Father! Draw Me Close

Sermon by Rev. John Paul Shea

19th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Aug. 9,, 2015

Saints Peter and Paul Parish, Tucson, AZ

“No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draw him, and I will raise him on the last day.” (John 6:44)

In today’s celebration of Mass on this 19th

Sunday of Ordinary time, we again learn of the great gift of the Holy Eucharist in John 6: 41-51. 

You may recall a few weeks ago we heard the passage of the feeding of the 5000.

The following week we heard Our Lord explain the bigger picture of the significance of the miracle of the loaves and fish. Our Lord said to the people, yes, you saw the miracle of the loaves and fish, but, “Do not work for food that perishes but for the food that endures for eternal life, which [I] will give you" (John 6:27). He says to them, “I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever. And the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world." (John 6:51). 

In today’s Gospel, we hear of the reaction of the Jewish people toward Our Lord’s revelation that He Himself is the living Bread that came down from heaven and that He gives eternal life. 

Sadly, they do not believe Him. They are thinking in an earthly manner, clinging to physical bread only. They grumble and murmur among themselves saying, “Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph? Do we not know his father and mother? Then how can he say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?”

So Our Lord rebukes the Jews because of their hardness of heart, and He reminds them

"No one can come to Me
unless the Father draw him."

that “no one can come to Me unless the Father draws him.” No one can come to Him unless they open their hearts to His grace.

My brothers and sisters, these words of Our Lord Jesus Christ in today’s Gospel passage were not just given to the Jewish people over 2000 years ago; these words are also being said to each one of us today.

Jesus is the living bread that came down from heaven, and the bread that we receive at Mass is “[His] flesh for the life of the world!" (John 6:51)

And we are reminded today -- through Our Lord’s conversation with the Jews -- that if we truly want the gift of the Eucharist to bear fruit in our lives than we must be open to conversion of heart. We must be drawn by the Holy Spirit to receive Our Lord in faith. 

There are many Catholics in the world today. But how many Catholics are drawn to our Church by the Father? In other words, how many come to Mass with the right intentions?

In fact, statistics tell us that only 30% of today's Catholics believe in the Real Presence. A mere 30% of Catholics today believe that the sacrament of Holy Communion is actually Jesus, the Son of God. Many think, "Oh, sure, it's a symbol of God." But, no! The bread that we receive in Holy Communion is the real thing! Christ instituted the sacrament of Holy Communion in order to remain with us until the end of time (Jn 14:18). He intended us to believe in Him, and, in believing, we are to eat His Body and drink His Blood so that we can have life eternal! If we do not believe, we are not fulfilling His plan. Furthermore, the deeper our trust in the True Presence of Our Lord, the more surely and effectively we will be sanctified in receiving Him! 

My brothers and sisters, to eat the flesh of Jesus means that we strive to have Jesus in the center of our lives. Just as the food we eat becomes part of us when it enters our

bloodstream and organs, Jesus becomes part of us when we eat His living Body -- if we are striving to receive Him worthily by a life lived in purity and holiness.

We come to Mass because the Father has drawn us. We come because we want to receive Our Lord worthily so that we can grow in sanctity and holiness. If we do not want to strive to leave our sins behind and grow in sanctity, than we are not ready to receive Our Lord in the Holy Eucharist. Our Lord has said, “Many are called, but few are chosen.” He has also said, “Strive to enter the narrow gate…”

Our Church is the narrow gate. All are welcome into this gate but few are chosen. This is because Our Lord knows that many have closed hearts. Many are unwilling to change their lives. 

God calls us to live in His grace. But we must be willing to live in His grace by offering our bodies, our minds, and our souls to Him. In today’s second reading Saint Paul says, “Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with which you were sealed for the day of redemption.” 

Each one of us who has been confirmed has been sealed with the Holy Spirit. Yet, we can squash the Holy Spirit that lives in us through grave sin. This is why Our Lord has given His Church the sacrament of confession. Our Lord will never refuse a repentant heart that truly wants to change even though we continue to struggle. But Our Lord won’t live in a heart that refuses to strive to walk in purity and truth.

As we come to receive Our Lord in the Holy Eucharist this day, let us thank God for the gift of Our Lord’s eternal Bread, and let us strive to receive this gift worthily so that we can live in Our Lord’s grace in this life and be raised by Him on the last day.

Did you enjoy this thoughtful sermon? Perhaps you'd also like to read the light-hearted Just Discovered: The Gospel of Symbols! a parody of 3rd and 4th century Gnostic thinking.

