Making & Maintaining Room for Christ

5th Week of Lent (W)
Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP
St. Dominic Church, NOLA

In our readings for most of last week and all of this week (so far), Jesus shocks and outrages the religious believers of his day with increasingly ridiculous revelations about his true nature. He starts by claiming the authority to heal the sick by forgiving sins. He goes on to reveal that he is the Son of God. Then, yesterday, he makes his most blasphemous revelation, “. . .if you do not believe that I AM, you will die in your sins.” In other words, if you do not accept me as the Lord your God, you will die unforgiven. For the Pharisees, this is more than mere heresy, more than blasphemy—it's suicidal insanity! Surely, this man Jesus is demonically possessed or dangerously brain-damaged or both. And just in case the Pharisees aren't outraged enough, just in case they aren't already prepared to tear him limb from limb, today, Jesus throws a truckload of gasoline on the roaring fire, “. . .you are trying to kill me, because my word has no room among you.” Why is this so inflammatory? Our Lord is accusing his accusers of being the ones in rebellion against their God! Jesus' string of gobsmacking revelations raises an essential question for us: is there room among us for his word? If not, how do we make room?

Before we can answer these questions, we need to understand what “making room for his word” means. We've all heard—ad. nau—pastoral admonitions about “clearing out the clutter of our lives” during Lent. We've heard the demands for more silence, more contemplation, less work, less worry. There's no doubt that Lent provides us with the spiritual reasons and necessary excuses to slow down and pay attention to our personal and ecclesial relationships with God. But Jesus accusation here—there's no room in you for my word—is substantially more serious than a teacherly finger-wagging about the need to calm our busy lives. If I say to you, “Here's a 45ft. statue of the Sacred Heart for your house. . .”; or “Here's a pet elephant for your kids;” you would probably say, “Um, thanks, Father, but we don't have room for that.” You mean, “We have no place to properly store, properly house such a thing.” When Jesus accuses the Pharisees of having no room for his word, he means that they are completely unprepared to store, to house, to live with, to thrive in his teachings; they are unable and unwilling to build room into their lives, or renovate their lives so that his word can take up residence in them. Therefore, they will die in their sins.

At the moment of our baptism a room is built for us. Our parents, our godparents, the Church all pitch in and construct an indestructible room for us to store Christ's word. The room is permanent, but who lives in our room is a decision each of us makes day to day, hour by hour. If Christ's word is not in residence, something or someone else is. How do we make sure that we are keeping Christ and his word thriving in our room? There's no magic here. . .just the hard work of virtue, the good habit of trusting in God's promises; loving Him by loving each other; by seeing in the people we meet everyday a daily revelation of God's truth, goodness, and beauty; by sacrificing for the poor, the oppressed, the sick, the lonely, and the helpless; defying sin by forgiving those who sin against us; by wantonly throwing ourselves on the mercy of God and receiving every blessing He has to give us. With this kind of busyness, we keep our indestructible room filled to the ceiling with the Word of Christ. "If you remain in my word, you will truly be my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free."

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Coffee Cup Browsing

Great news!  It looks like 7 of the 9 Justices of the Supreme Court aren't buying B.O.'s assertion that the individual mandate is a tax. . .meaning Congress has no authority to impose it.   Of course, guessing SC votes is like reading tea leaves.

Did B.O.'s lawyer take a dive yesterday?  ObamaCare is wildly unpopular.  Having it struck down by the SC would save him from having to defend it before the Nov elections. 

Mark your calendar. . .politician caught telling the truth.  His mic was on and he didn't know it.

I'm looking forward to performing this rite! 

When every other argument/plea/threat fails, throw the Safety Card.  I did this a few times when I worked in the psych hospital.  Sometimes it was the only move left after being slapped down.  The bosses don't like workers documenting a "safety issue."

A bunch of self-anointed Brights use their superior intellects to mock religious belief.  This reads like the puffed-up rantings of a adolescent brat.  There are good atheists out there.  The Church needs them b/c they keep us sharp, e.g. Kai Neilson.  Why is Islam never an atheist target?

