https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=dHQQnh9XruA
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen. Lord Jesus, as we gather here in your Eucharistic presence, we ask you to send your Holy Spirit into our hearts, that we could understand the power of our baptism and to live its effects in the world. You who live and reign forever and ever, Amen. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen. Welcome to our second Parish Mission talk. I’ve had many people say that they were happy that it was on YouTube because they were unable to make it the first time, and perhaps that’s some of you, and so that is available on YouTube. If you want to know how to find it, just go ahead and ask me. But for those of you who are coming here without having heard yesterday’s, don’t worry, we’re going to do just a little bit of a recap here. When we think about our baptism, we could think about it as a seed that contains the entirety of the spiritual life. And so for most of us, we have everything that we need already, and we received that on the day of our baptism. Now all seven sacraments are good and necessary, but everything begins with baptism. It begins with that divine life we’ve received in baptism. So when we look at the confirmation and Holy Communion, what those sacraments accomplish, especially your first Holy Communion, is they complete what was given to you at your baptism. It brings it to full fruition. When you receive, week after week, Holy Communion, and anytime you would receive the sacrament of the anointing of the sick, that can strengthen the graces that you were given at your baptism. Confession, and sometimes the anointing of the sick, can restore it completely if by sin we’ve cut off our baptism back down to the root. And one of the nice things about the grace of baptism is it’s like a dandelion. You just really can’t kill it, right? You may be able to rip the top off, but that root is always down there in the soil. And all it takes is the right conditions, and the right time to spring up again, just as hardy as ever. And marriage and holy orders, these are sacraments that take the graces given to you at baptism and utilize it for service, for service to the church, service to the world. And so you can see all of the whole sacramental sacraments of the church, it all begins in baptism, it all has that as its foundation. And so, I encourage you all to dig through the files, and to look up the date on which you were baptized, and to celebrate that. Buy a cake, and you’ll be able to see the date on which you were baptized. And to celebrate that, buy a cake, buy me a cake. October 9th, 1992, that was the day of my baptism. And you know, we celebrate our birthdays, and that’s good and right that you were, you know, the day that you were introduced to the whole world. And celebrating your baptism, that was the day that you were born unto eternal life. So I go ahead and encourage you to celebrate that. Now what does baptism do? Baptism puts sin out, brings God in, and brings us into the church. And so, baptism takes sin out. We are no longer alienated from God, but we are now able to be in communion with him. Baptism removes that separation between us and God, whether it is simply original sin, and also original sin, and any personal sins they may have committed for an adult. All of that is washed away in the sacrament of baptism. Sacrament of baptism puts sin out, brings God in. That you are now an adopted child of God. You can now trust God, and you truly call Jesus your brother. And as an adopted child of God, you participate in the divine nature, this profound mystery of the Christian faith where by this extraordinary and amazing grace from God, we become participants in the divine nature such that we are Jesus. That we are the body of Christ on earth. This adoption brings us all together. That we become this mystical body of Christ. We become this spiritual organism across the world doing the will of God for love of God. Baptism gives you all of this in a seed form. It gives you power. Sin can destroy it, can prevent it from bearing its fruit, and indifference can make it weak. And so, that’s the title of this talk, Unlock Your Baptism. Christ had three offices while he was here on earth. Three things that he accomplished that we share in. That we are made into priests, prophets, and kings by the reason of our baptism. And so, all of us here, all of us here are baptismal priests. And priests can do two things, or the main job is doing two things. One of them is sanctification, and the other one is mediation. And remember, sanctification is bringing things up out of the world and making them holy. And mediation is bringing the presence of Christ down from heaven into earth. We begin sanctifying our lives by making special times and actions holy. Remember holiness is where we take something and we set it out of ordinary use and bring it up for the use of God. So my chalice, my chalice, my gold cup that I use to celebrate mass that is no longer used for any ordinary human activities. It is only for the worship of God. So it’s become kind of humanly useless and consecrated to divine worship. So what we do as baptismal priests is that we set time and energy, we consecrate that to God. The time that you are spending in prayer has no earthly use, but it is precious to God. If you’re consistent with the prayer and you begin to have these regular encounters with God, his presence will begin to bleed into all times and all aspects of your life. When Jesus comes again, heaven and earth will no longer be separate, they will be perfectly unified and joined together. And so everything at that point will be holy. But until then we need to grow in our priesthood. And