Just as the saraph serpent was lifted up on a pole in the desert for the people to live, so the Son of Man, Jesus Christ, was lifted up on the cross for the salvation of the world. In these late Lenten days, as we look upon the cross, either here in church or in our homes, our hearts surely must be stirred to remember the painful price our Lord paid for our salvation. With hearts filled with gratitude, we come to this Eucharist, with our eyes fixed on our Lord lifted up for us, who pours himself out for us again and still. When we see him lifted up, we remember that he is “I AM,” our crucified and risen Lord, and whenever we look to him, we are saved.
Tag: salvation
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The Nativity of the Lord: Mass During the Day
All during Advent, we have been yearning for the light. Advent reminds us that the world can sometimes be a very dark place, that war and terrorism and crime and disease and sin and death can really give us a beating, that very often we experience life much differently than God intended us to, and that all of this darkness has kept us from union with our God. But Advent also has reminded us that it’s not supposed to be that way, and that God has always intervened for love of the people he has created. And so in Advent, we came to see that God promises salvation for the people that are his own, and that he would do everything to make that promised salvation unfold for us.
The Old Testament unfolds for us the many ways that God has intervened in history to save his people. He placed man and woman in the Garden of Eden, safe from all harm, should they choose to accept it (which, of course, they did not!). He brought eight people through the deluge of the great flood on Noah’s Ark. He promised Abraham his descendents would be as numerous as the stars of the sky. He led his people out of slavery in Egypt, through the desert and into the Promised Land, protecting them and guiding them through the hand of Moses all along the way. His love for his people, his desire that they be one with him, and his efforts to save them from their own folly have been abundant all through human history. But as numerous as his efforts have been, so have humankind’s failures to follow him been numerous as well.
Which brings us to the event we celebrate today. Let’s be clear: this is not some last-ditch effort before he throws up his hands and leaves us to our own devices. This is the saving event, par excellence. This is the way to salvation that has always been intended and has been promised through the ages, from the very days of the creation of the world, when the Word, as St. John tells us today, was with God, and with God, was the Word through which everything in heaven and on earth came to be.
This awesome event is the Incarnation: Jesus, the Word through which all were created, comes to be one of the created ones. This is the primordial mystery of our faith: without the Incarnation, there could be no cross, no resurrection, no ascension, no salvation. None of the savings events of the Old Testament could be as efficacious as the Incarnation and the Paschal Mystery: in fact, those previous acts of salvation led up to the salvation we have in Christ Jesus, and paved the way for that saving act. In today’s feast, the great light of Christ has taken hold of the darkness this world brings to us and shatters it forever, shining great light into every corner of our dark world, and our sometimes very dark lives as well.
That’s all very theological and theoretical, I know, and maybe it goes over our heads most of the time. So let me put this all another way. For this illustration, I have to thank one of my seminary professors, who beat this image into our heads over and over again. Here’s the way it works: God always intended for us to be with him. But, that became impossible, because over time we developed this great, dark chasm of sin and death. That chasm separated us from God, and we could not reach across it to get to God. So, on December the 25th, in the year Zero, if you will, God sent his only Son to be our salvation. He was born into our midst and became one of us: he walked our walk, he lived our life, and he also died our death. But that death did not last forever: instead he rose to new life that lasts forever, canceling out that great chasm of sin and death, and forever uniting us to God, allowing us to live the life God always intended us to have. Now, I should mention, he used to call that chasm the “deep dark yogurt of sin and death,” and he once explained that he used that image because he didn’t like yogurt!
You get the idea. This gift of the Incarnation is the best Christmas present we will receive – it is the best gift of any kind that we will ever receive, because in the Incarnation we have what’s necessary for us to be saved. This is so important a mystery and so great a gift, that at the words of the Incarnation in the Creed today, we are instructed to genuflect, not just bow. So we will genuflect when we say the words, “by the power of the Holy Spirit, He was born of the Virgin Mary, and became man.” And we genuflect because we remember with great gratitude that if the Word didn’t become flesh, if he wasn’t born of the Virgin Mary, if he didn’t become one like us, if he didn’t pay the price for our sins, we would never have salvation, or hope of life with God. Praise God for this great gift today!