Race-baiter endangers the lives of a elderly FL couple.  In the old days, they'd call this a "lynching."

Oh, those Inconvenient Narratives. . .they are always messing up a perfectly good fairy tale!

The Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite finally reintroduced in England.  Sorry, but that miter is too much. . .

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Sisters supporting our bishops. . .

To any young women out there considering a religious vocation:

Many congregations of women religious women in the U.S. have publicly expressed their support for our bishops and their fight against B.O.'s violation of our religious liberty.

Many congregations of women religious women in the U.S. have thrown their support behind B.O. and his plan to force us to fund the mortal sin of others, providing him with "Catholic cover" for his power grab.  The LCWR has issued a statement lauding the contraception mandate.

If you are looking around for a congregation to join, may I suggest you consider one of these:

Religious Sisters Speak Out (link)

At press time, 22 orders of women religious who have posted on their websites statements supporting the bishops’ position against the HHS mandate:

Dominican Sisters of St. Cecilia
Little Sisters of the Poor
Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist
Sisters of St. Francis of Perpetual Adoration, IHM Province
Sisters of Life
Carmelite Sisters of the Aged and Infirm
Carmelite Sisters of the Most Sacred Heart of Los Angeles
Religious Sisters of Mercy of Alma, Mich.
Daughters of the Immaculata
Dominican Sisters of the Immaculate Conception
Carmelite Sisters of the Divine Heart of Jesus, Central Province
Congregation of the Divine Spirit
The Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, N.Y.
Franciscan Daughters of Mary, Covington, Ky.
School Sisters of St. Francis, Panhandle, Texas
Servants of Mary, Ministers to the Sick, Kansas City, Kan.
Sisters of St. Francis of the Holy Eucharist, Independence, Mo.
Sisters of the Resurrection, Castleton, N.Y.
School Sisters of Christ the King, Lincoln, Neb.
Franciscan Sisters of Dillingen, Immaculate Heart of Mary Province, Hankinson, N.D.
Sisters of Charity of Our Lady, Mother of the Church, Baltic, Conn.
Sisters of Our Mother of Divine Grace, Port Sanilac, Mich. 

It goes w/o saying that there is more to selecting a congregation to join than assessing their position on one political issue.  However, if a congregation is openly undermining our bishops on this fundamental issue, well, that's a pretty good sign that the sisters have seriously lost their way.

Why join an order that pretends to be an alternative magisterium? 

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Monday Fat Report (Octave)

It's +1 this week. . .ah well.  Up to 328lbs.

It could be much worse, I guess!
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Blog-begging for our OP novices and students. . .

I haven't done any blog-begging in quite a while, so here goes:  The Province of St. Martin de Porres is in the midst of its annual 1216 Campaign. . .

This is our major fundraising (i.e., mendicant, begging) event of the year.  Since Katrina our fundraising base here in the Nawlins' area has diminished considerably, so we are reaching out well beyond the local church.

The money we raise during the 1216 Campaign provides a huge portion of what we need to form our novices in Irving, TX and educate our students in St. Louis.

Since 1980, our OP students have been attending Aquinas Institute in St. Louis.  This is a collaborative studium with the Province of St. Albert the Great (Chicago).  Our students have been living in Jesuit Hall (!) on the campus of St. Louis University.  

In December of 2011, this living arrangement changed rather dramatically.  Our students moved into their own place.  We renovated a convent nearby and gave our students a place of their own.

You can see the new St Dominic Priory here.  The student brothers no longer pray in the basement of Jesuit Hall!  The young friars are particularly excited about the new choir stalls installed just a few days ago.

Formation costs for the novitiate and studium eat up a large portion of our annual budget.  So, we need help!  We need your help.  

If we are to provide the Church in the 21st century will well-educated, faithful, dynamic preachers, we need the support of those who have benefited from the preaching ministry of the Order.

If you have benefited from our ministry or long to see Catholic preaching and teaching thrive, please donate to our campaign.

You can donate online.  

