Homily for August 17, 2025

With words like the ones we just heard, I can’t help it but to think of my Dominican Sister, St. Catherine of Siena, who most famously said: “Be who God meant you to be, and you will set the world on fire.”   

God revealed something to her that is also beneficial to all of us, so we recognize her as one of the 28 Doctors of the Church.   Her reflection does not come out of thin air but from the Holy Spirit. When the Apostles were gathered together with Mary, there appeared to them tongues as of fire on the feast of Pentecost—50 days after the Resurrection, when world history changed.   Jesus said, I have come to set the earth on fire, and how I wish it were already blazing!   Jesus did not come to earth for Himself but for us   out of love of the Father and to prepare the way for the power of the Holy Spirit in the Church we live-in today.   Pentecost became the birth of that fire Jesus longs for.

Among the major religions, Christianity is the one with most members, but that can’t be the whole story.   Just looking at the Christians, then,   are we on fire?   What would that even look like?   “Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire!”   We have to know ourselves deeply—who am I now?   And who does God want me to be?

The simplest answer for each of us:   I am now a sinner;   and God wants me to be a saint. I.e., He wants me with Him in heaven for all eternity and to begin now.   Next month two young men will be canonized saints, one whose love for the Eucharist was so big that he wrote a website to share with the world about Eucharistic miracles/another whose love for the poor was tremendous to the point that he died of an illness contracted while curing the sick.   Saints are not made from cookie-cutters: we come in all shapes and sizes.   The common denominator is that they allowed the grace & fire of God’s love to dwell within them!

The only way Jesus’s fire upon the earth will be ablaze is for us to become saints.The same Catherine of Siena said that “all the way to heaven is heaven;”   it’s not something far in the distant future but a choice to love God/to love God in my neighbor, in myself—and we will set the world on fire.   The goal is for the Holy Spirit to live, breathe, and speak through every person on earth!   That is the kind of blazing fire Jesus is looking for.   A fire in our hearts that no evil shadow can extinguish but that gives us the confidence that God dwells in us.

Only when we understand that the Holy Trinity is a jealous God who desires to live within us—that we ought love Him alone; no other deities or any idols we make for ourselves—only then can we begin to appreciate the depth of Jesus’s words: Do you think that I have come to establish peace on the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division.   Even if someone were to edit out that one verse, Jesus speaks more at length later on: When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit upon his glorious throne, and all the nations will be assembled before him. And he will separate them one from another, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats.

That is one of the deepest sources of division: those for whom Jesus is the Lord of their lives separate themselves from those who despise Jesus.   If our disagreements about Jesus do not cause separation,   He will delineate that division at the final judgment.    Some people claim that you can believe in Jesus but remain in your sin. Guess who disagrees with that!   Jesus: Neither do I condemn you; now go and sin no more.   So, to twist Jesus into a person who is so “loving” that He wouldn’t make me set aside what causes me harm/what hurts the people around me,   that lie promises a false union.   True union with God and with each other necessarily requires division:a separation from those things that lead us to fall again & again into the cold and lifeless lures of sin.

And, when we feel like we’re fighting alone, the letter to the Hebrews reminds us that Jesus is the source of our strength:   Consider how he endured such opposition from sinners, in order that you may not grow weary and lose heart.   Everything Jesus endured—His face covered with blood & spit—was for love of each of us.

The devil lies to us and wants to make us believe that we cannot resist the temptation to this sin anymore,   so we should just give in and get it over with. But the letter tells us that in [our] struggle against sin [we] have not yet resisted to the point of shedding blood.   Meaning,   with the Spirit of Jesus we can say “No” to any sin all the way to the grave.   But we need the grace of the Cross to resist every sinful temptation.

Every battle we win against temptation guides us on the path of holiness, which culminates in union.   Jesus came to bring about division b/w what is holy and what is un-holy.   To be more deeply united to what is holy, not only do we run away from sin, but we run towards Christ—we receive Him in our bodies and souls in the Eucharist. It’s the most intimate union we can have with God in this life;   it’s our “little heaven” on the way to heaven.

And the further we are united with God, the greater our fire of love and joy will be!   That love and joy is going to make us saints according the capacities/gifts/and aptitudes of each—all through His grace.   And sainthood is not just for us, but we will set the world on fire.   That’s what Jesus came to do: to set the earth on fire   and how much He wishes we were already blazing with the fire of His love!