to the church. You realize that you're divided from people you know. You're divided against people you love. It's the people you raised. Now you're divided. The people who raised you and now you're divided, or the people you're raised with. And they're not strangers. They are people you love. And they're not villains. They're just ordinary people. I think this is. We need to keep going back to this. They're not strangers. And also, this division isn't unusual. This division isn't unexpected. This division shouldn't be a surprise. Jesus literally, in the Gospel today, he said that this would happen. And if you know any history, it did happen for 2000 years. It has happened throughout history and around the world. Wherever Christians are, there have been children who have handed over their parents. If Christianity was illegal, there were kids who handed over their parents who were Christians to be tortured, to be killed. Wherever Christianity has been illegal, there have been parents who have handed over their Christian children literally to be tortured and literally to be killed. That's part of our story. And Jesus said, that's what's going to happen now. When I was a kid and I remember encountering this in high school and reading the gospel and hearing Jesus saying, a family of five divided three against two, et cetera, I remember thinking like, that's, that's kind of strange. I can't. I couldn't imagine that being the case. I couldn't imagine people being divided over, over Jesus because like, we're all Christians, we're all Catholics. And I think one of the reasons why is because when I was a kid, it was still a kind of Christian culture that it's no longer that, that it used to be that the mainstream of our culture at least was kind of more aligned with the Christian worldview. And obviously not totally, never was that totally aligned. But that's no longer clearly. Right now we're living in a, what they call a post Christian culture, a post Christian worldview. We look back and say, like, there was a time, though, where the mainstream of culture was more aligned with Christianity. Now I don't look back with these idealized view, like, oh, back in Christendom, it was so great. No, there were a ton of problems when Christendom was a thing, when the culture was actually more Christian than not. There are still problems. One of the problems being this. It's really easy in a Christian culture to pretend to be Christian. It's really easy to be in a Christian culture to kind of just check the box. Yeah, I'm Christian cause I was raised Christian or I'm Catholic because I was raised Catholic. It's really easy in a Christian culture to basically be a hypocrite to say that I believe in Jesus but not live like that. It's really easy in a Christian culture to be lukewarm. So I'm not saying that it was perfect. There were problems. But now to say yes to Jesus is to stand against the culture. In fact, as Catholics, you know this. To say yes to Jesus is to risk even some people saying that you're the villain. To say yes to Jesus is to risk that some people will say, you must hate people. I mean, to be a Catholic. I mean, just a couple examples. When it comes to immigration as Catholics, what's our perspective? Our Catholic perspective is neither right nor left. Our Catholic perspective is this. We say no to open borders. We said, every country has a right to have a border. Every country has a right to defend itself. That's the right of the country. At the same time, every follower of Jesus has to say yes to the dignity of every person who's in need of that, every true disciple of Jesus in some way. We're challenged to say yes to every person who knocks on our door. So we find ourselves either on right or on left, but divided. Or when it comes to the issue, this issue that has transformed our culture in the last 15 years, when it comes to same sex marriage, if you're a follower of Jesus, we have to say no to the idea of same sex marriage. At the same time, if you're a follower of Jesus, we have to say yes to, to the dignity and value of every single person who identifies as lgbt. We're no there on the right, nor on the left. We have to be in this place. We have to belong to Jesus. And so because of that, we find division when it comes to abortion. We know this in our culture. Every follower of Jesus has to say no to the killing of an unborn child. At the same time, every Christian has to say yes to the mother who could be terrified of what it means for her, carry a child to term. We also have to say yes to every person who made that choice to terminate her pregnancy. To every person who has made that choice, we have to say yes and say, God's grace is actually offered to you. God's mercy is offered to you. Because even when we find division over these topics, we realize those people, they're not villains. They're just ordinary people. They're not villains. They're ordinary people, just like you. And very, very much just like me. I mentioned this before, but I had a conversion to Jesus when I was in high school. But I went to college and I, in some ways, fell off the deep end. In some ways, I was saying I majored in theology. I was going to Mass all the time. I was a missionary, Catholic missionary in Central America. But I will say this. I hated the church. I hated the Catholic Church as a Catholic missionary, going to daily Mass. And the reason why is because there were some teachings that the church has that stand directly against our culture. And I didn't want to be a place of. I don't. I don't want to be a person of division. I wanted to be someone who went along with our culture. I Didn't want to. And also I didn't know why the church would teach what the church was teaching. One of those areas was the area of contraception. It's just kind of fascinating because I had no stake in the game. I had no horse in the race. It was merely theoretical in my life. I just. The idea of why was contraception intrinsically wrong? Was just no one explained it to me. And so I was so embarrassed over this. Why is the Catholic Church making this claim, making this statement, making this stand against virtually every other Christian domination as well? And so I would say, yeah, I'm Christian, but I was ashamed to say I was Catholic. Why? Because I just. It highlighted division. And in those moments, I have to remember the lesson of Jeremiah, the lesson of Jeremiah here, Jeremiah, in the first reading, he's the one prophet who's willing to speak the truth. In the time of Jeremiah, there were a ton of prophets who were speak. They were speaking the words that people wanted to hear. They weren't speaking the truth that God needed them to hear. And we still have this, we still have this with Christian preachers who condone what has been condemned by Christians for the entire history of the church. And I realize that was me, truly that would have been me because I was a teacher. I was a missionary and I was teaching. And in those years, those days, I was teaching what I believed, not what the church taught, not the truth. I was teaching my opinion. In some ways, whenever I spoke, I was a false prophet. And that would still be me except for God's mercy. I know that. And that's me. Not a villain, just an ordinary person. And if we find ourselves divided, that doesn't mean we're divided as villains. It means we're divided as ordinary people. And yet here's the. At the same time, ordinary people can still be dangerous. Like what can ordinary people do? In