 I will briefly spend a little bit of time on the road to Emmaus but I'm excited to be able to look really at three themes quickly. The first one is hope. I believe that we live in a very, very challenging world and things are confusing to the church and I think we need hope desperately. And so I'd like to speak briefly about that. I want to talk a little bit about what I would call world view or it's also called imaginative vision and I'll talk a little bit more about that and then I would hope to get to, we've got the time, a really simple solution to restore hope called the little way. And so I'm looking forward to that. Well that's pray, name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen. Lord Jesus, we ask that you would send us your Holy Spirit. Now at this moment, but Lord throughout our entire lives, that you would transform not just our hearts but our minds, that we would see what you see, that we would love what you love. The world pushes us to think about things, everything differently from you, but you through the power of your spirit can transform us into your image. Be with us Lord, we love you and we entrust ourselves to you through the mother you've given us as we pray together, Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. 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. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen. Well I'd like to talk to you a little bit about hope. Hope is a very interesting virtue and like the other virtues were taught by St. Thomas Aquinas and others, that the virtues are actually opposed by vices in a very unique way. There's actually two vices that oppose every virtue. One of them is the exact opposite of the virtue so for hope the opposite would be despair but the other vice that attacks is a counterfeit. It's a shallow pretend version and the pretend version, the counterfeit for hope is presumption and so I want to talk to you about how we need to avoid presumption because it's going to, it'll paralyze us and how we need to avoid despair because it also paralyzes us. We have to be able to act with hope and hope is different than optimism. Optimism is the whimsical desire, the wish if you will that things will get better and I stand before you tonight brothers and sisters I am not an optimist. I do not have a whimsical view that things are going to get better but I am here tonight with you filled with hope. Hope says if we fall to our knees, if we draw close to the scriptures, if we immerse ourselves into sacraments, if we work our tails off if and only if we're immersed in prayer and in the sacraments because grace is everything and then we work and we suffer. God will bless that and we could see things change for the better in dramatic ways. Hope is amazing. It's this wonderful virtue. It's poured into us at baptism and strengthened in confirmation and every in all the sacraments to be able to see the power of this great virtue. It's interesting to see that St. John Paul II sometimes was referred to as an apostle of hope. His autobiography, Witness to Hope, he wrote on the threshold of hope. He spoke a lot about because I think he saw the same thing that there are challenges with us and there are challenges on the horizon that will require us to have the virtue of hope and not mere optimism. I want to give you an example of presumption and how I think sometimes Catholics have a faulty or an incomplete view of a biblical passage which we all know very, very well and that we need to understand that it can lead us to presumption. We know it well in Matthew 16 verse 18. Jesus says, upon you Peter, I will found my church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it and I think this if we're not careful can lead us to presumption. I heard people say things like this, well, we're going to win in the end, right? And that's true but this is where the presumption comes in. The margin of victory is very much up for grabs. We're going to win but really the margin of victory is everything. There are billions of people on earth today who do not know Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior and if we don't go and get them, they may die without ever having known him, ever having known to call out for his mercy. But if we were to pray and immerse ourselves in the sacraments and the scriptures and we were to go in hope, then we could reach them and they might live forever with God. We can't presume because the margin of victory is everything. Many of you have family members and loved ones who are in a questionable place with the Lord right now. We want to be filled with hope and then to act. We'll talk a little bit more about how to act. I want to talk to you about despair and I'll give you an example. Just a couple weeks ago, I got back from Greece. I took my wife to Greece, a pilgrimage. The pilgrimage was the footsteps of Saint Paul and it was beautiful. We had 50 Catholic families, a bishop and about five priests on a four mass sailing ship. It was unbelievable, mass and holy hour every day, great pilgrimage sites and then also a happy hour every evening. The people who invited us say, you need to understand, Curtis, if you're going to come when you pray, you're going to have to pray hard and when you play, you're going to have to play hard. Michael and I looked at each other and said, we can do that. It was amazing and probably the highlight of the trip was the day we were in Patmos. Patmos is where Saint John the Apostle was exiled and where he received the book of Revelation in a vision and dictated it to one of his young disciples. The cave is there and it's an amazing situation. It's a large Orthodox monastery above the cave and we're down in the cave and this