Sunday Homily

Fr. Tom Lucas, S.J. 

August 24, 2025

The Narrow Gate

Below is an abbreviated homily from Sunday, August 24th.

A prenote:  This homily was preached by Fr. Tom Lucas, S.J. this past weekend.  It was appreciated by some, and roundly criticized by others. My job as a homilist and faith leader isn’t an easy one: striving to satisfy all in a diverse group of faithful listeners. Some find some of my recent ramblings to be too pointed, political, even polemical. With respectful regret, I say that I have to speak the truth inspired by the gospel text as I see it, challenged by the Word and informed by the Church’s social teaching. Sadly, the gospel is not a comfortable armchair we escape to in order to avoid the world and its trials. It’s two-edged sword.

"Jesus passed through towns and villages,
teaching as he went and making his way to Jerusalem.
Someone asked him, "Lord, will only a few people be saved?"
He answered them, "Strive to enter through the narrow gate,
for many, I tell you, will attempt to enter but will not be strong enough.”

For the past few weeks, and indeed since the 4^th of July, I’ve been reflecting on where we are going as a country, and feeling the gospel’s imperatives looming over me as an individual and over us as a community. I read with horror that some muscular American Christian “homesteaders” are planning new racially and religiously pure townships (read White and Fundamentalist). I watch as masked and unidentified paramilitary patrols sweep through the streets of our cities and the parking lots of Home Depot arresting many hardworking folks along with a few hardened criminals. I hear the concern of disabled people on Medical and seniors on Medicare who fear for their healthcare, and I talk with educators who worry for their Latino students, born and bred American citizens, who are at risk of having their families shattered and their futures placed in jeopardy at the prospect of the deportation of their parents. The wide gate of the American Dream everywhere is getting narrower and narrower, and now is being bricked up. The infamous wall on the southern border is now being painted black, the better to absorb the repellent heat of the desert sun. 

During the summer I was invited by one of our former staffers Maribel Arizmendiz to attend and join a group of local faith leaders called Sacramento ACT. I attended a meeting of this group of faith filled community organizers, and have been in dialogue with them, and this past week signed on to a letter along with other pastors, rabbis, and imams addressed to our Congresswoman Doris Matsui. As community leaders and organizers, in that letter we asked, indeed, demanded the end of a deplorable local situation: the overcrowded and inhumane conditions that ICE and Homeland Security detainees are undergoing in one of our federal buildings downtown. The Moss Building on Capitol Mall was not designed as a detention facility, and the overcrowded detainees are sleeping on floors, being fed on the floor out of cans, and deprived of any semblance of human dignity. This situation is, of course, only one in a avalanche of inhumane actions that have become regularized, normalized in the present moment. It’s come to our attention that Congresswoman Matsui was denied access to the building when she tried to visit it and its incarcerated inhabitants last Friday. The wide gate was slammed closed even to her. 

Will the letter do any good? Maybe, maybe not. Will demonstrations planned by the community organizers help? Perhaps, perhaps not. Is a response necessary? Certainly. 

“Jesus passed through towns and villages,
teaching as he went and making his way to Jerusalem.
Someone asked him, "Lord, will only a few people be saved?"
He answered them,"Strive to enter through the narrow gate,
for many, I tell you, will attempt to enter but will not be strong enough."

The narrow gate of the gospel does not open onto an easy superhighway leading to a luxury ranch in Montana or a Tuscan villa in Montecito, or to an apartheid colony in the Ozarks. The narrow gate, the one that requires strength to enter, is the door of justice, compassion, and dignity, that leads to hard uphill path of generosity, forgiveness, and forgetfulness of self. It is opens onto the road where the Samaritan found the battered traveler, where Jesus found Magdalene, where the last oh-so-paradoxically will be first and the first, alas, will be last. It will be travelled by many who come for the north and south, east and west who hear the invitation to charity and mercy, people of every race and tongue, nation and tribe who move together as if on pilgrimage. It’s the road we are invited to follow as followers of Christ who climbed the hill of Calvary for us and with us. 

In the coming months here in our parish we will invite you to reflect on that narrow gate and uphill path that are described by our Catholic social teaching from Leo XIII a century and a quarter ago to Leo XIV today. For some the response will be prayer, for others action, for all of us, a call to human solidarity, as sisters and brothers on a difficult journey that, we believe, finally will lead us home.