 So I'm going to, what I'm going to do is offer a reflection on 2nd Timothy chapter 4, verses 1 to 5, but just to set the context, what St. Paul is doing in this letter to Timothy is really an act of apostolic tradition. He is genuinely passing over responsibility for the tradition from himself. This is the place where he says, you know, I've run the race, I fought the good fight, you know, for now a crown awaits me. He knows he's approaching death. So he's really, he's handing on to Timothy what is most precious to him, St. Paul, that is to say the gospel. And so that's the context of everything that goes on in 2nd Timothy. And so very much like a father, he's saying, this is what you're going to face. This is what you need to do. This is who you need to know. So he sets the context and we're going to look at that in 2 ways. But first of all, just 2nd Timothy 3, the first 5 chapters. So this is Paul speaking to his spiritual son, but understand this, that in the last days there will come the last days. Paul is speaking like he's speaking to Timothy now. He's not saying, well, some hazy future. He says now we're in the last days. Every generation of Christians is in the last days. We live in the already. The kingdom has already come, but it's not fully there. So, but we're in the last days. And this would become obvious as soon as I keep reading, it says, there will come times of difficulty. That's mild. Sorry, I'll try to hold back on the commentary. For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God. Sound familiar? We're in the last days. I don't know if they're the last, last days, but we're in it. So that's the context that he's handing this over to Timothy. So this chapter, chapter four, he's doing it very specifically. I'll read it and then I'll break it down a little bit more. It says, chapter four, verse one, I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom. Preach the word. Be ready in season and out of season. Reprove, rebuke, and exhort with complete patience and teaching. For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves, teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths. As for you, always be sober-minded, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry. I want to break it down to three parts. First of all, what's the charge? Preach the word. What's the context? People having itching ears will accumulate teachers to suit their own passions. And what's the work? It's the work of an evangelist. This is Paul's charge and his strategy for Timothy going forward. How do you take this forward into these last days? This is what he's offering you. He says, I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus. He's doing something that's common in the Greek world. This is a solemn right of succession in which a father would pass on to his heir, or a ruler would pass on to his subordinate who's to take his place. I'm passing over my role and my authority to you, and it's done in the presence of witnesses because it's a solemn right. It's a public right. It's for his witnesses, Jesus Christ, the enduring witnesses to everything that Paul has done and the witnesses for Timothy. It's a very solemn charge. In fact, it takes almost the character of an oath that you can't get more solemn than this. He's embracing the charge. As I said before, this is an act of tradition. Now, I study biblical theology. My pros and friends would always say, is there any other kind? So I'm a little hazy on some of the fundamental theology stuff. So I'm not saying this is like, it is capital T tradition handing on. But what I'm saying is he's handing on to Timothy, but he's handing on to Timothy for the last days. So what that means is he's handing in this on to you because we live in the same days as St. Paul has lived in. We live in the last days, and we are part of passing on the tradition of the faith. And God and Jesus Christ witness to us. We don't do this in a microcosm. We don't do this in a bubble. We do this before God and before our Lord Jesus Christ. We have received this charge to preach the word in season and out of season. Because what's at stake is that faithful handing on of the word. Who is the word? Jesus Christ. How will people know him? Well, faith comes from hearing. Who will tell them those who have been sent? This word preach, of course, I mean, you guys know this. It means to announce. Who does the announcing? What's the process? The word here is around the charigma word. So a charix is a messenger, a herald who announces news of great importance, life changing news. That's what we've been called to do. To make present a life changing event. It's always done under authority. You've been given authority by our Lord Jesus Christ. You've been sent. This word charix, the announcer is analogous. It's also used sometimes as apostolos. We've all been sent. To whom have we been sent? To everyone that God brings into your life. What's the word? The word is Jesus Christ. I'm speaking to people who know this all very well. But like anything, especially when you're entering into a new era, a new age, we are entering into the age of the new evangelization. And this idea of announcing, preaching, proclaiming Jesus Christ is something that we as Catholics are a little hazy on. So where do you start? You start with the fundamentals. Right? If you're learning basketball, what do you learn first? Usually how to dribble with your right hand. You do that like a thousand times, then they say, well, now try it with your left hand. And you go, that's impossible. We have to start with the basics. And first of all, understand that this charge is for you and me. I may keep emphasizing that. It's not for somebody else. It's not just for guys who have episcopal bling or black shirts. Well, especially these black shirts, they are actually doing it. And the rest of us black shirts, we're trying. The charge is for us. So what's the word? Well, it's Jesus. It's Jesus in the Scripture. All of