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Guess what!\u00a0 All of you carry the light of Christ within you.\u00a0 When you were Baptized, you were given a candle which was lit from the Paschal Candle, and that Paschal candle was first lit from the Easter fire during the Easter Vigil mass.\u00a0 The paschal candle symbolizes the light of Christ that resulted from His Resurrection. \u00a0That means each of you bears the light of Christ within you.<\/p>\n
So, the question for us today is simply this:\u00a0 Is your lamp hiding under the bed?\u00a0 In other words, are you hiding the light of Christ within you or are you showing it for all to see, effectively evangelizing by word and deed?<\/p>\n
There are a couple of ways that you can hide your light.\u00a0 First, there are those who believe, but they think that their faith is just between them and God.\u00a0 They don\u2019t need the Church; and they don\u2019t need others.\u00a0 They just need to talk to God and affirm their belief. \u00a0\u00a0We see these people chastised in our first reading.\u00a0 Paul says clearly:\u00a0 \u201cWe should not stay away from the assembly\u201d.\u00a0 And that\u2019s because we really need each other.\u00a0 God is by His very nature a social being.\u00a0 First, He is three interrelated persons in one God.\u00a0 Second, why else would He have made all of us, and then tell us we are made in His image and likeness?\u00a0 And so He wants us to love and cherish each other, reinforcing our Faith, and giving Him Glory and praise in the assembly.<\/p>\n
The second way we can hide our lamps is to keep them neatly hidden right here in the Church.\u00a0 That\u2019s why the Pope has called the year of Faith.\u00a0 We have been conned by today\u2019s \u201cinclusive\u201d, secular society, into keeping our faith to ourselves in the name of tolerance of everyone else\u2019s beliefs.\u00a0 We have bought into the philosophy:\u00a0 \u201cLet\u2019s not offend others who don\u2019t believe as we do\u201d.<\/p>\n
Well, I\u2019m sorry, but we need to take the light of Christ out of this Church and spread it far and wide for all to see.\u00a0 And sometimes it may offend people- it offended the Romans, who persecuted the early Christians.\u00a0 It offended the Nazis and the Communists, who sent those who stood up for their faith to concentration camps and worse.\u00a0 And it will likely offend today\u2019s secular humanists who believe in gay marriage, abortion rights, atheism, and a whole range of other moral atrocities that Christianity opposes.<\/p>\n
Now you might say, it just isn\u2019t right for us to offend others, we should love them instead.\u00a0 Two thoughts on that.\u00a0 First, aren\u2019t their beliefs and practices offensive to us?\u00a0 But that doesn\u2019t stop them from being bright beacons of their position in the public sector.\u00a0 So much so that Christianity is losing ground fast.\u00a0 The second thought is this.\u00a0 Recently I saw a quote from Pope Benedict that made an interesting point about love.\u00a0 He talked about \u201clove in truth\u201d.\u00a0 And the long and short of it was this: \u00a0\u00a0We are all being called to love, yes.\u00a0 But you cannot love someone if you are not being truthful with them.\u00a0 And one of the worst ways we tell an untruth is by hiding the truth, and by keeping it to ourselves.\u00a0 It is called a sin of omission.\u00a0 God is love; and God is truth.\u00a0 And so, everything we do needs to be done with loving kindness, but we must always represent the truth.\u00a0 And it is time for our Christian truth to be front and center again in our society.<\/p>\n
And so, let us reflect today on how we can come out of this Church and bear the light of Christ in in our secular society.\u00a0 It is time to get involved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Thursday of Third Week in Ordinary Time Heb 10: 19-25; Mark 4: 21-25 Dc. Larry Brockman Guess what!\u00a0 All of you carry the light of Christ within you.\u00a0 When you were Baptized, you were given a candle which was lit from the Paschal Candle, and that Paschal candle was first lit from the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5],"tags":[183,182],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.deaconlarry.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.deaconlarry.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.deaconlarry.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.deaconlarry.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.deaconlarry.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=275"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.deaconlarry.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":276,"href":"http:\/\/www.deaconlarry.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275\/revisions\/276"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.deaconlarry.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.deaconlarry.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.deaconlarry.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}