Homily: 2nd Sunday in Ordinary Time – Cycle A
This week the Church transitioned back into Ordinary Time. Perhaps for most of you the switch was rather unremarkable. Generally these transitions are pretty smooth for me, too, but because of my vocation, I can never just “roll through” them with little notice. In the breviary, which is the book of prayers from which all priests must pray every day, there’s always a little note at the end of a season. For example, this past Sunday was the feast of the Baptism of the Lord, which officially ended the Christmas season in the Church. At the end of Evening Prayer there’s a simple note that says: “After the feast of the Baptism of the Lord, Ordinary Time begins.” Even though I know that this is coming, I almost always pause when I read that and think to myself: “[sigh] Suddenly, everything just feels so… ordinary.”
This can be how we feel, right? How many of you were lamenting to put away Christmas and get back to the “rest of your life”? We know that we can’t live our lives in constant celebration, and that we have to get back to work and school, and so we go back to “ordinary” things and we leave Christmas, and all the excitement of celebrating Christ’s birth, packed away in boxes until next year. Can you see that there’s a problem with this, especially when we apply it to our lives of faith?
“Ordinary Time” never means “just go back to doing what you were doing before”. Rather, Ordinary Time is the time to take all of the blessings that you received during the celebratory season (like those new things that you received at Christmas) and apply them to your everyday life so as to help renew your everyday life and thus grow as a Christian disciple. Ordinary Time is the time in which we engage the hard work of growing in holiness. It is not “throwaway” time in between the great seasons of Advent/Christmas and Lent/Easter, rather it’s valuable time given to us so that we might produce fruit in the world for God’s kingdom.
And so, let me remind all of you of something: holiness is a great privilege to which we have been called. Yet, how often do we see it as a burden! “Well, I guess I ought to be holy today… ugh!” To live holiness is difficult and if we weren’t called to be holy we wouldn’t be able to obtain it ourselves, but we are called and so we can live it. The problem, it seems, is that we’ve lost touch with the understanding of the amazing gift that holiness is; and so we’ve lost the ambition to live holiness, even though we’ve been called to it.
In fact, if you find yourself thinking that holiness is something that you have to “do”–that is, just another project on your list of projects that never seems to get accomplished–then you don’t have a proper understanding of holiness. (If so, it’s no wonder why you might have lost your ambition to pursue it… what a difficult task!) The great thing about celebrating the Baptism of the Lord last Sunday was to remind us of our own baptisms. Great because, in remembering them, we remember that we are holy. Yes, in our baptisms, we were washed clean of Original Sin (and any personal sin for which we may have been guilty at the time) and the Holy Spirit came to dwell within us. Thus, we were made holy: that is, consecrated… sanctified… set apart for God. The work of our lives since that point has been to live in that holiness, and thus to be witnesses of the call to holiness that God has given to everyone.
If you find that you have lost your ambition to live in that holiness, then there are two things that may be happening: 1) You think that holiness is a project for which you are ill-equipped to tackle because of a lack of time or resources (which is a problem of understanding of holiness, to which I was just referring), or 2) you’re still attached to sin and purely worldly things and so find striving to live the life of holiness unappealing. It’s probably a combination of both, and so I’d like to share some ways to combat each.
The first should be relatively simple to overcome. (When I say “simple” I don’t necessarily mean “easy”, I just mean “not complicated”.) If you think holiness is a project you have to accomplish, then receive the freedom of knowing that, by your baptism, you already are holy! In this sense, holiness is not something to achieve, but rather something to “unlock”... to “make manifest”... or to “shine forth” in your life. Saint Paul, in the opening of his first letter to the still-somewhat-new Christians in Corinth, wrote, “to you who have been sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be holy…” In doing so, he was emphasizing this truth: they had “been sanctified in Christ Jesus”–that is, they had been made holy–and they were “called to be holy”–that is, to make manifest this holiness in their lives. This is the same for us: we, too, were “sanctified in Christ Jesus”, that is, “made holy”, in our baptisms, and we, too, are “called to be holy”, that is, to make manifest this holiness in our lives. I find great freedom in this realization; because it means that holiness is not something I have to achieve, but rather something I’m already equipped to live. And, if I’m failing to live it, then I simply have to look for the obstacles to living it in my life.
The biggest obstacle that any of us have to face in living holiness is our attachment to sin. Take just a moment to think about what I just said and then ask yourself if I’m wrong. The reason why we don’t live holiness every day at every hour is because we are still subject to concupiscence–that is, our disordered desire for the things of this world–and so choose to give worldly things more importance in our lives than the higher things, to which holiness calls us. Notice I said, “more importance”... We are not completely depraved creatures, but our desires are still disordered towards the things of this world and so find it difficult–and, at times, unappealing–to pursue the higher things of the spiritual life (and to give witness to them). It’s like when the wheel alignment of your car is off: You can force the car to continue to track straight on the road, but it naturally wants to veer off to one side or the other. It’s capable of living a “perfectly aligned life”, but it needs to have its alignment corrected before it can realize it. Our attachment to sin and things of this world “mis-aligns” our desires and prevents us from “tracking straight”. When we realize that “perfect alignment” (that is, holiness) is already possible because it is built into us, it becomes possible to detach from sin that mis-aligns us and strive to “track straight” towards the higher things of the spiritual life.
My guess is that most of us can think for a moment and name some attachment in our lives that is misdirecting us from the life of holiness we are called to live. I will further guess that we can each feel the frustration of being unable to overcome completely that attachment (or even to have the desire to overcome the attachment). The problem with this (and the source of your frustration) is that detachment becomes part of the project of holiness. In other words, we say to ourselves, “I have to get rid of this sin before I can be holy.” As I’ve already said: You are holy. If you’ve allowed some attachment to sin and to worldly things to become an obstacle to living holiness, then hear the words of John the Baptist today: “Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world. My friends, Christ Jesus has taken away the sin of the world by his coming as one of us, and by his passion, death, and resurrection in our human nature. By this, he made it possible not only for us to become holy (through baptism) but also to live holiness (through detachment from sin and worldly desires). This means that removing the obstacles to living holiness can be quite simple: accept Jesus’ offer to take away our sins.
My friends, if we want to discover (or re-discover) the gift of holiness and the joy of living it, then we need to do two things: 1) realize that, through baptism, we are already holy; and 2) abandon ourselves to Jesus and accept his offer to take away our sin. The first is achieved by simply repeating that truth to ourselves day after day: “I am holy, and I am called to be holy”. The second is achieved through prayer (connecting with Jesus daily) and by changing our habits (that is, those daily practices that keep us attached to our sins). This, of course, is hard work. (To fix the wheel alignment in your car, you sometimes have to take a lot of things apart to straighten things out!) The fruit of this work, however, is freedom: the freedom of knowing that you’re living the life of grace and the freedom of receiving the joy that comes with living holiness. ///
My dear brothers and sisters, Ordinary Time in the Church is never ordinary. As we enter into this Ordinary Time, we have a special opportunity to embrace this time for what it is: a time to heed the call to live holy lives, for we have been made holy. I pray that the power of Christ that we receive in this Eucharist will inspire you to engage this bold work of living holiness anew; so that each of you, and this parish, might become a place where all encounter Christ and his call to become holy and to live holiness; and thus be ready to proclaim with all of us those words of John the Baptist that bring us salvation: “Now I have seen and testified that He is the Son of God.”
Given at St. Louis de Montfort Parish: Fishers, IN - January 17th & 18th, 2026
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