Ficsh Parishes

03/27/2022

02/26/2022

Mardi Gras Celebration in Selden on Sunday! Come join the fun and take home some yummy goodies from bake walk.

10/25/2021

It’s that time of year, to order your Christmas Poinsettia’s for Sacred Heart in Selden. If you would like to purchase one in memory of or in honor of a loved one, to decorate the church for Christmas, please do so by Thurs. Nov 4th. Please contact Jaci Schaben 785-386-8025 or Nicole Schiltz 785-386-8022.

Prices are as follows:
Small 6” $25
Medium 8” $40
Large 10” $55

09/06/2021

Friends, in our Gospel today, Jesus heals a man with a withered hand. As I’ve said many times before, we tend to domesticate Christ, reducing him to a guru or a teacher, one spiritual guide among many. But this is to do violence to the Gospel, which presents him not simply as teacher but as savior.

I realize that the culture militates against Christianity at this point, for it steadily teaches the ideology of self-esteem and self-assertion: “I’m okay and you’re okay”; “Who are you to tell me how to behave?”

But this sort of thing—whatever value it might have politically or psychologically—is simply inimical to a biblical Christianity. The biblical view is that we have, through the abuse of our freedom, gotten ourselves into an impossible bind. Sin has wrecked us in such a fundamental way that we have become dysfunctional. Until we truly feel what it means to be lost and helpless, we will not appreciate who Jesus is and what he means.

Jesus is someone who has rescued us, saved us, done something that we could never, even in principle, do for ourselves.

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/090621.cfm

09/01/2021

Friends, in our Gospel today, we see Jesus in action. He is always hurrying from place to place, on the go. Today, Luke gives us a sort of “day in the life” of Jesus. And it is quite a day! Our Gospel opens just after the dramatic expulsion of a demon in the Capernaum synagogue. And after entering the house of Simon, Jesus cures his mother-in-law, and then the entire town comes to his door. Jesus spends the whole evening curing presumably hundreds who were variously afflicted.

In the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, in an attempt to make Jesus more palatable to rationalists and “realists,” theologians put great stress on Jesus’ preaching, especially his ethical teaching.

But this is not the Jesus that Luke presents. Rather, he is a healer—“Soter,” rendered in Latin as salvator, which just means “the bearer of the ‘salus’” or health. Jesus is portrayed as a healer, a savior. In him, divinity and humanity have come together; in him, the divine life and divine power are breaking through. God’s deepest intentions for his beloved creatures appears—what God plans for us in the kingdom to come is now historically anticipated.

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/090121.cfm

08/30/2021

Friends, in today’s Gospel, Jesus begins his Galilean ministry with a prophetic message in the synagogue at Nazareth: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring glad tidings to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord.”

The moment has arrived, the privileged time, the “kairos”; something that human beings have been longing for and striving after and hoping to see has appeared. In Jesus of Nazareth, the divine and human have come together in a salvific way, and this reconciliation is the long-awaited kingdom of God.

One motif in Scripture is persistent: the passionate desire for deliverance, the cry of the heart toward the God from whom the people feel alienated. What Jesus announces in his first sermon, and what he demonstrates throughout his life and ministry, is that this wild desire of his ancestors, this hope against hope, this intimate union of God and humanity, is an accomplished fact, something that can be seen and heard and touched.

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/083021.cfm

08/27/2021

Friends, our Gospel today is the parable that compares the kingdom of heaven “with ten virgins who took their lamps and went out to meet the bridegroom.” This is an image borrowed from the customs of the time. The bridesmaids would wait for the groom and, upon his appearance, accompany him.

Well, this is the Christian community, waiting for Christ the groom to arrive. Did Jesus tell this parable because he knew that his Church would be in for a long period of waiting?

We are wise in our waiting if we pray on a regular basis; if we educate ourselves in the faith; if we participate in the sacraments, especially the Eucharist; if we perform the corporal and spiritual works of mercy; if we become people of love. We are foolish in our waiting if we neglect these things.

And here is one of the hardest truths of this parable: the divine life, so cultivated, cannot simply be shared with another at the last minute. The wise virgins are not being difficult and self-absorbed when they tell their friends that they can’t help them. A saint can’t simply infuse his life into another; it just doesn’t work that way.

