Each of us is called to lead others to the gracious mercy of God.

The Gospels for the eight Sundays from Easter to Pentecost form a wonderfully cohesive progression from Jesus’ Resurrection to our taking up Jesus’ mission to preach the Gospel.  The first three Sundays of Easter always feature appearance accounts of the Risen Lord.  This fourth Sunday we are invited to reflect on Jesus’ great love and care for us and be assured that we will not be abandoned.  Jesus will be with us always.  On this Good Shepherd Sunday, we begin our mission of discipleship as we move into the second half of the Easter season and our preparation for the celebration of the descent of the Spirit at Pentecost.

Today, we hear the words of the Good Shepherd:  “I am the good Shepherd.  I know mine and mine know me.  I will lay down my life for the sheep.”  The same Eternal Word that became flesh in Jesus longs to become flesh in our lives --  in our home, workplace, parish, global marketplace.  Indeed, there is no shortage of need for compassionate people who continue Jesus’ mission.

Our spirituality is not primarily about keeping the rules.  Our spirituality is primarily about relationships  --  our relationship with God and our relationships with one another.  Yes, there are rules to be kept – no doubt about that.  But more than that, the imagery of Jesus as the Good Shepherd reveals the depth of intimacy that the Lord Jesus has for each of us.

The Shepherd calls his own sheep by name and leads them out.  The sheep follow him because they do not follow the voice of strangers.  What are the voices in your life in which you are safe and very much loved?  How well do we recognize the voice of Jesus in our life?

I pray that you are clearly able to identify the voices of your life in which you are safe and very much loved?  Who in your family speaks words of unconditional love to you?  Treasure and value very highly the people you love and the people who love you?  Who in our faith community speak words to you to assure you that you are safe and very much loved?  We are to the witnesses to each other of God’s unconditional love.

Today is the World Day of Prayer for Vocations.  All of us have a vocational story to share.  Vocation comes from the Latin vocare  “to call.”  Our vocation is our response to the call of God in our lives.  By Baptism, God calls all of us to be disciples, to be witnesses of God’s presence in our world.  There are to be as many disciples, as many stewards in this parish as there are baptized parishioners.  For us to have an appreciation gathering for our parish stewards, we would not only need the entire restaurant at Shadow Lake; we would need the entire golf course.  The vision we seek for our parish faith community is immersed in the mystery of God’s love for us as the Good Shepherd of our lives. We seek to be the witnesses, the icons of God’s love for each other.

As we celebrate this World Day of Prayer for Vocations, may we encourage some young men in our parish community to consider the call to the ordained priesthood.  To be a leader of our faith community as a priest is a call from God I invite you to pay attention to.  The Church needs people to respond to call to the ordained ministry as a deacon and as a priest.

May our prayer be that we seek the grace of the Good Shepherd.  Each of us is called to lead others to the gracious mercy of God.  Like the shepherds, we do not do this by herding or forcing people along.  We seek to live lives of such self-evident joy that others can trust that we are leading them in the path of life eternal.

Jesus, our Good Shepherd, give us the grace we need to gently lead others to become more aware of our love and of God’s love for them.

Like the first disciples, we will experience the presence of the Risen Christ when we see His wounds -- to be found in the sufferings of our brothers and sisters in need.

Year after year, Easter Sunday celebrates the reality of Jesus’ resurrection as the foundation of our Christian identity.  As St. Paul says, “If Christ has not been raised, they empty is our preaching, and empty is your faith.”

And yet, in the resurrection appearances of Jesus to his disciples, failure to recognize Jesus is a hallmark of his resurrection appearances.  So rather than Jesus they see a ghost, and rather than joy they experience fear.  The evangelist says:  “the disciples were startled and terrified and thought they were seeing a ghost.  Before the disciples were going to become fearless evangelizers, they needed a deep spiritual learning curve.  The meaning of resurrection faith was that Jesus was going to change the disciples “slowness of heart” and fearful misunderstanding into “opened minds” and joyful recognition.

Fast forward to our lives and our failures to recognize the presence of the Risen Christ in our midst, the question for us is how will Jesus appear to us in this day and age?  Will we be any better able to recognize him than those first disciples?  Jesus showed his first disciples his wounded hands and feet and spoke “peace” to them.  Could it be that Jesus is showing us his wounded body in the sick and the homeless who need our care, in the immigrants or prisoners who need to be rekindled by our Easter zeal?

In the Gospel account, Jesus stood in their midst and said to them:  “Peace be with you.”  As Jesus noticed the disciples the disciples were startled and terrified, he asked:  “Why are you troubled?”

In wishing us peace, Jesus also asks us why are we anxious, why are we fearful, why is your life shaped by our worries in our economy, why are we dominated by the possessions of our life, why do we give to another person so much power over our lives when it is not life-giving?

