05/10/26 A Reason to Hope

0:01 Welcome to Sunday homilies with me, Father Mike Schmitz. I hope today's homily inspires and motivates you, and I also hope that it leaves you hungry for the one who gave everything to feed you. If you want to get this and other Sunday Mass resources sent straight to your inbox, sign up at ascensionpress.com slash Sunday or by texting Sunday to 33777. You can also follow or subscribe on your podcast app for weekly notifications. God bless. The Lord be with you. A reading from the Holy Gospel according to John. Glory to you, O Lord.

1:05 I will come to you. In a little while, the world will no longer see me, but you will see me, because I live and you will live. On that day, you will realize that I am in the Father and you are in me and I in you. Whoever has my commandments and observes them is the one who loves me. And whoever loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and reveal myself to him. The Gospel of the Lord. let you have a seat so um we just had our last week of finals last weekend last week and i was just thinking i was you know in those in those times i sometimes reflect on man why did i choose to go to school where i went to school like they just got done a lot of our graduates just graduated now they're off wherever um and i think wow i i chose to go to the school i went to for a very particular reason. So I've mentioned many, many times that in high school I had a conversion. I had an encounter with Jesus in confession that just really changed my life. And that kind of set my life on this track of just wanting to learn more about who God is. And at one point, I heard today's second reading. And I was like, that's what I need. So what does St. Peter say?

2:25 First Peter, he says, always be ready to give a reason for the hope that is within you. you know i always heard it said always be ready to give a reason for the faith that's within you and so i was like okay great let's i want to i want to go to college i want to study i want to be able to explain why i believe what i believe and so that's that's why i went to a catholic school and i studied theology because i wanted to be able to give an explanation for what i believed and so that was it that was the goal the goal was be ready to give an explanation in fact last weekend i had a couple students uh they are from duluth but they go to a christian school christian college. And they said, what's your advice for being Catholic on a really fervent Christian school? And I said, well, first you should take care of your prayer life. You need to pray every day. And secondly, you need to study the faith, be able to know, like give an explanation, give a reason for what we believe. But then this is the interesting thing. It doesn't say, St. Peter didn't say, always be ready to give a reason for your faith. He said, always be ready to give a reason for your hope. Always be ready to give a reason for the hope that is within you.

3:35 And I was a person, even in high school, I'm like, no, I have faith. But the more people I talk to and ask them, you have faith? Of course I have faith. Okay, do you have hope? I find that more and more people are more and more reluctant to confess that they have hope? That I know what I believe. I believe in God. I believe in the whole creed. I believe in the word of God, all these things. I have faith, but do I have hope? And we can ask that of ourselves this Sunday. We can just ask that question. Am I a person of hope? And if I'm not, and this could be the reality for us, if I'm not, how do I get hope? In fact, well, it's great because the Bible actually tells us how to get hope. So if you ever read the book of St. Paul's letter to the Romans, Romans chapter 5, St. Paul tells us, here's how you become a person of hope. And fair warning, it's not easy.

4:34 But he says this, he says, we know, he says, we know, we boast our afflictions, he says, knowing that affliction produces endurance. And endurance, proven character, and proven character produces hope. And hope does not disappoint because the love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that's been given to us. So here's what St. Paul says. He says, okay, if you want to have hope, what you need to have is affliction. Well, thanks a lot, Paul. But think about this. It's affliction that leads to endurance, which leads to character, which leads to hope.

5:13 Why affliction? We have to understand this. We have to understand that affliction is not optional. Affliction is necessary. We have to understand that struggle is not optional. Struggle is absolutely necessary. In fact, it's so necessary that in the Bible, Paul, again, this is just one of those two scriptures, Romans 5, but also the Acts of the Apostles, Acts of the Apostles chapter 14, where St. Paul, he shows up to a bunch of Christians who themselves have been persecuted. These Christians have been beaten down. They've been tortured. They've been persecuted by the local authorities. And what does St. Paul say? It says this. It says, Paul shows up and strengthened the spirits of the disciples and exhorted them to persevere in the faith by saying, here's what he would say. Now, here's what you would say. Here's what I would say. I would say, hey guys, keep at it. Hey guys, it's not all bad. Hey guys, it's gonna get better. How does St. Paul strengthen the spirits of the disciples? He says this, it is necessary for us to go through hardships to enter the kingdom of God.

6:10 Like, thanks Paul. Like when it comes to this, he's saying, no, actually, if you want to get to heaven, you have to go through hardships. He says it is necessary to go through hardships to enter the kingdom of heaven. This is the same person who also said, no, affliction produces endurance and endurance produces character and character produces hope. We have to go through affliction. I think so many of us, our goal in life is to reduce affliction. Our goal in life is to reduce struggle instead of the fact that our goal in life is to be able to go through struggle. Why? Because it's this fascinating principle. Maybe you've heard it before. There's a man named Nassim Taleb. Nassim Taleb is, I think he's an Egyptian Christian, but he is a social scientist as well as an economic economist and he looked at the world and looked at almost all biological systems and he found that, well, not just biological systems but other systems, that things can either fall into one of three categories. Either we're fragile, right?

7:02 So you come against something difficult, it breaks us. We know a thing, wine glass, a wine glass is fragile. Or we're resilient. That's kind of the buzzword right now these days. Like you want to have kids that are resilient, right? resilience is great. Resilience is like an anvil, right? Or even a hammer. A hammer is resilient. An anvil is resilient. You can beat on it and beat on it, and it doesn't change. It withstands the struggle. These are great. If you have an option between fragility and resilience, of course you want resilience. But Nassim Taleb points this out. He says there's actually a third category of beings, and this is from everything from our biological systems to organizations. It's on every level of human living and even just organic living. Yes, there are things that are fragile. They come up against something difficult and it crushes them. A caterpillar against a tire. It crushes it fragile.