I recommended a real simple thing for that. Daily prayer, weekly mass, and monthly confession. That if you commit to those three practices and do them consistently, you will be growing in your baptismal priesthood. And before I go any farther, I just want to give a few notes here. I think something that’s important to remember is that God is the one who calls each and every single one of us. That he is the one whose grace and whose call draws us to himself. That this isn’t something we do on our own, but this is a gift and a grace we receive from him. It’s always a respond to his grace. And I hope that’s a comforting thought, knowing that it isn’t 100% up to you. This is primarily the work of God that he’s doing, primarily his motion and his action drawing you through your life. And you have willingly responded and willingly cooperated with what he’s done. You haven’t resisted to the point where you wouldn’t show up here on a Monday night. And sometimes I think people might feel like they’re falling behind in holiness. Looking back at their life with regret, saying I really wasted that period of my life. That was that time that I was far away from God. And really the Lord is the one who is the supreme Lord of the universe. That everything that happens he has accounted for. That he is allowed. And it’s woven into a part of his plan. So if there was a period of your life that wasn’t given over to God in a good way, we shouldn’t expect that it’s entirely wasted. We shouldn’t expect that God can’t do anything with that. God does things at his own pace and according to his own will. So we could look at St. Therese of LeSue. Late 1960s, he was a Christian. So we could look at St. Therese of LeSue. Late 19th century, a French young woman enters a Carmelite convent, begins living the ordinary life of a nun. She dies of tuberculosis at the age of 24. And her spiritual autobiography is published and becomes a best seller. And translated into dozens of languages, probably sold millions of copies at this point. By the age of 24, God had her on the fast track of being holy, of being sanctified, of being a saint. He did it in 24 years. He moves at the pace that he so chooses. We could think of the good thief on the cross. And the tradition, the one good thief that said, Lord, remember me when you come into your kingdom. The tradition has given him the name Saint Dismas. And we call him Saint Dismas. He was sanctified in a second and brought up into heaven. Now we can ask his intercession. After all that life of crime that was bad enough for him to be crucified by the Romans, Christ accomplished what he needed to in an instant. Christ will move as fast as he so chooses with each and every single one of us. And as long as we’re willing to follow after him and to remember him, he will be able to move as fast as he will. And we can ask him to repent of our sins. There’s nothing, not even our sins, that need to be considered wasted. That his grace can actually bring good out of those sins. So be at peace. Be of good cheer and follow after the Lord. Let’s talk about what it means to be a prophet. Well we use this word prophet in modern American English. What we usually mean is somebody who predicts the future. And I won’t say that that’s entirely wrong. That’s something that needs to be excluded. But we can take an instance of a prophet that I’m sure you’ve all heard of, the prophet Jonah. And after the unfortunate business with the whale being spit up on the shores of Nineveh, he goes and he delivers the message exactly as God had told him. And the message was this, 40 days hence and Nineveh will be destroyed. It’s real short. Do you remember how that story ends? Nineveh was not destroyed. They repented. They repented of their evil doing. The whole city, the king and everybody repented of their evil doing and God decided to spare them. Which means that Jonah did not accurately predict the future. And so should we say that he was not a prophet? Now this notion of prophecy is much bigger than telling the future. When we look at the word prophet, what it means is the one who speaks for God. Literally the one who speaks in front of. That’s what a prophet does. The prophet speaks on behalf of God. And that is God. The prophet tells the world and everyone who’s hearing about who God is and what his intentions are. The Old Testament is full of prophetic books, prophetic oracles, and they can take many forms. Very often a prophetic book is calling out injustice, saying that what you are doing here is wrong and the Lord is displeased with it. That’s not predicting the future, but it is still speaking on behalf of God. Sometimes it comes in the form of threatening punishment for sin. If you don’t turn back from your evil ways, the Lord is going to punish you. And so the prophet says, he’s going to punish you. And he’s going to punish you. And in the Old Testament we often hear prophetic words promising mercy. If you turn back to me, if you turn away from this evil way, I will bestow mercy upon you. I will bestow mercy to the thousands generation. So that’s what prophets do and that’s what prophecy is. It is fundamentally making the nature and the intentions of God known. And so being a prophet is astonishingly simple. That we witness to the truth about God. And we see this in the life of our Lord Jesus in his own person. That he wasn’t really a prophet because he was speaking directly for himself and for his father in heaven. So we can read this from John chapter 14. This is a last supper sequence. This was the night before Jesus died. Philip said to Jesus, Lord show us the father and we shall be satisfied. Jesus said to him, have I been with you so long and yet you do not know me Philip? He who has seen me