And so as we continue our prayer today, we offer God the darkness in our lives: our sins, our frustrations, our disappointments, our pain, our grief – and we hold up all of this to the great Light that is God’s Word, the one who became one like us, who pitched his tent among us, and who dwells with us now. We pray that the Light of the world would banish our darkness, and help us to see the way to God from wherever it is that we find ourselves on the spiritual path today. We celebrate that today and every day, Jesus Christ is the Light that shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
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Tuesday of the Fourth Week of Advent: Come, O King of all the Nations
We hear a similar song from Hannah and Mary today. In fact, many Biblical scholars suggest that the song of Mary we heard in today’s Gospel is a restatement of the song of Hannah that we have in today’s psalm. Whether or not that is true, it is clear that both women give birth to a child by the grace of God, and both women’s sons are destined for greatness. Samuel’s strength is a foreshadowing of the strength of Jesus Christ who will overcome sin and death.
Samuel becomes a great king, but it is Jesus who becomes King of all the Nations, which is the title of Jesus we celebrate in the “O Antiphons” today. The verse from vespers prays, “O King of all the nations, the only joy of every human heart; O Keystone of the mighty arch of man, come and save the creature you fashioned from the dust.”
Today we anxiously await the strength of Christ, King of all the Nations, the only joy of every human heart. He alone can save us from our sins. He alone can unify the hearts of all humankind, putting to an end, once and for all, the sad divisions that keep us from the communion we were always meant to have with one another.
And so we pray, Come, O King of all the nations. Come, be our strength, be the One who leads us in the ways of righteousness, be the joy of every heart that seeks you. Help us to find the peace that only you can bring. Come, Lord Jesus, come quickly and do not delay!
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Monday of the Fourth Week of Advent: O Radiant Dawn
There’s a little more light today. As we get toward these last days of Advent, we find ourselves in a time when more light is beginning to shine. All of the candles on our Advent wreath are lit, and the only thing that can make it brighter is the coming of our God in all his glory, dawning brightly on the earth.
Today’s “O Antiphon” tells us as much. Today we hear “O Radiant Dawn,” and the antiphon for Evening prayer is this: “O Radiant Dawn, splendor of eternal light, sun of justice: come, shine on those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death.”
This light is the source of the joy of which Zephaniah the prophet speaks today. He tells the broken people Israel that God has forgiven their sins, and that he continues to walk among them, which should be cause enough to remove their fear. That enduring presence among the people Israel, of course, is a foretaste of the enduring presence that we experience in the Incarnation of Christ.
Mary and Elizabeth celebrate that light in today’s Gospel. Mary’s greeting of Elizabeth is an act of hospitality, and Elizabeth’s welcome, along with the Baptist’s reaction in his mother’s womb, is an act of faith. That faith incredibly affected the salvation of the whole world.
And all of this light continues to shine on our sometimes-dark world. A world grown dark and cold in sin is visited by its creator, and that world is changed forever. The darkness can never now be permanent. Sin and death no longer have the last word for us, because that was never God’s will for us. We have hope for eternal life because our God eagerly desires us to return to him and be one with him.
And so we pray, Come, O Radiant Dawn, shatter the darkness that sometimes reigns in our cynical world. Give us the warmth of your light to warm our hearts grown cold with sin. Shine on all who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death. Come, Lord Jesus. Come quickly and do not delay!
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The Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary
Today’s readings
Blessed Pope Pius IX instituted the solemnity of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary on December 8, 1854, when he proclaimed as truth the dogma that our Lady was conceived free from the stain of original sin. This had been a traditional belief since about the eighth century, and had been celebrated as a feast first in the East, and later in the West. So let us be clear that this celebration pertains to the conception of Mary, and not that of Jesus, whose conception we celebrate on the feast of the Annunciation on March 25.
This feast celebrates the belief that God loved the world so much that he sent his only Son to be our Savior, and gave to him a human mother who was chosen before the world began to be holy and blameless in his sight. This feast is a sign for us of the nearness of our salvation; that the plan God had for us before the world ever took shape was finally coming to fruition. How appropriate it is, then, that we celebrate the Immaculate Conception just before Christmas, when our salvation begins to unfold.
The readings chosen for this day paint the picture. In the reading from Genesis, we have the story of the fall. The man and the woman had eaten of the fruit of the tree that God had forbidden them to eat. Because of this, they were ashamed and covered over their nakedness. God noticed that, and asked about it. He found they had discovered the forbidden tree because otherwise they would not have the idea that their natural state was shameful. Sin had entered the world, and God asks the man to tell him who had given him the forbidden fruit.
