How Far Do You Want Me To Go, God?
These are everyday sermons, usually not the same sermons Michael delivered on Sundays. He takes the liberty of personally addressing the people who came to the 6:30 communion service, whom he loved so much, and who loved him.
Be sure to read the footnotes at the end of the sermon!
IF YOU LIKE, READ ALONG WHILE YOU ARE LISTENING:
I love St. Stephen. One of the reasons I love St. Stephen is he reminds me I am a coward and reminds me of the depth of my faith.
Now some of you know, but my wife is, and in the past much more actively so, a pro-life fanatic. She would go out and do whatever she wanted to to. She was at protests and she was doing all those things, and she would go, "Come with me, come with me." And I was always saying, "I can't come with you. I have to make the money working a job so you have enough money so you can go do those things. If I went with you, who would take care of the kids?"
So one time the kids were older, I said, "Okay. I'll go with you." So shortly after getting there, there were policemen everywhere and everything else like that, I took umbrage at what the police were doing and got upset. Frankly, I walked out into the middle of the street and confronted the policeman and started arguing with him. I'm going [in my head], “This is not really smart.”
And in another instance, getting probably smarter in that instance, they had the audacity of suing my wife. Now, the law firm (the one representing the abortionists) knew me. And when I explained to them, "If you sue my wife we are not going to do anything by agreement and we're going to go to trial and I'm going to rip your case to shreds. And you are going to have one of the hardest fights you've have ever had in your life." They agreed to dismiss my wife. *
So, but I look at St. Stephen! I love St. Stephen! Man, he just says it the way it is! And just like I'm a... Finally when the policeman said, "Sir, you had better leave or you're going to go to jail." I said, "Fine, I'm leaving."
I'm a coward!
It brings to my attention, St. Stephen does, what I am called to do, what we are called to do for our faith. We are called to live our faith, including not coming up with excuses like I gave to my wife of, "Well, if I went with you to Washington, D.C., (as it turned out, she never went to the March for Life in Washington, D.C.) or whatever it was, who would make the money so you could have food on the table." Legitimate excuse, but it was a cop-out. Let's face it.
Why, though, why is it that God gives me this faith and wants me to go out there and fight for His faith. Eh, I still have that tendency. I have to back off sometimes. I've gotten into situations where I have to go, "Okay. That's it. I'm not going to go much farther."
And the reality comes to me that my faith is so important that I just love this: "I am the Bread of Life, whoever comes to me will never hunger, and whoever believes in me will never thirst."
The Eucharist. That's why you crazy people get up this early in the morning. It's right there. That's why I'm crazy enough. You know, I didn't start out doing the Communion Service. I found that Fr. Bradley was doing a 6:30 Mass every morning and I went to 6:30 Mass. Before, I had been doing it at St. Monica. I wanted to go to Mass. I want the Body and Blood of Christ.
Well, I love you here, Fr. Frank. I just love having you here.**
But the very core comes down to: Jesus is the Bread of Life. If it weren't for Jesus, where would you be? Would you be the person you are without the Bread of Life? And I ask that question. It's real simple. No, you wouldn't be. You'd be someone else. Someone who is not as wonderful and special as you are. Because the Bread of Life is there, at the very core.
And the question I deal with, frequently, is, you've seen me sometimes, I can get going, is how far is God pushing me to be like St. Stephen? To be (a person who says), "Well, I'm a little nervous about saying that." How far does he want me to go in my salvation? My working towards making my life to be His? How far does He want me to go?
And, you know, I talk about Parkland Hospital, and one of the wonderful things about Parkland Hospital is that God just pushed me right to the limit, where I was having to do things. What I always remember vividly when I first got into there, they said, "You're going to run across rooms where it says you're going to have to put on a plastic mask and you have to put on all of these gowns and you have to walk in there and you have to have your face covered and everything else." And he says, "Don't ignore it. Because you never know if we're trying to protect the patient, or we're trying to protect you. But go ahead and go on in there." You know, that gives you pause to ponder; when you go, "Whoa!"
And so God pushes me to the edge. And I just… I mean I just come over here by Mayve, and go, "No, I don't want to do that, God! Uh-uh! That's the line. I'm not going to pass that line."
And in our lives, we do, you know, we go through your history and there are so many instances where you've pushed the line. And I love St. Stephen because he had the courage to push the line to the point of death. That he was willing to look up to Heaven and see God. "Lord, do not hold this sin against them." And then he died.
I'm not St. Stephen. Sometimes I wish I had it in me to be St. Stephen. But, I try. And that's why I know I am so inadequate. And you've heard me say this, "Thank God for Purgatory!" Because I need my sins cleansed and I need my inadequacies cleansed because I know as much as I want to get in the front of everybody and fight for my faith to the point of death, I'm a coward. That's what it comes down to.
But when we look at our lives always remember, God isn't static. He's always pushing us, pushing us, pushing us so we can become closer and closer to Him. And sometimes when there are these pushes, and you have the desire to resist the push, remember that it is God trying to bring you closer to Him. And it isn't a matter of pushing, it's a matter of urging forward and bringing you to Him as opposed to, "Well, go do something you shouldn't do, you don't want to do. It's a drawing close, that God loves us so much that He's trying to draw us close to something like Christ dying on the cross. And there we see the love of God. And we see, right there, the Bread of Life that is calling us always to Him.
May 7, 2019
At the time, Michael had more civil cases before the courts than any other lawyer in Dallas, or probably any other law firm. And he won. One judge, echoing the prevailing opinion in the courts at that time, once said to opposing council, "If you choose to pursue this case, know that you are in for a fight!" It is a general rule that trial lawyers never go to trial. Instead they press for an out-of-court settlement before their clients incur the expense of charges for trial time and a trial experience wherein the lawyers were absolutely ignorant of the procedures needed to succeed against fierce opposition.
Fr. Frank Agbowai had come from Africa to take care of the needs of the French-speaking community in Dallas. He had to wait for the paperwork to be completed for his immigration before he could be granted privileges to celebrate Mass in Dallas.
As a relevant historical note, pro-life demonstrations in Dallas were met with the strangest attitudes on the part of the police. The demonstrations usually involved a Mass succeeded by a procession to an abortion facility, where more prayers and singing and speeches took place. The police escorted the procession through the streets to the killing place where there were dozens and dozens of policemen waiting, some with horses as if to control a riot. I (Michael’s wife, Laura) never could figure out if the policemen were there to protect us or to arrest us when we got there. They did both.
The Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion, Roe v. Wade, started in Dallas. Because the police would openly ignore the law that forbade abortions, and because the city refused to prosecute abortionists for the murders of the dead women they found in hotel rooms after abortions, women came from all over the United States to have their abortions in Dallas, thinking they were safe. Obviously, considering the death toll which was usually around a half dozen or more mothers each week, according to the coroner when I spoke to him, they were not safe. Making abortion legal simply meant that the killers could hang out their shingles as abortionists; the killing of mothers went on unchanged and unchallenged. Even now there is no category for reporting abortion-related maternal deaths. They are counted as pregnancy-related deaths, enabling the abortion industry to claim that abortion is safer than pregnancy. At any stage of pregnancy, remaining pregnant is always a safer choice than surgical or chemical abortion.
Those were wild times. You can read short descriptions of incidents from my approximately 40 years of pro-life activism at SnapshotsFromTheStreet.com