Little Known Facts about former U.S. President Barack Obama

Dem POTUS Created 

the Bureau of Vital Fetal Organs 

by Lawrence Fox

Months before President Barack Obama’s sodomy promotion tour in Kenya, the White House established the United States Bureau of Vital Fetal Organs.

Congress did not approve the new bureau. In fact, the majority of Congress was not informed about the matter, and still remains ignorant of its existence.

“We will not punish our daughters with unwanted children and we won’t hurt medical research by restricting their access to intact body parts,” the president was overhead saying at a meeting with Planned Parenthood and Democrat members of Congress. He did not use the word human or little person during this exchange since he was already on record stating, “The question of when human life begins is above my pay grade.”

By working to establish the Bureau of Vital Fetal Organs, the president demonstrated his ethical consistency on the science of abortion. Early in his first term, he issued an executive order, releasing a large unused line of “frozen embryos” for medical research. Embryos’ released from frozen captivity have been carefully injected into mice, rats, and hamsters for the purpose of seeking a cure for AIDS, which unfortunately is still contracted by drug use and sodomy -- activities which the President promotes around the world.  Medical science should not be hampered by religious and cultural biases, the president said while signing the executive order creating the Bureau.

U.S. Democrat Senators and Representatives worked feverishly with the president while he was negotiating with Dr. Bladder – a Planned Parenthood advisor - on the exchange of fetal body parts for profit, it was reported anonymously.

President Obama was mostly concerned with adding to his presidential legacy the creation of one arching mechanism that would stimulate the U.S. economy, decrease unemployment, decrease the human carbon footprint (the snap removal of little feet from fetuses is quick and simple), and address Climate Change.

The President reminded those present in the White House during the negotiations that he promised to lower ocean levels as a result of his presidency. It seemed the expeditious merging and promotion of capitalism, medical science, and de-population under one umbrella would secure a Democrat victory in the next general election.

Dr. Bladder advised the President that in the past federal laws protected millions of women in America with access to safe, clean, sanitized, painless, and private abortions. But now by allowing cadaverous witchdoctors at Planned

Cadaverous Witch Doctors
from Planned Parenthood

Parenthood to alter and prolong the abortion procedure (i.e. making them less safe and more painful), but allowing more fresh (in fact alive) intact fetal body mass  be available for a profit with each abortion.

To do this successfully, the amount of Saline,  D&C and Vacuum procedures would have to be reduced. Highly cruel methods of infant execution -- as used during a partial birth abortion -- would need to be used more often.   It was anonymously reported that the option was proposed of not aborting the fetus, but delivering it whole and alive and then immediately putting it in deep freeze like a salmon netted and yanked out of the earth’s liquid uterus.

Dr. Bladder advised the President that the plan had one drawback. There existed a shortage of specialized and intoxicated abortionists capable of performing the task without reservation. The President was reminded that the Lutheran Deacon and partial birth abortionist George Tiller was recently terminated at the OK Corral and Kermit the Frog Gosnell was imprisoned because Attorney General Eric Holder could not protect him. Kermit ran his little house of horrors for years within property owned by Eric Holder’s wife.  

It was anonymously reported that the President retorted, “We can certainly recruit from among ISIS adherents since they have no difficulty with slicing heads, arms and legs off of non-Muslim children. We have done our best to keep ISIS in business only pretending to give a damn. Because of our open borders policy, we have ready access to members of ISIS, who have snuck into the country. ”

Dr. Bladder told the President that there was a very small risk of the un-educated American population finally learning that abortions are not performed on blobs of tissue or

undifferentiated cells, but instead on tiny human fetuses with developing and intact body parts including: heads, legs, arms, fingers, eyes, hearts, kidneys and livers. If that information got out, there would be some indignation among Republicans who would wage another war on women and seek to stop the flow of millions of taxpayer dollars from the federal government to Planned Parenthood.  

It was reported anonymously that President Barack Hussein Obama considered the matter for about ten seconds and reasoned, “If the altered abortion procedures advance medical science and promote my legacy, then this Administration will continue to shield the cadaverous witchdoctors of Planned Parenthood.”

The president then ended the meeting with Democrat members of Congress including: Representatives Lipton Soup and Pepsi, Senators Bentover, Rheem, and Rover. The meeting had netted all the talking points necessary in case things went sour.  

Dr. Bladder, the President and the members of Congress retired for lunch together. Munching on their salads, sipping wine, they discussed casually the value of vital fetal organs and the color of the Lamborghinis they would soon receive from Planned Parenthood. 

P.S. They didn’t know there was a video recording.

Did you enjoy this spoof? Lawrence has written others. FOR THE OBAMA LADY: New Product from Smoke & Mirrors!   