Or send a check to: 

Southern Dominican Province
1421 N. Causeway Blvd.
Ste 200
Metairie, LA   70001

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Retreat report

Beautiful day yesterday in NOLA area!  Sunny, cool.  

The retreat with the Mt Carmel Academy faculty was a lot of fun.  Good food, good company, great facilities--Solomon Retreat Center in Robert, LA.  No one threw a book at me, so my part of the gig was (at least) not offensive, or not offensive enough to throw a book.

We covered:  reasons for the new translation, the Mass parts, nature of the homily, theology of offering and sacrifice. . .lots of fun.

Yesterday was the first time I've been across the Pontchartrain Bridge since I was about 11 y.o.  My family moved from Belle Chase to Slidell, and I vaguely remember us driving over the bridge.  It's not as scary some 35 yrs. later.

Off today!  See y'all tomorrow.

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Retreat Day

Headed across The Lake this morning to give a retreat to the faculty of Mt. Carmel Academy.

We'll be reading/discussing the Mass. . .line by line.  My fav retreat topic!

Fr. Philip, OP
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Coffee Cup Browsing

Welfare State + Contraception = Demographic/Financial Collapse. . ."Surely, this is the ultimate expression of the suicide cult that is the modern Left. . ."

EU Court:  same-sex "marriage" is not a right; however, if SSM is legalized, churches must comply. 

Like teenie-boppers squealing for the Beatles, EU Nannies welcomed the 2008 election results.  Now, not so much.  I believe the appropriate term is "Rubes."

Jesuit owned America Magazine once again beclowns itself by attacking the bishops' support for religious liberty.  Wonder what they will spend their 30 pieces of silver on?

A predictably dismissive NPR piece on last Friday's Religious Freedom Rally.  NB.  the use of polling to minimize Christian concerns and condescending labels for participants.


Atheists rally in D.C. to show support for non-religious liberty.  Good for them.  The Constitutional right to practice one's religion includes the right to practice no religion at all.  Now, will these folks stand up for our rights when the time comes?  The rational ones will.  Dawkins?  Not so much.
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No Cross, no Throne. . .

NB.  I wrote this homily three years ago while living in Rome.  Since the community Mass on Sunday in the convent was celebrated in Italian, I never got to preach it.  So, I thought I'd give it a hearing this weekend.

Fifth Sunday of Lent (2012)
Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP
St. Dominic Church, NOLA

Jesus is troubled. What should he say? “Father, save me from this hour” or “Father, glorify your name”? He chooses to glorify God’s name. Why? He says, “…it was for this purpose [to glorify God’s name] that I came to this hour.” By glorifying God’s name he fulfills his purpose. Does this glorification of God’s name accomplish any vital tasks other than praising the Father? Yes. Jesus says to the crowd at that time of judgment, “. . .the ruler of this world will be driven out. And when I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw everyone to myself." What Jesus says and does is the mechanism of our salvation; his word and deed makes us sons of the Father. What does he say? “Father, glorify your name.” What does he do? He dies. And then he rises from death to take us with him. So, why is Jesus troubled? To rise with him, we must die with him and our deaths must be in service to him. We cannot hope to escape the betrayal of Judas, the passion in Jerusalem, the nails and wood of the cross, and then expect to be part of a glorious Easter harvest. If we will follow Jesus up from the earth, we must follow him on the earth. This is what troubles our Lord: “. . .unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat; but if it dies, it produces much fruit.” To rise, we must fall; to produce much fruit, we must die.

So, are you ready to die? I mean, are you ready to follow Christ and produce the fruit he produced by dying on the cross? Most of us hope to avoid the kind of death that Christ died. And most of us will. At least in the particulars. Few of us will be scourged. Or force-marched to a burning landfill and nailed to a cross. Few of us will be subjected to public ridicule and executed to spare the nation the wrath of its foreign military governors. Few of us will be accused of blasphemy, religious sedition. If we are killed for the faith, it will be incrementally. Slowly. Almost invisibly. The proverbial frog boiled by degrees of increasing heat. The Enemy’s strategy this time around is far more subtle. More understated and restrained. This time we will be accused of hating ourselves, our neighbors, and our God; we will be accused of standing against truths the science and progress, against the beauty of Mother Earth, against the innate goodness of our human nature. This time, we will be charged with being inhumane, intolerant, uncompromising, divisive, and ignorant. And like all the other times, we will die. . .for preaching the simple truth of the gospel.