is the place. They're just 100% sure and it's just amazing to be there. There's a little notch where Saint John would have been able to put his head and as you look out from the cave on a clear day, you can see Ephesus. Ephesus is where he had been exiled from. You may remember that he brought the Blessed Virgin Mary there after the persecutions in the Holy Land increased. He brought Mary to Ephesus. Ephesus was one of the largest cities in the world but it was neither Jerusalem nor Rome which were dangerous places for Christians. So Ephesus was relatively calm. Later St. Paul would come and live there and write a famous letter to the Ephesians and so we were there and it was just, it was spectacular and great day of prayer. The next day we sailed to Turkey was our one day in Turkey and we went to Ephesus and Ephesus is devastating. It's literally devastated. It's in ruins and I want to read to you just a quick passage from the very letter of Revelation to the church at Ephesus. They're told in Revelation 2 verse 2, I know the deeds in your toil and perseverance that you cannot endure evil men and you put to test those who call themselves apostles and they are not and you found them to be false. All positive compliments now the challenge and you have perseverance and you have endured for my namesake and have not grown weary but I have this against you. You have left your first love. Remember therefore from where you have fallen and repent and do the deeds that you did at first or else I'm coming to you and will remove your lampstand. The image there of removing the lampstand is I will remove the church. A church founded by Paul and John and Mary. Church was flourishing that received a beautiful letter from St. Paul. It has been illegal to be a Christian in Ephesus for centuries. The lampstand is gone. In fact when we were there we spent the day in Ephesus and I found myself devastated. I said we came here to pay money to see what non-christians broke. It's all gone and you go and the council of Ephesus was held there. The first Mary and dogma that Mary is the god bearer the theotokos was declared there and as the case with Mary and dogmas they're really about Jesus. That Jesus is one person and we don't our natures don't have moms or as persons we have moms and so Jesus is two natures human and divine united in his divine will divine personhood had a mother and a father and Mary's the mother of God and it's kind of cool the people outside were chanting about Mary being the mother of God. The bishops inside were thinking I think they're praying and trying to figure out and the people are chanting it hit me while I was there of course they're chanting their great great grandparents knew her. Oh my goodness it's so real but the place with the council of Ephesus to a place is in ruins and then we went to the other side of town to the basilica of St. John which is written ruins and we were traveling with a guy who's kind of a character and he knows how to get things done if you know what I mean he went to the Turkish government and said could we have mass on the ruins of St. John's Basilica and they said we don't know we don't do that and he said are you sure and so Bishop Tubes who are we're with the wonderful bishop from Beaumont Texas said mass on the ruins of St. John's Basilica we first started to talk to the local tour guides they said there hasn't been a mass here in over a decade and then we talked to some others it's there hasn't been a mass here in over 25 years and as we dug a little bit more it may have been hundreds of years the apostle John's tomb is there it was moved from the ruins of Ephesus to where the basilica was and then was later destroyed the church is gone but it doesn't stop there there's six other churches in the book of Revelation who will get warnings for various things and all seven of those churches are no longer they have no Catholic presence at all no Catholic presence at all in fact if you look at the New Testament you look at the letters written to the cities Rome Corinth Galatia Ephesus Philippi Colossae Thessalonica Rome is the only city that still has a majority Catholic presence all of those churches are gone they're either dominated by Muslims or in some cases like Corinth there's a strong Orthodox presence but Rome's presence is not there and I left Ephesus is the sense that we lost we got trounced and I found myself being angry that this had been destroyed and I thought this is not the attitude that Paul had when he came here he loved these people with the love of Jesus Christ and he wanted better for them and I remember sitting I said bishop can I talk to you at lunch and bishop tubes at lunch and I said I've been in doing evangelization for 25 years I don't even know of anybody who's actually talking about sending Catholics back to Ephesus or to Smyrna or any of these places to win them back to Christ into the fullness of faith in the Catholic Church we have to I'm not saying that focus should do that but I'd like to encourage people to I don't know what God's calling us to do but I found myself despairing for a couple of hours and then realized I can't live and despair we have to pray we have to dive deeply into the sacraments and then we have to act with the power of the Holy Spirit and so that's that's hope and I'm very grateful that we have an opportunity to do this and I'm here to tell you what I'm going to share with you works it works if we didn't invent it we just stole it from Jesus and it works but there's a really simple stuff that we as Catholics can do and I want to talk about that but before I do I want take one step also on to the issue of worldview or imaginative vision because I believe if we