Sermon, 6th Sunday after Pentecost, June 30, 2013

6th Sunday after Pentecost – June 30, 2013

Epistle Romans 6: 3-11              Gospel Mark. 8: 1-9            

           

The Introit prayer in today’s Mass is interesting. “The Lord is the strength of his people, and the protector of the salvation of His Christ: save, O Lord, thy people, and bless thine inheritance, and govern them forever.” The first half of this prayer teaches us what it is that gives us our courage. It is our faith - “The Lord is the strength of His people.”  In the second part of the Introit we find a conviction of our own nothingness when we pray, “The Lord is the protector of the salvation of His Christ . . . govern them forever.” We are nothing without His protection.  With our faith we understand, as Abbot Guéranger wrote,  that “All the truth, all the goodness, all the beauty of created things, are incapable of satisfying any single soul; it must have God. So long as man does not understand this, everything good or true that his senses and his reason can provide him with . . . is . . . nothing more than a distraction from the one object that can make him the happy being he was created to be.” The Lord patiently waits for all our human schemes to fail, then He helps us if we permit Him to help.

There is a fundamental lesson in today’s Gospel about who Jesus Christ is. He says to His Disciples,” I have compassion on the multitude.”  We can see the sympathy and pity of human tenderness that shows us Jesus was fully human.  And in the miracle of feeding thousands of people with a few loaves of bread and a few fish we see our Lord’s Divinity. Today’s Gospel is a clear presentation to us that Jesus Christ has two natures, one human and one Divine.

Who are those our Lord speaks of who “came from afar off?” Certainly some in that crowd came from a great physical distance, but there is also a mystical meaning here that refers to those who, having repented from their sins, have now come to the service of the Lord. Because the more a man sins, the further away from God he is. Those Jews who knew Jesus to be the Messiah came to Him from close at hand, because they learned about Him through the Law and the Prophets. But the Gentiles who believed Christ, in a manner of speaking, came from afar because no sacred writings from their past had prepared them to believe in Him.

In his Epistle today, St. Paul speaks of how Baptism changes our lives through the forgiveness of sins, “. . . our old man is crucified with [Jesus] that the body of sin may be destroyed, and that we may serve sin no longer,” so that we also reckon ourselves “to be dead indeed to sin, but alive to God.”

Three thousand years ago King David was established for us as a type of confession and repentance, and as a type of one who is “dead to sin, but alive to God.” After his sin with Bathsheba and the murder of her husband Uriah, David was confronted with these sins by the Prophet Nathan.  Despite his position as king, despite his wealth and power, David did not resent Nathan for chastising him, rather, he made an immediate and complete confession of his sins and wept with sorrow for what he did. How far the mighty fall we say. But it is not might and wealth that makes great men fall.  It’s their pride. King David rejected that pride and made a humble and complete confession and repentance of his sins. What we admire today of David is not his wealth and power but rather his humility of heart and his love of God. That has survived these past three thousand years, and will continue to survive into the future. David’s wealth and power died with him as it does with all of us. +++

THE TERM "XMAS"

It a common misconception that the use of the term "Xmas" instead of

"Christmas" spelled out was started by those who hate Christianity and who

want Christ to be removed from society.  Actually, the term "Xmas" has

religious origins.  It is not some kind of X-ing out of Christ,

removing His name from the season. 

In fact, the X is not a Roman X at all, but the Greek letter chi,

which looks something like the Latin X.

Chi and rho are the two letters in ancient Greek that begin the name

<i>Christos</i> [Christ].  The chi-rho was used on the standards of

Constantine's Roman army when he defeated Maxentius and brought Christianity

into the Roman Empire as its official religion in the early fourth century.

The symbol is often seen on a priest’s traditional Mass vestments.

So, "Xmas" is actually a more ancient form, in a way, recalling to

our minds the origins of our Faith, in which Greek, as well, as Latin, is

paramount in Tradition.

(Thanks to Traditio.com)

We Celebrate the Tridentine Latin Mass