Speaker 1: Welcome to Saint Patrick Catholic Community podcast. We're glad you're with us.
Bishop Peter Bui: Good morning again. What a day to be here with you. Today, we celebrate Laitari Sunday, which the church again invites us to pause during Lent to rejoice. We are also celebrating your patron feast day, Saint Patrick, and a newly ordained bishop who has been given approximately more or less twelve minutes to make a good impression. No pressure whatsoever.
Father Eric, when I was stepping up here, he said, good luck. My brothers and sisters, Saint Patrick and I, we have a certain kinship and that is Saint Patrick was a stranger. He came to a land and he loved the people of that land. I was a stranger too when I was five coming over from Vietnam. And, I came here and I loved the people also.
But, I must clarify that while Saint Patrick was forced to be in Ireland, I was welcomed here in Scottsdale. Now, have him one on that front. We all know the story of Saint Patrick, but here's what strikes me about it. And, it is a detail that many people who know something about Saint Patrick, forgets, that never hears. Because the story of Saint Patrick, we learn usually starts too late.
We know the ending. We know that he's a bishop. He was a bishop. He came and he preached the gospel in Ireland. We know about the Shamrock.
We know that in Ireland up to today, there are no snakes in Ireland because he drove the snakes out of Ireland. But the story begins somewhere darker and less comfortable. It begins on a hillside in Ireland with a 16 year old boy, far from home, alone in the coal and forced to tend the sheeps of a master that he didn't choose. Patrick had been kidnapped from Britain, sown to slavery, and left in a cold windswept mountain for six years. No one was looking for him.
No one was coming for him. And yet, he would later write in his autobiography called The Confessions, The Confessional. It was precisely there in the darkness, in the obscurity that something cracked open inside him. He prayed, he said, a 100 times a day while tending the sheeps. Sometimes through the night even, and not out of piety, but out of desperation, out of nothing else left to do but to pray.
And you know what? God was listening to that little boy. God was watching that boy on a hillside that the whole world had forgotten. And that is the one spiritual truth threading through every reading today, and that is God sees precisely what human eyes pass over. That is God stops for the one we thought no one would call.
Let's take a look at the first readings. The the prophet Samuel arrives at Jesse's household with a task to anoint the future king of Israel. And what does does Jesse do? He parades his sons before Samuel. Tall ones, strong ones, impressive ones.
And we read right past what is actually happening. Jesse had eight sons. He only presented seven sons. He doesn't hide David out of malice. He simply does not think to include David.
David, he said, is in the field. David is tending the sheep. David is where David should be. And, that is the wound very quietly in this first reading. Not the dramatic wound of open rejection, but the quieter, more common wound of simply being forgotten.
Imagine, it's it hurt it hurts so much when you know that you are forgotten, not just by people, but especially by loved ones. And God stops the entire proceedings. Seven sons, and seven times God said no to those seven sons. Then the question, are these all the sons you have? And Jesse paused.
There is still the youngest. He is tending the sheep, Jesse says. Now, watch what God does. He doesn't argue with Jesse's assessment or judgment. He doesn't correct or rebuke.
He simply bypasses it entirely. He sends for that son that is being forgotten. He And then he's he taught him a lesson. He said, not as man sees does God sees, because man sees the appearance, but God sees right into the heart. And then we turn to the gospel today, and the pattern repeats itself.
But now the ones doing the overlooking are the disciples themselves. A man born blind from birth sits at the roadside, and the first thing they do is that they try to explain his situation. They ask, whose sins caused this man to be born blind? They're not they're not being crude. They're doing what educated, well meaning people do when they are faced with suffering, and that is trying to explain suffering.
And Jesus doesn't answer their questions. He frames it in its entirety. This happens so that the work of God might be made visible through him. Then he does something strange, something earthly. He does something tender.
He spits into the dirt. He makes mud with his hand. He anoints the man's eyes and send him to the to wash in the Pool Of Silwan. And the man comes back with his sight restored. Paul, in the second reading, names what has happened in one single Starling sentence.
