Lansing LEM Session 2 How Does the Church Get Well?

so so we just sat through kind of an assessment of where we are the reason for that is not to wallow in it or to like woe is us it's just to acknowledge it uh we were talking over here like um craig was mentioned like there was a conversation about ptsd you know they've been brought up by some other people i mean these are real things that we experience that we don't usually talk about and it's healthy to be able to talk about now the question is so what does the lord want to do like how do we get better if the church is crying and the church is instituted by the lord to be the means by which the world's cry can get answered how does the church get well right no one has the answer to this we don't have the answer to this but we have three principles not methods not programs but principles which we think the lord has just revealed to us over time and experience that help the church get well they're not on your slides i don't think i'll just mention them to you the first is this it's to reacquire a biblical way of seeing so for example lots of people are trying to preach in the election right now lots of people are preaching on the election right now this this is from my perspective what i'm what i'm seeing in people's response oftentimes when i s when a priest or a deacon preaches on the election oftentimes the response from the lay faithful is one of two things it's a whole set of people who are like finally someone said something or a whole set of other people who are like who the heck are you to be telling me how to vote and i think that's indicative of we have remember we got 79 of our people don't even go to mass the people who are at mass if i was to ask them how many people here have made a decision to surrender yourselves to jesus i'm not sure how many hands would go up and so we have and i don't mean this as a a judgment on someone's interior i just mean on that judgment on someone's exterior we have a lot of folks who are at mass every week who i actually think are remarkably anti-clerical and anti-church but they're there because i'm catholic i don't really believe much that the church teaches but i'm catholic you know like i'm irish and uh and i love being catholic i disagree with pretty much everything she says but i love being catholic and so we a key is i have to hear again the gospel that's what we're going to soak in this morning and the beginning of the afternoon and by hearing the gospel i'm not going to try to convince you of the gospel i'm just going to try to share with you how i see the holy spirit's the only person who can convince anybody and the beauty of the gospel is paul says the gospel is power not the herald of the gospel is power the gospel is power it changes lives it changed mind please god it changed yours so the first way to get well we would argue is to reacquire again a biblical way of seeing the second way to get well is the staff has to become healthy of the three principles this is the one that requires the most work and unfortunately there are not a lot of people in the church or rather in the country who are able to help the church get well i love amazing parish they do amazing things i think they have four coaches four that's great but we got thousands of parishes we need desperately need coaches to help us get well and if you can get well if you can like i would say about the parish i had a chance to serve that we were at one point we were a great staff we were a bad team like we were really productive we got a lot done the lord did amazing things like despite us or at least despite me but we were not a good team we had a lot of politics we had a lot of meetings after meetings we didn't have a lot of trust we didn't have a lot of vulnerability we had a lot of silos this area was doing good this area not so much we have got to get healthy if we can get healthy then we can really go out on mission that's the second principle and then the third principle is what we call god is the architect and that's what we're going to spend the latter part of the afternoon talking about i'll tell you what that means right now just so you can have it i'm firmly convinced we're firmly convinced god already has a plan for your parish and you don't need to sit around in a circle and have a brainstorming session to try to figure out what it is we need to get on our face and to ask him to show it to us and if we'll do that he will and the way he'll do that is once we've become healthy which means now we can go at it like that's the thing i say about us as a team you know like i love nick and chris and mary and steve and kelly who works with us part time and they're dear friends of mine but the thing i most love about us we have great conflict and we push each other like crazy and no one wants to win we just want the best idea we just want god wants and when you get to a place like that in a parish staff and you can say that with honesty about yourselves amazing things are possible and then you can go as a team and you can pray and you can ask the lord to show us like what is it you wanted me i don't understand i can't hear you and the way you discern is you come back after you pray and you go what did you hear and then you argue and you argue to clarity and that's how you discern these things so those are the three principles that we think so what we want to do first is we want to we want to spend some time allowing ourselves the luxury again of soaking in the gospel the unexpected and extraordinary news of the gospel i'm looking at tom out there and so i'm thinking al cresto would often say you know i think a lot of people's perception of christianity is something like especially younger people kind of passe nothing really to see there move along