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"JE-DI" Meme Created by Deacon Dennis Purificacion & Kids
(1/28/2019)
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(1st weekend homily without using my prepared text)
12pm School Mass
(video)
(1st weekend homily without using my prepared text)
12pm School Mass
(audio only)
12pm School Mass
(audio only)
(1st weekend homily without using my prepared text)
10am
10am
8am (using prepared text)
As we celebrate Catholic Schools Week on this 3rd
Sunday in Ordinary Time, I am reminded of when I started as a 23-year-old
rookie teacher at St. Patrick-St. Vincent High School here in Vallejo. Most if not all my students were overall good
teenagers. Some of my students called me
not just Mr. P. or Master P but Jedi Master P because some of them knew I liked
Star Wars.
In the famous pop culture Star Wars story, there is a
character named C-3P0. And in Return of the Jedi, C-3P0 tells a story
to these little cute teddy bear species called Ewoks. (As robot, C3P0 is a robot fluent in over 6
million forms of communication.) At the
end of the story, C3P0 says, “Wonderful, we are now part of the tribe.” To be part of a tribe, we must remember the tribe’s
story.
This leads to the 3 main parts of this homily.
First,
remember the story of salvation, so that we know where we’re going, Heaven.
Second,
Jesus fulfills the story.
Third,
you and I are part of this story of the Tribe of God.
(#1) So let’s go to the first part: Remember the story. In salvation history, God creates an ordered
world. Then our First Parents disobeyed
God, and nobody could go to Heaven anymore.
(Angels.) But out of his love,
God did not abandon us and promised to send a Savior in Gen. 3:16. To prepare us for the Savior, God called Noah
to build an Ark of the covenant (a foreshadow of baptism). From Noah came the Patriarch Abraham along
with the priest-king Melchizedek who gave bread and wine to Abraham and Sarah. This foreshadows the Eucharist. From them God called their descendants Isaac
and then Jacob who changed his name to Israel.
The children of Israel then came to Egypt through the Patriarch Joseph,
and when the Israelites became too numerous, they were enslaved by the
Pharaoh. Moses then brought God’s people
out of slavery and recall this story in the Jewish Passover bread. Then God gave the 10 Commandments and the
Manna-Bread from Heaven which they kept in the Ark of the Covenant, the
Tabernacle. David and Solomon then built
the 1st Temple in which they placed the Ark of the Covenant. Inside this Ark was the Bread from Heaven
kept in the Tabernacle. Then the
Prophets came to remind the people to follow God’s teachings, but the people
rejected the Prophets, so God destroyed the Temple and the people went into Babylonian
captivity. After their Exile, the
Israelites rebuilt the 2nd Temple and the Roman Empire conquered Israel. In occupied Israel, God chose Mary, the new
Ark of the Covenant in which the New and Everlasting Covenant took flesh. All this story was to prepare for our
salvation. This is the beginning of our
story.
(#2) The second
main point is that Christ is the center and fulfills the story. (There is a saying that the Old Testament
foreshadows the New Testament, and the New Testament fulfills to Old Testament.) In today’s Gospel from Luke Chapter 1, St.
Luke tells us that he too is writing a story, “I too have decided, after
investigating everything anew, to write it down in an orderly sequence for
you.” It is the greatest love story ever
told! St. Luke’s Gospel describes how
God became one of us in a Baby in Bethlehem and at age 12 was found in the
Temple. We celebrated this at Advent and
Christmas. These are the 5 joyful
mysteries of the rosary. Then, as we
celebrated the past 2 Sundays, we see Jesus was baptized at age 30, then
attended a Wedding in Cana, and then now, after his hidden life in Nazareth, at
age 30, Jesus began to announce the Kingdom of God through parables and
miracles. These are luminous mysteries
of the rosary. Jesus takes up a scroll
from the Book of the Prophet Isaiah and he says, “The Spirit of the Lord is
upon me, God has anointed me to bring salvation to his people, to heal the
broken hearted and release to prisoners.”