The question why are you troubled is often asked in the Gospel of Luke.  Recall the annunciation when the angel Gabriel announced to Mary she was going to be the mother of the savior, and Mary was confused as to what this meant.  Then the angel asked Mary:  Why are you troubled?  Be assured the Lord goes with you.

These words are spoken as well in the midst of the questions and fears of our lives:  “Why are you fearful?”  The Lord is with you and the Lord’s gift to you is an inner peace and joy that no one nor any situation can take from you.

As we reflect on the Gospel, I would highlight three components of the Gospel story that are also three movements In our spiritual journey.

1.       The disciples were a community of people.  The two disciples on the way to Emmaus had rejoined the community of disciples in Jerusalem.  Jesus appeared to them in their midst. Even if our faith is a jumble of commitment and confusion, we like the first disciples gather as a community to welcome Jesus.  We are not just individual disciples.  We are a community of disciples.  We are a Church who celebrate the presence of Jesus in our midst.

2.       We are a Eucharistic people.  “While they were still incredulous, Jesus asked them:  “have you anything here to eat?”  As for those first disciples, and so too for us, our own privileged encounter with the Risen Jesus is at table on the Lord’s day, in the context of the community’s meal.

3.       The first disciples were to be a missionary people.  Jesus commissioned them “to be witnesses of these things.”  Jesus sends forth the disciples to bear witness.  How often Pope Francis reminds us that we “touch the flesh of Christ” in the wounds of our suffering brothers and sisters to whom we are sent forth from every Eucharist as witnesses of Jesus’ self-sacrificing love.

4.       With your permission, I would add a fourth movement that gives me an opportunity to give you an update on our capital campaign on this Commitment Sunday.  The first disciples were committed to the mission of Jesus.  As the first disciples were committed to the mission of Jesus, so too we are committed to the mission of Jesus by our commitment to our Mission Driven capital Campaign.  We are making very positive progress toward of our goal of $1.8 million.  We have now pledged over $1 one million and One hundred eighty three thousand dollars in pledges.  This has been made possible of over 320 of your fellow parishioners.  Thank you to everyone who has contributed to our campaign and we are extremely grateful for your support.

I hope that everyone has had a chance to review the campaign brochure that and other material that have been mailed to your home.  As a brief recap, the three components of the Mission Driven campaign include:

·         Constructing a gathering space at the east transept of the Church where parishioners could meet and hospitality be provided.  From the Gospel, the first disciples were a community of disciples who experienced in their midst.  We will provide the facilities to enable us more fully to be a community of disciples who know one another and recognize the presence of the Risen Jesus in our midst.

·         Providing improved security for the children and staff of St Joseph’s School.  It goes without saying that we place a high priority on providing a safe and secure environment for our school children and staff.

·         Replacing our electronic organ with a pipe organ.  Our current organ is aging and tired.  A new pipe organ will enrich the sacredness of our Eucharistic celebrations.

Now is an exciting at St Joseph’s Church and St. Joseph’s School.  The brochure and the campaign materials detail what we can look forward to in the coming months.  We are excited to announce we have been meeting with the architects, LaBella Associates, and the contractor, LeChase Construction.  At this stage, we are working out the details of our building project.

We are making good headway but for us to reach our financial goal and see this project come to fruition, we need everyone to consider a pledge toward the campaign.  We ask that everyone be as generous as possible.

To reach our goal, we need some people to pledge over three years at the $15,000 level; others to consider a pledge of $3 to 4,000 over three years.

Obviously, the circumstances of each family are different.  We very much appreciate whatever you are able to give.  Trust that each commitment is deeply appreciated.  We are hopeful you are able to complete your pledge form and place in the collection today.

Please know that I and the entire staff of St Joseph’s live with an attitude of gratitude.  We are grateful for your generosity and may the Risen Lord bless you many times over for all the ways you give to make our Church a Community of Disciples who celebrate the presence of the Risen Lord in our midst,

Pope Francis proclaims a Jubilee Year of Mercy.

Pope Francis officially proclaimed a Jubilee Year of Mercy beginning with the Feast of the Immaculate Conception on December 8th.  "This is a time for the Church to rediscover the meaning of the mission entrusted to her by the Lord on Easter Day, namely, to be a sign and an instrument of the Father's mercy.

This year we are to be transformed by His mercy, so that we may become witnesses of mercy,"  the Pope said.

The Holy Year's motto is, "Be merciful like your Father"  which the Pope said involves opening our hearts and witnessing mercy everywhere, for "Pardon is a force that can give rise to new life and infuse our courage to look with hope to the future."

