17th Sunday (C) 27 July 2025 Sermon

17th Sunday (C )  27 July 2025 United with God

God will give you what ask though it might take a while.

It sounds easy the way it is put in the Gospel. Just ask and you will receive.

But it takes a long time, or never, in some cases.

If we ask something that is not God's will it cannot happen, no matter how much we ask, or how well.

If we do not get what we want we can be discouraged and even angry. Still, prayer is never wasted; we hope for other benefits to come from the prayer.

It is not so simple to ask and receive when there are multiple factors involved. So many things are out of place in the surrounding culture.

We would get a lot more prayers answered if we behaved better, the ‘we’ being the whole Church or whole human race.

We have to pray for the surrounding factors as well; see the whole context of the prayer objective.

For example, to pray for peace requires that everyone has to have peace in their hearts. And that is a big operation. Much more than stopping a particular conflict somewhere.

Praying for things to happen should flow from the closeness of our relationship with God, rather than only when there is a  crisis - which would suggest we do not have a strong connection with God.

Our Lady had the desirable link with God, and so was able to pray for a miracle at Cana, without making any song and dance, but simply calling on her union with her Son. It was like taking heat from the sun, without affecting what remains with the sun.

This is how God wants us to approach Him, and how He can offer so much success in our prayer.

Our prayer can help sort out the surrounding issues as well as the one on which we are focused.

For example, vocations. If we want vocations we have to pray another prayer for conversion of the young to the true faith.

The idea of drawing from the source, the sun, leads to a need for perseverance. We cannot simply name a prayer and then walk off as though we had done enough. We have to stay connected like a plug, ready to be switched on anytime.

We pray all the time in the sense that we are needing to maintain that constant union with God.

If we have that closeness to Him we can pray anytime and always achieve at least some improvement in the outcome.

If we slacken off with the prayer we will have that much more ground to recover each time.

Seeing God as only a provider of miracles is not going to work. We need to be in relationship with God?

So we find ourselves praying for particular goals, while seeking a general movement towards Him.

We seek to restore the order of God’s kingdom, where there is no opposition to God's will.

Stability is needed. Today we honour grandparents for their special role in the Church and wider society.

For those families fortunate enough to have grandparents, and a basic unity, we see in the older generations a foundation for the younger ones to build upon.

Grandparents represent order, stability, wisdom etc. Something like the stability we have in going back to Gd and His kingdom.

For fractured families we pray for as much order as can be retrieved. We need lots of reassurance in today’s world.

For the young, listen to the elders, and avoid a lot of the self-destructive behaviour  that otherwise might follow.