Today the Church is reminding us that we have been created for something greater than passing comforts, empty pleasures, superficial popularity, and earthly achievements. We all want our lives to matter, to make a lasting difference in this world, not just a passing difference, a little scratch on the surface. But do we all want to live fully and faithfully under Christ's rule, firmly entrusting our lives into his care so that we can all reach our God given potential to make the world a better place, living in the imitation of Christ the King, experience fulfillment of purpose and the interior peace that follows. 
 
Jesus came to inaugurate among us the Kingdom of God. It is he himself who embodies the whole vision of the Kingdom by the way he lived, spoke, worked, taught, healed, liberated, and finally sacrificed his life in love for us.  He is our model, the one we are to imitate. There is no other who so completely reveals to us the truth of who we are and who we were made to become.
 
Colossians tells us that before all, he existed, and it is he holds it all together, sustains and supports the unity of creation. In him, we gain our freedom, through the forgiveness of our sins.  By him who frees us from the power of darkness, we are brought into his Kingdom to live freely what we now see clearly is our true identity. It is in him, the first-born of all creation that we see the image of the unseen God and ourselves. 
 
Yet, we find it so difficult to remain free and faithful. We are all too willing to hide who we are, what we believe and find that too easily we cede our influence to the knowing and the ignorant minions of the enemy. Bombarded by media messages that tell us to keep our religion to ourselves and out of the public square we effectively allow the world to be ruled by the shadow masters. If we truly believe that Christ is the Savior, that there really is one God who created us and redeemed us, we should not be afraid to bring that faith to action in the society around us. If we don't, others will fill the void. 
 

• If we don't defend and spread Christian values in society, what values will thrive there?
• If we don't continue to bring Christ into culture, what will culture become?

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That's the question at the end of this weeks Gospel Reading. If we want the answer to be yes, then we need to follow the example of Aaron, Hur, Moses, the woman in the Gospel and take to heart the exhortation of St. Paul in the second reading.

God desires us to be born into a family and to worship in a community. We are not solitary pilgrims on the lonely road of salvation responding to the universal call to holiness. We are the Body of Christ and we are meant to accompany each other in meaningful and fruitful ways on this journey. Just as the first reading described, united we stand but alone we will grow weary allowing the enemy to overtake us.

"Humbly we pray that, partaking of the Body and Blood of Christ, we may be gathered into one by the Holy Spirit!

Being the Church...

​The First Reading, reflects the areas of difference and conflict that are bound to arise when Christians come face to face with new problems and new questions for the articulation of their faith. Such conflicts, when properly handled, are necessary, even desirable, if we are to have a deeper understanding of the real meaning of our faith in a changing world.
 
And God speaks to us through the changing situations in which the world finds itself. Both calm and conflict have something in common. They remind us of the different ways in which God speaks to us. Through his Spirit, which Jesus promises to send after he has left his disciples in the flesh, he will continue to be present, to be with his community, the Church.
 
Love, as has been said, is not a feeling – it is a verb. There can be no love (feeling) without loving (doing). And anyone can start the process.
 
For Jesus, love, by which he means loving, is achieved by “keeping his word”. The “word” of Jesus embraces everything we know about him through the Scripture – his words, his actions, his relationships with people of all kinds, the guiding principles of his life, his values and attitudes. The “word” of Jesus also comes to us from all our interactions and experiences within the Christian community where Jesus still speaks to us. It comes to us through the whole of creation of which Jesus is the Head and with which he identifies through his Creator Father.
 
The Church is much more than an organization founded 2,000 years ago by Jesus Christ. It is, as the Second Vatican Council emphasized, a people. It is a community – at times a rather fractious, disjointed, flawed community – whose members in varying degrees share their faith and hope, their love and caring. A community which, with and in Jesus, is called to work for the transformation of our world of sin and weakness, to make it, in the words of Revelation today, “a city where the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple,” the focal point of worship.
 
It is through this community, that the Spirit continues to speak as it did in the days of the first disciples. That Spirit of the Father and Jesus speaks not only through pope, bishops and priests but can and does speak through each and every one of the members of Christ’s Body – old or young, educated or illiterate, men or woman, friends or enemies.
 
We see the same tendency in the Church today. People who want to turn the clock back and resurrect old customs and impose them on others. These people tend to make the Church an end in itself. The Church is primarily a vehicle, a means by which the experience of God’s love is extended to the whole world. And, if the Church is to be true to the Spirit, it must remain open to the world for it is the world which, in the words of one theologian, “writes the agenda for the Church”.
 
It was precisely because they listened to the situation of the new non-Jewish converts, that the Church realized where the Spirit was leading it. When the Church becomes an enclosed, elitist society sitting in unbending judgement on the rest of the world it is no longer the Church that Jesus founded.
 
Collectively and individually, we need to become aware of the wonderful ways that the Lord can come into our lives. If we give a little time to God each day, if we can remain completely still for even a short while, we can experience an overpowering desire to share in the loving that is reaching out to us from God. And then start reaching out ourselves. God wants to share with us more and more of what he has and is. The problem is that most of us hardly give him a chance. Loving is not only a verb; it is a two-way street.