God’s will be done; therefore, we are troubled. So, what do we say: “Father, save us from this hour” or “Father, glorify your name”? We could ask our Lord to save us from this hour. We could. But why should we? Can we honestly claim we didn’t know what was in store for us? Can we look God in the eye and say, “Hey, this wasn’t in the brochure!”? “No one every said anything about suffering for the faith!” No, that would be a lie. If you know what it means to be baptized into his death, then you know what it means to be resurrected into his life. If you will rise, you will die. Why would you beg God to save you from the very thing you signed on for? Yes, we were promised a garden. . .and we will have it! Look for the path marked “Gethsemane.” Ask yourself: why do I deserve a better life and death than Christ? You might say, “Didn’t Christ die so we wouldn’t have to?” No, he didn't. No, he died so that we might have eternal life and have it most abundantly! That path—the Way to an abundant life, an eternal life—cuts straight up and through Gethsemane. And there is no escalator, no detour.

No detour, for sure. But there is hope; and here it is: “…when I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw everyone to myself." Though we may understandably fear the death we have signed up for, part and parcel of that death is the promise—the guarantee—the death is not the end; that is, death is not our end, our purpose. We were not created to die. We do not live to die. Though our bodies fail us, and we cease to live, we do not stop being exactly who God made and remade us to Be. In fact, in Christ, we are made perfectly who were first made to be. And only in Christ—perfect God, perfect Man—can we be perfectly who we are made to be for all time. When Christ dies on the cross, humanity dies with him. When Christ rises from the tomb—dead for three days, three nights—humanity rises with him. If you and I will be among those who rise with Christ, we must be among those who die with Christ. As Christ himself teaches us: “Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there also will my servant be.” If you read any detours in that sentence, you might need to get your eyes checked.

Whose path do you follow? Where are you on that path? Which Way do you go? You, like every man and woman ever created, will be offered, at some point, a bag of thirty silver coins. The Powers of this world want one thing for this price: a simple, easy accommodation, a compromise; an answer from one who has chosen to follow the Way of Truth and Life—“So that the many may avoid persecution or pain or inconvenience or anxiety, tell us what we want to hear; tell us that this Christ is a fraud, a myth; tell us that his good news is simply one message among many equally valuable spiritual options; tell us that we do not have to suffer the Cross and die in order to rise again; tell us that we can make our own lifestyles choices and still have eternal! Tell us, Christian, that God loves us just the way we are and doesn't want us to change.” At this moment, staring down at thirty pieces of silver, who are you? Where are you and where do you hope to end?

Before you answer. . .before you commit. . .hear again: “[Jesus] learned obedience from what he suffered; and when he was made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him.” If you will learn, if we will be saved. . .we will first suffer—maybe physically, maybe emotionally, maybe socially or spiritually. But we will suffer, and when we suffer for the sake of Christ's name, we obey his commandment to love. He loved us all the way through his Passion, all the way through the garbage of Gehenna, and on to the Cross. Like Christ, to rise, we must fall; to produce much fruit, we must first die.

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The Nawlins' Rally for Religious Freedom

The thunderstorms that rolled through Nawlins' on Thursday night fled Friday morning at the sight of about 300-350 religious believers (mostly Catholics) meeting in front of the Federal Building on Camp St.  

We had our signs.

We had petitions.

We had priests, religious, seminarians, lots of Pro-Life lay folks.

We had moms with babies.  Teens, dads, grandma's and grandpa's.

We had a large group of students from a couple of Catholic schools.

We even had one of the original framers of the Constitution give us a short history lesson!

Most of the people driving by honked horns and gave us the Thumbs Up.  A few shouted obscenities.

As expected, no media.  

Yours truly flubbed his own admonition to take pics.  I'd let the battery die.  After I got home, I remembered that my fancy-pantsy phone can take pics.  Oy. Poet-theologians are not tech-savvy.