With the leadership of our Parish Council, we are developing our next five-year visioning plan.  Following the example of our Holy Father, may we proclaim a jubilee of mercy in our parish life in which we witness to the extravagance of God's mercy in all the dimensions of our parish life.  May we be defined as a Church of Mercy just as the Father is merciful to each and every one of us.

In today's Gospel, Jesus shows us His wounds.  They are wounds of mercy.  Jesus invites us to behold these wounds, to touch them as Thomas did, to heal our lack of belief.  Above all, Jesus invites us to enter into the mystery of these wounds, which is the mystery of His merciful love.

The Easter mystery is to invite Jesus to touch your heart with His peace and joy.

I must confess that during the midst of the penitential season of Lent, I took a four day vacation and went with my sister Anne to visit my brother John and my sister Jean and their spouses in the luxurious sunshine of Florida in Jupiter and Stuart.  Indeed, this was a rich experience of Easter joy for me.  My sister Jean and I would go down to the ocean beach before sunrise with a cup of coffee and also Morning Prayer from the Liturgy of the Hours.  To experience the sun coming out of the ocean at sunrise alongside my sister Jean was an experience of Easter Joy.

Now while my sister Jean is younger than myself, neither one of us are teenagers, don’t you know.  A deep part of the experience of Easter joy was that over the years we have experienced together both joy and sorrow, birth and death, athletic feats but also painful illnesses.  As the sun came out of the ocean, we prayed Morning Prayer together entrusting that day into the hands of our loving God and asking for the grace to be the witnesses to His love.

What I was grateful for was that prayer was not a foreign language to the way we share our love with each other.  In fact, our prayer was our expression of Easter faith and Easter joy. My sisters and brother make very real to me the presence of the Risen Lord in the here and the now.

Now that was awesome but it was only for four days, and then Anne and I returned to the brutal elements of winter, and I immediately immersed myself in our wonderful parish ministry of the Lenten season embracing spiritual disciplines.

A message for me and hopefully for all of us is that Easter joy is experienced in many, many life experiences.   Easter is about Jesus.  Easter is about real life.  Easter is about how we experience the risen Jesus in our lives.  The real Easter mystery is when experience the presence of the Risen Lord in the beauty of a sunrise, in simple sharing with people you love, in the ways you wash the feet of God’s poor, in this mystery of the Eucharist as are fed and nourished at the Table of the Lord.

One of the advantages of getting older is cataract surgery.  Now I have been wearing glasses all of my life – feeling a bit jealous at times of people with 20-20 vision.  Now with the miracle of cataract surgery, I no longer need glasses to drive my car or to celebrate the Eucharist.  It is a sightedness that I have never previously experienced.  The Easter grace we pray for is to have spiritual cataract surgery that enables to recognizes the presence of the Risen Lord in our lives in the here and the now.

Now I must warn you as was true of the first disciples they first encountered the empty tomb before experiencing the Risen Lord.  The Easter Gospel speaks of the empty tomb experience of Mary, Peter, and John.  They only gradually came to an Easter faith.

An important truth of our lives is that we discover important things about ourselves at the tomb.  Just as the first disciples experienced the empty tomb before they came to a resurrection faith, we too need to empty ourselves at our own graves, leave behind our own burial cloths, and live in the light of the Risen Christ.

Our empty tomb experiences are the moments of darkness and confusion in life.  As we peer into the empty tombs of the ups and downs of our everyday lives, we are challenged to see and believe as the apostle John did as he stared into the empty tomb.

Be in touch with the empty tomb experience when our worship is isolated from the rest of our lives.  Does what happens at Mass on Sunday morning effect the way we live our life from day to day.  At the dismissal of the Liturgy, we proclaim:”Go in peace glorifying the Lord by the way we live our life.” We receive the Eucharist at Mass so that we can witness of the love of Jesus by the way we live our lives.   The Easter grace we seek to make more connections between the presence of Jesus that we receive in the Eucharistic body and blood of the Lord and the Jesus we experience in our love and service of one another.

It is the experience of an empty tomb we do not recognize the presence of Jesus in our lives. Christ is present to us 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The question is do we recognize the presence of Jesus, the spiritual dimension of the beauty of the sunrise and in the simple sharing with one you love.  We seek the grace of a spiritual cataract surgery that sharpens our spiritual sightedness in being of God’s presence in the stuff of our life.

It is an empty tomb experience when Gospel values cannot be recognized in the way we live our lives.  Plain and simple, we need to walk our talk as the followers of Jesus.  Yes, self-centeredness, greed, lust, power and control, fears, anxieties are demons most of us are familiar with but we need to trust and embrace the grace Jesus offers.  The risen Jesus calls us by name and offers us the grace to walk away from the empty tombs of the fears and the demons of our lives so that we live with Easter joy and an Easter peace.

