My name is Don and I’ve been a Catholic priest now for over 50 years. And during that time I keep going back to the same readings over and over again, only to discover that they contain something I never understood was there before. It gives me new enthusiasm and excitement for the message that keeps revealing itself. And I pray that the message that I’m sending you will be valuable. And if you find it so, please share these podcasts with your friends. Thank you.

Good morning. Today we celebrate the fourth Sunday of Easter. The opening prayer Almighty ever Living God, lead us to a share in the joys of heaven, so that the humble flock may reach where the brave shepherd has gone before, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever. Amen. A reading from the Acts of the apostles, 13th chapter, 14th verse, and the 43rd through the 52nd verse. Paul and Barnabas continued on from Perga and reached Antioch.

In Pisidia, on the Sabbath they entered the synagogue and took their seats. Many Jews and worshipers who were converts to Judaism followed Paul and Barnabas, who spoke to them and urged them to remain faithful to the grace of God. On the following Sabbath, almost the whole city gathered to hear the Word of the Lord. And when the Jews saw the crowds, they were filled with jealousy and with violent abuse contradicted what Paul said. Both Paul and Barnabas spoke out boldly and said it was necessary that the Word of God be spoken to you first. But since you rejected it and condemned yourselves as unworthy of eternal life, we now turn to the Gentiles, for so the Lord has commanded us.

I have made you a light to the Gentiles that you may be an instrument of salvation to the ends of the earth. The Gentiles were delighted when they heard this and glorified the Word of the Lord. All who were destined for eternal life came to believe, and the Word of the Lord continued to spread through the whole region. The Jews, however, incited the women of prominence who were worshippers and the leading men of the city, stirred up a persecution against Paul and Barnabas and expelled them from their territory. So they shook the dust from their feet in protest against them and went to Iconium. The disciples were filled with joy and the Holy Spirit.

The Word of the Lord we are his people, the sheep of his flock Sing joyfully to the Lord all you lands Serve the Lord with gladness Come before him with joyful song. We are his people, the sheep of his flock Know that the Lord is God he made us we are his, his people the flock he tends. We are his people, the sheep of his flock. The Lord is good. His kindness endures forever, his faithfulness to all generations. We are the people, the sheep of his flock.

A reading from the book of Revelation, seventh chapter, ninth verse and the 14th, 17th verse. I John had a vision of a great multitude which no one could count from every nation, race, people and tongue. They stood before the throne and before the Lamb, wearing white robes and holding palm branches in their hands. Then one of the elders said to me, these are the ones who have survived the time of great distress. They have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. For this reason they stand before God’s throne and worship him day and night in his temple.

The one who sits on the throne will shelter them. They will not hunger or thirst anymore, nor will the sun nor any heat strike them. For the Lamb who is in the center of the throne will shepherd them and lead them to springs of life giving water. And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes. The Word of the Lord. Hallelujah.

I am the good shepherd, says the Lord. I know my sheep, and mine know me. Hallelujah. The Gospel for this Sunday is taken from St. John 10:27, 30th verse. Jesus said, my sheep hear my voice.

I know them and they follow me. I give them eternal life and they shall never perish. No one can take them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one can take them out of my Father’s hand. The Father and I are one. The Gospel of the Lord One of the things that excites me about the role that I have as a teacher, one who tries to open your heart to the wisdom and the truth of who God is and who we are and what we’re here to accomplish.

I’m also called to be someone who tends and cares for you. It helps you through difficult times by giving you a sense of the patience and the love and the understanding that flows from this God who lives inside of us. And every year that we go through these holy days which we’ve gone through, we’re like reliving an experience that happened to a group of people. And the positive thing I want you to take from these stories is that they’re not just about going back in history and listening to what people went through. And isn’t that interesting? No, it’s there.

Living out exactly what you and I are called into, that we’re called to live out the same experiences they are. They Were moving from an Old Testament image of a God who was distant and judgmental somewhat. Not maybe somewhat, but pretty judgmental, and basically held people to a high. High, you know, level of performance. And then when they failed, they made it a kind of a, you know, an institution that was designed around pointing out faults and then demanding that certain things be done by them to get them out of the disfavor from God. That was the system they were in, and they.

They were invited into a radically different system. And if that seems like that’s something, it just happened a long. Just think about it for a minute, because that’s exactly what every human being that I’ve ever met goes through. That there’s a kind of, I don’t know, instinct inside of us that we have this goal that we’re supposed to achieve and it’s higher than who we normally are, and that we have to strive to be more than we are. And then that puts us in a kind of stressful situation because as we’re called to some kind of goodness and perfection. This is especially true when you’re young and you’re, you know, you’re.

