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<TITLE>Byzantine Catholic Priest: the Homilies of Father J. Michael Venditti</TITLE>
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		<td valign=top width=20%><p align=right><font face="Maiandra GD" color=#7c6262 size=+1>Wake Up and Smell the Coffee, Part Four: We're All In This Together (an Epilogue to the Phillips Fast Epistles).<p align=right>For the Sunday:<br>Colossians 3:12-16;<br>Luke 17:12-19.<p align=right>For the Feast:<br>Galatians 4:22-31;<br>Luke 8:16-21.<p align=right>The Twenty-Ninth Sunday after Pentecost;<p align=right>The Maternity of St. Ann, also known as The Conception of St. Ann or The Immaculate Conception.*</font><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><font face="Maiandra GD" color=#7c6262 size=-1><p align=right>Return to <a href="index.htm">ByzantineCatholicPriest.com</a>.</font></td>		

		<td align=right valign=middle width-80%><font face="Maiandra GD"><p align=justify>11:42 AM 12/8/2013 — Our series on the Phillips Fast Epistles takes another winding road today for a couple of reasons.  First off, we have another dual celebration, as the Twenty-Ninth Sunday after Pentecost coincides with the feast of the Maternity of St. Ann, sometimes in our Tradition called the Conception of St. Ann, known by the Latins as the Immaculate Conception, for them a Holy Day of obligation, for us not; that's the reason we have two complete sets of readings.  It's also the Sunday following the feast of our Holy Father Nicholas of Myra.  <img src="conception.jpg" align=right hspace=15 vspace=5>We have a further difficulty in that the Apostolic reading for the Sunday is displaced in much the same way that the Gospel was displaced last week.  Last Sunday's Gospel was displaced because it is always read on the Sunday of the Forefathers coming up; today, it's the Apostolic reading that's displaced for the same reason; so, the first one we read today is the one for the Thirtieth Sunday, also from Colossians.  I've always dealt with this annoying jumble by falling back on St. Nicholas or the Conception of St. Ann, but we've done both several times.  So the question becomes: can this reading, which comes from the middle section of the letter to the Colossians, in which the Apostle deals with morality and the virtues, fit in with the theme he's been ranting about in all the other readings we've been picking apart?

<br>&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;The very question, of course, betrays a spiritual fallacy: we don't take the Scriptures and manipulate them to fit a predetermined theme; they tell us the theme, and we conform ourselves to it.  But I've found that, when we do that, the theme imposed on us actually fits in a beautiful way, which you would expect when you recognize that the Liturgy is not so much the work of man as it is the work of God.

<br>&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;The Apostle has been screaming at us to recognize the times in which we live, to live our Christian faith less passively, to see ourselves as an army repelling an invasion of evil.  He's been encouraging us to actually put a face to the enemy, anticipating what would be revealed by the Blessed Apostle John in the Book of Revelation.  The irony of it all is that, for all his ranting and raving and jumping up and down and stamping his feet about sin and evil, his message is underhandedly consoling; it's the idea that, when we fall into sin, it's not entirely our fault; there's a third party involved when we sin against God.  The Devil is real, he wants us to sin for reasons stemming from his own sense of pride, and he attempts to lead us in that direction by lies and deception and a never-ending appeal to our natural appetites which we are physically inclined to obey anyway, and which we could never satiate left to our own devices—that's the deception part—and which we cannot resist in any case without a direct infusion of Grace by God.  The deception part, which I just glossed over very quickly, is actually very clever, because the natural appetites are so constructed that they can never be totally satisfied: the more you satiate them, the more they re-adjust themselves to make us desire more; so, we get caught in a never-ending spiral into a complete slavery to the passions, the end result being that the more we think we're satisfying ourselves, the more we are left empty and wanting.

<br>&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;So much for Scriptural psychology.  Our first reading, taken from the middle section of Colossians—the little part of the letter that deals with the virtues—while it may seem extraneous to this discussion, really isn't because it elevates the subject from one of how to resist the Devil in our individual fight against temptation and sin to one of how that fight can be fought, and even won, in the context of our relationship to one another.  The Apostle begins the very brief reading with a lovely little litany extolling the virtues of the ideal Christian; and, again, it's Msgr. Knox's translation which makes it comprehensible if you can see through the Victorian language:

<blockquote><p align=justify>You are God’s chosen people, holy and well beloved; the livery you wear must be tender compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience; you must bear with one another’s faults, be generous to each other, where somebody has given grounds for complaint; the Lord’s generosity to you must be the model of yours.  And, to crown all this, charity; that is the bond which makes us perfect (Col. 3:12-14).</blockquote>

<p align=justify>Every memory and good experience I've ever had I would gladly sacrifice if I could have Ronald Knox's brain for ten minutes, or just his facility with the Greek language.

