16th Sunday of Ordinary Time

In the spirit of full disclosure, and because so many people had commented how much they loved this homily, I must give credit where credit is due. The idea of tying the gospel reading with the formation of conscience was all mine. The 7 step plan to form your conscience is based on a 10 step plan I found in this web site, which bases its plan on the book: The Catholic Faith Handbook for Youth. published by St. Mary's Press.
Like I said, this homily got such a good reception that I'm working on turning it into a 45 minute talk and make it available on MP3 for people to download and share with others.
Also I've decided to merge my personal blog "Tolle lege!!" and this one, in the hope I can manage them better (And this will motivate me to add more content) Stay tuned!!
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Today’s Gospel is a continuation of last week’s reading. In fact both readings share many themes: they are both parables, they both talk about of planting fields, of soil, and harvest. However, if you recall last week’s gospel, Jesus talked about a farmer who’s good seed landed in types of soil; on the road, on rocks, among weeds. In today’s parable Jesus is more focused, he talks about just one type of soil, the good soil, the fertile one, the soil that when planted with good seed will produce, 30 or 60 or 100 fold. The kind of soil we know very well here in the four-county area, soil in which the smallest seed, like the mustard seed, can grow into a great tree. But also the kind of soil so fertile, that it takes time and effort to get it ready, and once is planted requires a lot of tending and care, because if we go and plant it without tiling or fertilizing it and don’t take care of its cleaning and hoeing, most likely we will end up dealing with lots of weeds, especially if an enemy, comes after us and spreads bad seed in our field.
The beauty of Jesus parables is that the same story can be used to teach multiple lessons. For example, in today’s gospel Jesus gives us an interpretation for this reading, but we can take this story and apply a different interpretation, one that will shed light in some of the biggest questions of our culture. In this new way of looking at this parable the field is our conscience; the place within our mind in which we make judgments, the place in which we decide what is right and what is wrong, the place in which we decide how we are to live our life. The good and bad seed are the ideas we receive from our culture ideas we get from the church, the Bible, our parents, our friends, the TV, the internet, magazines, surfing the web, there are dozens and dozens of sources for these “seeds”. Some of them are good and some of them are bad, but all of them when allowed to grow in the soil of our conscience will make us the person we are.
As I mentioned before any fertile field which is not prepared correctly and is not tended lovingly will end up over run by weeds. So the topic I would like to explore today is this: How can we prepare our conscience? How can we help form our conscience and the conscience of those with whom we live? How can we plant the right seeds and tend to them so that at harvest we can produce much fruit? Well… To answer this question let me introduce you to a quick seven step plan to form your conscience. I assure you if you follow these steps you and yours will develop very strong characters.
First: Study, pray and practice the Scriptures; in your daily life and in the lives of others. Follow rules like: Love your enemy, feed the hungry, protect the innocent and give voice to the weak. Lear what Jesus says about these things, plant then in your mind and then do them!
Second: Receive the Eucharist. The body and blood of our Lord is like the sun and the rain which gives life and nourishment to the fields. We receive the love of God in communion, he will give us strength and a desire to seek truth and act in a way pleasing to him.
Third: Examine your conscience and Go to confession. Reconciliation is like weeding the field of our conscience from the weeds we get because of our fallen nature and that we receive from our culture. Start with the commandments and ask yourself each day: Were my decisions today based on these them or did I made them on my own?
Fourth: Find out what the Church teaches about important matters. Read the catechism, talk to a priest, read religious articles and books. Educate yourself on what the Church says and why. This knowledge is like the round-up that will get rid of any erroneous ideas that might be keeping us from the truth of the Gospels.
Fifth: Pay attention to the little decisions that you make every day. Habits form before we can recognize them and often choices that seem small in the beginning can become like crab grass in our conscience, once they attach to the ground they are very difficult to eradicate. Base your decisions on the eternal and simple truths of the Gospel: Truths like Human life is sacred, or like: In the order of creation there is only one life giving union that reflects God’s inner life that of one man and one woman united in Holy Matrimony; We were created to be in life giving relationships, anything else goes against Gods plan for each one of us. Everything we do even the smallest act, even if we do them in private moments of our life form the person we are and make our fields grow.
Six: Pay attention to your environment. Every day we are bombarded by ideas. It’s just like watching what you plant in your garden. You want to be careful you are using the right kind of seeds. You want to make sure of that what you read, or watch will not corrupt your mind. Surround yourself with things that line up with what is good, true and beautiful in life and reject what is fake and disturbing.
Seven: Look for role models. Look to those people who live virtuous lives, priests, nuns, deacons. Learn about the lives of saints and imitate them! Look at how the fields of others are fruitful, and imitate them.
My brothers and Sisters you might be saying “That sounds like a lot of work” Well?… Any farmer will tell you that it takes a lot of work to get a good harvest. I you want to form your conscience the right way don’t settle for anything else, work hard for what pleases the Lord and ask Him to help you plant the right seeds in your fields so that you too can produce a bountiful harvest. God bless you.