the second reading today, It's Hebrews chapter 12. At one point the author of Hebrews says this. He says, consider how Jesus endured such opposition from sinners. Now think about Jesus endured opposition from sinners. The people who killed him. I think sometimes though, we think of those sinners as like these crazed, ravenous, like foaming at the mouth sinners. They weren't. The people who put Jesus to death were just ordinary sinners. They were just ordinary people. People who put Jesus to death were ordinary people. There were people like me. People like me murdered Jesus. Ordinary people like me murdered God. A number of years ago I came across this really powerful book written about the Reserve Police Battalion 101. They were a German battalion during World War II made up of about 500 or so working class middle aged men from Hamburg, Germany. And at one point they were deployed to Poland, occupied Poland. And their commanding officer was a man named Major Wilhelm Trapp. And they had a bunch of Jews who were in like concentration camp facilities. And he didn't give them an order. He gave them an option. Their job, if they were to accept it, was to kill the Jewish men, the Jewish women and the Jewish children. Now again, once again, Major Wilhelm Trapp did not give them an order. He simply gave them a choice. If they were willing to do this, they can go to this. If they weren't willing to do this, they actually could opt out. And he even told them there would be no negative repercussions in their life, in their career at all. They could just say no and. And they would be let go. Out of over 500 men, ordinary guys, again, these are not ideal ideologues, right? These aren't people who like really believe in the cause of Nazism. These are just guys from Hamburg, Germany who were drafted and were asked if they'd be willing to kill innocent Jewish men, Jewish women and Jewish children. Out of over 500 men, like a dozen said no. Between 10 and 12 said no. The rest of them killed innocent Jewish men and Jewish women and Jewish children. They said that over the course of time it became easier. In fact, some of them became enthusiastic about it. In fact, the brutality increased the more and more they did this. They were just ordinary men. In fact, that's the name of the book. The book is called Ordinary Men. I think there's a myth we have, and the myth is that exceptional evil is done by the exceptionally evil. It's not, it's done by ordinary people. You know, at this point I've under this. I think at this point maybe a lot of us might jump to in our day and age, we might jump to yes, yes, yes. And you might say, yeah, that's what I'm worried about. This or that political party. I think that's where we're going in our culture, I think in our country, this or that political party, that that's what they're going to do. And if you think that, I think that you are exactly right. If you think that we, in our current cultural climate, our current political climate, this political party or that political party has the ability to do that, you are completely right. Which begs the question, which party, which political party has the capacity to do exactly that? And I would say the answer is yours, whichever party you belong to. If you think that that's possible in our day, in our age, in our. Where we live, you are 100% right. And the party that it's going to belong to is yours. Why? St. Paul said this in his first letter to the Corinthians, chapter 10, he said this. He said, therefore, whoever thinks he is standing secure should take care not to fall. Because the division, yes, it's between clans and country and culture, and it's between family. It's even closer than that. It's even closer than that. The division is in our own hearts. The division we experience is in our own ordinary hearts. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, he once said this. He said, the dividing line between good and evil passes directly through the human heart. And this is the last thing. Walter White, that TV show Breaking Bad. I. I think his story of being an ordinary man who became a bad man is so well told because it wasn't the fault of circumstances. It wasn't someone else did this to him and that made him who he was. He was just an ordinary man who made a series of choices and became a bad man. He was an ordinary person whose small decision by small decision became a villain. But he didn't have to. He's the ordinary person. His story didn't have to end that way. During the course of the last number of years, I have had encounters with people, met with people, talked with people. I've heard from people who had lived a life far from the Lord, really far from God. People who even in their whole lives, they had gone to Mass, they had gone to church, and then at one point, they picked up the Bible. At one point they started, like, listening to the Bible. At some point, they just encountered God's word and it completely changed their life. And they realized that, oh, my gosh, I have to make some new decisions. And they were able to do this because if you had to pause their life at any moment, snapshot of any moment, you would say, oh, my gosh, you are so far from the Lord. You're divided. You've left the church, you've left Jesus. And I remember this man. I met him a number of years ago. He was 87 years old. And this was an ordinary person. This man had been raised Catholic, and he had walked away. He pursued his career more than anything else. He had a lot of brokenness in his life. But at 87 years old, I remember he contacted me and said, father, I want to go to confession. I had briefly met him at a Mass. I was filling in locally here in town. And afterwards he just said, I would like to go to confession. And so, great, let's do this. He went to confession for the first time in 50 plus years. And the story he told was the life that hit that. If you paused it in his 50s, you'd be like, oh, wow, that's a train wreck. If you'd have paused his life in the 60s, you'd be like, oh, man, you are so far from the Lord. If you paused his life in the 70s, you would think you are lost to God. But he paused his life now. And now He's, I think, 93 years old. And I recently talked with him and he said, father, I want to go to confession regularly. I've been going to mass as often as I can. He can't get out of the house very well. But he said, but Father, every day, every day you told me to pray 15 minutes every morning and 15 minutes every night. I say, father, I haven't missed a day since the last time we talked about. Here is an ordinary man who lived in some ways is true as a sinner, but he will die as a saint. We are not surrounded by heroes or villains. We are not surrounded by sinners or saints. We're surrounded by. By ordinary people just like ourselves. And ordinary people whose stories are not over. They could become villains, they could become heroes, they could be sinners, they could be saints. And that includes our families, the people when we were divided, that pain. But those you love, those you know, their stories are not over yet because God has done and still does great things in the lives of ordinary people. And our hearts can be so broken, our hearts can be so divided. But your story is not over yet, and my story is not over yet. And God can still do great things in your life and in my life, because both villains and heroes are made from the same stuff. Both sinners and saints are made from the same stuff. They're made from ordinary.