Welcome to Finding God in Our Hearts. The following production Pastoral Reflections with Monsignor Don Fisher is a weekly program of deep spiritual insight on Scripture, revealing the indwelling presence of God. Monsignor Fisher is a Catholic priest, a member of the Diocese of Dallas, and founder of the Pastoral Reflections Institute, a nonprofit in Dallas, Texas, dedicated to to enriching your spiritual journey. We appreciate your listenership and if you find this program valuable, please subscribe and share with your friends. This program is funded with kind donations by listeners just like you make your donation@pastoralreflectionsinstitute.com. Good morning.
We’re celebrating today, the fourth Sunday of Advent. The opening Prayer Pour forth, we beseech you, O Lord, your grace into our hearts that we to whom the incarnation of Christ, your Son, was made known by the message of an angel, may by his passion and cross be brought to the glory of his resurrection, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever. Amen. A Reading from the Old Testament from the book of Isaiah, 7th chapter 10:14 the Lord spoke to Ahaz, saying, ask for a sign from the LORD your God. Let it be deep as the netherworld, or high as the sky. But Ahaz answered, I will not ask, I will not tempt the Lord.
Then Isaiah said, listen, O house of David, is it not enough for you to weary people? Must you also weary my God? Therefore the Lord himself will give you this. The virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and you shall name him Emmanuel. The Word of the Lord. Let the Lord enter he is the King of glory.
The Lord’s are the earth in its fullness, the world and those who dwell in it. For he founded it upon the seas and established it upon the rivers. That the LORD enter He is the King of glory. We shall ascend the mountain of the Lord or who may stand in his place? One whose hands are sinless, whose heart is clean, who desires not what is vain. Let the Lord enter He is the King of glory.
He shall receive a blessing from the Lord, a reward from God his Savior. Such is the race that seeks him, that seeks the face of God, of Jacob. Let the Lord enter he is the King of glory. A reading from St. Paul’s letter to the Romans, first chapter, first through the seventh verse. Paul, a slave of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle and set apart for the Gospel of God, which he promised previously through his prophets in the Holy Scriptures.
The Gospel about his Son, the descendant of David, according to the flesh, but established as son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness, through the resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord. Through him we have received grace of apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith for the sake of his name among the Gentiles, among whom you also, who are called to belong to Jesus Christ, to the Beloved of God in Rome, called to be holy, grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. The word of the Lord. The virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call him Emmanuel. The gospel for this fourth Sunday of Advent is taken from St. Matthew, first chapter 1824.
This is how the birth of Jesus Christ came about. When his mother Mary was betrothed to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found with child through the Holy Spirit. Joseph, her husband, since he was a righteous man, yet unwilling to expose her to shame, decided to divorce her quietly. Such was his intention when, behold, the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary, your wife, into your home. For it is through the Holy Spirit that this child has been conceived in her. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus because he will save his people from their sins.
All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel, which means God is with us. When Joseph awoke, he did as the angel the Lord had commanded him and took his wife into his home. The Gospel of the Lord. Now, I invite you to just ponder images that we’ve just been awakened to in these readings as we listen to the music. Brian Harner.
This Sunday we have something that we had last week, and that is a reading from Isaiah that prophesies something about the coming of a savior, the Messiah. And then in the New Testament reading, we see it being fulfilled. But the interesting thing, in both last Sunday and this Sunday, we see words on the lips of Isaiah that are exactly like the words that happened to Jesus and to those that were most intimately connected to his incarnation. So last week we saw that the prophecy had to do with all the wonderful things that God’s gift would be through Jesus to us. Eyes would be open, ears would be able to hear, tongue would be able to speak. The lame would leap like stags.
It’s all images of fullness and wholeness and being able to be who God intended us to be. That’s the promise. And I think it’s interesting that the Old Testament prophets, they’re proclaiming it like Isaiah. And then yet still the Pharisees, the scribes, didn’t get it. They didn’t understand it. And when Jesus life was unfolding, instead of being excited about the fact that these things were happening in.
In exact, you know, the way that they were prophesied to happen just underscores the fact that they didn’t really know the Scriptures. The Pharisees, the scribes that were running the temple, they had lost their groundedness in the story. And it led to all kinds of abuse, all kinds of ways in which Jesus would describe this place of healing and life giving strength and grace. He turned it into a place that was robbing people of life, a den of thieves. So it’s important for us not to fall into the trap of the Pharisees for sure, but to look at these stories and understand they are so filled with something that we need to be conscious of. Not just from the standpoint of I know it, but I’m living it, I’m living it.
So there’s this quote in Isaiah about a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Manuel. And then we see that same phrase being on the lips of an angel. And the angel is the one that came to Joseph to explain to him the mystery of this thing that had happened to the woman that he was in love with, that she was found to be pregnant outside of the marriage, that they hadn’t been betrothed yet, or they were betrothed, promised, but they hadn’t gone through any kind of ceremony to make them husband and wife. And yet we have this mysterious dream of Joseph. And I love the fact that this thing that we all experience called dreaming is very much a part of the way in which sometimes God works and speaks to us through our dreams. And if you ever know anything about Jung psychology, it’s filled with an invitation to pay attention to the images in your dream.
