God made you worthy of dignity and respect
Faith is not about being perfect
Faith is not about getting it all right, faith is about taking the journey, knowing that we can’t fully understand and know everything, at least not during this mortal life. As St. James says in the Epistle today, we all make mistakes. As St. Paul says elsewhere, we see through a glass darkly, we see through a mirror dimly. It is impossible for us to understand it all, to get it all right. It is impossible for us to be perfect.
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Be Doers!
Well, no more bread today! Instead, what we have are some pretty biting words from Jesus about traditions. When the Pharisees and some scribes notice Jesus’ disciple aren’t observing all the rules for cleansing, and purifying, especially around eating and food prep, they ask: “What gives Jesus? Your followers aren’t keeping the rules, they aren’t following the tradition of the elders, why not?”
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The Abundance of God’s Love
In St. Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians that we heard today, Paul offers a prayer for the people. He prays that they may be rooted and grounded in love. And he also prays that they may know the height and length and breadth and depth of the love of God. A love that surpasses knowledge, Paul says. When people are filled with this love, he says that God, through us, can do infinitely more than we can ask for or imagine.
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Genesis' Two Creation Stories
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The Book of Genesis has two stories about the creation of the world. These stories are not meant to be science or history, but that doesn’t mean they don’t contain truth. They contain a lot of truth, really important truth that we need to remember: theological truths, moral truths, ontological truths, truth about who we are.
Our first reading today comes from the second creation story. But before we talk about that, we need to talk about the first creation story because these two stories are in dialogue with each other. They are in conversation, and we can’t understand one if we don’t understand the other.
