27th Sunday in Ordinary Time
October 5, 2025 (8:00am, 10:00am, Noon)
St. James Cathedral, Seattle

My friends, as we gather on this Respect Life Sunday, the plea of the apostles in today’s Gospel resonates with us: “Lord, increase our faith.” As we live through very challenging times, whether in our public or personal lives, we often turn to the Lord and say, help me to believe in you and trust you. Increase my faith!
 
We are not the first followers of the Lord to live through challenging times. The prophet, Habakkuk, living and writing in the 6th century, B.C., echoes what many of us feel today, “How long, O Lord? I cry for help but you do not listen.”
 
For the people of Gaza, of Ukraine, of South Sudan, and so many other war-torn places throughout our world, it seems like the Lord is not listening. In Gaza there seems to be a glimmer of hope for an end to the war. But, is it real? And in Ukraine there seems to be worsening conditions every day. And so we wonder, how long?
 
If we step outside the doors of this cathedral, we see our brothers and sisters on our streets, without a house, struggling in poverty, with addiction, and mental and physical illness. And it feels like, as a society, we have failed them. It feels like we really don’t have much respect for human life - from the infant in the womb to our neighbor living on the street. How long, O Lord? When will their lives be respected?
 
As we live through a time in our country, and this has happened far too often in our history, where our immigrant brothers and sisters are demonized and criminalized simply because they are looking for a better life - a life free of poverty, violence and injustice - for themselves and their families, we ask, how long, O Lord?
 
The prophet goes on to describe his landscape and it looks a lot like ours: “Destruction and violence are before me; there is strife and clamorous discord.”
 
But then, there is this word of hope from the Lord, and it is the word that gathers us here, Sunday after Sunday:

Write down the vision clearly…so that one can read it readily. For the vision still has its time, presses on to fulfillment, and will not disappoint. If it delays, wait for it, it will surely come, it will not be late.

Help us Lord to live in this time with that hope!

Waiting for the Lord and living day in and day out with the disappointment that God is not responding in my time frame, tests my faith. Will the vision - a vision of God’s peace and justice prevailing - will that vision “press on to fulfillment”? Will it “surely come”?
 
Lord, increase our faith!
 
Like St. Paul’s admonition to Timothy, we are called, in these times, to “stir into flame” that original fervor, that original confidence, that original trust in God’s ultimate victory. And so, like Timothy we are called to “bear our share of hardship for the gospel with the strength that comes from God.”
 
The challenge of these days for us, as it was in days of Habakkuk, and Timothy and Jesus, is to know and trust that God is always with us, no matter how much evidence there seems to be to the contrary, and how difficult the journey.
 
That flame of faith is stirred and our trust is strengthened in community. We witnessed that yesterday as hundreds of us gathered in Tacoma for a procession from St. Leo’s Church to the Northwest ICE Processing Center, where more than 1500 immigrant people are incarcerated. Outside of the detention center, we celebrated Mass and prayed that we might, in the words of Bishop Elizondo, see God in the eyes of all our brothers and sisters.
 
In that gathering, we experienced a stirring into flame the gift of faith that is burning inside each one of us. Those inside knew that we were outside praying for them and that they are not forgotten. What we did yesterday, my friends, is the kind of thing we need to do as followers of Jesus Christ.
 
As Jesus makes clear in today’s Gospel, we don’t do these kinds of things expecting a pat on the back. No, we are doing what we are obliged to do as disciples of the Lord. And being together like we were yesterday, and are here today, does increase our faith, it does stir that faith to action on behalf of those who are suffering.
 
Some sixty years ago, another voice, a modern day prophet of the Civil Rights Movement, asked the same question Habakkuk had asked, “How long?” And Dr. King’s answer that March day in 1965, on the steps of the Capital in Montgomery, Alabama, after the long march from Selma, echoes the vision that presses on to fulfillment.
 
“How long?” Dr. King asked. “Not long!” Because no lie can live forever. How long? Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice,” he said. Indeed it does.
 
My friends, what we face in our country today and throughout the world are moral questions. They are questions about the fundamental respect for all of life, from womb to tomb. They are questions that are at the heart of the Bible and of the ministry of Jesus Christ, whose disciples we strive to be.
 
Sometimes we feel like Jesus’ apostles, when we look around and see the jumbled mess that our world and our lives can sometimes be, and we ask for more faith. But the Lord says to us that we have plenty of faith, we just need each other and God’s grace to stir that faith into a flame that can light our way.
 
As we gather around the Table of the Eucharist, we are plunged once again into the saving death and resurrection of the Lord. Here at this sacred altar the vision is renewed and we are strengthened for the journey.
 
Here we gain perspective and can say with steadfast faith, how long? Not long!

Father Gary F. Lazzeroni, Pastor