Scripture is about Jesus. John 21.31, he says, these things have been written, why? So that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ and by believing, find life in His name. That's the purpose that John wrote his gospel. But it's the purpose of all the Scripture. It's all about Jesus. One of the downfalls that we faced in a lot of us from our preaching is that we learned Scripture in a way that was kind of broken up. You had the Old Testament and that was one thing and then you had the New Testament and another thing. Many of us did not get the understanding that every word of Scripture speaks of Jesus. Sometimes it's very veiled. I will give you that, like the genealogies in the Old Testament. Somebody will say, where is Jesus there? I can get there, I'm not sure you can get there. But every word of the Scripture is about Jesus. That's part of the conversion of mind and heart, especially for us preachers. That we need to discover Jesus in every text of the Scripture. Another problem that we've faced is that in general, we've taken in an historical view of Jesus. Often in our homilies what you'll get is Jesus past tense. This is what Jesus did back then. It's one of those things that if you don't say it explicitly, it's like you're denying it. What we're saying is all that stuff that Jesus did, it was just nice, but that was for then and this is now. We don't connect the fact that Jesus is doing what he did then. He's still doing it now. He's still healing the sick. He's still opening the ears of the deaf. He's still touching the tongue of the mute. He's still doing all those things that we see that he did. He's still doing that. And that's the word, that's the Jesus. We're called to proclaim. The Jesus who is alive, who's still meeting people individually, who's still calling people out from the death of their lives into the abundant life that he wants us to have. What's the difficulty? Jesus has become an inconvenient truth. That's why St. Paul says it's in season, out of season. It's another way of translating whether convenient or inconvenient. Jesus is very inconvenient today. In the past, he's pretty convenient. People will refer to him in the past and say, wasn't he a marvelous teacher? He had this intranable mercy and everything is cool. It's a misreading of Jesus. But people are, it's very convenient to have Jesus to back you up because he's the most fascinating individual that ever lived. But in the present, he's very inconvenient. But that's the Jesus we need to bring forth. That's the Jesus we proclaim. The Jesus who's changed our lives and set us on a decisive direction in our lives. It's very inconvenient to preach him. But he's the one we proclaim. So how do we preach? He says, reprove, rebuke and exhort with complete patience and teaching. What I want to suggest here is that what Paul is saying is preach to the heart. What's the heart? Well in the scripture, the heart is the place that the mind, the will and the emotions meet. Another way of saying it is the heart is the place that you keep your commitments. It's the place where all your thoughts, your intellect, your choices and those passions, affections that drive your choices, that's where it all meets. They didn't have this kind of dualism separation between these different, my feelings are not me. No, your feelings are you. It all met there. Part of the issue for many of us, including myself, I'm part of the lost generation who really never got catacysed. I was talking to some folks yesterday and forgive me if I tell my true confessions. I am pietistically, devotionally challenged. I was helping lead outdoor stations at the cross with a group of seminarians. We're out in Fatima because we used to do these pilgrimages with the seminarians. I and the other priests would switch off. You introduce this one, I'll introduce the next one. We're walking along and he would introduce his and then we go to the next one and I'm going, which one is it? I don't know what they are. I can see that, you know, and it was, it's very, you know, if you show me the whole scene in, you know, intimate detail, I can probably figure it out, you know, but these were kind of abstract. I had no idea. And, you know, and I own that, but I never got it. You know, there's lots of things, you know, I was telling them about, you know, the Ten Commandments. I never learned them. Even while I was, I mean, I mentioned I did learn them, but I didn't learn them. Yeah, because I had to swear that I did learn it, right, you know. So, but I didn't learn, you know, so many of a certain generation, you know, because I've had confessions where people say, well, I have three times on number four, two on six and four on seven, you know, and I'm trying to figure that out. And I just, well, she's God bless you, you know, I'm not sure what you can confess. The sixth grade teacher with my first pair, the first pair as Proccio Vicker, you know, grabbed me in the hallways, oh, Father Mike, would you come talk to our kids, you know, they really need something on the sixth commandment. She goes on talking and inside I'm going like this, trying to figure out, you know. And in the meantime, I lost Jesus. He became confusing to me. You know, a lot of some of my religion classes were on Godspell or on Jesus Christ Superstar. He just became deconstructed. But at the same time, what they were focusing on was trying to fill my head with stuff. And we still do that in catechism. We fill the heads of children with stuff, with terminology, with doctrine, which is really good stuff. But until your heart has been opened, it just doesn't make any sense. Until your heart has been converted, then you don't have the hunger to know more. I mean, you know, I had an opportunity to meet Jesus through a life in the Spirit Seminar that I'm sure a number of you are familiar with when I was a freshman in college. After that, you know, I couldn't stop reading this, you know. I looked up catechism just