has seen the father. How can you say show us the father? Do you not believe that I am in the father and the father in me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own authority. But the father, the father in me, I do not speak on my own authority. Dwells in me and does his works. Believe me that I am in the father and the father in me or else believe me for the sake of the works themselves. And so if we want to see our father in heaven we look at Jesus. This perfect image. And that while he was here on earth he represented his father perfectly. He did his father’s will. He was perfectly obedient to him in all things. So Jesus himself in his own person shows us who the father is. That’s our call as the body of Christ on earth. That we are supposed to embody the body and show the father by imitating Christ. So is it really that simple then? Is it enough to just tell people facts about God? Is it enough to come up with the best arguments about the existence of God, the nature of God, the veracity of the Bible, the truth claims of the church? Is that what we need to do? How many of you have encountered the new artificial intelligence chat programs? Chat GPT? Well I’ve got an idea. There’s a really brilliant YouTuber out there. His name is Trent Horn. Have you guys ever heard of Trent Horn before? He’s a real smarty pants, right? And so we don’t even need you to witness to Jesus. What we’ll do is that we will train this artificial intelligence on all of his many hours of podcasts. We’ll feed his books into the artificial intelligence programs and that artificial intelligence program will be able to answer questions with a startling degree of accuracy based on Trent Horn’s writings. We don’t even have to do this work anymore. We just deploy the Trent Horn chat bot out onto the internet and the whole world will become Catholic within days. So we’ll have a lot of people who are going to be interested in this. And you know we could train a more sophisticated type of neural net to do these things. We could look at all of the great and valuable arguments, persuasive facts, and we could train an atheist to repeat those arguments. A lot of them atheists, they’re smart. They can get those arguments, they can learn how to do the debates, they can have all of the facts at their fingertips. But I don’t think that would actually work. I don’t think that would actually be us doing what Jesus did and doing what he’s asking us to. The very first words of Jesus in his public ministry were repent, believe in the gospel. And this word that we translate as repent in English has a very interesting meaning. It’s metanoia in Greek. And what we would translate that literally as is repentance is having a transformation of the mind. A complete transformation of the mind. Not simply memorizing arguments and memorizing compelling facts, but having your mind transformed by the Holy Spirit so that you begin to see the world through the eyes of Jesus. I’m sure many of you went to the Redeemed Eucharistic Conference this past fall and heard that absolute barn burner that Monsignor Shea gave. I wasn’t the only one there, right? Lots of people went there. Monsignor Shea had this brilliant image, which I’m going to steal from him, but give him credit. He says that everybody, because of original sin, is born with cancer of the eye. We’re born with eye cancer. We can’t see this world clearly. We can’t see what is happening. But our impeding by this illness causes us to be blind to certain realities. Every age has had to deal with this and has had to deal with a particular form of eye cancer. And there is one form of this cancer of the eye that affects 21st century Americans. And this is blindness to the spiritual. Blindness to spiritual realities. Either denying the reality of spiritual things entirely, or perhaps saying that it exists, but not giving it its proper place. Not allowing the spiritual to have its proper priority over the material. And so some will deny the spiritual altogether. I believe that the entire universe is made up of matter, which is governed by inflexible, un-material, and un-sensory, un-sensory, un-sensory physical laws that allow no deviation. That if you knew the starting conditions of the universe with enough accuracy, you would be able to predict with clock-like efficiency everything that happens in the universe forever. I believe that the whole world came from nowhere, came from nothing, and is heading nowhere, and that all of us are blind and deluded meat puppets of the laws of physics. And when we meet people like this, they seem to believe one of two things. They actually believe that the universe is made up of matter, and that they either believe that they can fix all of our problems here on earth with merely human effort. That as long as everybody was running the right program and got on the same page together, that all of our problems would be gone. Or they’ve despaired and they’ve given themselves over to impulsive hedonism. Just living for themselves and living for the moment. I think more, however, a much greater percentage of the population will acknowledge the existence of spiritual realities, but will not give them the appropriate priority. You can tell people who believe this way because they begin to use vague, impersonal language about spiritual realities. That person has bad karma. They’re going to get what’s coming to them. The universe, the universe is against me today. I’m sending good vibes your way. And the great thing about karma and the universe and vibes is that they don’t make any demands of you. They don’t really ask you to do much beyond conforming to basically what everybody else is doing. And as long as you’re meeting the minimum of your needs, you’re going to