You’ve got all this energy inside of you to go in all these different directions, and there’s this sense inside of you that you’ve got to control all this. And the stress is there, meaning this distress is, I want to do this, but then I’m told I can’t do that or can’t do this, and I must do that. And it’s a pressure, and we grow through that. And sometimes that even separates us from the whole goal or the idea that we should be better than we are, and we give up. And then we discover something later. I always think the spiritual world doesn’t really begin to awaken in us the enthusiasm we should have for this life that we share with God until we’re in our 30s and 40s.

And for me, it was probably more my 50s and 60s, because that notion of being in a pressure cooker that says I should be better than I am and I’m failing and I’ve got to do something to make up for that, or if worse, we get caught up in a deep, dark spiral of shame. And we figure that because we failed so many times, there is no hope for us. And we have this pressure inside of this kind of. This pain in the center of our stomach that kind of constantly shows itself and says, what’s the use? What’s the use? I can’t do better than this.

And we kind of give Up. We give up on this goal of being more than we normally can be on our own, because we’re trying to do it on our own. And what we’re seeing in this story unfolding for these disciples, they’re like all of us who have this time in our life when we are spiritually awakened. They. You know, they. They were caught up in an image of themselves in the world that they thought, you know, we’re special, we’re chosen.

We’re going to be the new. The new temple elite. They thought they were going to be. They used to have arguments of who among them was the best. Does that sound familiar? Competition?

Am I better than this other person? And they got caught up in that. And then they saw something happen. That when the God who was calling them to a different way of life, to a kind of death to that old life, and they were caught with not being able to make that shift, and they denied him, and they felt so ashamed and so guilty. And then this awakening happens. Then God reveals to them who he really is.

And he’s saying, look, the fact that you failed miserably is an invitation for you to always look at yourself and realize that human beings are not capable of anything I’m asking them to do. They’re not able to be the people I want them to be unless they are awakened to a gift. And the gift is me. Me. God. Jesus is God.

Jesus. When he says this, I. I am forgiveness. And forgiveness is nothing more than I will come into you and enter into your sinfulness and use it to teach you, to awaken you to a mystery, which is this commingling of my presence in your humanity, your selfishness and my selflessness. And I teach you how to become selfless like me. It’s beautiful.

It’s called destiny. What is your destiny? It’s in that first reading. Our destiny is that we’re called to live in grace, in God’s grace. What is God’s grace? What is grace?

Look it up in the Oxford English Dictionary. It’s favor. God’s favor. Remember when Jesus was baptized, he said, this is my son. My favor is with him. When he said that, he was saying that not only about his son, but about you and about me.

He created us. He sent us into this world to accomplish a goal that is our destiny. And the destiny is not necessarily a life that’s predetermined. We have no input in how it goes. No, the destiny is not that we are in that we don’t have control over our choices. Destiny is that we’re called to live in those choices we make and in the way the world unfolds with a conviction that there is this presence in me that is always there with me, for me, to enable me to deal with whatever life is presenting to me.

And you know the thing about life’s presentations to you and to me? Well, we need grace to be with us. So what does that say about them? That we’re not capable of dealing with these situations on our own? And that’s when we talk about stress and distress. Stress and distress are those moments in our life, in your life and mine, when we feel this stress, desire, longing to be more than we are and we can’t quite achieve it.

And we find ourselves in a disposition perhaps of just giving up. Sometimes, you know, I’ve tried and I failed, and I can’t do any better than I’m doing or whatever. But whenever there’s that sense that there’s something in us that is saying, you’re not worthy, you’re not good enough, be careful. Because that’s the Old Testament coming back and wreaking its havoc. Because the Old Testament would do nothing other than point out your fault and then tell you that you have to do something to make up for that. You have to make some kind of sacrifice, pay something.

And what Jesus is trying to say to you and to me, that idea that you have to make up for the sins of your past is wrong. I, Jesus speaking now, I am the one who’s come into your life and I am doing something that you have to understand. It’s beyond your comprehension to figure it out. But I will pay for everything you’ve done that’s wrong. I will take care of that for you. That’s called living in grace, living in God’s favor.

Can you believe that? Can you feel that without taking advantage of it? This is the weird thing about the Old Testament and New Testament or even super conservative religious people and more liberal people, it seems like the conservatives don’t have any real trust that people will respond to love. They only respond to punishment or to being condemned or to being judged. How many times do people tell me, you know, they feel when they go to church that there is a spirit in some communities where unless you have figured out your life and are living it perfectly, you know, unless you do that, you’re not really accepted. And how does that show up?

