18th Sunday Ordinary Time August 3, 2025

Readings: Ecclesiastes 1:2; 2:21-23, Colossians 3:1-5, 9-11, Luke 12:13-21

These readings today invite us to think deeply about what we value and how we spend our time and energy. The basic teaching is that an inner spiritual life is the most important reality that we can ever have in this world. So often we can forget that as we try to achieve other values: a house, a home, an organization, etc.

Our lives sometimes get caught up in work and we forget to pray or we think that we will pray when we finish our work and then simply don’t pray. Our lives need the deep refreshment of the Spirit and yet so often we can go on day after day and year after year without giving our attention to the spiritual life that is within us.

The second reading, from the letter to the Colossians, also speaks of the need for us to seek the things that are above—just another way of telling us to look for what is of the spirit. The practical teaching, however, is strong in the second reading when it tell us to give up immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and the greed that is idolatry—and to stop lying to one another. Today such advice is not listened to easily. So often we redefine reality so that it becomes comfortable to us!

What we have put before us today is a clear invitation to live a life that is deeply moral, that is pure, that is not directed by our passions or by any evil desires or by greed. In order to do this we must learn how to stop lying to one another and how to name evil and sin for what it really is.

This can sound like fundamentalist teaching, but it is fairly straightforward. When we call things what they really are, we have more of a chance of responding to them in truth. On the other hand, very few people today want to speak much about sin or evil. We find ways to call these realities with other names and thus change their impact on life.

May our loving Father send us the Holy Spirit so that we shall have strength and wisdom to recognize the reality in which we live and be transformed by Jesus Christ.

Fr. Terry