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.

Today we celebrate the baptism of the Lord. The Opening Prayer Almighty ever living God, who, when Christ had been baptized in the river Jordan and as the Holy Spirit descended upon him, solemnly declared him your beloved Son, Grant that your children, by adoption, reborn of water and the Holy Spirit, may always be well pleasing to you, Our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, 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 42 first through the fourth verse and 6 through the seventh verse. Thus says the Lord, here is my servant whom I am upholding, my chosen one with whom I am pleased, upon whom I put my Spirit. He shall bring forth justice to the nations, not crying out, not shouting, not making his voice heard in the street.

A bruised reed he shall not break, a smoldering wick he shall not quench. Until he establishes justice on the earth, the coastlands will wait for his teaching. I the Lord have called you for the victory of justice. I have grasped you by the hand, I have formed you, set you as a covenant of the people, a light for the nations, to open the eyes of the blind, to bring out prisoners from confinement and from the dungeon those who are in darkness. The Word of the Lord Responsorial Psalm the Lord will bless his people with peace. A reading from the Acts of the Apostles, 10th chapter 34, 38th verse.

Peter proceeded to speak to those gathered in the house of Cornelius, saying, in truth I see that God shows no partiality rather in every nation. Whoever fears him and acts uprightly is acceptable to him. You know the world that he sent to the Israelites as he proclaimed peace through Jesus Christ, who is Lord of all. What has happened all over Judea? Beginning in Galilee after the baptism that John preached, how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and power, he went about doing good and healing all those oppressed by the devil, for God was with him the Word of the Lord, I’ll leave. Verse John said, one mightier than I is coming.

He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire. The Gospel for this feast of the baptism of the Lord is taken from St. Luke, third chapter, 15th and 16th verse. In the 21st and 22nd verse, people were filled with expectation, and all were asking in their hearts whether John might be the Christ. John answered them all, saying, I’m baptizing you with water, but one mightier than I is coming, and I am not worthy to loosen the thongs of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.

After that, all the people had been baptized, and Jesus also had been baptized and was praying. Heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven. You are my beloved Son. With you I am well pleased. The Gospel of the Lord Foreign this feast of the baptism officially ends the Christmas season.

What we’ve been focusing on is this most fascinating, interesting thing. It seems from the beginning of time, men and women have longed for something more than they have or more than they are. And whenever they seem to examine the life that they had, they said, someone has to come and give us something that we’re missing. Because somehow we’re not connected like we should be to this whole thing. We need a messiah, somebody who will come with great wisdom. And I would add this one line that they wouldn’t have said, but when we are ready, when we are ready for the Messiah, one might say, well, why didn’t the Messiah come to Abraham?

Why did we have to have 1500, 2000 years of struggle with one particular way of looking at the world and looking at God. God being the one who created us and who is demanding of us that we respond to him, that we love Him. But the only way we could show we loved him was to do what he said. And so we were bound by a very complicated set of rules and laws. And we kept trying and trying to keep the relationship going by being more than we were able to be, kept being punished. And God would even threaten to destroy us when we failed so miserably in doing what he asked.

Why did we have to go through all of that before we had his beloved Son who comes into the world to reveal who he is? Why didn’t he start with who he was? Well, I think it’s pretty obvious, as we couldn’t have handled was 5,000 years ago when God called Abraham almost five. And if that’s true, then people Were not at all like they are now in terms of being involved and growing in a capacity, understand things, especially the things of a world that we can’t know directly but need help in knowing. And that’s the world of the spirit. We know pretty much about the world that we live in.

At least it seems that throughout history, human beings were capable of figuring things out and discovering new ways of seeing the world and new ways of using things in the world to take care of themselves. We call it evolution. And it’s so funny to me that one of the primary causes of the evolution of human beings in terms of growing into knowing how to use the things of the earth to take care of them was the weather. They’d learn how to protect themselves from elements, and as they did that, their bodies and they themselves adapted themselves into becoming someone who could live in a certain environment. And that’s never ceased. Our environment is constantly changing.

