 I'd just like to ask for your help a little bit as I get started. If you would be so kind as to pray for me, pray that I can speak the Lord's words to you and I'll pray that you're able to hear what he wants you to hear. If we could just pray for each other in a moment. And let's also ask for a lady's intercession. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners. Now and at the hour of our death, amen. Jesus tells us in the gospel to be perfect. This is often a justification that people use for perfectionism, to justify striving, to justify comparisons. And Matt described it so beautifully this morning, what happens when our insecurities get flared up and then we retreat to those places where we feel confident, we cling to our successes, we cling to our own abilities. So I also suffer from insecurities and especially being with so many of my brother priests. It's easy to get a little bit insecure about what I can offer you. So I cling to my own areas of where I can be better than somebody else and I sized up the whole crowd and determined definitively that nobody has a longer beard than I do. So I found some security in that. When Jesus says be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect, we have to take that in together with the parallel verses from the Old Testament in Leviticus. Moses says be holy for the Lord your God is holy and in Luke's gospel we hear a parallel verse, be merciful as your heavenly father is merciful. The kind of perfection that Jesus is talking about is related to the verses that came just before it, which are a perfection in love, universal love, even to the point of loving our enemies, to love as the father loves, to be merciful as the father is merciful. And whenever we talk about holiness in Christianity, we always talk about holiness in terms of love because holiness is to be one with God and God is love. Perfect is perfect in love and that challenges us. It's a good way of making an examination even for preparing for an unbound session what prevents me from loving? What gets in the way of my love? Who do I find difficult to love? Where is my heart held back from loving? Because Jesus assured us of his love and he calls us to love with his love. In John's gospel, love one another, sometimes the translation rightly so is as I have loved you but the translation is also accurately as I love you. And so we look back on the ways that he has loved us and we allow his love flowing into us right now also to fill us and to flow over unless there is something that holds back that love, something that makes us afraid of loving as he loves us or resistant to loving those who have hurt us. It's a good way to examine our hearts. Where am I being bound, held back from loving with the father's love, from being perfect as the father is perfect? We can also look at the two readings together. Of course the father is perfect and Jesus is also perfect but that doesn't mean that he's perfect at everything. Even Jesus is not perfect at everything. For example, Jesus is not perfect at being a woman. It's fairly obvious right? He's not perfect at everything. Sometimes we have this idea that we're supposed to be perfect at everything but we actually heard in the first reading that definitive of Jesus is that he became poor. He wasn't afraid of his poverty. Jesus became poor. He emptied himself of his divinity. He emptied himself of divine privilege. We don't know all of the details of the inner consciousness of Jesus but apparently he made himself unable to know certain things, emptied himself of the divine prerogatives of knowledge and power in order to become poor so that he could be really human because to be human is also to be poor. We have some gifts that the father has entrusted to us that he places in the hand of his little child to use for a time but they remain always his gifts as Saint Therese said it. He gives us gifts to use but the way we began our life as a single-celled human being and the way that we will end our lives unable even to breathe until our heart stops and we make that passage to the father. The way that we begin and end is definitive of who we are in our human poverty but the fact that we are so poor means that we can also constantly receive. I love what Neil says and I quote it all the time. Unbound leads us from bondage to weakness because the danger is that we depend on ourselves too much and then we limit ourselves only to our human powers. When we know how poor we are we start to depend on God's power. When we depend on ourselves we lock ourselves into that small story but when we start to depend on God we allow him to do in us things that we could never do on our own. We've all taken this for granted too many times maybe even on a daily basis but as priests especially who can make Jesus present in his body and blood? None of us can do that by our own power. We need to own our poverty and we can only do that by his power and so many other things as well and we all know the experience from the confessional. Someone dumps out, pours out pain, suffering, experiences and we feel so poor in the face of that. What can we possibly say to this person? What could we say to communicate Jesus love to this person? We feel the depths of our poverty and in that moment a word comes or maybe just love fills our hearts and we're able to communicate that love by our presence. Our affirmation, being empathetic, just sitting with someone in the darkness for a moment and then giving them a hand to help them take a step up and make an active hope in the Father. But it's from our poverty that the Lord does the most beautiful things. The riches that Jesus has the great treasure is his trust in the Father and we only really learn how to trust in the Father when we get in touch with own and stay in our own poverty. So Jesus enters into all of our poverty to teach us the way of trust in the Father and helps us to call out, to cry out in that trust in the Father. The word in the gospel, be perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect is from the word telos in Greek, teleo is to perfect. Telos is a goal, it's a destination and so the perfection that Jesus is talking about is really being complete and in our completeness we are not self-sufficient. Even what God reveals to us in the completeness of Father's Son and Holy Spirit, his completeness is in divine relationship and so the perfection of Father is not in becoming the Son, the Father never becomes the Son. The Father always remains, he always maintains his distinction as Father and remains in relationship with the Son. The perfection of the Father is to be Father, the perfection of the Son is to be Son. The perfection of our humanity is to be poor and that's why Jesus makes the proclamation, it has been perfected in his last breath on the cross. It's the same word, it is consummated, it is finished, it is perfected when Jesus has become totally poor even in pouring out his last breath and so unbound moves us from a place of self-sufficiency and a place of pride, a place of depending on ourselves, on our human powers, into a place of poverty where we have a deeper dependence on the heavenly Father and what a joy it is to help people step into that trust, to be able to trust again, to be able to open their hearts because without trust, without poverty it's not possible to have relationship and it's not possible to have love. So the Lord invites us in the context of this youth grist to open our hearts to our deepest need, to get in touch with our own poverty and we feel that in different places. The Lord has entrusted us with certain gifts and we use those with confidence but there are also places of our poverty where we know deeply how much we need him and that's the best place to receive him. It's a hungry man that enjoys food the most. It's a homeless man that loves to have any kind of shelter over his head and it's a poor man who loves to have even a dollar to his name and as we open up that poverty, our deepest hunger, the hunger for love, the hunger to be seen, to be known, to be affirmed, to be strengthened by his presence and to be loved especially in our poverty. As we open up that poverty to him now let us make a space for him to fill us with his body and blood in the Eucharist.