somehow the unexpected and extraordinary news of the gospel has become for so many people in the world that we're living in that we're trying to reach either ordinary or it's bad news and if you've recognized this lately but we are dangerous a little group in the university of northern iowa was just shut down a pro-life group the university will not allow them to exist because they're hate speech because they're for life and one of the persons who was responsible for saying they can't exist says all opinions are not equal some opinions lead to people getting killed and she wasn't speaking on behalf of the pro-life group which is trying to defend the unborn and the lives of the women who are carrying them we are increasingly considered dangerous and i think it's going to get worse don't know that but that's the way it looks so our task our first task in the midst of all this is to hear the gospel anew and then to share it with people fleming rutledge anybody familiar with fleming rutledge this is a woman who i've just come to love to no end she's a uh elderly anglican woman anglican priest who writes in a book uh called the crucifixion in the final analysis theological speculation can only take us so far we need to know the story and i would argue most catholics don't know the story i don't think most catholics have ever heard it i think they've heard parts of it i think the reason for that is our lectionary i'm not advocating going rogue so don't misunderstand me i'm just saying the lectionary presupposes you've been evangelized the constant cry from people when they have the encounter with jesus for so many of them is i don't know the bible help me know the bible more right most of our people don't know the story the story is the gospel and by the gospel it's not matthew mark luke and john the gospel is the gospel huh paul says i am not ashamed of the gospel it is the power of god for salvation huh again remember it's the gospel that's power not the herald oftentimes we i think we we mistake and and misinterpret what it is that paul's saying and we think if only i could speak like so and so or if only i had this gift forget that you just need to say the story and we want to try to share the story that's what that book's all about in a simple way as we know how it's four words if you know these four words you know the gospel created captured rescued and response created captured rescued response try those four words i think that's the easiest summary of the gospel i know and we want to just walk us through that again this morning the word paul uses for power huh the greek word it's the word we get uh the word dynamite from this is not ordinary news the tragedy peter craft would often say as we unfortunately as disciples of jesus we have managed to undo the miracle of cana we've turned wine back into water we've turned the only person who never bored anybody the most interesting person in the universe jesus we've made him boring and jesus ain't boring pope francis the message capable of responding to the desire for the infinite which abides in every human heart that's the gospel that's the advantage that you and i have as being heralds of the gospel like i know what you want not because i'm smart because i know what it means to be human you want insatiable happiness true fulfillment and i know how you get it god he has a monopoly on happiness and you can try to fill it with lots of other things it ain't gonna work john paul two in a document that he wrote on catechesis he says this about the the the gospel the core of the gospel the kerygma we would call it huh the kerygma is the initial ardent proclamation by which a person is one day overwhelmed and is brought to the decision to entrust himself to jesus by faith so like i'll just challenge well father ed's a bad example probably because of christ the king so father matson like now you're a bad example too father smith who's back here who's got a dead perish father smith this sunday ask your people at mass given the fact that it's going to be small anyway because of the covet thing how many people here have been overwhelmed by the gospel try imagine this at a typical parish on a sunday and you're looking out going ah one two three five six okay great how many people here have made a decision to entrust themselves to jesus by faith to surrender their whole lives to jesus by faith imagine this at your parish or somebody else's parish anybody that's why this is the first principle we think for getting well i got to learn to see again and everybody sees we all have lenses we all have glasses we just don't recognize them we're all seeing the world in a particular way the question is am i seeing the world the way scripture reveals the world so here's the way that i would ask it so if i showed this imagine i'm a high school history professor or history teacher and i'm asking a bunch of freshmen there's a picture here's a multiple choice quiz why are they there option a the beaches in france are spectacular no right option b the mona lisa is to die for in paris no option c you can't get better coffee than the coffee on champs-elysees no you know right like option d they're there to fight dum-dum yeah now i show this picture was he there this cute sappy sterile blah picture what's he doing there i would argue we should have as immediate and as quick an answer as we did for the soldiers landing at normandy but i think for most catholics there is not clarity on that question like why did god become a man so imagine imagine nick and i live in france and it's 1944 it's june 7th and we've lost brothers and sisters my mom got shot our father's in a concentration camp in poland we've been living under nazi tyranny for a set of years now for four years we're sitting in the coffee or sitting