It’s not just the weather, but you think of the world we live in now, Even the world that I was born in 70 years ago, practically, you know, it’s so different. And yet when I see younger people getting into things that I can’t quite figure out, seemingly to do it without any effort, they seem to understand how these things work. This technological world we live in, they seem to have an intuition about it that I don’t have. Is that because I’m stupid and they’re smart? No, they have adapted from it from a very, very young age. And.

And that means everything. I mean, the world I was created in, in the world that I learned my basic ways of dealing with life, is so radically different than theirs. And so we all should give ourselves some slack when it comes to why can’t we figure all this stuff out. But we have grown and we have changed, and God has revealed more and more to us. And I love the idea that the whole history of the human race is very much a kind of metaphor for what we individually go through, starting with childhood, infancy, childhood, adolescence, young adult, older adult, wiser adult. When you get close to 70, 80.

So what is it that we find in this conclusion to the invitation we’ve all had in the liturgy to remember this new creature that came into the world called Jesus. And we end with an epiphany. Last week was the feast of the Epiphany, but now we have a true epiphany. When Jesus the man was baptized in the Jordan by John, there was this showing of his divinity. First of all, a spirit. The spirit of God took bodily form in the form of a dove.

And the Spirit of God descending into Jesus is a sign and a symbol that we, Jesus like us, not to the same degree, but he’s there to show us that we’re like him. And he’s the first one to say something it seemed almost impossible to believe that God’s spirit dwells in me and enables me to do things I could never do on my own, just as a human being. And so we see the Spirit descending into this man, and then we hear a voice. And the voice says, this is the one, this is my son that I’ve always promised I would send to you. Listen to him. That’s what he said in the same kind of theophany at the transfiguration.

This is my son. Listen to him. In this case, he said, this is my son. He has my favor, my love, my presence inside of him. And you can have it too. You can have it too.

So we end on this note of baptism. Baptism is a very interesting sacrament. It’s something in the Catholic Church that is required, as it is in almost all religions. But the one thing interesting about the Catholic Church in its teaching on baptism is always recognized baptism in any other faith, it never rebaptized someone, let’s say, when you became a convert. So here’s a ritual that we believe always, always, always works, no matter who does it, no matter what religion does it. And what is it when you’re baptized?

It’s so important. Well, the ritual is essential in many ways. But in another way, it isn’t the only way one can receive the gift of baptism. The Church teaches that you don’t have to be baptized literally by another person in the name of the Father and the Son and Holy Spirit to be baptized. You can be baptized, call it a baptism of blood. That’s when you give your life completely over to the truth.

Become a martyr. Give your life or your faith, or also just the desire to want desperately to be filled with God. That’s a baptism of desire. So as much importance as we put on baptism, we wouldn’t say that a person who isn’t baptized doesn’t have God inside of them, because that is given as a gift to every human being. We are redeemed people. And I want to see if I can try to describe what redemption is.

It’s always been difficult for me to figure it out. If it means that we’re freed of sin, then why do we still do sinful things? If we’re told that we’re freed from the punishment of sin, why do we always feel that? And why does the church often say to me that, you know, if you don’t do what God wants, he turns away, he punishes. It damages our relationship with him. He won’t dwell with us anymore until we get our sins forgiven in confession.

That’s what I was taught. So how are we supposed to understand it? Well, here’s one thing that I hope helps. And it’s been something I’ve been pondering for these last few days. And I hope it makes sense. But I know I can’t explain it, but I can point to it.

I can’t describe exactly how it works. But in that moment that Jesus was baptized, he revealed the work that he was here to accomplish. And the work was to reveal a dimension of God that we never knew existed. And that is that he refuses to punish a sinner. He refuses to separate himself from a sinner. He refuses to let our actions do anything to damage his affection, his attention, his desire for our salvation.

I never knew that before. And I don’t know that I’ve lived my life in any way, shape or form that I really would say I base my reactions to my weaknesses on that kind of truth. I base them more on a truth that the culture lives in. And that is if you do something wrong, you’re punished. If you take someone’s life, we believe that the government has, or at least the government believes they have a right to take your life. It’s just an eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth.