don't understand this we can't provide a solution and I would say things have gotten so bad that if we don't understand this we can't make headway we can't make headway now what do I mean by worldview well my good friend Ted Street was talking to some of our leaders the other day Ted Scott glasses and he said you know worldview is kind of it's not what you see it's the lens through which you see and it's developed over time you're sometimes we're frequently not aware of what it is but lots of different influences form the way we look at things and and then Ted said my eyesight is so bad that when I take off my glasses I can't tell if you're a boy or a girl which is exactly what's going on right now in our culture they've got broken lenses and things that are so obvious they can't see and I'm not saying they're bad people I'm saying they're held captive by a worldview which is resistant to the gospel and I want to talk about how that happened and then I want to talk about how we can overcome that because there's a simple simple solution the great thing is is everybody in this room can participate in this there are superstars in this room there are priests in this room men and women who are called to do unbelievably great things there are also folks that are relatively ordinary who have been called to live extraordinarily ordinary lives and you can do this too powerfully so I want to talk about that but what I want to see is that there's a a set of influences that are going on in our world and it's been going on for a long time Dr. Sree led our leaders in the study of a book the rise and triumph of the modern self by Carl Truman I don't have time to get into Truman's study he takes the argument back hundreds and hundreds of years and builds a compelling case that we've been wobbling for quite some time and now we're spiraling completely out of control and in the last generation it's just become undeniable that people are lost in a desperate sort of way but I just want to pick up the last generation because I would argue that something's been going on in the last generation that was built upon the sand of the previous couple hundred years that Truman talks about that we're already we were already thinking poorly or inaccurately about things see worldview is it's not what you think it's it's how you look at things it's it's a look at it this way I'm an LSU fan whenever Alabama loses it's good right off the bat I don't even think about it it's just great I just love when Alabama my two favorite teams LSU and whoever's playing Alabama and I just it's I don't have to think about it it's just right there I'll give you another example on the feast of the sacred heart this year the Dobs ruling came back and role was overturned praise God but there are millions of people in our country who immediately saw that as terrible news they didn't think about it any more than you had to think that robin overturned was a good thing because there's all kinds of thoughts and views and convictions that you have that leads you to be pro-life so yeah we can learn the arguments but we have deeply held convictions that are are poured into us and I want to talk about how that's happening and how I think it's happened in a particular way in the the last generation now I would go back and say I think we're talking about storytelling I think without a doubt the greatest storytellers in the history of the world are our Jewish brothers and sisters and the Catholic Church they've been telling stories for millennia for many many years when those stories were being told the person who told the story and the people who were listening did not know how to read stories were the lifeblood of the family when the sun went down you were done light a fire and tell stories and so dad and mom would tell stories and they would tell the stories of their ancestors and the great things and the terrible things that had happened and this would become the framework for their life and as Catholics we tell the stories of the saints but I would tell you that I think in the last generation an entirely different set of stories have been told and they're not from our background we have the best story in the world we are historically the best storytellers but we've been out story told in the last generation marvel comic strip 19 billion with a b dollars in storytelling and growing these numbers are probably six months old star wars 22 and a half billion dollars harry potter 25 billion dollars game of thrones three billion dollars in addition to that you've got video games 35 billion dollars a year facebook 86 billion dollars twitter 4 billion instagram 7 billion pornography 95 billion dollars now i'm not here to critique the stories much there's a couple stories in here like porn and the game of thrones i would critique dramatically but my point is let's let's take harry potter i didn't have my kids read harry potter when they were young i actually had an argument with archbishop chap you about this he said why won't you let your kids read harry potter i said i don't have anything against harry potter my kids don't know our story and until they know our story i don't want to listen to somebody else's story and it's the imbalance see here's what's wrong with these stories there's two things that are radically wrong with these stories the first thing is god is not in these stories oh i know when you first saw the star wars we as catholics injected god well obi won kinobi's kind of a christ figure okay but but you did that they didn't do it harry potter there's no christ figure and when we project that these are these are worlds in which god is not in nor is he the center of the story god is in and is the center of