When we left the rally, the group was praying the rosary.  

How did the rally turn out in your neck of the woods?

Update:  The Anchoress has some pics from all over, including links to more pics.  Doing the job the media won't do.
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Media Watch

The MSM will send two dozen reporters and cameramen to cover the adolescent antics of four OccuTards in Peoria. . .but they completely ignore 300,000 Pro-Life marchers in B.O. backyard.

I expect today's Stand Up Rally for Religious Freedom will either be ignored completely or portrayed as some sort of clergy led astroturf against the administration.  

Let's keep a watch on the MSM!  Take pics, vids during the rallies, and watch your local news and papers.  When they pull their usual deceptive nonsense, call them on it immediately.  We already know most "journalists" are little more than pipelines from the White House to the public.  Don't let them get away with any anti-religious

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Get caught being Catholic in public!!!

Get caught being Catholic in public!!!

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On being a small but brighter light

4th Week of Lent (Th)
Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP
St. Dominic Church, NOLA

We are all children of the Enlightenment; that is, we were all raised on a daily diet of rational skepticism, the need for scientific proof, and a general suspicion of the supernatural. Add to this mix a uniquely American pragmatism and common good sense, and you have a model for the modern person who strives in live in the real world of things. However, like most children, we've taken bits and pieces of our upbringing and incorporated our own experiences into a worldview that seems coherent to us. Since we are believers, we have rejected the idea that there is no supernatural realm. We've accepted the existence of God; the reality of angels and their fallen kin; the destructive consequences of sin and the free availability of freedom from sin. Though few of us would claim to fully understand how the supernatural world works, most, if not all, of us would agree that there is something like a world beyond the physical world. How did we come to this conclusion? Evidence? Wishful thinking? Just a gamble? Maybe a little of each? If we follow Christ, we do so by choice. We made a decision to believe, a decision to trust the promises of God and to follow His Christ. Evidence plays a supporting role and reason helps us to understand, but ultimately, we choose. We choose to believe the witness of faithful generations.

Jesus confronts his accusers with a radical assertion: I am the Son of God. He shocks the Jews to their religious core by claiming to have the authority to pass judgment on sins, to forgive those sins, and heal the sinner. In effect, he is claiming to be God Himself. So why does he say, “If I testify on my own behalf, my testimony is not true”? First, let's understand what he is saying. He means, “When I testify for myself, you do not believe me.” He's not saying that his self-witness is false, only that his testimony is not heard as the truth by those who will not to believe. Augustine says it perfectly, “For He knew well that His Own witness of Himself was true; but for the sake of the weak, and hard of belief, and [those] without understanding, the Sun looked out for lamps. For their weakness of sight could not bear the dazzling brightness of the Sun.” The sun, our brightest star, looked for lamps. The Son of God looked for smaller lights to reflect his brightness so that those blinded by the brilliance of his witness could see him for who he really is. 

The Church—for 2,000 yrs—has been and continues to be a global collection of those smaller lights, each reflecting a sliver of Christ's light, each shining out a glimpse of his true glory. The accumulated light of 50 generations, 20 centuries, with each new generation adding to the brightness of our corporate witness, this gathered light tells the true but as yet imperfect story of our collective labors toward bearing a final witness to Christ's triumph over death. Evidence supports our claim that the Church is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic, even if individual lights in the Church fail at being one or all of the above. Reason—as a divine gift oriented toward the Gift-giver—supports our incomplete understanding of God's complete Self-revelation. But evidence and reason alone do not constitute faith. Reason and evidence do not suffice as truthful testimony. We choose to trust; we choose to love; we choose to hope. And when we choose to trust, love, and hope, our smaller light is added to the global witness, making the Church's testimony to the glory of God's mercy all the brighter. We can choose to brighten the light of our witness, or we can choose to darken it. Join the faithful generations in bearing witness to the saving power of Christ!

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Coffee Cup Browsing

His frustration with the bishops is understandable. . .but his rhetoric and understanding of canon law are deeply flawed.  