Not necessarily that they’re all voices of angels, but that God uses them, uses everything to bring about something within us, some transformation, some change. And in this set of readings, what I love about that image of Emmanuel, the angel says that there is this virgin will have a child and the child will be named Immanuel. And it gives exactly what the name means. God is with us. And it’s also interesting that there’s a time when in another passage from Luke, there is this image of Jesus name being given to Mary through an angel. And it’s God saves, God saves, God heals.
I think it’s Interesting to take those two and put them together, because that’s what I want to talk about is this image of a God who comes into the world to save us and then returns to heaven to guide us from there often implies something perhaps that God is not really with us. It’s God is within us. And you see in that opening prayer this beautiful image of grace, grace being poured into our hearts. And you’ll notice in the reading from Paul, he’s saying at the end of it, grace and peace from God and from our Lord Jesus Christ. The two are one. Grace and peace.
What is grace and peace? First, it is the indwelling presence of God within us. God does not come into the world and do something that radically changes the understanding that we have of how God works and the saving us from our sins by his own death and surrendering to the fullness of his humanity. In a sense, on that cross, when he said, you know, everything that he was doing was in a sense, radically opposed to our humanity. And he was able to be filled with passion and intention and desire and go through that crucifixion and find resurrection. And that’s the story of every one of us.
That grace, God’s presence, God’s favor is poured into our hearts and that can sustain us as we go through the radical transformation of being confronted with the thing that we call sin. Our self centeredness, our self worth, our need to be somebody important in our own eyes and maybe the eyes of others. Jesus was able to pass through that incredible place of letting go of all of his egocentric parts, of him as a human being. And he taught us something in that moment that there is this gift that is given to us called grace. God’s presence. God is with us.
God is within us. Remember when Jesus was baptized in the Jordan by John and the Holy Spirit descended upon him? And what were the words that everyone seemed to clearly hear? This is my son. My favor is with him. So I want you to think of grace as a pouring forth into your hearts continually.
Once you allow God to dwell in you, once you believe that he dwells in you, his presence, his grace that sanctifies, sets us apart to do a certain work in this world. It’s real. It’s there all the time. We may not feel it all the time, but if you know that it’s there all the time, doing its work of filling us with an awareness that we have this grace, this powerful love inside of us, of God, his favor, his being with us to awaken us, something that was radically needed and in a way desired, that we are willing to be set apart, to do this work that means to be sanctified. Grace sanctifies, sets us apart. And what is it inviting us to do the same thing that Jesus did, To go through something like our own passion, our own transformation, our own growing and becoming who we’re intended to be.
But also there’s an image in this passage from Paul that says we’ve been given this grace, this favor from God, and it’s about our apostleship. Apostleship? What is apostleship? Well, being. An apostle is being one who is sent out to do something. A disciple is somebody who’s learning.
All the disciples became apostles. All the learning, all the growth that we have inside of us that puts us in touch with who we are in the process of transformation that God’s grace and presence and peace creates in us. All of that is what we are engaged in, to be continually moving in this direction of being people who move from discipleship to apostleship. And that means we’re interested in giving something to other people, sharing this wisdom. So what I’m asking you to consider in these images of grace and peace, that they are the fruits of the presence of God inside of our hearts. And when we connect with that, we join the intention of God.
And the intention of God is that we bring grace and peace to the people around us. And there’s something about Christianity that’s dangerous, that can be subtly getting into our way of imagining what God is asking of us and in a way stop the process. And when it’s too focused on perfection and our own selves. And we are so interested in becoming holy and perfect and sinless. And that’s not the process of apostleship. The apostleship is not interested in so much being a perfect person, but being a person who helps other people to be better, to be stronger, to be closer to the reality of who they are.
In other words, if we focus not just on self, but on guiding other people into this place called the kingdom, where we find so much grace, so much peace, that’s the challenge and that’s the work of Advent to awaken us to this beautiful world that we’re to live in. A world of grace and peace, knowing that we have a gift to share and a well being, that we are participating in that very gift. God bless you. Foreign. The closing Prayer. Father St.
Paul gives us this beautiful image of who you are, the God who fills us with all that we need. So bless us with this grace that sends us forth to share our faith. With one another and the peace that ends the tension and the war inside of us trying to get rid of our sins and growing into a place of patience as you slowly transform us and we ask this. The music in our program was composed and produced by Ryan Harner for this show. Pastoral Reflections with Monsignor Don Fisher, a listener supported program is archived and available on our website pastoralreflectionsinstitute.com and available anytime, anywhere and for free on our podcast, Finding God in Our Hearts. You can search and subscribe to Finding God in Our Hearts anywhere you download your podcasts.
Pastoral Reflections with Monsignor Don Fisher is funded with kind donations past listeners just like you. You can make a one time or recurring tax deductible donation on our website pastoralreflectionsinstitute.com we thank you for your listenership and your continued support. Without it, this program would not be possible. Pastoral Reflections with Monsignor Don Fisher is a production of the Pastoral Reflections Institute, a NonProfit in Dallas, Texas dedicated to enriching your spiritual journey. Executive Producer Monsignor Don Fisher Produced by Kyle Cross and recorded in Pastoral Reflections Institute Studios. Copyright 2020.