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Corpus Chirsti Sunday

On this celebration of Corpus Christi, I decided to tell you the story of a saint. Not one of the “Big ones” like Francis of Assisi or Therese de Lesieux. The Saint I’m talking about is hardly known. The reason why I’m talking about her today is because of a conversation she had with a deacon, about 800 years ago, a conversation that unknown to both of them, was going to change the history of the Church forever. Her name is St Juliana of Liege.
She was born in the year 1193. When she was 18 years old St Juliana began having mystical experiences in which Jesus visited her, and it was these private revelations that made her dedicate her life to the propagation of devotions to the Blessed Sacrament.
Anyone reading the stories of St Juliana’s visions, would dismiss them as just one more story from just one more virtually unknown medieval Nun, except for the fact that one day, by chance, a Deacon named James Pantaleon, a young theologian of his time, decided to visit Juliana in her convent. During this visit she revealed to Deacon James that in one of her visions Jesus had specifically requested to have one day of the year dedicated to the exaltation of the Eucharist. The young deacon was so impressed with Juliana’s sincerity that he left her convinced she was telling the truth.
What neither of them could have known was that, with time this same deacon became a leading medieval theologian, which allowed him to advance in the ranks of the church leadership until in the year 1261 Deacon James Panteleon, was elected Pope Urban IV. Now Urban never forgot his encounter with St Juliana, and the story of her visions, and in the year 1264 just a few months before his own death declared the feast of Corpus Christy a universal feast of the Church.
And since then, answering to the desires of Jesus expressed in the private revelations of an obscure visionary, every year the Church takes this day to reflect on the mystery of the Eucharist, on the mystery that is, Jesus Christ resurrected and glorified body, blood, soul and divinity making himself present on the altar and becoming food and drink to satisfy our thirst and hunger.
Like I said, all this happened in medieval times, 800 years ago; with time the Church came to realize that the miracle of the Body and Blood of our Lord is the one fundamental truth of our belief. It is the one truth by which The Catholic Church stands or falls, to the point that the Second Vatican council simply calls the Eucharist the “Source and summit of our faith”.
But what is the meaning of this to us? Just think about it for a second, if what we had been doing and proclaiming since the revelations to St Juliana, in fact since the times of the apostles… if this is somehow not true then every time we treat the bread and the wine as if it is our God, every time we kneel, genuflect, pray to it, offer our adoration to it, offer it to the Father as a victim for our sins, we are committing a terrible blasphemy.
On the other hand… if we are right, if the words of Jesus in the gospel are in fact true when he says “I am the living bread that came down from heaven… Unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood you will not have life within you…For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink.” If Jesus truly meant all this we read in the Gospel of John today, then every time we come to mass we are witnessing the greatest miracle of all times. In every mass the God of the universe enters His creation, to bring us closer to Him, and every time we receive communion, when we eat and drink his body and blood we are making Him part of our bodies, part of our DNA, part of who we are.
Simply put my brothers and sisters Corpus Christi Sunday is a day to reflect on where are stand; Is the one day of the year in which Jesus challenges us directly. What do we truly believe? Do we believe in Jesus own words or is this teaching to hard for us? Do we believe it is truly Him who we receive in communion? This is a day to look within ourselves and think hard if I truly believe that God loves me so much and that he is so powerful that in an incredible act of love he becomes for me, bread and wine, so that He can be as close to me as it is humanly possible in this side of heaven.
This is a day for us to examine what we think is true. Because if we believe that Jesus Christ is present in the Eucharist it would make sense for us to spend hours, days prostrated in adoration thanking him for all the gifts he has bestowed in us? If we truly believed he is present in every mass it would make sense for us never allow anything, not sports event, no travel team, no business or vacation trip to keeping us from attending mass on Sundays.
If we believed Jesus is present in the Eucharist, every time we had a problem, or become scared, or tired or confused; this place right here in front of the Tabernacle would be the first place in which we would look for consolation, not on friends, not on food, not on sex, not on therapists, but right here were he can see us in all our sinfulness and brokenness, and we can see him in all his humility.
If we truly believed Jesus words, we would be like St Juliana and the Eucharist would become our number one priority in life not only at church but at home, in school, at camp; every were we go and everything we say and do would be pointing towards making sure we are bringing glory and honor to Jesus Christ, our Lord and savior.
Blessed be Jesus in the most holy sacrifice of the altar.