This leads to the first instance of passing the buck, as the man blames not just the woman, but also God, for the situation: “The woman whom you put here with me: she gave me fruit from the tree, and so I ate it.” In other words, if God hadn’t put the woman there with him in the first place, he never would have received the fruit to eat. The woman, too, blames someone else: the serpent. As if neither of them had been created with a brain to think for themselves, they begin that blame game that we all participate in from time to time.
Thus begins the pattern of sin and deliverance that cycles all through the scriptures. God extends a way to salvation to his people, the people reject it and go their own way. God forgives, and extends a new way to salvation. Thank God he never gets tired of pursuing humankind and offering salvation, or we would be in dire straits. It all comes to perfection in the event we celebrate today. Salvation was always God’s plan for us and he won’t rest until that plan comes to perfection. That is why St. Paul tells the Ephesians, and us, today: “He chose us in him, before the foundation of the world, to be holy and without blemish before him. In love he destined us for adoption to himself through Jesus Christ…”
And so, in these Advent days, we await the unfolding of the plan for salvation that began at the very dawn of the world in all its wonder. God always intended to provide an incredible way for his people to return to them, and that was by taking flesh and walking among us as a man. He began this by preparing for his birth through the Immaculate Virgin Mary – never stained by sin, because the one who conquered sin and death had already delivered her from sin. He was then ready to be born into our midst and to take on our form. With Mary’s fiat in today’s Gospel, God enters our world in the most intimate way possible, by becoming vulnerable, taking our flesh as one like us. Mary’s lived faith – possible because of her Immaculate Conception – makes possible our own lives of faith and our journeys to God. There’s a wonderful Marian prayer that we pray at the conclusion of Night Prayer during the Advent and Christmas seasons that sums it all up so beautifully:
Loving Mother of the Redeemer,
Gate of heaven, star of the sea,
Assist your people
who have fallen yet strive to rise again.To the wonderment of nature you bore your Creator,
yet remained a virgin after as before.You who received Gabriel’s joyful greeting,
have pity on us, poor sinners.Our celebration today has special meaning for us. Because Mary was conceived without sin, we can see that sin was never intended to rule us. Because God selected Mary from the beginning, we can see that we were chosen before we were ever in our mother’s womb. Because Mary received salvific grace from the moment of her conception, we can catch a glimpse of what is to come for all of us one day. Mary’s deliverance from sin and death was made possible by the death and resurrection of her Son Jesus, who deeply desires that we all be delivered in that way too.
Pray for us, O holy Mother of God, that we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ. Amen.
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Thirty-third Sunday of Ordinary Time
Why are we still here?????
Have you ever thought about that? Why is it that Jesus has been so long in returning? Why hasn’t he come back to put all things to their proper conclusion? Why do we still have wars being fought all over the earth? Why is there still terror, and death, and sadness, and pain? Why do our loved ones still suffer illness? Why do relationships still break down and why do people still hurt one another? Why can’t God just wrap things up and put an end to all this nonsense? Why can’t we all go home to be with our Lord and our loved ones?
If you relate to those questions, then you probably can relate to the readings that we have from the prophet Daniel and from Mark’s Gospel today. These are what we call “apocalyptic writings” which are usually written to give people hope in the midst of very hard times. So you can see why they would be so important to us today. Because we have hard times of our own, don’t we? I would venture to guess that everyone sitting here is either affected in some way by the economic downturn, or else they know someone who is. Do you know someone whose son or daughter was stationed at Fort Hood? Judging from the number of funerals we have had here lately, I would say that a lot of you have lost loved ones recently, or know about someone who has. And that’s to say nothing of the day-to-day stuff like relationships ending, and the darkness of our own sin.
When these things confront us, who among us wouldn’t call to mind the words of Jesus in today’s Gospel? “The sun will be darkened,” he says, “and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from the sky, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.” It often seems like our whole world is falling apart, and we are desperately looking for some sign of hope.
They are hard readings today, really kind of dark in nature. They remind me of the darkness of the days that we have at the end of the year. The sun sets a lot earlier than it did, and the skies are often cloudy. It’s a darkness we can almost feel, and these readings that we have at the end of our liturgical year really echo that sentiment for me.
But I think that’s the point. A lot of fundamentalist folks have spent the greater part of their lives trying to figure out when all these things would take place. They want a day and time when the end will come, and they sometimes tell us they have figured it out, only to have the time come and go, and they have to return to their lives, if they can. But these readings aren’t supposed to be a roadmap. They are supposed to accompany us when our lives are as dark as the autumn nights. The message they give us is one of hope. No, we will not be spared the disappointments, frustrations, and sadness that can sometimes come in our lives, but we never ever ever have to go through them alone.