The Test of Courage in a Man: Choose Life

by Susan Fox

“Christ, the Son of God, who with the Father and the Spirit is praised as “uniquely holy,” loved the Church as His bride, delivering Himself up for her. He did this that He might sanctify her. He united her to Himself as His own body and brought it to perfection by the gift of the Holy Spirit for God’s glory. Therefore in the Church, everyone whether belonging to the hierarchy, or being cared for by it, is called to holiness, according to the saying of the Apostle: “For this is the will of God, your sanctification.” (Vatican II, Chapter V, The Universal Call to Holiness, #39)

Fred Jaramillo, @chooseliferacer on Twitter gearing up
for his first race Friday July 24, 2015 at Bandimere
Speedway, Denver (photo by Susan Fox)

The test of courage in a man is not whether he undertakes great things without fear.

No. Courage is exercised in the face of fear.

So it is with @chooseliferacer, aka Fred Jaramillo, of Bosque Farms, New Mexico. Raised to love drag racing from the age of 5, and a drag racer since the age of 16, he perhaps could be called courageous because he engages in a dangerous sport. Twice before, violent accidents have taken place right behind the one-time National Champion of the Mopar Mile-High Races in Denver (Super Gas Class) involving his opponent – both times just barely missing him.

But in 2002, Jaramillo decided to marry two of his passions: drag racing and his Catholic faith. This took true grit.

For Fred admits he feared his opponents: people who support abortion. He feared their reaction to a message of life printed large on the side of his cars. He feared unpleasant encounters, sabotage of his autos, blasphemy and persecution.

As a pro-life Catholic, he put a small bumper sticker on his dragster that said, “Every 4^th Baby is Aborted.” 

“Somebody saw it and asked if it was true,” Fred said in a break between racing at the 36th Annual Mopar Mile-High National Hot Rod Association (NHRA) Nationals on Friday July 24, “The only reason he saw it was because he was close.”

This started Fred and his family – his crew chief and sister, Jenn Green, and fellow racer and father, Phil Jaramillo – to start thinking about the name on their dragsters. (They had four racing regularly until five years ago when they dropped to two. Crew chief Jenn Green was pregnant, and choose to stay at home with her child, another life affirming decision in an overwhelmingly Catholic pro-life family.)

“So we prayed about the name,” Fred said. And they picked the name “Choose Life.” Fred and his family had decided to live more closely for eternity -- exactly as Vatican II said a Catholic layman should.

“But by reason of their special vocation it belongs to the laity to seek the kingdom of God by engaging in temporal affairs and directing them according to God's will. They live in the world, that is, they are engaged in each and every work and business of the earth and in the ordinary circumstances of social and family life, which, as it were, constitute their very existence. There they are called by God that, being led by the spirit to the Gospel, they may contribute to the sanctification of the world, as from within like leaven, by fulfilling their own particular duties. Thus, especially by the witness of their life, resplendent in faith, hope and charity they must manifest Christ to others.” (Vatican II, Lumen Gentium.)

Uncle Fred Jaramillo sleeping with
his infant niece. Fred has five children,
five nieces & four nephews.
Photo courtesy of Jaramillo Family

Whew. That’s a lot of words to describe the fact that whatever a person’s vocation, the call to holiness is universal. In the Catholic Church, it was sometimes erroneously thought that the call to holiness was only for priests and nuns, not laity. But our understanding changed dramatically with Vatican II. Now the world is the oyster where the laity hopefully manifest Christ to others, as wives, husbands, fathers, car mechanics, newspaper reporters, and yes, even drag racers.

“We are to go out into the world and spread the good news. Our lives may be the only Bible some people ever read,” Fred said, “Our talent and our treasure is to be used for

Fred Jaramillo before the start of races Friday.
His T-shirt reads "Unborn babies feel pain."
Photo by Susan Fox

God’s glory, everything we have is ultimately His.”

In 2002, when they changed the name on the dragsters to “Choose Life,” the response was surprisingly positive. Indeed, I experienced the same thing on Friday. One woman seeing me intensely taking pictures of the Choose Life racecar said something really happy and positive. I don’t know exactly what she said (and she repeated it three times) because we were on the starting line, and it’s impossible to hear anything there. She did ask if Choose Life was my car, and I nodded vigorously, saying yes. Then she said, “......” -- a bunch of stuff I couldn’t hear. But her facial expressions showed happiness and good will. I didn’t leave the track with a black eye.

But one year, Fred met a man at the track who saw the name of the cars, and his reaction was violently negative. Fred said his childhood was so rough he thought he should have been aborted.  But Fred and his family all spoke to him. The next year when he ran into the same man he was friendly. He hadn’t changed his position, but he was a much more gentler person. That was a sign of God’s healing.

