We Were Born For This with Fr. John Riccardo

before anything else why don't we just take a moment and ask the spirit to descend upon us and to anoint this time in the name of the father and the son and the holy spirit father i want to ask for uh your blessing in a particular way upon the entire napa institute upon tim and john and all the brothers and sisters who make this event possible and who have given themselves to you so that the gospel might be unleashed in power now in this uh unusual and extraordinary way through the virtual conference well we're grateful for the opportunity to be alive right now in the midst of all that's happening we ask that you would give us courage ask that you give us wisdom lord we pray for your spirit to be upon me and upon all the brothers and sisters who are speaking help us to say only those things that you want us to say and be upon each of us who's listening that our ears would hear those things that you most want to resonate in our minds and our hearts so that we can step into this mission which is uniquely ours right now as the church at this time in our country we thank you in advance for all that you're going to do not only today but in the days and weeks and months ahead jesus we love you and we trust you father we thank you for your son spirit we ask you to inflame our hearts with charity for one another we ask all this through christ our lord amen in the name of the father the son and the holy spirit amen so it might only be me on the camera but i'm here on behalf of uh the team to which i belong to acts 29 so uh you can't see them they're off screen we kind of thought about doing what major league baseball is doing right now you might have noticed i watched one of the first few games and they've got all these cardboard cutouts in the stands which just looks really kind of silly but it would look even worse in a presentation like this so i'm talking but i'm talking really on behalf of all of us so let me just tell you a little bit about who we are so acts 29 hopefully you all know there's only 28 chapters in the acts of the apostles the whole point is that you and i are living right now better we would actually say that the holy spirit is writing right now the next chapter of the church in your life and in mine and so we stole that image from our archbishop here in in the archdiocese of detroit archbishop vigneron it's actually used pretty frequently i think by many of our evangelical brothers and sisters but that that's who we are so we all worked in parish ministry i'm a priest of uh almost 25 years now for the archdiocese of detroit and we all served together uh in a parish for the better part of maybe six years some of us a little bit longer some of us a little bit shorter and we describe ourselves in one of two ways we're either uh itinerant missionaries uh who the lord has called to this mission um or maybe better yet we might say that especially for for priests who might be listening um much like god called us to forgo marriage and family primarily not exclusively but primarily to care for marriages and families so god called us by analogy out of parish ministry so as to really care for parishes to try to speak into parishes to try to work in a particular way with with my brother priests and their lay leaders who are trying to help bring about transformation and re-creation in their parishes and so we started in july of 2019 and in the first year of our existence we've had the really the great privilege and blessing and honor of bringing a little bit more than 500 somewhere between 500 and 600 priests on retreat we've done some work with some lay folks around the country too but the bulk of our work has really been with with priests and everywhere we go we see more or less the same thing which is uh a sense of being tired and often lonely and isolated and getting tired of playing whack-a-mole which is what most of us do in parish ministry i mean your head just lives on a swivel the whole time and it's really informed our work and as we were praying just before we turned the camera on here somebody had the image and i had the the same image in my mind as it was said over me that what god wants to do right now is to shine something like a light a very piercing light on all of us and i want to further delineate that to say i think he wants to bring clarity to three things like a piercing clarity to three things first clarity to the times that you and i are living in clarity to the mission that god's giving to us and clarity to the urgency of these days that you and i are living in so at the heart of our work in acts 29 we have what we call three fundamental convictions this is something like the soil out of which our ministry really comes and the first conviction is this that you and i are not alive right now by chance god could have created you to be alive at any moment in human history it could have been 4th century madagascar right or 16th century france but he chose he willed he destined for you and me to be alive right now at this time in history in the midst of everything that's happening in our world and in the church and we summarize this by uh really finding a tremendous amount of inspiration from the words of saint joan of arc kind of a condensation of some of her words really where she says i'm not afraid god is with me i was born for this that's not just true of joan that's true of you it's true of me it's true of each one of us i'm not afraid god is with me i was born for this god has equipped you and me with natural and supernatural gifts for this moment and no one else can play the role that you and i have been tasked with playing i often think that god is he's creating this massive beautiful spectacular mosaic and each one of us is a tile in this mosaic