God will be with us. He will, as the Gospel tells us, “gather his elect from the four winds, from the end of the earth to the end of the sky.” As the prophet Daniel tells us, “At that time [God’s] people shall escape, everyone who is found written in the book.”
And so that is why we are here today. That’s why we are still here. We are here to allow God to gather his elect, and we are here to help him do that. To that end, we have gathered eight of our brothers and sisters today, to welcome them and support them in their journey to become one of us. Two of them are now promoted to the Order of Catechumens. Catechumens are those being instructed in the ways of the faith. This pertains specifically to those not baptized. At the Easter Vigil Mass, they will receive all three of the Sacraments of Initiation: baptism, confirmation and first Eucharist. Catechumens have rights in the Church: they can receive a Christian burial if they are called home before the Sacraments can be administered; they can be married in the Church sacramentally, and they have a right to the sacraments.
The others being welcomed today are candidates for full communion with us. They have been baptized, some Catholic, some not, and so they already share with us the foundation of grace and are being called to confirmation and first Eucharist to complete their union with us.
If we take the readings today seriously, and I think we should, then these eight people are simply a nice start. We know that one day, we won’t still be here, that Jesus will return to complete all things and initiate the reign of God’s kingdom. And we want everyone to be there. In many ways, we cannot any of us go if we all don’t go. It’s not just “me and Jesus.” Salvation is not an individual thing, it’s something we all receive together. And that’s why we have the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults. That’s why we actively reach out to those not among us and call them to communion with us. We need to gather up all God’s people so that, one day, we can all be seated around the banquet of God’s people in heaven.
Back to my first question, then. Why are we still here? We’re still here because there is work still to be done. There are many more people to gather from the four winds so that their names can be written in the book of life. God is still working salvation among us; we need to cooperate with that saving work. It’s not going to be easy, and some days may seem oppressively dark, but we are never alone. Heaven and earth might pass away, but God’s word is forever. It will not pass away.
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Monday of the Twenty-sixth Week of Ordinary Time
God’s salvation is radical. Zechariah, in the first reading, is speaking to the broken Israel. On account of its sins, it was taken into captivity and exiled to Babylon. The fate they suffered was well deserved. Generations had rejected the Lord’s covenant, had instead turned to the pagan gods worshipped by the people in the surrounding areas. They had profaned the temple with the worship of foreign gods and every one of their kings led them to evil upon evil. So why would the Lord ever care about them again? Couldn’t he just throw up his hands and say, “I’m done”?
But he doesn’t say that. He’s not done. He fully intends to restore the people, gathering them from the land of the rising sun and from the land of the setting sun, that is from the east to the west, everywhere over all the earth, and gather them back to himself, restoring Israel and making Jerusalem a holy city once again.
All of this is a metaphor for our own need for salvation, of course. How often have we as a culture rejected God’s covenant? How much have we as individuals sinned? How much have our leaders led us to the worship of foreign gods, like wealth and power? We too have found evil upon evil and have rejected our God. We would well deserve it if he threw up his hands in our midst and said to us, “I’m done.”
But he doesn’t say that. He’s not done. He fully intends to gather us from wherever we have wandered. No place is beyond the reach of our God who longs to bring us back to himself. There is no place that we can go that is beyond God’s love. Nothing is impossible for our God who made us for himself.
God’s salvation is radical.
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The Exaltation of the Holy Cross
Theologian Robert Barron tells about an interreligious dialogue between Catholics and Buddhists. At one point, one of the Buddhists said to him, “Why is that obscene image on every wall in your buildings?” He was, of course, referring to the Cross. The Buddhist explained that it would be considered a mockery in his religion to venerate the very thing that killed their leader. The truth is, of course, that it is obscene. It is strange, and Barron wrote a whole book about it called The Strangest Way.
And we all must have thought about this at one time or another. Why is it that God could only accomplish the salvation of the world through the horrible, brutal, and lonely death of his Son? That question goes right to the root of our faith. We know that we had been alienated from God, separated by a vast chasm of sin and death. But into this obscene world, Jesus becomes incarnate; he is born right into the midst of all that sin and death. He walks among us, and goes through all of the sorrows and pains of life and death right with along with us. If sin and death have been the obscenities that have kept us from God, then God was going to use those very things to bring us back. Jesus comes into our world and dies our death because God wants us to know that there is no place we can go, no experience we can ever have that is outside of God’s reach.