Well, when faults are experienced by people, there’s not so much a judgment, there’s not so much an acceptance, but it’s more like a judgment. And we exclude people. And what I love about the. The reading, one of the readings that we had, the first reading, was about the. The disciples experiencing, you know, the joy of feeling God’s grace, God’s acceptance in whatever we’ve done. He forgives.

And there is the attractiveness of that to the people. That’s what they need. That’s the kind of shepherding they need. Because this Sunday has always been set aside as Good Shepherd Sunday, which is a meaning it is trying to say. Now we’re ready to begin to see what it means that we live in God’s favor and not in God’s judgment. Because the Old Testament is God’s judgment.

Judgment in the New Testament is God’s love and his favor. But what I find interesting is that the image of the Old Testament in that first reading is that they’re jealous. You know, the temple priests are jealous of the love and the outpouring of joy and acceptance and welcoming the disciples into their life and their message in. And it’s clear, clear to me that the message of condemnation may be accepted. You may say, okay, this is God that’s always demanding perfection of me. So I guess I’ll do everything I possibly can to become the best person I can out of my own energy.

And it’s always so frustrating because it doesn’t work. You know, that there’s that kind of reaction or that kind of response, that kind of human response to that kind of system is not love is fear and shame. And there was something in the heart that I think is beautiful. Maybe you can read it this way, but there’s something beautiful in the heart of these Pharisees that they would like to think they respected, they would like to think they were honored for their work, but they weren’t. They were feared. And when anybody in your life has that role, if it’s a parent or if it’s anyone else in a relationship where there’s that kind of power over you, you must perform in this way in order to have this relationship with me.

There isn’t anything there as a response other than a kind of fear and anxiety and stress. And that’s one of the things that the gospel has come to relieve us of distress. There’s an image that’s in the second reading that image. Revelations is such an interesting book. It’s hard to figure out, but some people think it’s just a way of imagining in very interesting images the heart of the message of Jesus. And that image of the stress of this image of everybody around this figure that’s Jesus, the truth, love, light.

They’re all delighted. They’re filled with joy and happiness. And it says they’ve endured the period of distress by being washed in the blood of the Lamb. And when you think about that, when you’re under a system of perfection and obligation and forcing yourself to be somebody that you aren’t yet really there yet, but you make yourself do it in order to be acceptable, that’s stress. And that stress is there in everyone’s life, in their own particular journey. And what this beautiful image and whoever wrote the revelation, John was his name, but we don’t know who for sure it was.

But anyway, he’s saying, if you understand what the blood of Jesus is, it is the outpouring of his love in the form of saying, no matter what you’ve done, no matter what you’re held to in terms of obligation, if you fail in that, that is nothing other than increase my desire to fill you with an awareness that you are still loved, you are still mine. You are going to be my shepherd, my sheep, and I will shepherd you. That thing we did last week with the difference between tending and feeding, when you feed someone, you give them all this information perhaps about what they need to be and what they need to do with their life. That’s important. But nothing is as beautiful as the image of the God of the New Testament, the God that lives in you and lives in me, that he tends, pays attention to, listens to the pain, listens to the stress, and wants nothing more than for you and for me to be freed of the stress of guilt and shame. What a gift, and what a terrible shame it is that from certain pulpits, from certain religions, from certain and all religions are.

Come on. They’re not guided solely by God directly. You don’t go to a church and hear the voice of God directly. You hear it through another human being. And depending on how much that person has been touched with grace and living in grace, the more likely it is if. If they’re filled with that grace, they’re going to be teaching you something that gives you comfort.

And if you go to a place where it’s about judgment and condemnation, you leave with. With stress. So what a. What a beautiful thing to be sensitive to and to be aware of. And that is the transformation from the old to the new, from a judgmental God to a God of favor, a God of grace, a God of love. Foreign Father, your favor, your presence, your deep concern for us in our journey of seeking a better understanding of who we are and why we’re here and what we’re called to be to the people around us is a is an incredibly complex thing at times and then it’s almost like you tell us no, it’s simple.

It’s so simple it’s living in your favor, it’s knowing you’re always there. It’s using our life and our experiences to constantly teach us so that our destiny is to grow into a relationship with you that frees us from the stress that is not our inheritance, but our inheritance is peace. And we ask this in Jesus name, Amen. The music in this program was composed and produced by Ryan Harner. I’m excited for the opportunity to awaken your spiritual journey. If you enjoy this program, please subscribe and share it with a friend.

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