Nineteenth Sunday Homily: From Moses to Modern Trials, Trusting in God’s Providence
Readings and Virtual Homily for August 10, 2025, Nineteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time; Virtual Homily; Caracas Update; August Schedule
Readings for Mass this Sunday:
Wisdom 18:6-9
Psalm 33:1, 12, 18-22
Hebrews 11:1-2, 8-19
Luke 12:32-48
Dear Friends and Family,
Trust and faith, as words, are not quite interchangeable, but they get at the same general concept. Today's readings invite us to develop and maintain a robust confidence in God's love for us, God's care for us and God's ability to see to our every need.
This business of trusting God with our needs can be daunting. After all, we cannot see, cannot hear (in any typical meaning of the term) or touch God. But our needs very frequently can be seen, can be heard, can be touched (or felt). They are experienced on the level of experience itself. Even if they are emotional or spiritual in nature, they are, to us, as we experience them, tangible, real. Trusting that which cannot be seen, heard or touched with tangible, with immediate and very real need can be, as I say, challenging.
The first reading, from the Book of Wisdom (one of my top ten favorite books of Scripture) reminds us of how God provided, astonishingly, for the needs of the Israelites at the Red Sea, with Pharaoh's army bearing down on them. Moses trusted; God delivered. The passage urges a deep trust in the ability of the God who worked such an amazing miracle for his original people, to provide for our needs today.
The psalm doubles down on this theme. "Behold, the eye of the Lord is upon those who fear him, upon those who count on his mercy, to deliver them from death and keep them alive through famine" (vss. 18-19). The reference to famine should be underscored here. There was a time when crop failures could threaten human existence itself. The psalm urges confidence, trust, faith -- even in such dire circumstances.
The second reading, from the Letter to the Hebrews (one of my top three books of Scripture) reminds us of the faith of our spiritual ancestors. In admirable literary style, the (unknown) author of the Letter to the Hebrews reminds his audience of Jewish Christian converts how, by the faith of their ancestors, God's majestic plan of salvation came into play. Only by faith, the author argues, is God's plan achieved among us, for it is beyond our capacities to bring that plan about on our own efforts. The author cites one example after another of how, in the plan of salvation, it was necessary for the ancestors of the Jews to let go and let God. The author goes on to urge such confident self-surrender to us.
The Gospel passage illustrates the dynamic that can come into play when trust, or faith, in God is set aside for faith in our own circumstances and abilities. We may be tempted, as the chief servant in the parable is, to take matters into our own hands, thinking that God is far off and not attentive.
This temptation -- I know it well -- urges on us a self-reliance and self-determination that may run contrary to God's design for us, and for that reason it must be resisted. Rather than meeting difficulty and uncertainty by barreling ahead with our own plans based on our own understandings, we should step back from the difficulty long enough to do what Moses did, at the Red Sea. Moses did not know how God was going to resolve the matter; he only knew that God WOULD resolve it. In his trust, in his faith, Moses "allowed" (if that is the term) for the astonishing miracle at the Red Sea.
"Your faith has healed you," Jesus tells the woman who suffered twelve years with the hemorrhage (Matthew 9:22). Our faith, our trust in God, in God's love for us, in God's unlimited ability to "fix" any bad situation, to bring us safely through any crisis, opens the way for grace to operate. And once grace is in operation, as Gabriel assured Mary, "all things are possible" (Luke 1:37).
As some of you are aware, I experienced a totally unexpected financial windfall this past fortnight, and, of course, one of the first things I did with it was send a chunk of change to my young Venezuelans. People have asked me, off and on, since the last time I reported on them, how my Caraquenos are doing.
In a word, they are surviving. They are doing little more than that. They are not living life the way we live it here in America, the way it is lived by most Europeans, by the Japanese, the Australians, the Moroccans, nor, for that matter, by most South Americans.
There is zero opportunity, today, in Venezuela, for anyone with an idea, a dream, a vision, a capacity to bring about a better life for him/herself and their family. It is hard for North Americans to conceive of such a set of circumstances, but it is what the vast majority of Venezuelans experience as a day-to-day reality.
The money I regularly send to Caracas (a chunk of it supplied by some of you) goes to buy food, to buy medicine and to help close the gap on the rent. It is not being put to any creative or entrepreneurial use; it cannot be. $100 (I mean, in American cash, which by the grace of God I am able to get to my Venezuelans; I am able to get them dollars, rather than their own worthless currency) lifts a family of five or six above the economic abyss for six weeks. Most of the nation, it has been reported now, and so reported for years, is dependent upon remittances from friends and family outside the country.
Which leads me to this point (and which point, I think, says something impressive about "my boys" from Caracas): Of the seventeen young men I became something of a mentor to, in Caracas back in the days when Americans could still travel safely to the country, one is now in New York, one in Savannah, one in Orlando, one in Barcelona, one in Cartagena and two in Lima. That is, seven of them have fled the country and are building new lives for themselves in free and prospering nations -- despite having the largest proven oil reserves in the world, Venezuela is neither.
That leaves ten of my young men in the country (all but two of them still in Caracas). I am in touch with several of them regularly via WhatsApp and also through mutual communications with the guys who are now expatriots. I am in regular communication in particular with the "kids" (they are now in their late thirties and early forties) in Orlando, Savannah and Barcelona.
With regard to today's homily, it might be said that this is a time of testing and of faith for the twenty-six million Venezuelans who remain in the country. Eight million have fled; the largest emigration of the twenty-first century and a tragic fulfillment of Mother Mary's prediction at Fatima in 1917 (the year of the Bolshevik Revolution in Moscow) that "Russia will spread her error throughout the world."
The Venezuelan resistance remains strong and unified. Last summer's fraudulent elections proved as much (see a couple of these e-mails from July and August of 2024). I remain convinced that, at some point in the future, the Venezuelan people will once again govern themselves in freedom and prosperity. There was a time, not that long ago, when the nation was a functioning democracy and the fourteenth largest economy on the planet.
In trust, in faith, I await the Lord's plan, for the liberation of this beautiful people from their criminal "socialist" oppressors.
Gonna leave it at that as it is late Friday night and I need to call it a day.
Take care. God bless.
Love,
Fr. Brawn
My apologies for not getting the August schedule out last week. It completely slipped my mind. Here is it from this weekend on:
Saturday, Aug. 9
5 PM (English)
Sunday, Aug. 10
930 AM, 1 PM (Spanish)
Sunday, Aug. 17
8 AM, 1115 AM, 630 PM (All English)
Sunday, Aug. 24
11 AM (The Catholic Community of Pleasanton; Seton campus, English)
Saturday, Aug. 30
5 PM (English)
Sunday, Aug. 31
8 AM, 1115 AM (both English)
Weekday Masses (all 8 AM and in English except where noted)
Monday August 11
Tuesday August 12 (7 PM in Spanish)
Saturday August 16
Monday August 18
Saturday August 23
Monday August 25
Friday August 29