You live in that all the time in the world. Yet we’re told that our God, in fully revealing who he is, is not that way at all. So how do we make this adjustment? How do we think about sin as not being something that damages our relationship? Because otherwise you’d say, well, then why worry about not sinning? I mean, if it doesn’t take God’s love away, God’s presence away, well, it goes deeper into an understanding of sin and the effects of sin in our life to say that God does not in any way, shape or form limit his love for us when we choose to do something wrong.

Still, in the doing of something wrong, there is damage done to people, people and to self. That’s not God’s punishment. That’s just the result of what you’re doing. You drink water and you’re hydrated. You stop drinking water and you die. If you don’t drink water, is the punishment from God that you’ll die?

No, just that’s the result of it. So it doesn’t change the fact that there’s something really dangerous about our sins. They are not in any way, shape or form limiting God’s love for us, but they are causing unnecessary, unwanted pain and suffering. And so what we have to do is learn how to accept that part of the world that we live in, that when we choose things that are negative and destructive, we do experience the destructiveness. But here’s the thing that I think is so interesting. So often when you see someone in pain because of the choices they’ve made, they have a feeling that God abandoned them.

He abandoned them. And somehow, somehow they’re left with this curse from God. I think it’s really interesting. We often, you know, tell people when things are going really well, oh, you’re so blessed by God. What a wonderful. Oh, you must be so pleasing to him.

Well, what does that imply when things are going bad? Well, he’s not pleased with you and you’re cursed. Why do we connect that dimension to our actions and somehow say, well, God, why are you doing this to me? Why can’t we see as clearly as this theology of redemption is trying to show us that no, he’s always there, always pulling for us, always wanting us not to abuse self or others. He wants us to learn. And so he allows the negative results.

Otherwise it’d be sort of like a body that doesn’t feel pain. You know, people have that, and it’s a horrible thing because you never know when you’re injured yourself and you can’t do anything about. It’s great motivation if we realize the things we’re doing are creating pain. But it’s so unfair to say that’s God’s response. It’s not God’s response. What I love about the Old Testament is the image of God that we’ve lost in the New Testament.

If you only read the New Testament, and that is that God in the Old Testament is usually described as somebody who’s rather demanding and legalistic and always crushing people that didn’t do what they wanted. It’s like God is the source of all punishment, all pain, rather, and it’s all in the form of punishment. And so, I don’t know, we somehow take that as to look at God in the Old Testament as not good and Jesus as good. And that’s completely oversimplified. What I love about the God of the Old Testament, since we’ve been preaching on it for now, 50 years in the first reading of every Sunday, is how human he is, how filled with ordinary emotions, human emotions he is. He’s sad, he’s angry, he’s jealous, he’s depressed.

You know, somehow when I was growing up and learning about God, God didn’t have anything like that because that would seem too human. It sounded like he was imperfect. But a God who loves, authentically loves, how can he not have an emotion about the person he loves when they don’t do what he’s simply asking them to do for their own benefit and for the benefit of everyone around them? He is sad. He feels sadness when we sin. So different than a judgmental, angry, punishing God.

And how does that change things? How does it make things different? I don’t know exactly how I can say this, but it does mean that if you don’t have that image of a God who’s always there in all of the negative things you do, you can’t ever believe that he’s always present, always in you, always pulling for you. His indwelling presence, this image of the dove entering into Jesus, his spirit. That’s what’s key, that’s what’s important. Closing Prayer Father, your redemption is the gift that frees us and restores us to a childlike belief and faith in your love and your presence, your desire to give us everything that we need.

Bless us with this gift as we face so many of the shortcomings that we experience in our life, the times that we fail, the times that we lose self respect. It’s never your will. Your will is simply that we continue to grow and to change and to become fully your child in whom we pray. We are always someone that pleases you greatly and we ask this in Jesus name. Amen. The music in our program was composed and produced by Ryan Harner for 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.

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