In another case of persecution, a man walked up to Fred and demanded to know if he gave all the profits from his races to orphanages. Fred didn’t understand what he was getting at, and he said, “No.” The man argued, “You should.”

This is a common tactic of pro-abortionists. They attack pro-lifers by saying they should be doing the charity that they think would make abortion less frequent – instead of witnessing against the murder of unborn children. Actually, there is a shortage of children available to adopt and the help needed is at the starting line to make sure children are born. That is where Fred and his family are already thoroughly involved.

Through their involvement in the Catholic Knights of Columbus, the Jaramillos raise money for the non-profit Gabriel House Project, which helps pregnant women in need with spiritual, material and emotional support.  The charity provides housing, medical care, job training, parenting classes and jobs for pregnant women in need, married or unmarried -- it doesn’t matter.

The man with the orphanage question also was changed by his encounter with the Jaramillo family. He met them the next year, and cheerfully helped with the air compression on their tires. They had made another friend.

Fred Jaramillo has another passion. It’s called the Internet. He met his wife of 13 years, Deanna, on America Online. He’s on Facebook where he has long witnessed to the pro-life cause. But he resisted joining Twitter until 2013 when Philadelphia Abortion Doctor Kermit Gosnell was found guilty of murdering three children born alive in a late term abortion procedure.

Then Fred entered the Twitterverse to join pro-life tweet fests as @chooseliferacer. Now his Twitter page has almost 7,000 followers and proudly promotes “Defund Planned Parenthood.” It’s not uncommon to see the hashtag #PPSellsBabyParts (Planned Parenthood Sells Baby Parts) in his tweets since the Center for Medical Progress earlier this month began releasing undercover videos of Planned Parenthood officials casually discussing the sale of human organs derived from children who are killed in abortions.

Once on Twitter, he naturally found a case that needed his help. A rape victim living in another city was pregnant with triplets and needed medical assistance and food. He sent food, money and baby items. One child died in the womb when she became dehydrated. A second child died after birth. But she had a healthy son, who was adopted by her cousins. “She sent us pictures of the ultrasound,” Fred said.

Drag racing is a funny sport. They don’t try to beat each other to the finish line. They try to stick to the index – 9.5 seconds in the Super Gas Class, which is amateur drag racing. So on Friday Fred won both of his qualifying races coming in at 9.59 seconds and 9.541 seconds. His opponents were alternately too fast and then too slow.

No one has a watch or any way to tell how fast they are going while they are racing, and the race is over literally in seconds! This was a great surprise to me. I started to climb the horrific steps to my seat to watch the race, and realized I couldn’t see the race, which I imagined must go on past the curve in the road to my left.

I started asking questions of a white haired man sitting next to me with orange plugs in his ears. Without taking his earplugs out, and after I repeated the questions numerous times, I finally discovered that the finish line was in my sight. It was those orange cones everyone went through seconds after they left the start! They race one quarter mile.

Choose Life Crew Chief Jenn Green watching as her brother Fred crosses the finish line on the left.
He won. His score is 9.541. His opponent was too slow at 9.583 seconds.  Susan Fox took the successful photo.

Now the actions of Fred’s Crew Chief Jenn Green, his sister, made sense. After both Fred and Phil, his father, took off, she anxiously stood in the middle of the start up line to watch the end of the race, and make sure her father and brother made it safely. The starting line is the best view of the finish.

She said she watched the race where Fred's opponent crashed into a wall. It looked like he dove right into her brother’s dragster, but actually he hit the wall right behind Fred. She found out later, the driver was telling himself, “I’m going to nail him to the tree,” meaning he was psyching himself out to do better than Fred. He emerged unhurt. The dragster was totaled.

Then on Saturday Fred lost his first qualifying race, coming in at an incredible 9.509 seconds. His opponent won by five hundredths of a second, coming in at 9.502.

Phil Jaramillo, however, won his first race on Saturday at 9.522 seconds. He qualified as 13th in his class. But Phil lost his second race. His time wasn’t bad but he finished off by three feet, according to Jenn. Oh well, done early, they came to my house for dinner, which turned into the finish line.

I think I’m hooked. Fred said I would be.

You called it, Bro!

“It pertains to them (the laity) in a special way so to illuminate and order all temporal things with which they are so closely associated that these may be effected and grow according to Christ and may be to the glory of the Creator and Redeemer.” (Vatican II, Lumen Gentium.)

Would you like to read another post about a pro-life business? Pro-Life Coffee: A Lifeboat Tendered to Those Drowning in the Great Sea of the Culture of Death