this story amen the other thing that i would have against them they're not true i hate to break this to you but harry potter never lived neither did obi won kinobi these things are all made up and here's the problem when young people read and watch this and they don't know the biblical narrative they don't know the lives of the saints when they start to think about the most important things in life they think about it from this perspective that becomes the lens they're looking through the world of harry potter the world of game of thrones the author of harry potter said i wanted to write a story about bad fathers the author of game of thrones said i wanted to write a story in which good lost an evil triumphed these aren't good stories i'm not saying they can't be entertaining but if we don't know our story first then we're going to be susceptible to thinking about the world and so a young person today when they think about the most important things from the perspective of these stories without god at the center that aren't true when they think about that and they're confronted with real life issues like death they don't know what to do if you ask a young person today if you knew you were going to die in an hour what would you do young people today would say i'd find the prettiest girl i could find and i'd make love to her to which we would say really you're gonna die and meet god in an hour so your your plan is to commit mortal sin that's the craziest thing you could possibly do but hollywood doesn't understand death or sex and they've been teaching our young people not to know about death or sex at all and these are two of the most important things in life to be able to understand this to be able to see these huge forces are coming at us they're they're they're powerful they're backed by billions of dollars they're taking millions of hours of our time and our energy and they're not moving us towards a godly culture i'm not saying that we say no no to all these those are decisions you can make what i am saying is if we don't turn up the volume in our story the great story of salvation history and the lives of the saints which is salvation history being played out in the era of the church if we don't know those stories of our young people don't know those stories they won't be able to evaluate things like dobs from a christian perspective do you see what i see says the hymn at christmas and it's a good question do you see do i see what he sees when jesus sees a mother in an unplanned pregnancy is it primarily about choice or primary about life for jesus it's primary about life do you see what he sees because we live in a world where they don't and and we're losing the battle and we have to recognize that and i would say the battle we're losing the most on the college campus is the issue about homosexuality and gender i would say we've been making steady grounds for the 25 years i've been serving on college campus on the life matters young people today are more pro-life on college campus than they were 20 years ago and it makes perfect sense many of them have brothers and sisters that aren't here because they were aborted many of them have had abortions and it didn't make anything better they don't believe what their parents or grandparents might have believed in the 60s make love and not war free love they don't believe that because they know that sex isn't free it's one of the most costly activities in our culture millions of babies and their lives defend that the broken lives we work with college men and women and i will say i see it particularly in the young women that we work with the devastation of giving themselves away physically to men who don't love them and then the pursuit for more attention and more love it's like drinking salt water it doesn't satisfy it actually makes you crazy and it can kill you now the men are experiencing the same thing but for some reason they seem to be a little more asymptomatic on the emotional side but they're just as devastated and to be able to recognize this and so how do we rescue them now we're not talking about emphasis we're talking about our young people our sons and daughters and grandsons and granddaughters in high school and in college today what are we going to do well i think we have to recognize there's some good good news here the first thing is there's massive hunger do you know how much hunger you have to spend that many billions of dollars oh my goodness our young people are searching really intensely and that's good news because we do have a true the true story and it is the best story and god is at the center we just have to learn how to tell it better and tell it more often and that's what i love about scott and kimberley and their life the institute of applied biblical studies of st paul's center this is what they've dedicated their life to i knew the scriptures before i met scott and kimberley i had read them many times cover to cover i just didn't know how to understand them and you need that i mean when you think about it when you look at our protestant brothers and sisters and and the catholic understanding of for example john chapter six we agree 100 percent what jesus said we do not agree on what he meant and how are you possibly going to know what he meant without somebody able to teach you in some ways that's exactly what the ethiopian unic was doing the book of acts reading the book of isaiah philip comes up to him says do you understand what you're reading he goes how am i going to understand unless somebody explains it to me and that's what the church can do she can teach us how to understand not just what it says but what it means and that changed everything because once we learn