This is the first weekend of our new mass schedule here at St James. It is a big change in our parish
community. It is also an exciting change
in that this is the first weekend of our youth mass. We want this mass to truly be the mass of the youth, to speak to the youth in
your language and in images that you will easily understand. We will try to have music that appeals to the youth, and by October, we will
have youth participating in all the ministries of this Sunday evening mass.
Our 2nd reading from St Paul today – his letter to Philemon – is a
good place for us to start in our youth mass. How many of you have even heard of this book of the Bible before? It is by far the shortest of Paul’s letters,
not even being organized in chapters, and containing only 355 words in the
original Greek. That’s very short, isn’t
it? What strikes me about this letter is that Paul wrote it while he was in prison
himself, probably in Rome. But Paul is
not interested in his own safety and own well being, but rather in the well-being of the runaway slave
Onesimus, who was returning to his owner, Philemon. Paul’s journey is so interesting, as he started out being a prosecutor of
Christians, wanting them to be arrested or to be killed. And now he is willing to do anything to
spread the Gospel to the world, even to go to prison for the sake of the
Gospel. When I was in Rome a few years ago at the Basilica of St Paul just outside the
walls of the ancient city of Rome, I even got to see a piece of the chains that
enslaved Paul when he was in prison. Now, Paul is a spiritual father to so many of the faithful, nurturing them in
the faith. He even calls Onesimus his
spiritual son in the faith, his own very heart.
For Paul, God was not some ambiguous concept or some far away being in the
heavens. Jesus was his Lord and his
Savior. Jesus led Paul to the faith and
to salvation. Like Paul, we the modern-day disciples of Christ, are on a quest for the living
God. We seek out God in the reality of our lives. Unfortunately, that is not how many of the world see it. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once
advised his sister Elizabeth to take a new path, to takes risks, to go on a search through life as if no
one has gone there before. He told her:
if you want peace of soul and happiness, then believe, but if you want to
follow the truth, then seek. Many in our world see belief as being incompatible with our search for the
truth just as the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche did. But our faith tells us that all of us are on a journey through life. We are all on a quest for the Living God. God is alive in so many way in our lives, in
our Church, in our faith. The book of Wisdom in our first reading tells us that it is hard sometimes to
figure out those things within our grasp here on earth, so how do we search out
those things that are from heaven? In our faith, we see Jesus as a light who illuminates our search through life,
who helps us on our journey of faith, who keeps us on the right path. We are all going to have a lot of questions on our journey, and hopefully
through our youth mass, through CYO, and through our religious education
program, we will helped on our search by the light of Christ and by our
brothers and sisters in Christ. Today, we kick off our religious education program, which is a very exciting
day for us. We look forward to a good
year, and we look forward to searching for God together.
No comments:
Post a Comment