i don't know if i'm a big tile or a little tile i really don't care i just know that i'm a unique tile that i have a role to play you have a role to play now why is this so significant what's so special about this time that we're living in there's a lot of ways to come at this but one of the ways that we come at it that we find to be particularly not so much inspiring as it is daunting is that this time in human history is particularly unique so uh just a little bit over a year ago now 2019 was the first time in the united states that the life expectancy in our country declined for a third consecutive year just let that sink in for a moment the life expectancy in the united states of america with all of our wealth with all of our technology with all of our expertise with all of our access to medical care is going down the last time that happened was 1918. so what was happening in 1918 well two things world war one which coming to a close and the second thing which we all know about now is the spanish flu the spanish flu unlike what's going on right now spanish flu killed 50 million people give or take that's what caused the life expectancy in the united states to go down for three consecutive years what's happening now in our age we're not living in a world war and we might be living through a pandemic but it's nothing like the spanish flu was sociologists say that the life expectancy in our country is going down because of what they call deaths of despair three of them most especially the first is the suicide rate the suicide rate in the united states since 1999 is up 30 percent in rural america it's up 40 amongst children ages 10 to 14 children 10 to 14. it's the second leading cause of death that's the first rate of dis or death of despair the second death of despair is the opioid crisis the united states is five percent of the world's population we consume 80 percent of the world's opioids and the last death of despair according to sociologists is the increase in cirrhosis of the liver which is up 65 since 1999 and especially in the ages 25 to 34 in what is supposed to be those ages that most of us look back and go man we were healthy and life was good and things were just going great i was dreaming about all that was going to come in that age group deaths due to cirrhosis of the liver are most rapidly increasing so that's that's our second fundamental conviction is that the world in which you and i are living right now is crying the third fundamental conviction that we operate out of is this that jesus institutes the church to be the means by which the cry of the world will get answered that's what we're supposed to be about through the body of christ through you through me people are supposed to come to know the father's love come to experience because of what jesus has done for us on the cross their own identity as the father's beloved sons and daughters be transformed recreated by the power of the holy spirit here's the problem maybe you've noticed the church is crying too and there's lots of ways to talk about this for me anyway the most powerful way to talk about this still is one word or one name mccarrick can you imagine being former cardinal theodore mccarrick who is now synonymous in the united states with the sex abuse scandal i don't know about you but i have felt convicted more and more by the lord to make sure that i personally name him every morning when i pray my prayer is that he will become something like a modern day king manasseh you might remember manasse in the old testament manasseh was the wickedest of all the kings who at his deathbed publicly repents and then the lord forgives him and welcomes him home may that happen with former cardinal mccarrick may he publicly repent and publicly name all those people in the hierarchy who knew all that they knew and made what has been a a cause and a source of tremendous uh uproar fervor scandal become an occasion of god using that for good but it's not just cardinal mccarrick or former cardinal mccarrick it's the sex abuse scandal at large 2.0 now at least in the united states um 37 of catholics in in the united states of america at least according to a gallup poll are considering leaving the church because of the sex abuse scandal but as a man who was a former pastor of his pastor for 15 years those things are significant by all means i don't want to diminish them but quite honestly they didn't impact our daily life anywhere near to the degree that just parish ministry impacted my daily life so i was pastor of a parish with about 3 400 families or so about 12 000 people we had a staff of about 25 and we lived going from thing to thing to thing to think to thing to thing so much so that i took the the month of july off after i left parish ministry before we began this work in acts 29 and i was with one of the members of our team and her husband on our uh for some of that time and i i turned and looked at them in the middle of this and just said you know i think i'm in ptsd and i meant it most pastors that i've come across over this past year these 500 plus guys that we've had a chance to minister to when we talk about this they all just nod their heads this is something like the untold story in the church this is the root crisis in my mind of the real problem in the church most parishes are just broken parish ministry i think is broken we need to do something different god's calling us to do something different that's a talk for another time but that just speaks into this third fundamental conviction that the church right now on a whole host of levels is crying so in in saying all this i just i just want to shine some light into this area this uniqueness of the time in which god has chosen destined appointed you and me to be alive right now all right