how to read the bible from the heart of the church well now all of a sudden we can become students of the greatest teachings and narratives in the world now i want to say i want to take a moment and talk about your mental capacity i don't care if you're a genius or you think you're average or you think you're below average you have so much more capacity than you could possibly imagine now what what you probably don't have is the capacity scott hon has i i i studied here and in my last semester i i was so foolish i decided to do an independent study with scott scott likes to use the term drinking out of a fire hydrant uh there was no place to hide for an entire semester uh and he's just piling books on me and and he reads and he's got a near or actual photograph it makes it ridiculous how great his memory is and and i had childhood dyslexia my my retention is pretty good but i read really slowly and he's like okay a thousand pages a day i'm like how about a thousand pages a year and at one point in time in this this independent study he handed me this 450 page book and i'm i felt like my eyes were bleeding and reading them oh gosh and there's it's the worst book i've ever read in my life and so there's nothing here this going on and on and i find it walked back over and i said why did you do this to me and he goes oh he opens up to page 342 and he goes see that sentence that's awesome sear ox the page man what are you doing ridiculous but i forgive you yeah and i survived barely i didn't need glasses before that independent study i do now but i would challenge you any any of you who know young people they know all the words to most of their songs on their playlist and they know some of the words to all the songs on their playlist i'm talking tens of thousands of lyrics and they've never seen the lyrics in writing our capacity to learn is amazing we're just using it to learn the wrong stuff pop music have you read the lyrics they don't even if they talk about anything it's bad stuff usually it's nonsense and to be able to recognize and this is what they committed they've loaded their brain with this and to the degree that it's not coming from a godly perspective and all you need to do is watch next year's grammy awards to see how how wholesome the music industry is right now that's in them and there was a principle they developed when they were creating the first computer garbage in garbage out and our young people have saturated and they watch video games our our young people are are supposed to be amazing and his first mass as pope benedict the 16th said and to you young people the world offers you comfort but you were not made for comfort you were made for greatness but our young people today experience greatness with their thumbs i conquered a city today no no you were really supposed to go conquer a city you were supposed to bring christ oh no i'm tired my thumbs hurt they've lost the the desire for greatness because they have a counterfeit that makes them feel great in a in an imaginary world i talked to young people young men in particular and i'll say why don't you become a missionary and i'll say well i don't know if i'm called i said there's a huge need i think you're called unless you're called to something else but a lot of these guys are i'm not sure what i'm gonna do i'm like i think you should do it and it's you know maybe later but i'm not hurting anybody if you're a fireman and the alarm goes off and you're playing video games you are hurting somebody and god did not make our young people for comfort he made them for greatness and there's a big war going on out there and here's the cool thing about it we don't go out and kill for christ but we may have to die for him we go out and love for christ but it's still war the battle will be between the devil and ourselves overcoming our own weaknesses so that we can love other people that's the love that john and mary and paul poured into emphasis and it transformed the city and the region for centuries that's the kind of energy that's needed today and so my proposal is a the little way and what i'd like to do is talk to you a little bit about the road to Emmaus i know you're familiar with it since you heard about it last night no but what i what i was talking with scott about this is um it's a funny thing to be a catholic because we know the bible so so well but we but we don't know how to read it very well it's been read to us but if i were to start a story to say there was a man a rich man who had two sons and the younger son came to us and i want my share of the estate you know how the story ends everybody in this room knows how the story ends and now not all of us know that's in luke chapter 15 but oh my goodness telling you that it's in luke chapter 15 is the easiest part the hardest part was learning the story and you already know and you know many many many stories now we don't always know we know for example that moses part of the red sea and that david killed goliath we may not be quite sure which one happened first and the cool thing about the way scott is teaching is that it's the bible's filled with stories but the bible is a story there's not just hundreds of narratives and they're amazing but there's a meta narrative that connects genesis to jesus and to be able to see the power that's in this tim gray and i uh wrote a book together on virtue and at one point in time the fbi was using it's a bible study and the fbi was using our bible study to train fbi agents and we were talking to the trainer and he goes here's what i do i sit back and say i don't you don't need to believe that king david ever existed but i want to tell you this story about king david and basheba and uraya