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Ascencion of our Lord

As I was preparing to preach this Sunday I came across a homily from Father Ron Rolheiser, one of my favorite preaches. I liked it so much that I decided to adapt it for this Sunday. I borrowed quite a bit from Him. Some words are my own, some words are Fr. Ron's, but it was all inspired by the Holy Spirit, for the Glory of God The Father. I hope you enjoy it.
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Today we are celebrating the Ascension of our Lord, one of the most mysterious events in the life of Jesus. To understand its meaning we have to return to the Last Supper account that is recorded by the apostle John in his Gospel. In here we find Jesus giving His apostles final instructions and preparing them for what lay ahead. And, he did this by explaining the reason why he had to leave them; not by dying on the cross but by finally returning to the one how sent him. There is no doubt about this in the culminating point of his instructions we hear Jesus say: “It is better for you that I go away! For if I do not go the Advocate will not come to you.”
All 4 gospel accounts record that the Apostles did not understand what he was talking about. And it was not until his ascension and after the coming of the Holy Spirit that they realized how the sadness of this final departure had turned into great joy.
Jesus knew their hearts very well. He knew that after, experiencing the sorrow of the crucifixion and the joy of the resurrection, His final goodbye was going to leave them confused and scared. And he knew this because part of been human is not been able to handle separation and absence. After all, we are created to be in relationships. It does not matter how strong we might think we are, no matter the circumstance; no one can handle final a goodbye and having to let go of someone we love.
Separation and absence are part of the human condition, they can be painful, they can fill us with emptiness, and they can make us feel as if all the color, energy, and joy that form the tapestry of our lives are snuffed like a candle in the night. Jesus knew this very well, but he also knew the meaning of his resurrection, the fact that with him there are no goodbyes.
Our daily experiences are proof of this. How many times after the restless, dark heartache of a painful goodbye passes something happens that makes us experience the opposite. And we realize that goodbye is just a new way of seeing and sensing our loved one’s presence in a new and different way.
Parents, for example, experience this when their children grow up and leave home to start lives of their own, or get married, or when they leave for college, and specially that very first day of school in kindergarten.
When we separate from someone we love we are left with a restless heartache and feelings of emptiness. But, after a while, especially when we meet that person again, the heartache quickly disappears. Because by their absence they make us realize how rich is our love for them. The pain of losing someone can turns into the joy of finding something deeper in the one whom we thought we had lost.
“It is better for you that I go away”, These are the unspoken words that children say to their parents when they leave home; these are the unspoken words we say to our friends when we have to move on with our lives; these are the unspoken words spouses sometimes say to each other when they have to grow in ways that, at the end of the day, will make a marriage stronger; and these are the unspoken words we say to each other every time we have to say a final goodbye.
The interplay of presence and absence in life is a great mystery. Jesus shows this today in the gospel with his final goodbye to his friends. As people created for relationships, we need to be present to each other physically, but we also need to be gone from each other at times. We bring a blessing both when we are with someone and when leave someone for a time. There is no presence without absence and there is something of our spirit that we can only give to the ones we love by going away.
Why is this so? Because absence is sometimes the only thing that can purify presence. When we are physically present, there are always tensions, irritations, disappointments, and faults in our character that partially block our full love. That’s why we rarely appreciate our loved ones fully, until they are taken away from us.
The pain of absence can help us to stretch our hearts so that the essence, the beauty, the love, and the gift of the one who is absent can flow into us without being distorted by the tensions, disappointments, and flaws of everyday life. Absence can work to stretch our hearts so that we can receive our loved one in a way that more fully accepts and respects them for who they really are. That’s why children have to go away because in this way they force parents to accept that they are growing and that as time passes, they have to develop lives of their own.
The mystery of saying goodbye is really the mystery of the Ascension, the less understood of all the mysteries in the life of Jesus. Is a mystery that speaks about having to go away and having to let go, so that our loved ones can fully receive our spirit. It’s a mystery about having to say goodbye, when goodbye isn’t really goodbye at all, but only love’s way of taking on a different color, a color that is deeper, purer, more permanent, less-clinging, and less-limited by the tensions, disappointments, inadequacies, wounds, and betrayals that that are part of our fallen nature and that distort all our relationships. The mystery of the Ascension It’s a mystery about living with each other even when we are still a work in progress. Is a mystery about understanding than in Jesus Christ, true God and true man, goodbye is just another way of saying, I love you. God bless you my brothers and sisters.

