Seeing Christ for who He is enables us to become who we truly are.
I got a bit agitated by a press release from my seminary. One of the current professors had received a major grant to research, as he puts it, “the hagiological argument for the existence of God”—that is, “the argument from (human) holiness.”
In sum, he intends to set about proving the existence of God through the stories and examples of saints, looking at what they actually did, how they experienced God, and how their lives as a whole reflected God.
It agitated me because it illustrates the challenge we have in sharing the Gospel in our current age. In every age Christians have to re-present the Gospel. But there is nothing particularly new about his study. On the contrary, it is precisely how God set forth to reconcile himself with humanity, indeed with the whole of creation, through His Only Son, Jesus Christ. It is precisely the point of the last Sunday of Epiphany, when we remember The Transfiguration.
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The light of Christ reveals the work to be done.
The amazing Scout shirt. It could take anything. From the drive to the campsite, setting up our tents, food and cooking box, building campfires, hiking, playing games – literally everything we’d do except swimming you could do in that shirt. And we did. Even sleeping. Some weekends I’d never take it off.
After a full weekend of camping, cooking, fires and fun, we’d come home.
The shirt was fine. I was not.
Dad, my brother and I would come into the house and see this odd mixture of love and rejection, reunion and repulsion, welcome and disgust, on my mother’s face.
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Don't lose your saltiness: to spice, preserve and heal
Jesus said, “You are the salt of the world.”
The very first episode of the original Star Trek TV show aired on September 8th, 1966. Do you remember what it was? I’m talking about the first actual episode with Captain Kirk, not the pilot.
The first episode was called The Man Trap. The Star Ship Enterprise goes to check on an outpost on a distant planet where a husband and wife are both archaeologists who had been researching an ancient civilization together. The plot thickens when we learn that the wife, Nancy, is not only a former girlfriend of Dr. McCoy, but for him “the one that got away.”
You may ask yourself, “What could this possibly have to do with today’s Gospel?”
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