that's the first bit of light that i think god wants just to shine the second thing is this you know jesus is not just kind this might be particularly apropos for men you know a lot of us have an image of jesus that goes something like this he's gentle he's loving he's compassionate he's merciful he's kind and he's all those things to be sure don't get me wrong but he's more than that jesus is absolutely and utterly unconquerable he is lord that's the conclusion of a prayer for most of us when saint paul writes jesus is lord those are fighting words to the people to whom he's writing right because they're living in the midst of an empire who has another lord right that's what caesar is called kyrios caesar is lord paul says no actually he's not jesus is lord and for me one of the most powerful passages that i found like the lord has encouraged me us in acts 29 just to soak in as paul's second letter to the colossians or his letter to the colossians chapter 2 verse 15 where he says god has stripped disarmed more literally disrobed the principalities and powers what are these principalities and powers the power of sin the power of death the power of hell and satan himself he has disarmed the principalities and powers making a public spectacle of them triumphing over them by his cross not on what comes into your mind when you hear those words but i'll tell you what went into the minds of the people in colossae that paul was writing to because triumph for the romans that's a very precise word a triumph was something which was held in the roman empire under very particular conditions and it usually had something to do with the emperor or a general early on it was either one later it was only the emperor coming into rome after having won a momentous victory and the triumph was this like mega parade in an empire known for parades and at the head of the parade would be caesar he'd be riding in his chariot and he'd be all cleaned up and behind him in a long line would be all these captives that he had taken from the territory that he had just conquered and at the end of the line would be either the general or the king of that territory usually naked chained in a cage with a sign above his head that said something like this this is the guy who used to threaten us he won't do that anymore that is what scripture says jesus has done to satan he has triumphed over him by his cross and the reason that's so significant is because you and i need to live with act with operate out of conduct ourselves with not optimism and not naivete i don't want to encourage us to be optimistic i'm not particularly optimistic about where things are going right now but we are supposed to operate out of confidence faith and trust in the lordship of jesus there is no other despite how it looks right now jesus is lord not just of heaven but of earth and the world and the church is firmly in his hands and he's the one who's destined you and me to be alive right now and he's the one who's calling us not just to be his disciples but to do the work of ministry and mission which is uniquely ours as his disciples in this a in which this day in which we live and so back in uh january maybe at the start of 2020 i was praying about a whole set of different things i was about to give a an address to some folks again we would all pray together as a team we do this all the time we pray daily together and as i'm about to go out to speak i felt like the lord said first to me and then to through me to everybody else and so i want to share with you these two words stop complaining really stop complaining jesus is lord live like it pray like it talk like it think like it let's let's live this way as his disciples huh so in the midst of all the uncertainty all the craziness and all the confusion that's going on all the unrest in the middle of the culture that we're living in right now let's ask the lord to give us confidence in him confidence in his lordship to remember to say that he is lord on his throne is not to say that he's far away he's not far away it's to acknowledge that everything is right here in the palms of his hands all right so given that what's our mission what's the task that god's entrusted to you to me individually and as the church as a whole let me get to that by saying this what's the message of easter this is how i've come to think about our mission more and more a lot of us me i think for a lot of years a lot of years as a priest um would have thought the mission of easter was something like this or the message of easter was something like this either jesus has risen and so will i one day right jesus is risen from the dead i will rise from the dead to one day by his power or something like on easter sunday god was breaking in showing what he could do if he wanted to but he really doesn't want to very often i mean miracles are kind of rare and so he's just kind of almost showing off that day but this isn't to be expected that might be a gross caricature over exaggeration but somehow we live that way many people in the pews and catholic churches live that way either the message of easter is jesus has risen i will or god once a while breaks into history but not very often and so we shouldn't really expect it what's the real message of easter i think the real message of easter is this deeply informed by cs lewis n.t wright and a whole host of others but especially these two here's how lewis puts it lewis says that that the gospel is really something as simple as this the gospel is the message of how the rightful king that is to say jesus has landed in the skies and until he returns in glory to put all things right you and i we're supposed to be agents of sabotage that is a great expression now to be clear let's make sure we understand what that means