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4th Sunday of Easter

The other day I was reading a report about the religious landscape in our country that painted very grim picture about Catholics in America. Here are some statistics for you: In America 1 in 10 people identify themselves as ex-Catholics. If these people were to create their own separate Christian Church, they would become the third-largest Christian denomination in the United States. The report cites many factors for this exodus, but the number one factor given by almost 1 in 4 people who have left the Church was that “their spiritual needs were not been met”.
I’m sure none of this comes as a surprise to many of you, as I’m willing to bet that almost everyone here today has friend or a relative, perhaps a sibling or a child, who has abandoned their Catholic faith for some other faith or just plain stopped going to church.
The thing is… I find such a contradiction between reports of friends and family losing their Catholic faith and the readings of today’s Gospel. Losing the faith does not match with the image of Jesus as the Good Shepherd who calls every one of His sheep by name with a voice who promises to satisfy our deepest spiritual hungers. How come then, some people give a lack of spirituality within our Church as the number one reason to abandon their faith? The natural reaction when we hear this reason is to ask: What is wrong? What is missing in the Church that caused this person to move on? And my answer to this question is a simple one: Nothing… Nothing is missing. We know that Christ calls everyone to follow him wherever he will lead. We know that, as imperfect as His church might be, His guidance is given in the teaching of this same Church, because that is His promise. And we also know that those who are suffering and in pain when they hear His voice receive great consolation and strength to deal with their fears and troubles. How can anyone abandon all this?
The thing is, my brothers and sisters that in order to follow the shepherd, a sheep needs to do two things. First they need to hear His voice clearly and then, they need to react to its message. Sheep need to make a decision to respond in a positive way to the call of the shepherd. God’s grace is free and is given to us through voices of all those who Christ has designated with His own authority to teach and preach the Gospel and to celebrate the sacraments he instituted and commanded His shepherds to perform for the good of the flock. But God also gives each one of us free will. He created us free so that we can accept or reject the voice of the shepherds.
In the world in which we live there are many voices who compete with the voice of Christ, the voice of the Church, Voices who disguise themselves as the voice of our divine shepherd, Voices who tell us about how the message of the Church is one of intolerance or even irrational. If we listen very carefully to these voices it does not mater where they come at the end of the day we will realize that they are our own voices. Every one of our brothers and sisters, daughters and sons, mothers and fathers that have abandoned their faith has made a free choice to stop listening to the authority of the Church and start listening to their own voices; they have become an authority in themselves. They have stopped been sheep and now are their own shepherds.
Now it is very easy to think about those people that have left the Church as “them”, as the ones we will never follow. But, and this is a very important point now, we have to be careful because we all run the danger of ending like them. If we are not careful, we are all run the danger of substituting the voice of Jesus for our own personal voices.
If we are to be safe and not let the thieves and robbers, like Jesus calls them, to confuse us and steal us from the divine shepherd, there are two things we must be willing to do. First we should follow his voice by following the teachings of His Church. For two thousand years the Lord has provided shepherds that have been willing to sacrifice their own lives for their flock. Because of them the teachings of the church have been constant since the times of the Apostles so we are certain that their voices have the authority of the Lord. Secondly we should never stop receiving the sacraments. The grace we receive through reconciliation and Eucharist brings us closer to our true shepherd, who commanded us to “Do this in memory of me”.
It is my experience that, those who claim that “their spiritual needs are not been met” by the Church, most likely disagree with what the Church teaches about marriage, the dignity of all human life, from conception to natural death or the roles of women and men in the Church. And they convince themselves that they know better that the two thousand years of reflection the church posses. These are also the people that come to mass, not to worship God but to be entertained by him. If they do not like the music or the preaching they feel they have not encountered God. They forget that when we come to mass we should bring more than what we take with us. If we do not leave our pains, fears, and sufferings here at the foot of the cross, we will have no space within us to take the consolation that comes from receiving the body, blood soul and divinity of Christ in the Eucharist. If we do not come here willing to do or give anything to God in exchange for His divine life, then what we do here has no meaning, it becomes a chore.
Jesus is the good shepherd, we wants to guide us, to green pastures, he wants to give us consolation for our troubles. We just have to listen to his voice and faithfully follow him, while resting on him all of our fears, doubts, worries and sorrows. If we follow this formula, all of our spiritual needs will be fulfilled and to quote Him in the last words of today’s Gospel, he will make sure that “We will have life and have it more abundantly”. Happy Easter everyone.