there having coffee in the morning bad coffee not like that stuff that's pretty good by the way i don't know where you get that but that's really good so i said they're having a cup of coffee paper boi throws in a newspaper i open up the paper and i read this headline and he looks at me and he says hey what happened yesterday and i say [Music] not much looks like the allies landed is that how i would read the headline of course not right i mean somebody came somebody's landed somebody's come to fight for us somebody's come to rescue us from a tyrant this isn't news this is unbelievable life-changing extraordinary news the gospel is infinitely better than that news was for the people of france and the people of europe and june 1944 infinitely better because the world's under the dominion of a tyrant who's infinitely worse than hitler so the gospel is what what john paul is talking about that initial ardent proclamation this is the kerygma which now suddenly like everybody knows or lets people throw this word around i've seen some people say things like well you know we have to do some things before we get to charismatic preaching i don't think that's true quite frankly i think you lead with this and the easy way to lead with this and whether it's in a conversation or in preaching is simply can i just share with you how i see the world if they say no well then you've saved time right if they say yes you can do this and i can do this in three minutes or i can do this in three days but the more we can learn how to explain to people to more than explain to share with people the extraordinary news of what it is that god has done for us in the person of his son the more people's lives will be softened and hearts one to jesus and understand why it is that they should respond to him in the meantime it seems often times like we're trying to convince them of something that they don't want to be convinced of i'm giving up convincing people i'm just going to share with you the gospel and i'm going to let god do it from there so the kerygma's four parts huh which are typically defined as this the goodness of creation sin and its consequences god's response to our sin and our response to what god has done for us john paul said that's supposed to overwhelm a person and bring them to a decision to surrender themselves that doesn't do it for me so i gotta find a way to share that one of the ways to share that that i found helpful is to ask questions each of which is a really big question so for each of the four parts is a profound question the first part the goodness of creation the question is why is there something rather than nothing mary and i were in um uh iowa where were we des moines there's one catholic high school in des moines one like every catholic kid in high school goes to the one school so we were doing a retreat for them we were walking them through this got to that question why is there something rather than nothing this one young guy i think he was a sophomore he came up to us at the break and he said father i don't know what you said after that question but i couldn't stop thinking about that question that is a huge question like why does anything exist why do you exist why are there planets why are there pandas why is there anything right second question why is everything so obviously messed up third question what if anything has got done about it and the fourth question if he's done something about it how should i respond that's still a mouthful and it may be hard for some people to remember so i've learned to just reduce it to four words which i find to be really helpful created captured rescued and response for each of these words when we so this isn't something that i'm supposed to teach so much is it something i'm supposed to soak in absorb reflect on sit in front of the blessed sacrament with and ask the spirit to overwhelm me again so that i will again surrender myself to jesus because you know thinking of romans 12 you know to offer yourselves as a living sacrifice to christ right the challenge of a living sacrifice is it keeps crawling off the altar as one person once said that's me every morning i have to crawl back onto the altar every day and so do you so when i'm meditating on each of these four parts i'm asking the holy spirit for a very specific grace when i meditated on create i ask for the grace of wonder and trust when i meditate uncaptured i ask for the grace odd as the sounds of despair when i meditate on rescued i ask for the holy spirit to give me the grace of unshakeable confidence in the lordship of jesus and when i meditate on response i ask for the grace of gratitude and surrender and courage so we want to just take some time to do these things so let's do what we said we want to ask the holy spirit to do let's just ask him real quick right now to give us this grace so father we pray that your spirit would descend upon this room and upon each and every one of us right now and then as we contemplate the grandeur of the universe that you would reawaken within us a sense of wonder and a sense of trust and help us to remember that whatever our image is of you it's wrong and you are so much bigger and so much more powerful and so good beyond anything we could imagine we ask it in jesus name amen you

Channel: ACTS XXIX

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Keywords: #FrJohnRiccardo, #Catholic, #ACTSXXIX, #GodWantsHisWorldBack, #YouWereBornForThis, fr john riccardo, father john riccardo, catholic reflection, catholic church, acts chapter 29, acts xxix, kerygma, evangelization, gospel, good news, catholic priest, catholic parish, you were born for this, god wants his world back

Id: UEMHKfg-lZE

Length: 26min 58sec (1618 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 15 2020