Yes, it’s at the tomb that we can make sense of the questions that have followed us on our Lenten journey.   The life issue we all face at at the empty tomb is that without trusting in the grace of God, we will never move away the empty tombs of our life that can too easily enslave us.   A basic issue for us is whether we intend to live life newly now or just go on doing more the same-old, same-old and call it “following Jesus.”  Lent has confronted us with the proposition that we are called beyond spiritual disciplines to a spiritual life.  Will we ourselves, touched by Jesus, now rise and live life differently?

What does it mean for us to allow ourselves to be touched by the person of Jesus?  What will it take for us to be convicted of the Easter message that Jesus seeks to fill with this world with His love?  What will it take for us to believe that God’s love will triumph over   poverty, conflict, violence and war?

We cannot celebrate Easter in one day; we cannot come to faith on one mass.  Together, as a community of faith, a God’s Easter people, we make the journey together over the course of a lifetime.

Where is the towel with your name on it?

With this solemn liturgy of the Lord’s Supper, we enter the heart and soul of the entire liturgical year.  We celebrate the paschal mystery – the dying and rising of Christ Jesus.  As the disciples of Jesus, we gather during the Triduum to celebrate the mystery of the presence of Jesus in our lives.

In today’s Gospel account, Jesus wraps a towel around his waist, takes a pitcher of water and, on the night before he dies, begins washing the feet of his disciples.  The disciples are stunned.  The washing of feet was usually done by a slave.   It was Jesus who was washing their feet.  Jesus is certainly acknowledging in gratitude the courage of his disciples in having walked with him for three years to this dark night.  He is surely proclaiming that in such walking, despite all that will happen on the next day, they have arrived nonetheless at the threshold of new life.  But most of all, Jesus is teaching them that this new life is gained not in presiding over multitudes from royal thrones;  it is gained, however, in walking with the humble and in humbly serving this world’s walkers.  When he tells his disciples to do as he has done in washing their feet, he is commissioning them to walk as he has walked and to heal as he has healed.

His disciples are to change the world by getting down on their knees and washing the feet of God’s poor.

This is the authentic mark of the follower of Jesus Christ:  that he and she wash the feet of the beggar, the leper, the miserable sinner rejected by everyone else.

Jesus the teacher demonstrated his life-giving message:  foot washing.  He did not ask his friends to die for one another, but to live for one another.  Holy Thursday is a celebration of life, and life together as a people of God.

In the Gospel account we find that Peter was uncomfortable with having Jesus wash his feet.  Peter, who was somewhat of an activist, would have preferred to see himself doing the washing, washing the feet of Jesus, and even of the other disciples.  Sometimes it is harder to remain passive and allow someone else to bathe us than it is to bathe someone else. 

But having our feet washed and washing the feet of others are two sides of the coin we call the Christian life.

Peter’s image of God was more of a king rather than a humble servant.  He was imprisoned by his image of who God is.  Jesus was giving Peter a different image of God and saying the only way to stay close to Jesus was to let him wash you.

The first and most essential part is to let the Lord wash us.  As Jesus said to Peter, “Unless I wash you, you have no share with me.  First, the Lord washes us clean so that we belong to the Lord.  Only then are we qualified and empowered to wash the feet of our sisters and brothers in the Lord.  When this truth dawned on Peter, he overcame his reluctance and cried our, “Lord, not my feet only but also my hands and my head.”  For this to happen all that the Lord needs from us is simply to be there, to present ourselves to him and to let him wash us.

The other side of the coin, which is equally important, is that after our feet have been washed by the Lord, we must go and wash the feet of others.  After Jesus washed his disciples’ feet, he said to them:

“Do you know what I have done for you?  You call me Teacher and Lord – and rightly so, for that is what I am.  So if I, your Lord and Master, wash your feet, you are to wash the feet of one another.  I have given you an example, what I have done, you are to do likewise.

On this holy night, we pledge once again to use our hands and feet for the work of forgiveness, for the work of loving each other.  We pledge to wash each other’s feet, to hand over our lives for each other, for the sake of the world.  We pledge ourselves to do Eucharist, to do this in memory of the One who gave his life for us.

Isn’t it odd what we experience this evening in this liturgy of the Lord’s Supper?  The meaning of salvation focuses on the voice of God speaking to us through Jesus with a towel around his waist asking us to find the towel with our name on it:  “As I have done for you, so you also must do.”

Service rooted in love is the example Jesus gives to his disciples.  It is a radical form of service because it is based on a radical form of love.

So, the question I leave with you as we ritually wash the feet of parishioners is:  Where is your towel with your name on it?