Homily | September 2, 2026 | The Baptism That Starts Everything (Episode 256)

This morning we stand before something very small.

Right behind you there is the baptismal font.

No, not a throne, not a papal altar, not a balcony of St.

Peter's Basilica.

A baptismal font here in the hometown of John Paul II in Baravice.

And this may be one of the most important places we visit on our entire pilgrimage.

Because before Carol Boitiwa became a priest, a bishop, a cardinal, or Pope John Paul II, he was brought to this font as an infant and baptized into Jesus Christ.

No one standing here that day could have imagined what God would do with that life.

But St.

Paul in the first reading today gives us the words for understanding it.

He says, I planted Apollos, watered, Apollo, I planted, Apollos watered, but God calls the growth.

God caused the growth.

That's not simply the story of Carol Boytiwa, it's meant to be the story of every Christian life.

Because at baptism, Christ claims us.

Sin was washed away, we became sons and daughters of the Father, members of Jesus Christ and his holy church.

And the Holy Spirit then begins to work within us.

But St.

Paul says something uncomfortable to the Corinthians.

He tells them, You have been Christians for some times, but you're still infants.

You receive the gospel, but you have not allowed it to mature within you.

There are still jealousy and rivalry, divisions.

There is still too much of the old life living inside the new one.

Perhaps that's a word some of us need to hear on this pilgrimage.

Because it is possible to be baptized and never truly grow up spiritually.

It is possible to receive the sacraments, attend Mass, know the language of the church, say all of the rosaries, crucifixes, even crosses, and still remain an infant in Christ.

We could visit every holy place in Poland and return home unchanged.

And that would be a tragedy.

Because a pilgrimage is not a religious tourism.

We have not come simply to see where all these great saints lived.

We've come to discover what made them saints.

Ultimately, the answer is not complicated.

They allowed Jesus Christ to take possession of their lives.

Karol Votebo was not formed in comfortable circumstances.

You've been listening to his life, you just went to the museum.

As you heard, he lost his mother, then his brother, then his father.

He lived through Nazi occupation and the brutality of World War II.

He worked as a laborer and prepared secretly for the priesthood later.

He lived under communism, determined to push a communism, a regime that was determined to push God to the margins of society.

This man had every reason to become bitter, every reason to become cynical, every reason to believe that God had abandoned the world.

But the grace given to him at baptism continued to grow within him.

We can look at John Paul II and think, what an extraordinary man.

And he was.

But Christianity is not principally about the story of an extraordinary person doing extraordinary things for God.

It is the story of what God can do in a human being who surrenders himself completely to him.

I planted, Apollos watered, but God caused the growth.

It is only through God's grace.

We look at the gospel, it takes us deeper.

Jesus enters the home of Simon and finds his mother-in-law suffering from a severe fever.

They bring all those in need to him.

But Jesus approaches her, rebukes the fever, and he heals her.

And it says that immediately she gets up and begins to serve them.

That's the pattern of the gospel.

Christ comes to us, Christ encounters us, Christ heals us, and then Christ sends us out on mission.

We're not saved merely so that we can feel better about ourselves.

We're saved for communion with God, and that communion sends us into love and service.

You heard the crowds want Jesus to remain with them.

Jesus stay with us.

They've seen what he can do, they want to keep him there.

But Jesus says, To the other towns I also must proclaim the good news of the kingdom of God, because for this purpose I was sent.

I must go.

The gospel must move.

The gospel cannot remain.

The good news must not remain here.

We're standing in this little town where one little boy's Christian life began.

But he did not remain in Badavice.

The gospel carried him to Krakow, to Rome, and eventually across the world.

Still, John Paul II is not the center of the story.

Jesus Christ is the center of the story.

John Paul II had no gospel of his own to preach.

He spent his life proclaiming the same Jesus we encounter today.

The Jesus who enters human suffering, the Jesus who touches the sick, the Jesus who confronts the evil, the Jesus who seeks the lost, the Jesus who announces the good news, the kingdom of God.

And ultimately, Jesus who goes to the cross and enters the deepest sickness of human condition, sin and death itself.

There upon the cross, he does what no saint, no pope, no priest, government, ideology, or human achievement could ever do.

Jesus from the cross saves us.

He takes our sin upon himself, he dies our death, and on the third day he rises.

That is the good news.

That is the charisma of the church.

The good news is that Jesus Christ is alive, he's conquered sin and death, and he can still enter human life and make it brand new.

That work began in us on the day of our own baptism.

So the most important question before this baptismal font today is not what happened to Carol Voitiwa?

We know what happened.

The most important question is: what has happened to the grace given to me at my baptism?

Has it grown?

Have I grown?

Am I capable of forgiveness?

Am I less controlled by resentment?

Do I pray more deeply?

Do I love more generously?

Do I serve more freely?

Am I becoming less concerned with myself and more attentive to the people of God, the people that God has placed before me?

Or have I remained, as St.

Paul says, an infant?

That's the harder question.

Some of us have been Christians for a very long time, and at some point we must ask whether those years have simply passed or whether Christ has actually formed us.

So the question comes to us: what will God be, what will God permit us to do with our lives?

With our wounds, our failures, our sins, our gifts, our limitations, the remaining years that we have.

Give whatever you have left to Jesus.

The same Christ who enters Simon's house still enters our human hearts.

God has placed our lives.

God has placed people in our lives who have planted and watered faith within us.

Parents, godparents, grandparents, priests, teachers, friends.

But God gives the growth.

He's the one that allows the growth through his grace.

So when we leave Poland, we cannot keep what we have received here for ourselves.

There are other towns waiting for us.

There are other homes and families and coworkers and neighbors wanting to hear what we experienced, wanting to hear the good news that we live.

So, my brothers and sisters, we can't simply return home with memories.

We need to return home changed.

Others are planted, others are watered, but God is the one that gives the growth.

And if we surrender the rest of our lives to Him, God is never finished with us yet, and the best is yet to come.

Amen.