TWENTY-FIFTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME
19-20 September 2026, St. Mary Church
Is 55:6-9
Phil 1:20c-24, 27a
Mt
20:1-16a
Seek the Lord
while he may be found, call him while he is near… let him turn to the Lord for
mercy; to our God, who is generous in forgiving.
Our first reading
from the prophet Isaiah offers an essential insight into the point our Gospel
parable makes about the landowner recruiting dayworkers for his grape harvest.
It is not so much that God sets His
own terms for repaying all who work in His vineyard, which is His right, but
rather that when he calls, we have to respond promptly; we have to stop
dragging our feet, stop hesitating or holding back. We need to get to work. We
have to respond immediately to His call to go along to the vineyard no matter
what the time of day or what the circumstance in which we find ourselves when
He calls. No giving him a deaf ear. The
master’s call is urgent, and we don’t want to lose out.
Seek the Lord while he may be found,
call him while he is near… let him turn to the Lord for mercy; to our God, who
is generous in forgiving.
Isaiah’s big
message is that of prompt obedience, of repentance for sin. To the extent that
we lend the master a deaf ear, we might just be thinking in terms of our own
interests. As a boy, I am sure the thought crossed my mind that there must be
some way to work the angle of this parable and get the master’s reward without
all the effort of sweating through the heat of the day. Ultimately, I think
that is a childish calculation sort of like trying to get ahead by cutting into
line or weaving in and out of traffic here in town only to get out of sync with
the traffic lights on a busy street. The Church is making a very different point
which has nothing to do with cutting corners and getting ahead. It’s all about and
only about the master’s call, about our baptismal call to repent of sin, to
give up dead works and to follow Christ and through a specific vocation, like
Christian Matrimony, or priesthood, or the religious life, to have the master’s
reward.
This year my
ordination class for the diocese is celebrating 50 years, and all seven of us are
still priests in good standing. That is a special joy, but I have had many more
at the age of 76. Since retiring, I have had the joy of celebrating with other
classmates from O’Gorman their golden wedding anniversaries. In some cases, I
have had the joy of coming to know their children and grandchildren still
strong in the faith.
Even while my
service of the Holy See took me out of our diocese for 40 years, I ended up coming
home to stay and being a privileged witness to people and events from earlier,
from before that. I can remember Bishop Hoch, who spent his whole priesthood
and all but his first years up in Bismark as Bishop repaying the debts the
diocese of Sioux Falls had to shoulder after its bankruptcy in the Great Depression.
Another one of the Bishop’s worries back then was the shortage of priestly vocations,
of men to work in the vineyard. Part of the reason he built the Minor Seminary
here in Sioux Falls as well as many of the Newman Centers on the state college
campuses around the diocese was to seek to build our young men up in the faith
and prepare them spiritually and intellectually to hear the master’s call to
come to work in the vineyard, to become good husbands and fathers and priests.
Back then a lot of bishops around the country were still recruiting priests from
Ireland and hoping for one or another immigrant priest from elsewhere to come
and serve our people.
Seek the Lord while he may be found, call
him while he is near… let him turn to the Lord for mercy; to our God, who is
generous in forgiving.
Isaiah reminds us
that we are all called to seek God’s mercy. By our repentance from sin, no
matter whether we are young or old, we may find ourselves called to cooperate
in other works for the Lord. +
PROPERANTES ADVENTUM DIEI DEI
