These are rather harsh accounts today but maybe we can get an understanding of what some of these mean.  How many of you have a plan for your life?  I don’t mean just living day to day but a PLAN.  A plan that after you work for 20-30-40 years in some business, or at the Lab, you retire. They give you a coin or two. You take an exciting trip perhaps to some foreign country, return and settle down to retired life. Then maybe you take a chance and eat some meñudo and a chicharrone burrito and then ask yourself, “Is that all there is?”  And I’m not talking about the chicharrones, either. I’m talking about, “Is that all there is to life?”  In today’s gospel reading, Jesus introduces four seemingly different situations that nevertheless have a common thread.  Jesus gave us a goal for life.  “If you wish to be my disciple, this is what you must do.  You must be ready to choose between maintaining personal relationships or your own life and Jesus.  You must have a definitive plan toward that goal. You have to be prepared to give up much to reach that goal including all of your possessions.  Then you must have a burning desire to achieve eternal life.”

In the first situation in today’s gospel, if your wife, husband, brother, sister, or children should approach you and say, “I’m tired of the Catholic Church.  I no longer want an organized church that is so stogy, old fashioned and full of rules and prescribed rituals.  I have found a freethinking religious group based on our own consciousness and we have no rules.  You must come with me or we no longer have a relationship.”  Now, this seems rather harsh, this sort of an ultimatum.  But what if you really are asked to choose?  Perhaps we need to go back and see what Jesus said about this.  “Whoever does the will of my Father is my brother, and sister, and mother.”  And we know that His mother totally did the will of His Father.

In the next two situations of building a tower and fighting against superior odds, Jesus asserts that our plans must not be overly grandiose.  We must not consider the good of the whole or our egos in what is important in the Kingdom relative to what we have here now. 

The fourth situation asks us to consider our possessions.  Does our plan for life include readily renouncing all our possessions? 

In all of these situations, you must be willing to hate anything in this world to be a disciple of Jesus.  But that might seem pretty harsh.  However, if you do have a plan for life, some plans are grand design plans but they have an inherent flaw.

When I was drafted into the Army, I went to school and became somebody who put nuclear warheads on missiles. I built atomic cannons: the 8-inch, the 280‑millimeter, the Honest John. All these cannons had nuclear warheads.  So, the Army sent me to Germany.  In Germany, they put us right on the western-most border of Germany because they wanted us to be as far away from East Germany as possible.  If there ever was a declaration of war, they wanted us to shoot all of our atomic missiles off. We’d have all that nuclear artillery ready to go and everything and we would shoot it all off.  Then we would go get our M-16’s and get ready to fight whoever was left over, if anybody.  They told us, “And be prepared.  They’re going to be really mad after we shoot all of those things at them.”  So, that was the plan.

After a while, there came a time when the Army said, “Nothing’s happening,” (this was the height of the cold war). They said, “It’s OK to bring your dependents with you to Germany.”  So, my wife had a child and she was pregnant but we said, “Come on over.”  When she did, we had to go out to live in what is called “the economy” or with the Germans.  Also,  when she got there, they called us both in.  The company commander said, “This is the plan.  Should there be a declaration of war, all the dependents have to go out, go down the Autobahn, and go through France to Paris. Then go on out to the seaport and there will be a ship waiting for you.”  Ha, ha, ha!  “No ship is going to be there,” we thought.  But that was the plan. 

Now, everyone knows, if you have a plan, you have to test it.  So, before we even got there, they tested that plan.  There are about 100,000 troops in the area where we were at and at daybreak they sound the alarm.  Here goes all the military equipment, the trucks, and everything.  The Germans seeing that thought, “Uh, oh!  They know something!  Let’s get out of here!”  They all came, especially all the gypsies.  They had these little carts.  Sort of like mobile homes that they pulled with horses.  They all came out of the woods and everyplace and congregated on the Autobahn and just stopped everything.  For two weeks, there were all these people that were lost out there in those little towns.  They tried to take short cuts and they were out there in the forest and they were all over the place in France.  There are stories about what they did when they were lost. 

That was the grand design but it was full of flaws.  But yet, as I was getting ready to leave Germany, there was a new couple coming in to replace us and I heard the company commander talking to them.  “And this is the plan,” he said. They knew it was going to fail but they didn’t know what to do with it and so they just let it stay.  It was so flawed.  Later I learned that no, there was no ship out there waiting for us.  That was just part of the plan.  It was so full of flaws and they knew it but they went ahead and kept right on going with this flawed plan--as if it was really going to work.