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Easter Sunday

Just before Ash Wednesday, I was invited by one of our Kindergarten Sunday School for a visit. Kids at that age are really shy around strangers especially with someone they see on Sundays right in the middle of all the action at the altar, so during my visit as I expected , I spent most of the time talking to Miss Trish and Miss Maureen while all the kids spent their time coloring. At the end of my visit I asked if we could finish with a prayer, and asked if anyone had any prayer intentions. I was amazed about the reaction I got from this request. Suddenly 5 or 6 hands went up, kids that a few moments ago could not peel their eyes from the picture they were coloring all of the sudden were eager to catch my attention. But what surprise me the most was the type of petitions I heard from these little children. “For my grand pa who has a brain tumor” “For my aunt how is sick with cancer” “For my friends brother who had a car accident and is in the hospital”. All the intensions of this group of angels were not for themselves but someone else. Someone that was either sick, in pain or suffering; and they were praying to Jesus with the certainty that he understood what human pain and sickness is, and the certainty that he could hear our prayers and that he had the power to help.
I left the room that morning asking myself, why? Why, instead of asking for stuff for themselves, they all asked Jesus to help someone else, and it has taken me the whole season of lent to find an answer to this question. These Children understood what Easter morning is all about. They prayed in the way they did because, my brothers and sisters, these children are what I call, People of Easter Morning. For them God is real, Jesus is alive, and it does not matter how bad the medical prognosis is or how much human pain our loved ones are experiencing, for People of Easter Morning, God’s mercy, love and hope is just a prayer away. I have to admit I was humbled by this lesson, after 50 years of life I finally understood what the Lord meant when he said that the kingdom of heaven is here and that it belongs to those who are like children.
The problem we grown-ups encounter is that we get so involved in the problems of everyday life, thinking that we need to somehow solve these by our selves, that we live as if we were stuck on Good Friday!
Many years ago I saw a car sticker that nicely captured this idea it simply said “If you believe in God, why do you live like he does not exist?”, sometimes we want to exert so much control in our lives and the lives of others that we forget that at the end of the day God is the only one that is in control. When you combine this with the fact that our culture operates as if God does not exist; we have to admit we find ourselves in a pretty pathetic situation!
Jesus spent the last three years of his life telling about God’s love and how to experience the joy of Easter in every moment of our lives, and we live our lives as if he is still resting quietly in his tomb. There is not much difference between the apostles that first Easter morning and us! When you are stuck on Good Friday, you do not know where to go or what to do and life becomes just series of struggles we just have to endure alone. It does not matter how much we come to church if we live as if Jesus were still dead, resting quietly in his tomb, we live a lonely life devoid of any hope.
But like the women who received the news from the angel in today’s Gospel, in this glorious Easter morning we are called to be like children again, to be people of Easter. People that have an unbreakable trust in the power of Jesus Resurrected, people convinced that God understands our suffering because of Jesus suffering in the cross, people that have an unyielding hope that God is in control and that at the end, it does not matter how bad our situation is, we too will rise again with Him. And when we become Easter people, we become people who cannot stay quiet, people who need to go out into the world and communicate the good news “CHRIST IS RISEN, HE HAS RISEN INDEED! Like our Kindergarteners we become people of faith and hope in the power of the Risen Christ to resurrect us too.
You know my brothers and sisters, if you ever question if God hears your prayers, or if you ever wander if there is still faith in the world, if you ever feel lonely and that there is not light at the end of the tunnel and that in fact you are not in a tunnel but in a tomb or a sepulcher, I invite you to pay a visit to Miss Trish and Miss Maureen’s Sunday morning class, ask the kids to pray with you, ask the kids to pray for you and you will see what people of Easter Morning look like. Happy Easter everyone!