Boys castrated in Dutch Catholic psych wards in the '50's.  This sounds like the sort of thing that trendy scientific "thinkers" of the progressive-wing would do.  Orthodox Catholics know better.

Update:  Yup.  Turns out that those castrating shrinks in the Netherlands were just "following orders" from the All Benevolent State, specifically a mandate to castrate sex offenders.  

Occu-Idiots:  No Chores Strike on May 1st.  Looking at the recent pics of Occupy herding, I'd say not one of them as ever done a chore.  Much less held a real job.

Wow. . .yet another 9-0 Supreme Court Smackdown for B.O.  Maybe appointing all those political hacks to the ranks of the DOJ is turning out to be a really bad idea, uh?

Only the minds of a public service union could come up with something this twisted.

Decades of socialist dreaming and cradle to grave welfare have destroyed Italy's future.

Outrageous salaries for archdiocesan bureaucrats. 

What is going on in China?  Tanks in the street, a reported military coup in Shanghai, ousters of Party officials. 
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Jesus is not equal to God

4th Week of Lent (W)
Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP
St. Dominic Church, NOLA

Jesus heals a crippled man at the Pool of Bethesda, ordering him, “Rise, take up your mat, and walk.” The Jews who persecute the Lord accuse him of breaking the Sabbath Law. When Jesus hears these accusations, he answers them, “Amen, amen, I say to you, the Son cannot do anything on his own, but only what he sees the Father doing; for what he does, the Son will do also.” This is Jesus' answer to persecutors' question, but what is the question? What do the accusing Jews ask of Jesus? Implied in the accusation is the question: just who do you think you are. . .healing on the Sabbath, forgiving sins, and ordering others to break the Law?” Jesus answers, “My Father is at work until now, so I am at work.” This answer only adds to the fury of his accusers “because he not only broke the sabbath but he also called God his own father, making himself equal to God.” The sheer audacity of Jesus' claim to be the Son of God is breathtaking b/c no creature can ever be divine, no mere mortal can embody the glory of the Creator. Breaking the Sabbath Law is crime enough to warrant severe punishment, but to claim divine sonship is beyond the pale, beyond anything these religious folk have ever heard. It violates the First Commandment of the Ten. Of course, as Jesus makes abundantly clear, he is no creature; he is no mere mortal.

Had Jesus' persecutors fully understood what he is claiming about himself, they would've been really, really upset. According to John's Gospel, the accusers charge Jesus with the heresy of proclaiming himself “equal to God.” Jesus does no such thing. He never claims to be equal to God. He claims to be God Himself. Does this seem like a distinction w/o a difference to you? Well, let me ask you: two nickels equal a dime, right? But would you say that those two nickels are the same as one dime? How many of you would say, “I am equal to myself”? Americans claim that men and women are equal, but we do not claim that they are the same. Being equal to someone is not the same as being identical. We can be “equal under the law” while being very different in every other way. The claim that Jesus is making about his person, his mission, and his ultimate destination are all bound together in who he is as the Son of God made flesh. When he acts, speaks, and thinks, we witness the acts, speech, and thoughts of God. It took us a few centuries to wrestle this insight out of revelation, and it matters a great deal that we guard it well. 

Why does it matter how we think about the identity of Christ? We need to get this bit of theology right b/c we place so much of the weight of the faith on the person on Christ. We claim to follow Christ. To do and say all that he did and said. This means following him all the way to the Cross, into death, and on to the resurrection. Imagine how different our understanding of salvation would be if we had concluded (wrongly) some 1,800 yrs. ago that Jesus was just a man with a really deep insight into the divine. He died a criminal and so would we. He didn't rise from the tomb and neither will we. Our whole faith would be limited to being nice to one another, doing a few good works, and sharing a communal meal once a week. Is that worth dying for? Would you give your life to imitate an executed 1st century Jewish heretic? Instead we have this, “. . .whoever hears my word and believes in the one who sent me has eternal life and will not come to condemnation, but has passed from death to life.” That, brothers and sisters, is why any of this matters.

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