be able to do that. And that’s what I think is the most important thing. And I think that with the minimal standards of decent and respectable people across the world, you’re doing just fine. Your spirituality is something you can just set up on the shelf. You can take it down when maybe you’re feeling a little bad and do a little bit of meditation, do a little bit of spiritual soothing for you. And you put it back up on the shelf and it works. The universe wants you to live your best life now and is there for you when you need a boost. Our God is a living God and he has plans. He has intentions to make you happy. He does whatever he wills and for those of us who would be his disciples, he welcomes us with mercy but he also asks us to follow after him. And so this vague spirituality, it’s so easy, easy for us to make our intentions and our plans, our efforts, our desires, our the center of our universes. Even for Christians, even for Christians who have been attending church their entire life, you can place your own intentions, your own desires, your own plans at the center rather than what God is doing at the center. So how is it? How is it that a good Christian can fall into this? I want to take a few ideas from 17th century mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal, a good Catholic boy in a skeptical age. And he said that there’s basically two ways that a human being can behave in the world. One is that a human being can behave in the world. Two different approaches that he can take to the different things, two different spirits by which he can interact with the world. We have the spirit of geometry and the spirit of finesse. Spirit of geometry and the spirit of finesse. So let’s take a look at this spirit of geometry first. This is the realm of facts. This is the realm of precise measurements. This is the realm of careful planning. This is a realm of documentable and repeatable procedures. The people who are in this world people who have to have this spirit of geometry while they’re doing their work. Well that’s mathematicians obviously. Chemists, software engineers, mechanics, carpenters and plumbers. And you will pay them all good money to have this spirit of geometry to make sure that the cabinets are going to fit in that section of the wall in your kitchen. That everything’s going to be precisely measured and you’re not going to have a half inch gap with nothing in it. So the spirit of geometry is a good thing. What the spirit of geometry is good for is for forming dead matter. Bringing it into the shape and the needs that we have. And the cool thing about it is that it’s all under our control. You can control the measurements. You can control the materials. You can make sure all of this stuff. It’s like I’ve got this. I’ve got the whole plan laid out. And sometimes you do. And sometimes things go very well. And the table that you build lasts for generations. And the spirit of geometry is a good thing. But it can also be seductive because it’s underneath our control. Let’s take a look at the spirit of finesse. The spirit of finesse is the realm of intuition. It’s the realm of context sensitivity, big picture thinking, seeing into the nature of things. And what’s tricky about this spirit of finesse is that it has real knowledge. It comes with real experience. But you can’t necessarily articulate it. It’s not something that you could document into a procedure or a precise description. The spirit of finesse would be how you approach a dog to pet it. Are we going to write a manual on how to pet a dog? Are we going to say you need to apply exactly this much pressure to the top of its head and stroke it for three and no more than four inches down its back? I mean that’s ridiculous. You don’t do that. You just read the dog as a dog. And you can do that. And is it looking at you with its tail wagging? Is it happy to see you? Or is it looking at you with its teeth out? Maybe I’m not going to pet it at this point. You don’t necessarily, if you know enough about dogs, you don’t have to think about it. It’s like, oh, that dog’s not happy to see me. I’m just going to keep my distance and where is the owner? The spirit of finesse tells you how close to stand to somebody when you’re talking to them. Because it matters. It matters on the context. Are you in the grocery store? Are you at home? Who are you talking to? What sort of conversation is this? You shouldn’t talk to your spouse at home the same way you talk to a stranger at the grocery store. And you probably do this intuitively without having to think about it. This spirit of finesse allows us to deal with living things and to take in account the intention and desires of the living being that we’re dealing with. The dog does not like being pet on the paws. This person doesn’t like it when I stand quite that close to them. You sense this. Now human beings hate being treated as if they were dead matter, as if they were living things. They’re not going to remember the sort of thing that you approach with the spirit of geometry. How many of you like going to the DMV? That’s basically a factory line for human beings. Everything has to be squeezed into the box, has to be put into production, you have to follow the precise procedure in order to get what you want. It’s not a fun place to be. How about when you get a phone call where it’s like, do you have a few minutes of your time? We’d like you to ask some questions. And it’s like, oh my gosh. I don’t want to answer all those questions. I don’t want to be reduced to a point of data on your spreadsheet for the Republican National Committee. I just don’t want to be treated that way. Well you know who hates being treated that way too? Our Lord Jesus. We have this from Mark’s