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7th Sunday of Ordinary Time

One of the many jobs I do at St Michael’s is teaching the Baptismal preparation class for parents that want to baptize their babies. Most of the time I start my classes with the same question “Why do you want to baptize your baby?” and most of the time couples have a really hard time articulating goods reasons for this decision. I get a lot of “Because is important” or “Because that is what Catholics do”. Every once in a while I get a couple or a parent who remembers their Catechism respond “Because I want to remove the stain of original sin from my baby”. The most common answer I get is “Because I want my baby to become a child of God”, which for them it means that they want their baby to experience the salvation promised by Jesus through the waters of Baptism. However what these parents do not realize at the moment is that becoming a child of God has another deeper meaning. It means that by the waters of Baptism their little babies become part of a bigger, much bigger family; a family which expands through out the world and across time all the way back to the apostles and martyrs.
Of course I do not expect everyone to go through life thinking about this great extended family we all belong to. In fact I’m willing to bet most of us never do. But what I find interesting, what amazes me about the Church and especially this parish is that although hardly ever we think of ourselves as a family, never the less, most of the time we behave as one!
I can not tell you how many times I have heard people say that here at St Michael’s they feel welcomed or how many times they have commented to me about how friendly people are in our parish. But it is not only in the friendliness of this parish were I see us as a family, it is in the times in which we all get together and bring our skills, what Ftr. Mike likes to calls our time and treasure to accomplish what needs to be done, without expecting a reward. There are not better examples of this than the Grace under fire capita campaign we just concluded, and the way people pour their time and efforts to make the Hoe Down a success year after year. My brothers and sisters I thank God for the great privilege of been not only your deacon but a member of this great family of ours.
However (and there is always a however) we should remember that our family is not just the people that gather with us every Sunday to worship God. Like I mentioned before our family extends beyond the geographical area of our parish. In the same way we are members of the St Michael’s family because of the waters of baptism we are also members of the family that is the Archdiocese of Baltimore, lead by Archbishop Bishop Edwin O’Brian. And in the same way our St Michael’s family needed us when the roof in the machine room leaks or the HVAC system is about to die, our Archdiocese family needs our help. Next weekend marks the beginning Archbishop O’Brian annual appeal, and the weekend after that it will be the follow-up weekend. My appeal to you today is for you to think about our extended family in the archdiocese. The money collected in this yearly appeal will be used to fund Catholic schools, religious education and vacation bible schools. Contributions help to underwrite the archdiocese office of Youth and Young Adult ministry, and fund outreach and evangelization through the office of Hispanic ministry and international support to Haiti, as well as more than 80 charities which compose the Catholic Charities organization. And if you think that we will never see the products of these annual campaign, I want to let you know that me and Deacon Cliff are products of your good will and generous contributions, since in the 4 years of our education to become deacons we only had to pay for our books, everything else was defrayed by the archdiocese.
Now I know how many of you have sacrificed of your treasure to make the Grace Under Fire and the upcoming Hoe Down a success this year, specially in these hard economic times. But I ask you to look upon your heart and think on our greater family and that in prayerful consideration you open your heart to the appeal of our Bishop to help our Archdiocese continue to serve those members of our church family that need help are less fortunate than us. God Bless you.