the weapons if you will that we're supposed to use are the weapons of truth and goodness and beauty and reconciliation and love but the lord's asking you and me to if you will blow up to rescue to free to liberate structures systems individuals which are in the hands of the enemy who he jesus has bound right that's what jesus says about the work that he's come to do when a when a strong man guards his palace his possessions are safe who's the strong man satan what's his palace this world who are his possessions us but jesus says when someone stronger than him overcomes him his possessions can go free that's who jesus is jesus is the one stronger than the enemy he's bound the enemy so that you and i can go free and as one of the members of our team mary says over and over again rescued people that's you and me as disciples rescued people rescue people that's what we're supposed to do rescued people rescue people so we're supposed to be agents of sabotage or as n.t wright is fond of saying you and i are supposed to be earnest about the work of recreation what happened on easter was that god began the work of recreating this world which he made which he loves beyond all telling so much so that his son became flesh so as to go to the cross so as to deliver us and to rise from the dead so as to conquer the powers of sin and death that was the beginning of recreation paul says to the people in corinth that if anyone is in christ he is a new creation or she is a new creation jesus says in revelation behold i make all things that began on easter sunday in your work my work our work individually and as the body which is the church is to continue this work of recreation mindful of course that we're never going to be able to do this fully until he comes back you know some of us know the song let us build the city of god terrible song don't sing that song you can't build the city of god but as right says we can build for the kingdom huh what does that mean here's an example i was talking uh to a judge one time and he said to me how do i do this how do i live my life as an agent of recreation in my vocation and he came to me and he says so maybe i could do something like this so maybe because i have to sentence people for serious things right could be murder they could be going away to jail for life and so i'm sitting there in a figure of authority i'm a god figure to this person and here's a way that i can recreate the judicial system in my own individual sphere of life my sphere of influence he says maybe what i could do is i could say to the person you know um you know bruce what you've done has repercussions and consequences and so it's just for you it's right for you to suffer those consequences right now you've taken a life and as a consequence of that you are going to be in prison and you're going to be in prison for the rest of your life but know this what you've done does not define who you are you can still become a great man and the judge looks at me says maybe if i said something as simple as that is that my serving as an agent of recreation i said absolutely he didn't even mention god there right he's trying to find a uh a clever way to to bring in the gospel even though in his particular situation he can't maybe explicitly name jesus that's what you and i are called to do whatever your sphere of influence is to be an agent of recreation so how does this play out for you and me individually let me give you two images let me talk first about uh you and me individually so jesus says in the gospel of matthew here this is the prop from off screen no no just bring it to me so they can see your hand that'd be great see this is very low tech here so jesus says in the gospel of matthew he says this he says you are the light of the world a city on a hill cannot be hidden no one lights a lamp to put it under a basket they put it on a lamp stand where it shines for everyone in the house in this little passage huh in matthew 5 14-16 i think jesus is talking about the mission that is yours and mine uniquely or personally as disciples and corporately as the church whether that's the parish or a diocese or the the body of christ as a whole first individually he says no one lights a lamp and puts it underneath a basket why not well because that would be stupid right i mean you don't do that you you turn the lights on so that people can see i mean i wouldn't flip the light switch and then cover the lights with duct tape that would defeat the purpose same with lighting a lamp you light a lamp in ancient times when there's no other light so that people can see right what what's jesus saying here he's saying i have not lit you on fire so that you would hide it i have lit you on fire so that it would shine or rather that i would shine the father would shine through you and when he says lamp this is what he's talking about he's talking about hand lamp the greek word is leaknose doesn't just roll off the tongue but this is this is a leaked nose huh and so i have one of these in my office and i have one of these in my house and i have it there because every morning i wake up and i want to remember this is supposed to be me so it's got a little slot here for a hand whose hand is supposed to be picking this up jesus i'm the lamp you're the lamp and every morning i want to be cognizant of the fact that jesus wants to pick me up and then he wants to bring me into different rooms in the house if you will the house is his world and the rooms are those places where i go every day and wherever i go i want to shine that's that's our mission huh in our words and our actions to shine but i'm going to give this off screen right now the props going to leave thank you vanna but it's not just it's not just an individual mission it's also a corporate mission