because this is a great story because i don't need you to be believers but i do need you to be virtuous these stories are powerful and they're true david did exist and to be able to see the power of these and to be able to then recognize how they link together and build upon one another and all of its points to a universal family of god that can radiate and the love of christ and receive converts into her heart but at no point in time in the history of christianity have even half the people on earth believed in jesus christ the theme of our conference is found in luke chapter four and also do you see my glasses you see that this never happens in colorado i can't see they it's humid here luke chapter four jesus is in the synagogue you know this it says the spirit of the lord is upon me verse 18 because he has anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor he has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind and to set those who are downtrodden free now i don't there there's four statements there and three of them to me make perfect sense if i was blind and it was going to be the jubilee what would i want i want my sight if i was a captive it was the jubilee what would i want i want to be let yeah absolutely and if i was downtrodden i'd want to be lifted up but it's interesting he says but to the poor we'll preach the gospel see if it was a if it matched it would be the poor would get wealthy and and and they are getting wealthy that's what the gospel does but not the way we've been doing it there's a there's a something i think we just have to understand i'm not here to criticize anybody but we have to understand john carol the first bishop of the united states i'm sure for good reasons i don't know the man obviously i'm i know i look old but i'm not that old the uh he removed missiology the study of mission from the curriculum because the united states was a melting pot and we were trying to get along now he didn't say it was wrong or bad he just said in the limited time we can teach we're not going to teach this and so the catholic church in the united states has never been a missionary church and when we have been it's been feeding the poor not preaching the gospel to the poor which is not what jesus said now i'm not opposed to giving food to the poor please god let's give food to the poor but here's the deal the corporal works of mercy serve the body and they're limited because the body's limited if i give you a meal you'll be hungry tomorrow but if i could if i could give you the gospel you could live forever and so we will care for the poor and their material needs but much much more important the spiritual works of mercy and we've reduced mission for the most part to the corporal works of mercy i think that's got to change without reducing the corporal works of mercy at all we need the spiritual works of mercy to come back because the good news is going to be preached to the poor and my experience is the poor are really receptive to it and they're waiting for us there are people in in our culture in our world in different cultures who are waiting and waiting and waiting you know we sent mission trips i think we've become the largest mission sending organization in the united states and maybe in the world i don't know and we send thousands of people into first second third world missions united states uh appalachia one of our favorite trips is india and uh so a group of our folks was was in india and one of the mission trip leaders had been on multiple mission trips but always to latin america and so he's they're in india and they're out just near calcutta and there's a little girl sitting in the sweltering heat emaciated covered in open wounds and people are just walking by her and a couple of the students that were on our mission trip said i'm a nursing student let's just go get some first aid and get her some water and and we couldn't speak the language and she was like an injured animal and it took a quite a while to just gain her trust so that we could give her some water and then of course with the ointment and the bandages they heard at first and so she didn't understand what was going on and so it was difficult but over time over hours we started to gain her trust but the other thing that was really amazing is that people started to gather hundreds and finally at one point in time one of the the locals looked at one of our missionaries and said what are you doing and we said we're trying to help her and he said why would you do that she was obviously terrible in a previous life and she has to work it out and if you don't let karma take its take its role she'll have to come back in a miserable life again as catholics we don't believe in reincarnation or in karma now if it's true then maybe they're right but that little girl's trapped and if we're right she needs to be rescued and it's going to only be from a christian perspective and i would argue will only be done most perfectly from a catholic christian perspective we can't think and i'm not here to criticize the hindus and the buddhists that are there that's not my point i'm here to say that there are amazingly wonderful people who are trapped in false belief systems waiting to be rescued that's what the early apostles did they rescued people from paganism because they were killing their children and now we live in a neo-pagan culture and we're killing our children again they need to be rescued they're not bad people they're victims they've been held captive by the devil and they're doing bad things but they want more they want you and they want me so the road to amass luke 24 so you know the story it's east or sunday not any east or sunday the east or sunday jesus rose