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 second Sunday of Lent.

The Opening Prayer O God, who have commanded us to listen to your beloved Son, be pleased, we pray, to nourish us inwardly by your word, that with spiritual sight made pure, we may rejoice to behold your glory through 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 Genesis, 15th chapter, 5th through the 12th verse, and 17th and 18th verse the Lord God took Abram outside and said, look up at the sky and count the stars if you can. Just so, he added, shall your descendants be Abram put his faith in the Lord, who credited it to him as an act of righteousness. He then said to him, I am the Lord who brought you from Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land as a possession. O Lord God.

He asked, how am I to know that I shall possess it? He answered him, bring me a three year old heifer and a three year old she goat, a three year old ram, a a turtledove and a young pigeon. Aban brought him all these, split them in two and placed each half opposite the other. But the birds he did not cut up. Birds of prey swooped down on the carcasses, but Abram stayed with them. As the sun was about to set, a trance fell upon Abram and a deep, terrifying darkness enveloped him.

When the sun had set and it was dark, there appeared a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch that passed between these pieces. It was on that occasion that the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying to your descendants, I give you this land from the Wadi of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates. The Word of the Lord Responsorial Psalm the Lord is my light and my salvation A Reading from the New Testament from St. Paul’s Letter to the Philippians, third chapter, 17th verse to the fourth chapter, first verse join with Others, in being imitators of me, brothers and sisters, and observe those who thus conduct themselves according to the model you have in us. For many, as I have often told you, and now tell you, even in tears, conduct themselves as enemies of the cross of Christ. Their end is destruction.

Their God is their stomach. Their glory is their shame. Their minds are occupied with earthly things. But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we also await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. He will change our lowly body to conform with his glorified body by the power that enables him also to bring all things into subjection to him. Therefore, my brothers and sisters, whom I love and long for my joy and my crown in this way, stand firm in the Lord, the Word of the Lord.

Verse before the Gospel from the shining cloud the Father’s voice is heard. This is my beloved Son. Hear him. The Gospel for this Sunday is taken from St. Luke 9:28 verse to the 36th verse. Jesus took Peter, John and James and went up the mountain to pray.

While he was praying, his face changed in appearance and his clothing became dazzling white. And behold, two men were conversing with him, Moses and Elijah, who appeared in glory and spoke of the exodus that was going to be accomplished in Jerusalem. Peter and his companions had been overcome by sleep, but they became fully awake. They saw his glory and the two men standing with him. As they were about to part from him. Peter said to Jesus, master, it is good that we are here.

Let us make three tents, one for you, one for Moses, one for Elijah. But he did not know what he was saying. While he was still speaking, a cloud came and cast a shadow over them. They became frightened when they entered the cloud. Then from the cloud came a voice that said, this is my chosen Son. Listen to him.

After the voice had spoken, Jesus was found alone. They fell silent and did not at that time tell anyone what they had seen. The Gospel of the Lord these Sundays of Lent contain the message of God to to man in a very, very powerful way. And it makes sense that since this season was the time that the catechumens would be entering the church, it was like their last full instruction as to what they were being baptized into. A great mystery, a mystery that was inviting them to allow something to happen to them that I think has been the most difficult part of this covenant, these promises that God made to us. The image in the gospel seems so clear to me that one of the things that Jesus has intended to do teach to all of us is seen clearly for the first time in this mystical Experience of these three disciples seeing the body of Jesus transfixed, transformed into the brightest light they’ve ever seen.

And to see in this vision two of the most important people from the Old Testament. Moses, who gave the law, Elijah, who represents all the prophets. They’re conversing. And what happened to the disciples when they saw this is they were completely confused. And they went into a place that would make sense to me. Whenever God is manifesting himself inside someone, there is a kind of, whoa, this goes way beyond my realm of what is possible.

So you sort of disassociate. So they go into this cloud. It’s reminiscent of the thing that happened when Abraham was called by God and manifested himself to him. And when he was explaining the relationship that he was going to have with Abraham and everyone after that, when that whole thing was unfolding, he went into a dark, dark place. I think it’s interesting. Abraham was in a place of darkness and fear, and the disciples were in a place of just confusion and cloud.

When they came out of that, they were changed. But I don’t know how consciously you are when you have some kind of major shift in your life in terms of understanding something that you never saw before. To see it for the first time is an amazing experience. But it doesn’t necessarily instantly erase all the things that you have been doing, your patterns of behavior based on something that was different than that. I can’t imagine what it was like for Abraham to experience the presence of God. We know that God had appeared, at least in salvation history.

We know he appeared first to Adam and then to. To Noah. The thing that happened when God had that time with Adam and Eve is so important to understand clearly, because what it is, it’s not about God being upset with human beings for being human and sinning, lying and believing a lie. But what was really happening in that relationship is it was established that God knew that this was a part of human nature, and he allowed them to leave, not with anger and resentment, but with, okay, if you choose to work out your salvation or you work out your way of understanding who you are on your own, I’ll give you that opportunity and, and I’ll just tell you first a little bit about it, how hard it’s going to be. But you go, not cursed. Only the serpent who lied was cursed.

They weren’t literally, you know, sent with a great prayer and blessing, but they maybe wouldn’t have even understood that. But they were sent to accomplish what they thought they were here to do. And that is to figure out life on their own, figure it all out. That is such a core part of human nature. I want to be the one who figures it out. I want to be the one who accomplishes is in our DNA.

It is in our human nature. To go against that is almost to literally go against our nature, our lower nature. But as you and I both know, this whole story of salvation history and the same thing happens in our own individual lives because our lives are reflections of the same full story we find in salvation history. But it’s simply that this task that we’re asked to do, this thing that we are making a promise to God to do, we know it has to have an ingredient that we naturally would rather not have. And that seems strange to say this, but we would rather not have a partner. In some ways.