How many of us have serious plans, in our plan for eternal life, similar to this plan that was so full of flaws?  But God gave us a simple and straightforward plan for eternal life that has no flaws.  You might ask, “What is that plan?”  Well, we will profess that plan at this mass and at every mass and at most liturgies.  God’s plan that has been given to us is so that we can strive to make the Kingdom on this earth to be like the Kingdom in Heaven.  Does that give you a hint?  Of course it does. Some of you might already perceive that this plan is, in fact, the “Our Father”.  The “Our Father” has seven petitions for our lives.  One of these, which is the only one that I will talk about is “Give us this day, our daily bread.”  When Martin Luther interpreted this prayer, he wanted it to reflect down to earth bread.  In other words, like the common bread you buy at the store.  That’s the way most people have thought about the “Our Father” when they’ve said it for all these hundreds of years.  In the original St. Jerome translation, the word “daily” is literally “super essential” or “super substantial.”  Now the prayer becomes, “Give us this day, the Lord’s day, our super substantial bread, the bread of life, the body of Christ” or more specifically, “the bread for eternal life”.  That is what we call the Eucharist.  Imagine what we are saying when we ask, “Give us this day” and we say this to our Father, “Give us our bread for eternal life.”  That’s pretty awesome!  This was the belief of the early church fathers.  Without this bread, we have no life within us.

The seven prayers of the “Our Father” are all termed “eschatological prayers”.  In other words, prayers of the end times and beyond, as long as we are not asking just for manna, for common bread.  The entire theology of the trinity, the church, the sacraments, as well as our own plan for life, is contained in the “Our Father”.  But there are some people who have a plan.  I know, over the past weekend, we have had an Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament and people spent time with the Blessed Sacrament.  Yesterday, we had Benediction and there might have been fifteen people at the Benediction.  Those people understand and have a plan of life and they understand the Kingdom of God because they know who the King is and they come to worship the King.  And they have a plan for life. 

The theologian who first introduced me to this deeper meaning of the “Our Father” is named Scott Hahn.  Some of you know him.  He is one of my favorite current theologians.  When Roberta and I heard that he was going to be the principal speaker at a conference in Anaheim, California, we were there.  We wanted to go.  And we went along with 10,000 other Catholics.  And I wondered, “Wow!  Where did all these people come from?”  Then I saw all the speakers.  It just so happened that all the speakers were ministers from other churches who had converted to the Catholic Church.  And you have all these ministers.  Some of them evangelical ministers and they talk the evangelical way.  They do things this way and that way.  They talk about the Bible and scripture and everything.  Except that this time, the words coming out of their mouths are Catholic.  They’re talking about the mass and how special it is.  They’re talking about the sacraments.  They’re talking about their devotion to Mary.  They’re talking about the Rosary.  The one talk I went to was a one-hour talk on Proving Purgatory.  This ex‑Southern Baptist proved purgatory by going through the whole Bible---Old Testament---New Testament—everything. He was so excited by it that everybody else was excited with him.

Well, I learned that wasn’t the only conference of that type going on in the United States. There are about ten of these per year and each one attracts about 10,000 people.  People that are being drawn by these new Catholics, these converted Catholics.  These are the ones, I believe after what I saw, that are going to change the face of the Catholic Church in this country.   Be ready.  These people are on fire!  And they’re on fire for all of these things.  And they’re totally and completely dedicated.  They’re going to try to get their own TV station and they’re going to make it happen.  And if you don’t believe, all you have to do is listen to them.

After Scott Hahn, (he, himself, is a converted Presbyterian minister) after he finished his talk I went up to him.  I went up to him like a neophyte approaching a guru.  I came up to him and I wanted to ask him how he came to learn about this new meaning of the “Our Father” that I had never seen. I was expecting a response that he discovered this information in a hidden library some place by some esoteric little known translation from some sort of an insight that an early church father might have had.  But, no, he calmly said, “I learned all of this from the Catechism of the Catholic Church.  You ought to read it!”  And that sort of took me aback.  He said, “It’s a great book!”  And, in fact, I did  read it and the seventeen pages pertaining to the "Our Father" is really fascinating. 

Yesterday,  after the 7 o’clock mass, somebody went to the library and came back and said, “I can’t find what you’re talking about in this book.”  They had the Baltimore Catechism.  So, I want you to know  that there is a difference between these two books.  Also, there is a companion to the Catechism of the Catholic Church that you can buy along with it that’s bigger than the book itself.   This morning somebody said, “By the way, we have about ten copies of the Catechism of the Catholic Church for sale.”   I didn’t know that either.
So, this is what these speakers do when they’re trying to look up anything.  They look it up in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. It’s that simple.  I encourage you to read it!    You can recognize the “Our Father” as God’s plan for our lives.  Maybe then you will be able to understand the notion of “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God.”