right so the lord says that you and i are as the church a city on a hill cannot be hidden you are the light of the world he says why do you build a city in a hill maybe you've been in the hillside towns of italy or france you build a city on a hill because it's safe right you're up high it's a place that i can defend you can see people who are coming right so you build a city up high for protection but you don't light up a city for protection you light up a city on a hill so that the people who are down below in the valley who are lost who are stuck in the thorns and the brambles they know where to go to find help to find security to find safety to find love to find provisions that's what the church is supposed to be here's what nt wright says about paul's vision of what the church is supposed to be and what i increasingly think is supposed to be our vision of what the church is supposed to be he describes it as a microcosmos a little world of the world to come of the new creation that jesus began on easter sunday and is going to bring to completion when he returns in glory but it was supposed to be ongoing each and every day right now through your life and mine and our lives together as disciples he says this paul saw the church as a microcosmos a little world not simply as an alternative to the present one or an escapist country cottage for those tired of city life but as the prototype of what was to come in this prototype wright goes on to say paul knew was going to be two things at the same time it was going to be compellingly attractive and it was going to be threatening so we said something about the the the uniqueness of the times that we're living in right now huh i mentioned earlier that one of our convictions in acts 29 is that you and i are not alive right now by chance we were born for this moment i'm not afraid god is with me i was born for this you were born for this this this time this age this era is an urgent era or an era which urgently needs the work that god wants to do through you and me individually and as the body which is the church why here's why because maybe you've noticed the culture at large all around us is restless it's almost literally and in some places is literally on fire people are clamoring for justice for charity for unity for reconciliation and rightly so at least at its best right those are things which we as the human race should be concerned about here's the challenge politics as essential as politics are they can't solve the problem policies is essential as they are as as important as it is to make sure that the laws that we have are truly just laws they can't solve the problem why because the key to problem solving is to define the problem what's the problem this is the problem the heart my heart your heart their hearts the hearts of all these people who are clamoring for justice for peace for reconciliation for dignity and only god can fix the human heart and we individually as disciples and as the church we should know this more than anybody because the church knows from our experience what paul talks about when he says that jesus has knocked down the dividing law of hostility when paul's saying that he's talking about the the wall in the temple which said a gentile who passes this mark is responsible for his own death and in paul's day and age they saw jews and gentiles people who despised one another come to a place where they didn't just learn to tolerate each other they came to a place where they called each other brother and sister and they were willing to lay down their lives for each other we know this in the church we have the experience or at least we should have in our experience of god giving us new hearts and of us helping or experiencing rather people that we used to be estranged with now not just tolerating but loving and calling brother and sister only the church can fix the problem that we're in right now or rather only god can fix the problem but he's going to fix the problem through the church that's through you or through me or will we not let him that's the challenge right now the world's waiting the people on the streets and all these cities are waiting for us to do something to show a credible compelling witness of the difference that god and god alone can make that's why if we will be the church if we will shine like a city on a hill if we will take the time to share with people what jesus has done in our own lives if we will do what we can to be agents of recreation in all the spheres of influence that we have then we will be a means by which others will be attracted to the church because they will see it as a credible witness and others to be sure will be very threatened by it just like they were in paul's day why because they serve other lords and they don't want to bend their knee to the name of jesus but we can't operate out of fear so will you will me will i will us as a ministry will you as a parish will you as an individual were you as a diocese will we step into this age that god has chosen for us to live in or will we not will we do it with confidence in the lordship of jesus or will we not please god we will brothers and sisters we've been struck over and over again by the opening prayer at mass in the very first week in ordinary time i remember it hitting me that day it's continued to resonate with me ever since and in my somewhat loose translation of it it goes something like this lord give me the wisdom to see what must be done and the courage to do it may that be granted for you and for me may god give us wisdom to see what he's asking us to do and may he give us the courage to do it god bless you

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Length: 37min 26sec (2246 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 28 2021