Today’s feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, also called the Triumph of the Cross, was celebrated very early in the Church’s history. In the fourth century St. Helena, mother of the Roman Emperor Constantine, went to Jerusalem in search of the holy places of Christ’s life. She razed the Temple of Aphrodite, which tradition held was built over the Savior’s tomb, and her son built the Basilica of the Holy Sepulcher over the tomb. During the excavation, workers found three crosses. Legend has it that the one on which Jesus died was identified when its touch healed a dying woman. The cross immediately became an object of veneration.
About this great feast, St. Andrew of Crete wrote: “Had there been no cross, Christ could not have been crucified. Had there been no cross, life itself could not have been nailed to the tree. And if life had not been nailed to it, there would be no streams of immortality pouring from Christ’s side, blood and water for the world’s cleansing. The legal bond of our sin would not be cancelled, we should not have attained our freedom, we should not have enjoyed the fruit of the tree of life and the gates of paradise would not stand open. Had there been no cross, death would not have been trodden underfoot, nor hell despoiled.”
Because of the Cross, all of our sadness has been overcome. Disease, pain, death, and sin – none of these have ultimate power over us. Just as Jesus suffered on that Cross, so we too may have to suffer in the trials that this life brings us. But Jesus rose from the dead and ascended into heaven to prepare a place for us, a place where there will be no more sadness, death or pain, a place where we can live in the radiant light of God for all eternity. Because of the Cross, we have hope, a hope that can never be taken away.
The Cross is indeed a very strange way to save the world, but the triumph that came into the world through the One who suffered on the cross is immeasurable. As our Gospel reminds us today, all of this happened because God so loved the world.
We adore you, O Christ, and we praise you, because by your Holy Cross you have redeemed the world.
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Tuesday of the Sixteenth Week of Ordinary Time
A perfectly respectable reading of the whole Exodus story is the allegorical one. In this reading, the Egyptian army, its chariots and charioteers and even its horses, symbolize the forces of evil and sin. God loved the Israelites, who are God’s chosen people, and in a sense, you and me, so much that he rescued them from their abject slavery in Egypt, a slavery that we all have to the forces of sin. Anyone who has struggled with an addiction or any pattern of sin in their lives, can tell you how sinfulness is really its own kind of slavery. God leads his chosen people away from sin back to the Promised Land, the heaven he promises us all. On the way, the forces of evil are drowned in the abyss of the Red Sea, which symbolizes the abyss between this world of sin and the Promised Land of heaven.
I like this allegorical reading because we are all pretty well removed from the ancient history of the Israelites and the Egyptians. But the slavery that we all have to sin at one point or another in our lives is anything but ancient history. God intends a very real exodus for all his chosen people, and he continues to do the work of salvation in and for all of us every day. All of us who are sister and brother and mother to the Lord Jesus, all of his family, are too important to be left behind in slavery to sin.
All we have to do is follow the Lord through the desert of purification, through the abyss of whatever the Red Sea looks like for us, into the Promised Land. And it won’t be easy. If the desert doesn’t discourage us, the abyss will outright frighten us. But the thought of being back at the fleshpots of our Egypt of sin should easily be enough to keep us all on the journey to get where we’re supposed to be. We too might sing to the Lord for he is gloriously triumphant. The horse and chariot of our own sinfulness has been cast into the sea.
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The Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ
Today we celebrate with great joy one of the most wonderful feasts on our Church calendar, the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ. Through this greatest of all gifts, we have been made one with our God who loves his people beyond all imagining. We experience this love in perhaps one of the most basic ways of our human existence, which is to say by being fed. Learning to satisfy our hunger is one of the first things we learn; we learn who we can depend on and develop close relationships with those people. Today’s feast brings it to a higher level, of course. The hunger we’re talking about is not mere physical hunger, but instead a deep inner yearning, a hunger for wholeness, for relatedness, for intimate union with our Creator and Redeemer.
What we see in our God is one who has always desired deep union with his people. We have just recently finished the Lent and Easter seasons, in which the history of God’s work in salvation history has been beautifully recalled. Salvation began with the creation of the whole world, the saving of Noah and those on the ark, the covenant made with Abraham, the ministry of the prophets, and ultimately culminated in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, the acceptable sacrifice which brings salvation to the whole world. God never lost interest in his creation; he didn’t set the world in motion and then back off to leave everything to its own devices. God has time and again intervened in human history, offering us an olive branch, seeking renewal of our relationship with him, and bringing us back no matter how far we have fallen.