As we hear in the First Reading from the Book of Nehemiah, Ezra the priest-scribe
holds up a book containing God’s laws while the people praise God, a foreshadow
of Jesus Christ proclaiming the scroll. At
the end of today’s Gospel, Jesus declared, “Today, in your hearing, this
Scripture from Isaiah has been fulfilled.”
Here, Jesus boldly announces God has anointed him with the Spirit. He is the Christ, the Anointed One. And in next week’s Gospel, we will hear how
Jesus is rejected when announcing that He Himself is the Kingdom of God. In fact, as we celebrate Ordinary Time for
about a month, we will hear that Jesus announces the Kingdom of God through
parables and miracles.
(#3) The story does not end here. This is my third point: You and I are part of this story.
You and I are part of the Tribe of God.
You and I are members of Christ with charisms and gifts of the Holy Spirit. As we heard in the Second Reading from the
First Letter of St. Paul to the Corinthians: You are the body of Christ, as a
body is one though it has many parts. We
are part of the Tribe of God and the story of salvation because of our baptism
and Confirmation. Ven. Fulton Sheen
reflected on today’s Gospel by saying that Confirmation gives us the Holy
Spirit. The role of the laity is to bring the Gospel to the world. Our words are that of Our
Blessed Lord: The Spirit of the Lord is upon us. God has sent us to bring God to others. Some of us are feet who bring the good news
of love and joy to others; some of us are the hands that heal broken hearts; some
of us are priests that are the head of the body; and some of us are the
heart. St. Therese the Little Flower
said that she was the heart because her vocation is love.
During Jesus’ 3-year public ministry, Jesus
establishes his holy Catholic Church with Peter as the head of 12 Apostles, and
he entrusts the Seven Sacraments. The
story also enters into Lent and Easter where we will celebrate the Passion,
Death and Resurrection of Jesus. These
are the sorrowful and glorious mysteries of the rosary. After the Resurrection of Jesus from the dad,
we will hear the story of the sending of the Spirit at Pentecost and how you
and I the Church spread to places like Rome where St. Peter was crucified
upside down on a hill called the Vatican.
Peter’s Successors, the Bishops of Rome, from Peter the first Pope to
Francis the current Pope, continues the saving work of Jesus Christ until now
in 2019. Before his Second Coming at the
end of the world, the Church will undergo the final purification, and an era of
peace and triumph of the Immaculate Heart as foretold at Fatima, and then the final
trial where the Church will be crucified and victorious like her Beloved Spouse
before Christ’s Second Coming in glory at the end of the world. Finally, Christ the Judge will hand over all
things to his Father, and the saints will shine forever in glory. That is the end of the story of salvation.
So to summarize the three main points:
(1) First, we must remember the story of salvation to
know where we are going;
(2) second, Jesus fulfills the story; and
(3) third, you and I are part of this story to save
souls.
Regardless of our charisms, we have to ask: How many
souls are we helping Jesus to save? How
many souls are we bringing to God? It’s
not just the head, the priests, but we the body is needed. How are we using our charisms and gifts that
God gave to us as part of this story?
In closing, as with C-3P0 who told his story about fictional
Jedi, let us be real JE-DI. J.E. for
Jesus and D.I. for disciples; let us be Jesus’s Disciples, real JE-DI with a
real story, where our real weapons are not lightsabers and blasters, but love
and prayer to bring others to Heaven, where our Jedi Temple is the Temple of
the Holy Spirit; where Jesus is our only Master, and we all are all his
disciples. In the words of the
Responsorial Psalm, let us too exclaim, “Your words, Lord, are Spirit and
life.” May always be members not of the Tribe of Ewoks and this world, but
rather let us be members of the Tribe of God.
Let us always remember the story of our salvation.
“Wonderful… we are now part of the Tribe!”
A.M.D.G.
