Sermons of Fr Paul Robinson SSPX

We call today “Good Shepherd Sunday” because of the Gospel where Our Lord compares Himself to a shepherd. It is traditional today to speak of the question of vocations, because of the fact that a priest is a shepherd of souls.
The question of a vocation is a crucial one because it concerns God’s plan for our life. As Catholics, we believe that God has created each one of us for Himself, for us to dwell with Him forever in Heaven.
Meanwhile, God creates us and places us on this earth, asking us to serve Him during this life. If we do that, He will give us the eternal reward of Heaven once this life is over.
God has established two main paths to serve Him in during this life: the married life, and the religious life or priesthood.
It is so important that young people take the time to ask themselves which of these two states of life would be better for them to choose. Both of them are good, and so it is never sinful to choose marriage instead of a vocation. But the vocation is a higher choice, because it is a higher way to serve God.
Everyone in this chapel who has entered into their state of life had to, at one time, ask themselves these important questions: what should my future be? What choice should I make of my state of life? This is as much true of myself as everyone else.
In today’s sermon, I want to explain two important differences between choosing a vocation and choosing the married life.

Why does the Church have us read about the patriarch Joseph on the feast of St. Joseph?

What is real and what is not real? There are many things that we know through direct observation. But reality is much greater than what we can observe directly.
For instance, for centuries, mankind was not aware of the microscopic world. There were some who speculated about it but could not prove that it existed. Regardless of what human beings thought about it, though, that microscopic world was existing.
Through the invention of microscopes, we are now able to directly observe microbes, cells, DNA and, to some extent, even atoms. Now, no one questions that they exist because we are able to see them directly. We know now that a single drop of water contains 20 million microbes and a single teaspoon of soil contains up to one billion microbes. Teeming with life!
But there are still many aspects of reality that we are not able to see directly. God wants it to be this way. He wants there to be hidden aspects of reality that we are not able to know by observation.
Some of those things that we cannot observe directly, He wants to tell us about and ask us to believe that they exist on the basis of faith in His word. This is the case for the truths of our faith. We are not able to observe directly any of the things that we believe in our Catholic Faith. We do not believe in them because we are able to observe them; we believe in them—we consider them to be real—because God, Who is the Master of all reality, tells us that they exist.
One of the things we are all able to observe directly, as being part of reality, is death. One of the things that we are not able to observe directly, but we believe on faith, is resurrection
We have all experienced people dying during our life. But none of us has experienced someone coming back to life. We believe that we will rise from the dead because Our Lord told us about it and because He Himself rose from the dead.
And just like the other aspects of reality that we are not able to observe, some people believe in the resurrection and some people do not.
The resurrection was something that both Jewish and pagan peoples, in the time of Our Lord, had a hard time to accept.

During the second half of Lent, the Church does something remarkable in the traditional liturgy: she has us read almost exclusively from the Gospel of St. John. From day 21 until the last day of Lent, there are only two Gospels that are not from St. John, outside the readings of the Passion. During that time, we read about 43% of the Gospel of St. John.
It is clear that the Church wants us to focus on this Gospel in order to learn about the Passion.
We know that this Gospel is unique: it was written long after the other three Gospels; it contains more words of Our Lord than any of the other Gospels; it seeks to complete what is missing in the other Gospels; it focuses especially on Our Lord’s claim to be God and His conflicts with the leaders of the Jewish religion.
I thought it might be helpful for us, on this Passion Sunday, to consider three things regarding all of these passages of St. John that the Church gives us in the second half of Lent:What is Our Lord doing and what are His claims about what He is doing?
What is the reaction of those who witness His actions and hear His claims?
What does this mean for us today?

When we read the epistles of St. Paul, we are mainly reading letters written by an Apostle to former pagans. These were people who had grown up in the world of the Roman Empire. It was a world of great military power and of amazing engineering feats, but also one of great decadence.
These people were not just used to leading immoral lives; leading such lives was a way of life. In other words, it was considered normal behavior to be immoral. By this, I mean getting drunk, committing fornication, seeking after riches, and so on.
Then, this Jewish man named Paul came into their lives, explaining to them that God Himself came down upon this earth and that He taught what we are made for, He redeemed us from our sins, and He showed us how we must live our lives in order to get to Heaven.
Many of these pagans converted and, when they did, they completely changed their lives. They stopped living as pagans in the Roman Empire and started living as Catholics.
At the same time, they still had to struggle greatly against their old habits, particularly the habit of impurity. It is striking that, in today’s epistle and in last Sunday’s epistle, the Church wants us to read St. Paul exhorting these former pagans to fight against impurity.
We are Catholics living 2,000 years later, we are in the middle of the penitential season of Lent, and the Church wants us to hear these words of the Apostle Paul to help us make that same fight against sins of the flesh that the first Catholics were doing.
Today, I would like us to hear some words of these two epistles about impurity, to understand what they mean, and also to understand why it is so important to fight impurity.