earlier in the morning the two disciples clopis and his companion are walking and jesus shows up and they don't recognize him and he begins walking with them and you know scott mentioned earlier it probably was a couple hours maybe a few hours it's a six seven mile walk and they're walking along and they're talking so they're probably not making great pace and all of a sudden jesus comes up and essentially what he says is uh what's going on and they're taking a back what do you mean what's going on you're on the road from jerusalem you have to have known what just happened this weekend what happened jesus we thought he was the messiah and on friday they killed him and now his body's missing how do you not know this and i imagine that as they walked he was like so so tell me about this jesus and when the first one started said something like this oh i was at this sermon that he gave on a mountain it was crazy i uh i quit my job actually and just started following him it was i was like this is the guy this is the guy and uh how about you i was down in jerusalem and there was this woman caught in adultery and uh he walked up and he said well he was out sin cast the first stone and beginning with the oldest and wisest of the rabbis they all dropped their stones and then jesus looked there and said but i don't condemn you either go away and sin no more and i i thought gosh if he could forgive sins like that he could forgive me so i started following that's great what was your favorite part about jesus this goes on for a while and and and then he's talking to him and then finally he can't take it anymore and he says oh foolish men in slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken was it not necessary for the christ to suffer these things and to enter into his glory and beginning with moses that's the title of my talk beginning with moses thanks and uh and with all the prophets he explained to them the things concerning himself in all of the scriptures this is the best bible study in the history of the world better than scott's it's really really good it's crazy how good this is and luke does not write one word about what he said not one word oh my i don't know if you if you go forward one page in john chapter one we find out what time it is it's four o'clock in the afternoon are you kidding me who cares what time it was i want to know a little bit about the bible study but the bible study is so good it's so awesome so he's there in the bible study and then he's he's looking like they've reached the end and he's going to go on and it says they urged him to stay with us because when you share the narrative of salvation history well people will want you to stay with them it's compelling their hearts would burn and then you know he goes into the end he goes with them and then the unity of the scriptures and the sacraments they recognize him in the breaking of the bread and then bam he's gone so they they run back to Jerusalem now what i hadn't seen until recently because the church when she reads these to us stops the story there on sunday and we pick up the next week but literally in loose gospel right back to back the next thing we know is jesus goes and appears in the upper room to the 10 you said 11 last night's 10 judas was gone and thomas was missing i guess so cool that has never happened and it probably will never happen again i almost told him about it privately earlier i had no way and this what does he do he does the exact same thing he gives the same scripture teaching again best bible study in the world number two not a different one second rendition of the same story and what we know from john's gospel it's not clear in loose gospel but just as in the first telling the telling of the scriptures in the narrative we're linked with the eucharist john helps to inform us that in the second telling it's united with confession because in john chapter 20 we know in this meeting in the upper room he gives them the power to forgive sins we don't hear in john's gospel about the bible study so we have to piece these together and reckon with the scriptures and the sacraments are meant to go so closely together there's only one prayer that we all have to pray as catholics it's the master's only one book that needs to be read at every mass and that's the bible and that is true of all of the full forms of the sacraments in an emergency you don't have to read from the scriptures grab some water and baptize them but in a liturgical baptism we read from the scriptures the scriptures and the sacraments are meant to go close and next to one another but my point i think is this jesus could have said anything he could have done anything but i gotta believe he's like you know i've been waiting since genesis three to come and do what i just did i i just well first of all my dad and i the holy spirit we wrote the old testament loaded all kinds of stuff in there that you would never understand until i came and fulfilled it that was amazing so let me tell you that but i don't know if you know today this morning i destroyed the devil it was awesome and i had a really good day and so did you best day ever it's so cool and the way i'm going to celebrate it i'm good i'm going to share the scriptures and i'm going to share the sacraments with you not to share the sacraments but for confession for the first time ever and what he's doing is he's shaping their worldview to understand because crazy stuff happens it had been a bad week they were all confused devastated and now all of a sudden his resurrection as and he could do this in your life too i know there are people at night that are hurting devastating her like i wasn't gonna come because i'm in so much pain and