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4th Sunday of Advent

The fourth week of Advent is usually the shortest week before the feast of Christmas. This year however is different… this year we have to wait a whole week before the big day. To some of us perhaps these last few days before Xmass are starting to look frantic; travel plans need to be completed, presents need to be wrapped, cards need to be mailed, cookies need to be backed… it feels like one week is not just enough!
Every year during our Advent journey the Church encourages us not to lose ourselves in the frantic pace of this time but to keep our eyes in what really matters, what is really important. For the last two Sundays we have heard about John the Baptist, a voice crying in the desert “make straight the paths of the Lord”. During this time the Church has used his voice to plead with us to remember what the real reason for Christmas is. The birth of our savior and the promise that some day he will return again for His Church… and every year some of us get to this last few days of advent thinking that there is still so much to do!
So this week, just as we get closer and closer to the celebration of Xmas, just as things are about to become more hectic… the Church changes the tone and gives us another man in the Sunday readings, to help us walk the rest of the way.
Today we meet someone completely different to John. We meet, St. Joseph the quiet carpenter of Galilee, the foster father of Jesus. Someone we can all relate to; a hard working man, protector of the holy family. A humble and simple man with the greatest responsibility ever, to teach the Son of God how to be a Man. Joseph is not like John, he speaks no words, but in his silence he resounds as loudly as John the Baptizer cries in the wilderness.
In this last week of advent, a time in which we can easily loose ourselves in the stress and anxiety of this season he comes to us with a fatherly and simple message: “Measure twice, cut once”
You see Joseph was first and foremost a craftsman, someone used to work with his hands, someone who recognized the value of quiet patience and careful consideration. I’m sure there are many craftsmen and women here today that understand the wisdom of quiet reflection before getting committed.
In today’s reading we can clearly see that for St. Joseph these were more than words, this it was a way of life! As the careful craftsman he was he applied this lesson to his whole life. You see, it is apparent that Joseph loved Mary deeply, and that when he heard about Mary’s pregnancy he began to struggle with what to do. He could react badly and report Mary’s pregnancy to the authorities. This was his right, but after careful consideration he chose the most sensitive course of action, an action that would satisfy his honor as a man and safe guard Mary’s dignity and perhaps even her own life. He chose to divorce her quietly and protect her from the authorities.
The careful craftsman measures twice and cuts once. The careful Christian thinks about what they are going to do or say twice and them make sure that their actions reflect the lessons of the Gospel, that their words and actions are sensitive and do not hurt or embarrass others.
And I think, my brothers and sisters that especially ina time in which people are so stressed by all the things that still need to be done, St Joseph example is one we can all follow.
During this season in which we have to deal perhaps with stressed bosses or teachers, with coworkers or even strangers in the street, a time in which we might meet with relatives that somehow manage to get the worst out of us let us Measure our words and actions twice before we do or say something we might regret later.
It is very easy to do or say the first thing that comes to mind, but to stop and think twice before we act, and to always follow the way of the Gospel, which after all is the way of unconditional love, that my brothers and sisters is following St. Joseph’s example, that is what is means to be a follower of Christ.
So in this week in which I know many of us will have an opportunity to put these words into action let us pray that through the intersection of St. Joseph, protector of the holy family and the Church, we can follow the example of this quiet and humble man, So that we have a joyful and peaceful Christmas and be a blessing to all those who we might encounter this season. Amen

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