Homilies - Fr. Daniel Scheidt - St. Vincent de Paul · St. Vincent de Paul Catholic Church, Fort Wayne, Indiana

Homily - March 22nd, 2026 - Fifth Sunday of Lent - 9am

March 25, 2026·23 min·2 clips

Jesus weeps before shouting 'Lazarus, come out,' and the dead man emerges bound.

1. Fr. Daniel Scheidt's Fifth Sunday of Lent homily at St. Vincent de Paul in Fort Wayne centers on John 11:1-45, the raising of Lazarus from Bethany. 2. Fr. Scheidt serves as sole homilist; no guests appear; he briefly mentions a young unnamed dating couple in the parish and Saint Peter as a scriptural figure. 3. The organizing thesis is that both sin and death are forms of 'disintegration,' and that Jesus's entire mission is to bring 'reintegration'—transforming what has come to an end into something greater. 4. Fr. Scheidt opens by noting that St. Paul's phrase 'the wages of sin is death' does not imply a simple one-to-one connection between individual sin and affliction; Jesus explicitly corrects this in several gospel passages. 5. He describes sin as a disintegration: acting against the purposes for which we are made, doing violence to the good purposes for which other things and people are made. 6. Using the biology of a human cell, he argues that life from conception is a process of integration—drawing what is given by the mother into oneself, replacing dying cells with living ones—and that death is the final failure of this integration. 7. The oratory at St. Vincent de Paul displays Ezekiel's prophecy in limestone above the graveyard: 'O my people, I will open your graves and have you rise from them,' which Fr. Scheidt connects to Jesus ordering the stone rolled from Lazarus's cave. 8. He interprets Jesus's weeping at Lazarus's tomb as a deliberate sign that God values each person and all persons together in their specificity, not as abstractions. 9. Fr. Scheidt makes the typological claim that by raising Lazarus, Jesus is training Mary of Bethany for what she will do on Easter morning: run from a cave-tomb and announce 'I have seen the Lord.' 10. For those in the congregation preparing to be baptized at the Easter Vigil, Fr. Scheidt states that in baptism all sins will be forgiven and integrated into the story of Christ's victory—'trophies of his victory.' 11. He draws a verbal parallel between Jesus's command 'Lazarus, come out—untie him, let him go' and the 'power of the keys' given to Peter: 'What you loose on earth is loosed in heaven.' 12. Turning to world affairs, Fr. Scheidt names war as 'the externalization of the conflicts of our hearts' and 'the apocalyptic disintegration.' 13. He delivers the aphorism: 'To anyone with a bomb, everything looks like a target. To someone with a seed, everything looks like a garden,' and applies it to Christians as carriers of the seeds of everlasting life. 14. He asserts: 'We are not hostages to anyone's evils or bad decisions. We are free people. We are citizens of heaven.' 15. For Easter week, he urges parishioners to 'plot good'—to plan concrete acts of neighborly contact on Easter Monday through Divine Mercy Sunday, noting 'if other people in the world can plot evil, what's the antidote? Us plotting good.' 16. He says that at the end of our lives, God will not ask about geopolitics but about our neighbors: 'the people who are geographically nearest us.' 17. Fr. Scheidt closes with a parish anecdote: a young dating couple has taken initiative to visit older married couples in the parish to learn from their successes, failures, joys, and sufferings, like 'little bumblebees in the garden.' 18. The homily is meditative and layered, moving from scripture through biology and typology to geopolitics and pastoral storytelling in a continuous arc. 19. Those drawn to homilies that connect liturgical scripture, biological metaphor, and practical spiritual exhortation across a broad thematic range will find this episode rich. 20. Listeners seeking topical commentary, interview-style conversation, or secular content should skip this episode.

As heard by us

A grave, expansive homily that turns Lazarus into a map of hope.

The sermon follows Lazarus from sickness to delay to tears to life, then keeps widening the frame to bodily mortality, Ezekiel's promise of opened graves, and the church as a work of reintegration.

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Why you'd press play

If you want a homily that faces death and resurrection without blinking, start here.

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