I would like to accomplish this on my own. So the first covenant that God made with Adam was to send him forth in a sense and say, I’ll give you all the information you need. Now go and learn. And there was a covenant with Noah because God got so upset with everybody. It seemed like he couldn’t find a single soul in the world that had a heart that wasn’t just packed with evil. An angel finds the family Noah and says, oh please save Noah.

And he destroyed all the other life life of everyone else and started over with Noah. And then he made a promise to Noah. I’ll never do that again. I’ll never do that again. Don’t you love the way God seems to grow in his awareness of how to work with human beings? It’s not.

He didn’t have to learn that. It was the way he revealed himself, a God who is learning about a relationship that he longs for more than anything. And we resist it, even though there’s something deep inside of us that longs for it more than we ever realize. Then we have the covenant with Abraham. And what Abraham has promised is two things. God said, I’ll come into your life if you’ll trust me, and I’ll give you a land.

And that land is going to be wonderful. And then later he adds to the covenant. He said, well, now not only am I going to give you land, but I’m going to give you the thing you long for the most. And back then, people didn’t really believe in such a thing as life after death. So they had this instinct. They wanted to continue to live.

So it was through their posterity, through their children, that they saw their life going on. So Abraham didn’t have any children with his wife Sarah, and That’s how you get the inheritance, through the father. So God said, I will give you a child and you’ll have posterity. And then let’s just stop there with the way God worked with people and just fast forward to the gospel. Now. Here’s a new covenant being established.

And how can I best describe to you the difference between the old covenant and the new covenant? It’s this look at the ceremony that’s in the first reading. Animals are cut in half and laid opposite each other. And then God symbolically walks between them. And Abraham in a way was to walk between them. He didn’t actually maybe do that.

But the idea is that you would make a promise to fulfill the thing that you were going to do. You would say, I will not ever keep my side of the covenant because if I don’t, I will die, I will have the fate of the animal, or some part of me will die. My integrity, my ability to keep a promise. What’s so fascinating about that is even after God made that covenant and realized that the Israelite people who were so stiff necked couldn’t keep their end of it, he said, oh, this is not ever going to work because if they don’t keep their part of it, I don’t owe them anything. And so he changed it. And he said, no, I’m going to make a change in this covenant.

I’m going to say no, I will never leave it. I don’t care how far you go from me, I will always be there. That’s my promise. You see this wonderful mysterious way in which God being revealed in the Old Testament becomes so attractive because you see him making adjustments to his demands based on human nature. And since God will always have the image of a demanding God, there’s something beautiful about him starting off with something. How can we say it over our head, over our capacity?

And when he finds out we can’t do it, does he just write off the human race and kill them all? No, he said, I will change it. I will work with you. So you end up at the time of Christ with this God who has made a promise to his people that he’ll never ever, ever leave them. And since he keeps seeing them as not being able to keep the covenant and he adjusts it, now he comes to the part where he’s not going to adjust it anymore, he’s going to change them. And that’s the incarnation.

And what is it that the disciples are watching? They’re watching the very thing that is the key to keeping the covenant on Our part. And that is a God man, A God man, a human being who it would have been so interesting to know the way the disciples slowly grew in their faith. But they must have seen Jesus as a human being completely. They couldn’t imagine him being God. And then he was promising them a career in the power structure of the world at that time.

I mean, they were going to be major players in the world. And yeah, they were attracted to that. They had no idea what it was going to take to be who God wanted them to be. But the idea of having power was pretty intoxicating, as it’s always been with people. So they really thought they were going to be given a key position. And every time Jesus would explain something to them, they’d sort of shake their heads and say, this doesn’t make any sense.

This doesn’t make any sense. And who can be saved, you know, that kind of thing. You just see this God man doing the work, preparing them for the reality that they see in Jesus happening to them. And they see that the things that Jesus is explaining about the way life really is, the truth of our existence, the truth of who we are, wouldn’t make any sense to them either in their culture. It didn’t make sense in their own way of seeing themselves. It didn’t make sense.

It pushed them, pushed them, pushed them. It wasn’t until this figure explained by his very life that the whole thing God wants from us is not a commitment to do what he says, but to become who he is and who we are. And when you become that, you have given up something that is so crucial. Your need to be in charge, your need to know what you’re here to do, your need to feel you have the ability to do it, all of that is the great obstacle. And isn’t it interesting that God said, that’s in you as humans. I placed it there on purpose because I want to be the one who enters into you and makes this all happen.

That’s what I want you to believe. Everything I ask you to do, you can’t do without me. Trust me, I’m in you. Not to judge you, not to tell you what to do, but to enable you to be a source of salvation for the world. Closing prayer Father, the mystery that you’ve given to us, to ponder, to wonder about, to feel the depth of what it really is, is this mystery of you coming and living with us, within us and this partnership is hard for us. It’s really hard for us to understand it.

It’s easier for us to be told what to do and then be judged by that, than to enter into this mysterious cloud of unknowing and find ourselves in union with you. And then we are somehow, in a way, not in charge, and we need to surrender our wills to yours. I used to think that meant leaving the world, but it means deep, deep investing yourself in the relationships that you have in the world around you. And through your presence in us, we’re told to believe we can make amazing changes in the world, changes we long to see. So bless us with a faith in that. Trust in that.

Let it happen to us. Amen. 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 by listeners just like you.

You can make a one time or recurring tax deductible donation on Our website Pastoral 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’s daughter studios. Copyright 2024.