He said, you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord, Paul says, reflecting this blind man. Not you were once in darkness. Paul didn't say that. He said, you were darkness itself. Now, can you see the transformation?
The transformation is not a change of location. It is a change of nature. Something in us is converted, not simply repositioned. And, it begins always with God asking the question Jesse couldn't bring himself to ask. Are these all the sons that you have?
Now, I want to tell you something that I haven't said publicly now. In the weeks after it was announced that Pope Leo the fourteenth had named me as Auxiliary Bishop of Phoenix, I went through what I would call like a crisis of mirror. You know what is a crisis of mirror? Every morning, I look at my reflection and thought, is this really a bishop? Or has there been some kind of, administrative error in the Vatican?
I even checked my emails repeatedly just to see if there was like a retraction or a mistake, know. But no. But here's the thing, the doubt passed, but while it lasted, it was real. Because I know myself, I know my limitations, I know my own hidden fields, just like David, just like Patrick, the parts of me that are still, let's be honest, tending sheep somewhere out there in the back. And in those days, I kept asking the question I suspect many of you have asked in your own way about your own life even.
Does God really see all of that and still say this is the one? And then I turned back to today's first reading. God had been watching David all along. All those solitary days in the field, all those nights under the open sky, God was not absent in David's life. God was watching.
God was planning something marvelous. And God was waiting for exactly the right time. Now, my brothers and sister, that is what grace looks like when it reaches us. Not a certificate of worthiness. Not a feeling that we are ready.
Just a voice saying, send him. He's the one I want. I realized something then, that doubt itself was not a sign of unworthiness. It was a sign that I understood something true, and that is like David, like the man born blind even in the gospel had not chosen this. They had not chosen this.
It had chosen me. That is the initiative came from God, not from me. I was simply the one being able to being asked to go go and wash like the blind man. To say yes to a mission I could not have invented for myself. And trust that the one who sent me could see something that I, in the mirror, couldn't see.
That is what obedience in the dark is like from the inside. And God does not waste the dark places, the moments of dark places that we are in. Today, your community celebrates its patron, And I want to suggest that the name Saint Patrick on your church, in your community, is not merely a historical decoration. It is a theological statement about who you are called to be. Patrick's entire mission was this, to bring light to a place the church has not yet reached.
To see what God saw in the people that the war had overlooked. He came back to the island of his slavery, not with resentment in his heart, but with a fire of love that burned and that changed everything and everywhere that he went. That is what lent is about when we are right now in lent. Forty days are not forty days of punishment. When you have to go without sweets or what you like.
They are the pool of silhouette, just like for the blind man. They are the hillside in the cold, just like for Saint Patrick. They are the space where God is making something out of our particular darkness. Cracking open the places in us that have grown comfortable with a lesser light. The fasting, the prayer, the honest examination of a conscience, these are not performances of piety during Lent.
They are saying, yes. We are saying to Jesus, yes. Make your mud. Press it into my eyes. I will go and wash, and we will come back seeing just like the blind man.
So this week, I invite you to sit with one honest question, just one. And that is this, where in my life have I made peace with darkness? Not dramatic darkness necessarily, but the quiet kind. The place where you stop expecting God to intervene in your life, or the relationship you have written off, or the habit you have excused, or the wound you have decided to carry forever because it has there, it has been so long that it has become a part of you. Bring it to prayer this week.
Hold it before the Lord the way the blind man held up his face so that the Lord can touch it. You don't need to try too hard to understand, just go and watch. Patrick was a slave on a hillside, The world had forgotten. David was a boy in the hill. No one thought to search.
The man born blind sat at the roadside with no particular expectation. In each case, God interrupted into their lives, looked past the impressive candidates, and asked the question that changed everything, or these are the sons you have. My brothers and sisters, we are still in the field like David, like Patrick, and God is already on his way into our lives. And like Saint Paul, you are the light in the Lord. Live as children of light.
Amen.
Speaker 1: This has been a Saint Patrick Catholic Community podcast. For more of our shows, go to our website and click Saint Patrick's Studio.