What is the goal?

Msgr. Michael Woster
The 25th Sunday in Ordinary Time
September 21, 2025

Like most boys, I played a bit of sports in high school. Mostly basketball because I was too small to play football. But my real love was for the guitar. February 9, 1964, I saw the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show, and I said, “That’s what I want to do. I wanted to become a rock ‘n roll star.”

I played every minute of the day I could and when I was a senior, my dad came up to my room one night while I was practicing and he asked, “Son, how many hours a week do you think you practice on that guitar?” 

I thought for a moment, and I said, “Oh, I suppose about 35 hours a week.” 

He looked at me and he said, “And how many hours a week do you pray?” 

I gulped, and I said, “I don’t know. Maybe half an hour.” 

My dad smiled at me, and he said, “Reverse that a bit, son. With that kind of energy, I think you could do something really great.” 

Our Lord, in the Gospel, makes a great point today when he says the children of this world are more prudent in dealing with their own generation than are the children of the light. Or as another translation in another Bible puts it, the people of this world are much more committed and shrewd in handling their affairs of this world than are the people who belong to the light are in handling theirs. 

What’s our Lord mean by that? He’s saying that worldly people are more willing to sacrifice for worldly goals, and Christians are willing to sacrifice for Christian goals. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in sports. Athletes practice hours and hours to hone skills and to develop strength to be successful in competition, but this is not new. Some 2000 years ago, St. Paul wrote to the Church in Corinth, “Every athlete exercises discipline in every possible way. They do this to win a crown of leaves which soon passes away and perishes … but we, we Christians exercise and labor in order to win a crown which never perishes.” 

The words of our Lord and Saint Paul are not intended to shame us or to embarrass us about our love and participation in sports — especially represented this time of the year with the beginning of the NFL football, the World Series coming up, and many other sports in our culture and schools — but rather their words are intended to remind us that no one has a greater goal to work and sacrifice for than we Christians. 

What is that goal? It’s eternal life. So, if you’re a young person, in addition to sports and school studies, you are to labor and sacrifice to bring joy and a better life to the family in which you live and also to the school where you learn and study. If you’re a lay minister in the Church, you are to sacrifice and labor in your ministry to bring new hope and encouragement to those who serve. If we are a priest or a deacon in the Church, we are to bring the light of the Gospel and the power of the Sacraments to those who need God’s truth and love and his healing and his strength. If we’re a parent or an adult, we are to bring good news of Jesus to our children and also to the world through our vocations and our careers. And the list goes on and on and on.

A sign outside of a Chicago service station a few years back read as follows: “We crawl under your car more often, we get our hands dirtier, and we work harder and longer than any of our competitors to make sure your car runs better.” That’s a great ad! 

The good news of the Gospel today is that if worldly people are capable of making great sacrifices to accomplish worldly goals, how much more are we Christians capable of making even greater sacrifices for our Lord and for his mission in this world if we are willing and we choose to do so? As my dad said, it just takes a little reversal of time.