God has repeatedly sought to covenant with us. Eucharistic Prayer IV beautifully summarizes God’s desire: “You formed man in your own likeness and set him over the whole world to serve you, his creator, and to rule over all creatures. Even when he disobeyed you and lost your friendship you did not abandon him to the power of death, but helped all men to seek and find you. Again and again you offered a covenant to man, and through the prophets taught him to hope for salvation.”
And unlike human covenants, which have to be ratified by both parties, and are useless unless both parties agree, the covenant offered by God is effective on its face. God initiates the covenant, unilaterally, out of love for us. Our hardness of heart, our sinfulness, our constant turning away from the covenant do not nullify that covenant. God’s grace transcends our weakness, God’s jealous love for us and constant pursuit of us is limitless.
Today’s Liturgy of the Word shows us the history of the covenant. The first reading recalls the covenant God made with the Israelites through the ministry of Moses. The people agree to do everything the Lord commanded, and Moses seals the covenant by sprinkling the people with the blood of the sacrifice and saying, “This is the blood of the covenant that the LORD has made with you in accordance with all these words of his.” The writer of the Letter to the Hebrews makes the point that if the blood of sacrificed animals can bring people back in relationship with God, how much more could the blood of Christ draw back all those who have strayed. Christ is the mediator of the new covenant, as he himself said in the Gospel: “This is my blood of the covenant, which will be shed for many.”
And so we, the many, benefit from Christ’s blood of the covenant. The preface for the Eucharist Prayer today says, “As we eat his body which he gave for us, we grow in strength. As we drink his blood which he poured out for us, we are washed clean.” God’s desire for covenant with us cannot be stopped by sin or death or the grave.
We disciples are called then to respond to the covenant. Having been recipients of the great grace of God’s love, we are called to live the covenant in our relationships with others. Which isn’t always the easiest thing to do. Sometimes people test our desire to covenant with them; sometimes they don’t even want to be in covenant with us. But the model for our relationships with others is the relationship God has with us. And so sometimes we have to unilaterally extend the covenant, even if the other isn’t willing, or doesn’t know, that we care for them. God wants to offer the covenant to everyone on earth, and he may well be using us to extend the covenant to those he puts in our path. As the alternate opening prayer for today says, “May we offer to our brothers and sisters a life poured out in loving service of that kingdom where you live with the Father and the Holy Spirit…”
We do this in so many ways. Here at St. Raphael, one of the important ways we do that is through our support of Hesed House and Loaves and Fishes. The Loaves and Fishes Community Pantry began in a closet here at St. Raphael in 1984. That year, eight families were helped. This year, as the year began, 1,800 families were helped, and that number has grown by about a hundred families a month due to this economy. Most recently, the pantry helped 2,800 families. I was privileged to offer the invocation at their 24 Hours Without Hunger event two weeks ago. The executive director expressed the organization’s deep regard for St. Raphael, noting that although so many Naperville churches currently support them, St. Raphael’s continues to be by far their largest congregational supporter.
We absolutely should feel good about the ways we show our love for our brothers and sisters in Christ. But we cannot rest on our laurels, as that number of families served continues to grow, we who are able must be strong in our support of them. One of the particular needs they have in the summer months is to provide extra food for children who, during the school year, receive a free lunch at school. They want to provide additional juice boxes and healthy snacks for kids this summer. Maybe we can all buy another box of snacks or juice boxes the next time we shop. Or even add slightly to our envelope for Loaves and Fishes on the second Sunday of the month. This is a great option because every dollar we give them can buy $10 worth of food through their sources. A small effort can be a great blessing to those in need this summer.
God’s covenant with us is renewed every day, and celebrated every time we come to receive Holy Communion. When we receive the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ in the Eucharist, we are renewed in the covenant, strengthened in grace and holiness, and brought nearer to our God who longs for us. We who are so richly graced can do no less than extend the covenant to others, helping them too to know God’s love for them, feeding them physically and spiritually.
The Psalmist asks today, “How shall I make a return to the LORD for all the good he has done for me?” And the answer is given: by taking up the chalice of salvation, drinking of God’s grace, renewing the covenant, and passing it on to others. May the Body and Blood of Christ bring us all to everlasting life!
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