you chose to come i am telling you i don't know what is the challenge that you're dealing with and i'm sorry you are but i tell you our god is bigger than your problem and to be able to recognize that is that is salvation history salvation history says it's not that moses is going to walk out and say come on israelites let's walk across the newly made bridge across the red sea no he brings them to the edge of the red sea and then the most powerful military in the world is turned on them yeah i mean there are times i don't understand church leadership today that would have been really hard to understand moses really are you are you crazy you're just trying to kill all of us and then all of a sudden part the red sea that's pretty cool nothing cooler than dead in the grave rose from the dead and not just rose from the dead because lazars rose from the dead but died again when jesus rises from the dead he reveals the rebel the resurrection this is not a resuscitation no jesus's body can walk through walls he could be in more than one place at a time he could do anything you want he can't suffer and your body won't be able to either it'll be able to do all those things and not suffer when you experience the resurrection in jesus and that will be the case for everybody else who encounters the gospel of jesus christ but we live in a world where people's lenses don't have room for god now how do we fix that how do we fix that we tell them stories that's how they got there just tell them better stories and they're right here in the scriptures and in the lives of the saints tell them stories an amazing thing happens you know that's true for you that i kind of watch i like to watch movies because i like to forget when i'm no longer aware that i'm watching because at a certain point i'm like okay there's the credits yeah and then at a certain point time i'm like wow i was just totally there and somewhere along the line they just had me and when when the narrative of salvation history is shared well you will just have them so my encouragement to you learn the narrative well you have immense capacity to do this you already have so much in some ways some of the work at this point in time in our lives is just connecting the dots that are already there so that we can tell the story better and then finally i want to encourage you to actually tell the story i was with christian smith he works at notared ames sociologist we were at a meeting with some bishops over evangelization and christian said uh oh curtis i you'll be interested in my new work i researched and we studied hundreds of families we broke them into three groups catholic jews hindus people of faith and then all them people of faith and the question was did your kids practice the faith and one group was all of them yes the other group all of them no and then in the middle some yes some no he said we discounted the middle because we needed clarity and we went and talked to those families who had either succeeded in every case or had failed in every case he said curtis one thing came to the top more than anything else lots of things were important meals together going to church all important but he said the one number one thing that that made a bigger difference in helping young people to keep the faith of their parents oh i can see i'm out of time i wish i could share it with you oh you i actually have a minute and 50 seconds left uh he said they had spiritual conversations with their with their children what are spiritual conversations their stories let me tell you what i think about what i think about david and basheba let me tell you what i think about mary did this today let me tell you about joe's at the patriarch because he's one of those glorious people in all of scripture and we should think and talk about that it'll captivate the hearts these are men and women who either made the heroic decision to pursue virtue and were blessed or made the unfortunate decision of falling into vice and had to suffer consequences and when you learn about that in a story you can actually make better decisions yourself when i heard about saint maxby and colby trapped in a concentration camp i'd never heard about him before so this is a obviously a life of a saint and ten prisoners are lined up they're going to be executed and one of the men said please don't i have a family and colby cathlet priest said take me instead that really happened yeah he outlived all of them in fact he was living without food or water for so long they finally went into murder him uh because he just wasn't dying and he was glowing in the dark last part of his life and the guards were starting to convert so they had to kill him it was a terrible afternoon for him but it's been great ever since and there are hardships in our lives today and they're terrible some of them are horrible but they're only going to last for a fleeting moment and eternity is forever and so it is my hope and prayer for each of us that you will recommit and work with st paul center to deepen our knowledge of the narrative and then love people enough to share the stories and spiritual conversations let's pray name of the father the son and the holy spirit amen father god we want you to transform our minds and our hearts we want you to launch the world launch us into the world so we can evangelize the world make the church strong and alive again so that we'll be light to the darkness and that many multitudes of people will come so that this generation of catholics will serve this generation of people glory be to the father and to the son and to the holy spirit as it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be a world without end amen father son and holy spirit amen