Homily originally presented June 30, 2019

There’s no turning back!

With the growth of evil in the world today you good Parents may wonder,

 “What would I do if my teenager ever got off track ...

got involved with the wrong crowd ... and began to do very bad things.

Would I do? Would there be any hope of ever getting them back to goodness?

Well, I’d like to share some hopeful and encouraging words with you about

the transformation that took place in one young man’s life.

Donald Calloway grew up in the back woods of West Virginia ...

without any religion or a father figure to model.

When his family moved to California,

he slipped into the lifestyle of sex, drugs and rock and roll.”

His pagan rebellion intensified when his family moved to Japan

and he ran away from home.

Satisfaction of the senses became young David’s rule of life and that escalated into a life of crime. Constantly on the move to avoid arrest, he and his friends got connected with the Japanese Mafia.

Now, during that time of endless wanton wandering of wine, women and song, Donald’s mother became Catholic and fervently prayed for her 15 yr old prodigal son to return home.

Like St. Monica praying for her son Augustine,

she trusted that God would bring him back to a life of goodness.

After many failures at drug rehab, Donald  reached a breaking point in his life and one night while staying at his Mom’s house he was looking through some of his Mom’s books and found one with a title he couldn’t even pronounce. It was called, “The Queen of Peace visits Medjugorje.”

He said to himself, “Let me just see what my Mother has been reading.”

“Let’s see what kind of a cult she’s into.”

Well after looking at the pictures in the middle of the book, he started to read the book. And he read and read till he finished it at 3:00 in the morning!

He remembers saying to himself, “This is the truth!”

The next day he went to visit a Catholic Priest and attended his first Mass.

The Priest gave him a Crucifix, a picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and a picture of the Pope. He went home with these new items and hung them up in his room.

He then went into his Mom’s kitchen and took 5 large Hefty Trash Bags

and went into his room and filled them with most of his stuff …

of his drug paraphernalia,  all his filthy things, all the music that he had stolen,

 a lot of his clothes, blankets, most everything that wasn’t his parents.

He took them ... and he threw them out!  

He chucked everything!

Nobody asked him to do this. He just knew that to start fresh he had to be clean.

So he took the bags filled with all his bad stuff and threw them in the garbage!

Once again the Blessed Mother did what she does best … she pointed another soul to Jesus. It was Her presence at Medjugorje … that someone wrote about in a book … that moved this young man to fall in love with Jesus. And at the age of 18, Donny Calloway, started the RCIA process and became a Catholic in 9 months.

He then entered the seminary and 10 years later was ordained a Catholic Priest.

Today, Fr. Calloway is a joyful Priest, deeply in love with our Lord and our Lady, who goes around the country sharing the truth about God and the Catholic Church and saving souls from the grasp of the devil … the grasp that he felt  in his early life.

What struck me about his conversion story is the definitive break that Donny made with his past in order to go forward with his future … a new life of goodness.

Can you just see him grabbing those big Green Hefty Trash Bags and filling them w/ the garbage of his past life & throwing them outside the house into the garbage?

That’s making a definitive break with the past … that showed his resolve and determination that things were going to be different in the future!

You know, it’s one thing to say, “I don’t want to do this anymore.”

And it’s another thing to say,    “I can’t do this anymore!”

With all his stuff gone ... there was no turning back!

Incidentally, that’s the name of the video about his conversion: “No turning back”

How appropriate!          How perfect!

“No turning back” is the very topic of our three Scripture readings today.

In our First Reading, the young man, Elisha, who is called by Elijah to be a prophet, does something remarkable. He uses the wooden plow and wooden yokes of the oxen to create a fire to boil the flesh of the 12 oxen!

That’s what you call making a definitive break with the past!

Elisha was a farmer.

You can’t be a farmer if you don’t have a plow and yokes and several oxen.

So by burning his equipment and his animals,

he was making a definitive break with his past profession of farming

and freeing himself to take on the newly offered profession of being a Prophet.

now, you may have heard this advice from someone, “Don’t burn your bridges.”

For the most part that is certainly true, especially when it simply means not getting nasty with someone over a problem so that they never want to see you again.

The wisdom of this is that you never know when the day might come

that you need them for something and you wouldn’t want them to remember

that you treated them badly on your last meeting.

So while the advice, “Don’t burn your bridges” can be good advice,

The opposite advice, “Burn your bridges” can also be good advice.

This is the very action that people may need to take to make a definitive break with a sinful past.  It’s the way they avoid going back to a sinful lifestyle.

St. Paul exhorts us in our Second Reading from Galatians to,

“stand firm and do not submit again to the yoke of slavery.”

How appropriate that Paul uses the expression “yoke of slavery”.

He’s speaking of course of sin … our slavery to sin.

And by describing it as a yoke we get the picture that it can really have a hold on us … just as a wooden yoke has a hold on those oxen ...

and keeps them going along the path they are on.

Now, just as Elisha burned the yoke of his oxen to free himself to be a Prophet,

all of us need to burn any yoke that has a hold on us that keeps us slaves to sin.

That could mean separating yourself from people you shouldn’t be associating with … people who lead you into bad things like drugs and extramarital sex.

It could mean throwing out drugs, cigarettes, alcohol, food, TV or Internet.

What is it that has a hold on you?     What is it that leads you into sin?

There’s a great Christian movie that came out in 2008 called “Fireproof” ...

it’s about a Fireman who needs to fire proof his marriage because ...

 it’s going up in flames due to his addiction to pornography.

Here’s a guy with a beautiful wife and she’s going to leave him because

he can’t stop looking at other women on the Internet.

How does he get rid of the yolk of slavery to pornography?

Well, there’s a powerful scene in the movie where he decides he wants his wife

more than he wants his sinful fantasies.

And you see him take the computer and monitor outside and he smashes it to pieces on the driveway with a baseball bat and puts it in the garbage can!

Did he make a definitive break with the past?

He certainly did!

no computer ... no way to look at pornography!

Are you or someone you know carrying the yolk of slavery that is pornography?

You need to burn your bridges and be set free.

I had a guy come to confession once and he brought into the confessional two big boxes of books, magazines and videos ... they were all filled with pornography.

He said “I don’t want to do this any more.”

he confessed his sin,     he was absolved and he left free ...

free of sin and  able .... not to submit again to the yolk of slavery to that sin!

he made a clean, definitive break with the past.

Only then will you be ready to make a fresh start for goodness.

Jesus puts it this way in today’s Gospel, “No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks to what was left behind is fit for the kingdom of God.”

Following Jesus means going forward and leaving our sinful history behind.

There’s no going back!

Once you enter into Jesus, there’s no returning to the old way of life.

Jesus is freedom. Sin is slavery! As Paul says, do not take the yoke of slavery again!

We know that the devil will never cease his efforts to enslave us.

So we must be strong, which is why we need the grace of Holy Mass, the power of the Holy Eucharist and the guidance of the Holy Word of God.

It’s only by falling deeply in love with God that we’ll be able to make a definitive break with our sinful past and embrace a new beginning of goodness.

I hope to show this video at a Family Night event. It is very inspiring!

Remember the title, “No turning back”

Burn your bridges ...  to your sinful past.

Throw out the garbage in your life.

We have the Good News of Salvation in Jesus. Let’s pray for the grace and the strength to keep moving forward and never turn back to our old ways of sin.

Realize: if you want to go to Heaven … there’s no turning back!