Gospel, chapter 8. The Pharisees came and began to argue with him, seeking from him a sign from heaven to test him. And he sighed deeply in his spirit and said, why does this generation seek a sign? Truly I tell you, no sign will be given to this generation. And he left them and getting into the boat he departed to the other side. Now for those of you who don’t have the entire Gospel of Mark memorized, what happened immediately before this passage was the miraculous feeding of the 5,000. Where Jesus took five loaves of bread and two fish and fed 5,000 men with it. Here’s your sign. And these Pharisees come to him as if he’s a vending machine. Give us another sign. We didn’t personally witness that. Let’s just put in the quarter and pull the handle. Jesus says no, no you don’t treat me that way. This generation is not going to get a sign if you approach me like that. And it’s so easy, it’s so easy to treat our Lord like this. It’s easy to treat our Lord like this. Easy for each and every single one of us. It’s easy for me to show up at Mass and say, well as long as I just do the right things with my hands, say the right words, you have to show up. And then I’m doing my job and then I’m being a good priest. And then I can go do something else. It’s so easy to fall into that. It’s so easy to say, Lord, I’ve already said my prayers for today and now I expect blessings. It can happen to any one of us to begin to treat the Lord of the universe as if he were dead matter, as if he were something that we shape and form according to our own intentions. And if that’s the way that we are treating our Lord, we can’t possibly give witness to him. We can’t give witness to him. We can’t possibly speak on his behalf if that’s the way you relate to him. So take this as an invitation to return again to the living God, the living God with his own intentions and plans to begin to realize that he is the living God. And that’s the way that we are treating our Lord. And that’s the way that we are treating our Lord. And that’s the way that we relate to him as a person. And I have a recommendation. Something that maybe doesn’t work for everybody, but some people find to be a very helpful practice. And it’s the use of your imagination in prayer. This is a tradition that goes back to the early centuries of the church and was articulated perhaps best by Saint Ignatius of Loyola in the 16th century. And so it’s fairly simple. You get yourself in a quiet place, a little bit of time cut off from the daily work, and you place yourself in the presence of God. What you can do is you can imagine the Father looking upon you with love. You make that the beginning of your prayer. You spend about the space of an Our Father, maybe about 30 seconds just asking God to be present. You ask for the grace to hear his voice. You ask for the grace to be able to listen to him. And then you can take a passage from the gospels, a narrative passage, something like Jesus feeding the 5,000, Jesus walking on water, Jesus being baptized by John of the Jordan, Jesus being crucified, Jesus healing the man born blind. And you just place yourself in that scene after having read the text. You build the scene with your imagination. And you just look at what’s going on there. You just look at what’s going on there. What’s amazing is that different people will find themselves in different places in that scene. Sometimes they’re in the perspective of Jesus. Other times they’re in the perspective of somebody that Jesus is interacting with. Other times they’re in the perspective of somebody that’s just an onlooker. Somebody just watching what’s happening. And if you enter into this with faith, it’s a good way to actually have that personal connection with our Lord. Because you can see his face. You can see the faces of the people around him. The rosary is also good for this. The rosary is also a good way to imagine the mysteries of the life of Jesus. And I think if you’re finding that your prayer is stalling out, this imaginative prayer may do you some good. And finally, the rosary is also a good way to imagine the life of Jesus. And finally, I just want to talk a little bit about the place of study. The place of study in the Christian life. Of learning this knowledge, these facts and these arguments. And the proper place for study is following upon the relationship with Jesus. Not going ahead of it. Knowledge of God does us no good without the love of God. St. Paul says this in chapter 13 of his first letter to the Corinthians, which can be read outside of weddings actually. If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith so as to remove mountains but have not love, I am nothing. We’ve all had the experience of being made to study something that we don’t love, and it’s just painful. Painful trying to memorize these things. But when the love is there, when the love is there, learning is a joy. And when it’s not, it’s a joy. You can’t get enough of it. And so arguments don’t ultimately convince people. But they are helpful. They may remove barriers to somebody’s understanding. But what’s ultimately the key to being a prophet, the key to witnessing to our Lord, is the grace of God and the love that you show towards other people. And so by your baptism, you share in the prophetic office of Jesus Christ. You are Jesus. You are called to show the Father to the world. If you don’t know God in the same way that you know your spouse, your family, your friends, your ability to witness to God will be crippled. How do we get to know God? I hold up especially intimate prayer with him as a way to truly understand him. Jesus is inviting you, come follow me, come and see and stay in the presence of the Father. And if you do, you’ll be able to witness to him.