<br>&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;You can see, I hope, where this is going: all this talk about fighting the Devil, including the military metaphor the Apostle gave us two week's ago, is now funneled into the context of our membership in the Church; in other words, we have not been parachuted onto the front lines alone; we're all in this together; and, when one of us has a little set-back, we strengthen the line of defense by supporting him and picking him up, not by knocking him down.  Knock him down and condemn him, and we've punched a hole in our own defenses.  Forgive him, pick him up and dust him off, and the line holds.  After all, as Paul has been telling us for the last three weeks, our failures to resist temptation are not entirely our fault: we're under attack.

<br>&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;The really important line in that passage, which is so clumsily translated in the New American Bible, but which Msgr. Knox makes to come alive is: "<font face=System>καθὼς καὶ ὁ κύριος ἐχαρίσατο ὑμῖν οὕτως καὶ ὑμεῖς</font> (the Lord’s generosity to you must be the model of yours).”  Think back, if you will, to our discussion of the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant from the Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost and how it illustrates the true meaning of that petition in the Lord's Prayer wherein we ask God to “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us,” the meaning of which, we said, was that when we forgive others, we are not giving a forgiveness which is in our power to give, we are merely passing on what we have already received as a gift.  The tag line, if you remember, was that it doesn't mean “if I forgive others then I will be forgiven”; it means “I have been forgiven, therefore I must forgive others.”

<br>&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;I said back at the beginning of Phillips Fast that all these Apostolic readings were about Grace.  Here's your proof, because this is exactly how Grace operates.  Christ sheds His blood on the Cross, canceling the debt of our sins; He rises from the dead and establishes the Church; <img src="nicholas.jpg" align=left hspace=15 vspace=5>He imparts to that Church the power of the Holy Mysteries, including the power of absolution; He institutes a priesthood and the Holy Eucharist to guarantee His presence among us always; He bestows His teaching authority upon the Apostles and their successors to continue to supply us with His guidance in changing times; He even infuses the very human and natural act of marriage with supernatural Grace.

<br>&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;So, here comes along St. Paul, seeing the Ephesians and Colossians both making no effort to resist temptation, falling prey to every enticement the Devil has to offer, failing to make use of the Holy Mysteries of the Church, even descending into fighting among themselves about the stupidest things, and all at a time so early in the history of the Church that most of the New Testament, including the Gospels, hasn't even been written yet, and the presence of Christ walking this earth as a man should have still been fresh in everyone's mind.  It's no wonder he gets pissed so easily.

<br>&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;Now, next week Phillips Fast enters its second phase wherein the Church begins to prepare us directly to celebrate the incarnation, and we observe those two Sundays which directly prepare us for Christmas: the Sunday of the Forefathers and the Sunday of the Genealogy or the Ancestors of Our Lord.  Those two observances are too important to be replaced by something else just for the sake of being original; so, we must end our romp with St. Paul at this point.  If you can take away anything of value with you from the last four weeks I hope it would be something that would help to guide you in the examination of your conscience in preparation for Confession, the special times for which are indicated in your monthly calendar.

<br>&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;I appreciate the fact that reading St. Paul on your own can be difficult, especially if all you've got is the common Catholic translation of the Bible that everyone seems to use, and that the Latin Church requires to be used in Church.  Some people are actually afraid of St. Paul; they try to read it, but it's all just “churchy-sounding” words that don't seem to say very much, due mostly to the mechanical nature of the translation.  I hope I've been able to strip away the veil from them somewhat, and will leave you, then, with the beautiful sentiment with which the Apostle leaves us at the conclusion of today's reading.  It's an appeal, after all he's been saying, to find peace in the fact that we're all in this together because we are all part of the Church.  And when you hear the last sentence, try to remember that the Colossians were hearing this letter read to them during their own celebration of the Divine Liturgy, and would, when the letter was finished, sing the hymn during which the gifts of bread and wine would be brought to the Holy Table for the priest, just as we are about to do:

<blockquote><p align=justify>So may the peace of Christ, the very condition of your calling as members of a single body, reign in your hearts.  Learn, too, to be grateful.  May all the wealth of Christ’s inspiration have its shrine among you; now you will have instruction and advice for one another, full of wisdom; now there will be psalms, and hymns, and spiritual music, as you sing with gratitude in your hearts to God (Col. 3:15,16).</blockquote>

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<blockquote><font face="Maiandra GD" color=#7c6262><p align=justify>* In the Byzantine Tradition, major feast days are not transferred to other days because they fall on a Sunday; instead, the readings and other texts from both are combined.  The two Epistles are read together as one, with only the title of the first one being announced; likewise for the two Gospels.  While the Feast of the Immaculate Conception is a Holy Day of Obligation in the Latin Church, the Conception of St. Ann in the Byzantine Churches is not.</blockquote>

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