7:56 There's things that are resilient. They can withstand difficulty. But there's a third category. And again, Nassim Taleb, he said there's actually not even a word for this. It happens everywhere. But he had to invent a word. and the word he came up with was the word anti-fragile. So fragile things come up against something difficult and they break. Resilience comes up against something difficult and they don't change. Something that's anti-fragile will come up against something difficult and it actually makes them stronger. And we've seen this all over the place. Like we actually, you are, human beings are anti-fragile. The fact that you know how to read, you know how to speak English is because you came up against like not knowing how and what happened. When you came up against not knowing how to do this thing, your brain adapted and you got better. That's how muscles work. That's how biological systems work. You come up against something difficult. You lift something heavy and the next time you can lift something heavier. See, human beings, how God made us, he made us not simply to be fragile and not simply to be resilient. He made us biologically to be anti-fragile and he made us spiritually to be anti-fragile.

9:06 St. Paul says, why? We have to go through afflictions. Why? Because affliction produces endurance. I mean, think about any person who's trained, in a couple of months, a couple of weeks actually from now, we have Grandma's Marathon here. It's a marathon in Duluth. And so many of our students have been training for this for months. So many of these students who are posting on their Strava, just had an 18-mile run, just had a 14-mile run. A couple of months ago, a four-mile run was a big deal for them. But they're anti-fragile. Going through affliction, going through struggle has done something to them. It's what St. Paul says. Affliction produces endurance. What's endurance? Endurance is I can now do something I couldn't previously do. I can now do something I couldn't previously do. This is true, again, physically. This is true spiritually.

9:53 Think about how maybe, this might not be the case in your life, maybe think about how easy it was to believe that God loved you when you were a child. And then what happened? That you went through a difficulty and it became harder to believe that God loved you. Then maybe you had a stumble or a fall, you fell into sin, and it became harder to believe that God loved you. It was going through that affliction that now you have this endurance. Now you have this ability to do something you couldn't previously do. But it had to go through the affliction. Like if we remain sinless, to be like, oh, easy. God, you're lucky to love me. But when I see my brokenness, I realize, oh my goodness, it stretches me. It tests me. I'm tried to be able to trust in God's love for me. Because affliction produces endurance. And endurance is I can now do something I couldn't do. But endurance produces something new. Endurance produces character. What's character? This is so fascinating.

10:54 You know, back in, I'd say, boomer years and maybe Gen X years, there was some of the goals. Some of the goals were the person who dies with the most toys wins, right? The collection of stuff. Like you wanna collect a bunch of things. You wanna get the off-road vehicle. You wanna get the four-wheeler. You wanna get the motorcycle. You wanna get the stuff. And the person, as I said, who dies with the most toys wins. That can be the mentality of the world. Now, after Gen X is millennials, Gen Z, Gen Alpha. and one of those situations, you have this cultural shift, this generational shift where a younger generation says, you know what, that's a waste of a life. To just acquire stuff, that's no way to live. That doesn't mean you won. So what we do as millennials, they say, or as Gen Z, like what we do, we don't collect stuff. We're not interested in stuff. We collect experiences. Like I don't wanna have all these things to weigh me down, these things to weigh me down.

11:47 I wanna be able to go out and just, again, experience life. I want to be able to see that kind of view from the top of this mountain. I want to be able to run this kind of race. I want to be able to accomplish this thing. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to collect experiences. Now, that might be a little bit better than collecting stuff, but that's actually not the goal of life either. The goal of life is what? The goal of life is who you become at the end of the story. It's not the stuff you collect or the experiences you collect. It's who you become, proven character. That's the goal, to be able to recognize that because I've been through these experiences, because I've done these things, it's not just now I've collected them, it's now I've become someone else. So affliction produces endurance. I can now do something I couldn't previously do and endurance produces proven character. I now am someone I previously wasn't and that is the entire goal. It's one of the reasons why, like last weekend, we were able to talk about the young man named Eli and say that his life was not wasted, not because he didn't ever own a car or own his own home, not because he ever, you know, summited a 14er in Colorado, but because of who he became at the end of his life.

12:58 Proving character. And proving character produces hope. See, this is the key for all of us. I might have a certain level of hope, but unless I go through affliction, which produces endurance, which produces character, I cannot have hope that's worth anything. Why? Because hope that's not tested is hope that can't be trusted. that's why St. Paul says we have to go through affliction we have to produce endurance in us we have to have this proven character and proven character produces the only kind of hope that can get us to the end of the finish line because hope that isn't tested is hope that can't be trusted and this is the last thing so what is hope keep saying the word but what is it you know this hope is not this false optimism it's not a wish it's not a dream it's not well i hope it doesn't rain today hope is relational you know the three things that remain saint paul says faith hope and love all three of those are relational love is clearly relation relational faith is what faith is trust in God. It's relational. And hope is faith extended into the future. Another way to say it is hope is trust in God extended into the future.

14:29 So are you a person of hope? I'm a person who I'm not trusting in an outcome. My trust in God is not based on outcomes. My trust in God is not based on whether he gives me what I want or what I'm wishing for.

14:52 That our hope is based on his character. And because we've gone through affliction and he's been there with us and because I've grown in endurance and he's been there with us and because we become have a proven character and he's been there with us, because of all that, we have proven hope. We have this trust in God extended into the future, which is one of the reasons why we can't be afraid. We're not afraid of suffering. We're not afraid of struggle. We as Christians are not afraid of affliction because we know.

15:33 not only does it do something in us, but the entire time.