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/082721.cfm

08/26/2021

Friends, in today’s Gospel, Jesus praises the faithful servant who served his master in a theo-drama. We are called to serve our Master in the same way. A theo-drama is written and directed by God. On the great stage that is the created universe and according to the prototype that is Christ, we are invited to “act,” to find and play our role in God’s theater.

The problem is that the vast majority of us think that we are the directors, writers, and above all, stars of our own “ego-dramas,” with other people functioning as either our supporting players or the villains in contrast to whom we shine all the brighter.

Of course, our dramas are always uninteresting, even if we are playing the lead role. The key is to find the role that God has designed for us, even if it looks like a bit part. Sometimes, in a lengthy novel, a character who has seemed minor emerges as the fulcrum around which the entire narrative turns.

When we de-center the ego and live in an exciting and unpredictable relationship with God, we realize very clearly that our lives are not about us. And that’s a liberating discovery.

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/082621.cfm

08/25/2021

Friends, in today’s Gospel, Jesus judges the Pharisees for their hypocrisy. He says, “On the outside you appear righteous, but inside you are filled with hypocrisy and evildoing.”

One of the greatest dangers in the spiritual life is to fall into the trap of auto-salvation, the conviction that one can save oneself through heroic moral effort. The principal problem with such a strategy is that it results in the strengthening of the very egotism that one hopes to overcome.

What Jesus so vehemently critiqued in the Pharisees was just this kind of egotism: “You are like whitewashed tombs, which appear beautiful on the outside, but inside are full of dead men’s bones.” Sin is not a weakness that we can overcome but a condition from which we have to be saved.

This insight should allow us, at an elemental psychological and spiritual level, to relax and to surrender. What happens often in the hearts of sinners is a kind of tightening of the spirit as the mind and will strive to break out of the prison of fear. All of this stretching and straining serves only to throw the ego back on itself in a misery of failure and self-reproach.

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/082521.cfm

08/24/2021

Friends, in today’s Gospel, Nathaniel declares to Jesus, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God; you are the King of Israel.” Nathaniel is also called Bartholomew, whose feast day we are celebrating.

Anglican Scripture scholar N.T. Wright has told us that when a first-century Jew spoke of the arrival of God’s kingdom, he was taken to mean something very specific. He was announcing that the temple was going to be restored; that the proper worship of Yahweh would obtain; that the enemies of Israel would be dealt with; and that, above all, the tribes of the Lord—and through them, the tribes of the world—would be gathered.

This is why Jesus chose twelve disciples, evocative of the twelve tribes. They would be the prototype and the catalyst for the gathering of Israel and hence the gathering of everyone. They would be the fundamental community and sign of unity.

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/082421.cfm

08/23/2021

Friends, in today’s Gospel, Jesus launches a blistering attack on the scribes and Pharisees.

The Son teaches, heals, preaches to, and forgives those who feel far from the mercy of God. He is the hand that the Father stretches out to sinners and to those who are lost. And by the same token, he is the judge of a sinful world. When the light of God’s forgiving love appears, the shadows of sin become all the deeper and more obvious. In light of him, there is nowhere to hide. And Jesus, the Word of the Father, gives voice to this judgment: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites. . . .”

The Son names all those powers that are opposed to the creative and loving intentions of his Father. He speaks a word of judgment on a world grown cozy with sin. He “channels” all of the feelings of the Father toward the world: intense, forgiving love to those who are lost, and equally intense hatred for the structures of darkness.

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/082321.cfm

08/22/2021

Friends, we come today to the end of the extraordinary sixth chapter of John’s Gospel. Before this, Jesus told his listeners, “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you.” Well, today, we have the denouement of the story.

We hear that “many of Jesus’ disciples who were listening said, ‘This saying is hard; who can accept it?’” Notice that we are talking about Jesus’ followers. And yet they find this teaching impossible to take.

If his words were meant in a symbolic sense, they wouldn’t have had this shocking effect. If what he meant was simply, “This bread is a symbol of my body,” why would there be such a strong reaction? I mean, the Jewish Scriptures deal in poetic metaphor all the time. The point is that they had understood him in this context only too well.

Given every opportunity to explain himself better, Jesus does nothing of the kind. Instead, he upbraids them for their lack of faith. This is why the Catholic tradition has insisted, against all attempts to soften these words of Jesus, that he should be taken straightforwardly.

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/082221.cfm