because I wanted to know. Unless the heart has been, you know, the head can't do it. You know, there's a, I'll give a full, you know, usually you don't have to footnote things in a talk, but a young woman named Julianne Stans, she's the evangelization coordinator for the diocese of Green Bay. I was in a meeting in which she, we were all present at the same meeting, talked about things. She offered a phrase, she's from Ireland, and she offered a phrase that she alleged was an Irish proverb. And I say alleged because if you're Irish, you know, something can still be true even if it's not actually factual. So that's why I say that, and I'm guilty of that lots of times. But here's what she said, she said, an arrow aimed at the head will never pierce the heart. A lot of our preaching, a lot of our teaching is aimed at the head. But unless it pierces the heart, the head will not respond. It bounces off. Our preaching needs to aim at the heart. What do I mean by that? The best feedback I ever got on a homily was while I was in the seminary, teaching in the seminary I was also a pastor of a small parish in Detroit. And after Mass one day, one of the regulars came up to me and she said, Father Mike, I finally did it. I said, what? She said, I threw him out. I said, through who out? I've been living with my boyfriend for a long time, but your homily three weeks ago, I threw him out. It finally, it hit home to me. I got to throw him out. I had no idea what I said three weeks ago. But something hit her heart. That's the reprove, rebuke and exhort. What does reprove mean? Reprove means preaching in such a way that invites the activity of the Holy Spirit to convict the heart. It says in John 16.8, the Holy Spirit will convince the heart of sin. Something that I said, I wish I knew what it was, convinced her heart that what she was engaged in was wrong. Rebuke, in other words, is to admonish, to warn or to invite to repentance. Something that I said, invited her to respond to that conviction of the Spirit. And invited her to make a change, to repent. And then something in the homily appealed to her. See, once the heart is convicted and the opportunity to repent is opened, the heart often needs something more. It needs encouragement. It needs someone to appeal to something deeper in them to make that response, to take the step. This, you know, reprove, rebuke and exhort. I mean, those are, especially, reprove and rebuke are harsh sounding words. And it is. It's a messy process. But what does that do? It creates a crisis in the heart. What shall I do? I'm offered life and death. Which shall I choose? That's how fickle the human heart is, isn't it? You know, even Moses back in the Old Testament, he said, I set before you life and death. And he had to tell them, choose life. Choose door number one. That's a much better way to go. But that's how fickle our hearts are. We'll hold on to death knowing it's death. We need someone. We need a word spoken. We need the power of the Holy Spirit to touch the heart to say, no. I'm going to choose life. And I need help over every obstacle. And sometimes with that hat, with that, where that comes in our preaching is not so much by, you know, saying, you must repent. What does that do? That throws up a shield, right? It's often an image or a metaphor or even just a personal testimony that somebody says, I get it. We had an experience of that, an opportunity. Are any of you familiar with the course called Alpha? Some of you are. It's an evangelistic course that presents. Thank you. You didn't have to call me out on it. Sorry, that's an inside joke. But it's a process of evangelization in which people learn a little at a time about who Jesus is and have an opportunity to respond to Jesus. So it's a series of like 11 weeks. And so in the third talk, I used the image itself of Jesus knocking at the door, that famous picture that the door is kind of overgrown with weeds and whatnot. And he's knocking at the door. And if you look really close, there's no door handle on it because they have to open the door to Jesus. It's going off of that passage in Revelation that I stand at the door and knock. So you know that one. So we raised that and mentioned that. And a woman afterwards, after the whole course was over, was giving her testimony about what she experienced. She said, you know, I was really convicted by that image. And I knew I hadn't opened the door to Jesus. And so I opened the door. Here's the thing. She said, but I left the chain on. Isn't that something? What self-knowledge to understand? And when she was invited to respond, she said, I knew I had to take the chain off. I was too afraid. I didn't know what would happen. And at a certain point in the course, we have an opportunity to be prayed to be filled with the Holy Spirit. And so she brought this to prayer. And she said to the people who were going to pray with her, you know, I feel like I've opened the door to Jesus. I've left the chain on. I just can't break it. And somebody in the one of the prayer partners says, we'll pray for you that Jesus would break the chain. And then she said, I prayed and they prayed and he did. He broke the chain. My heart is open. My heart is open. That's kind of an extended version of that. She felt convinced of sin by an image. She was invited to respond through a direct invitation. But she had people with her, exhorting, encouraging and praying with her for Jesus to come home. Now that's a tall order. And you can't do it necessarily in one homily. And you can't necessarily do it in one conversation with a friend. But that's the dynamic of what it means to preach the word to the heart. You have to appeal to the mind. Because choosing, there's logical evidence for Jesus. It's not a leap of faith. You need to speak to the evidence. You need patience, as Paul is saying, to Timothy. Patience to win the affections. The heart has to be warmed. And it can't just do it alone, right? You know, if you set a coal embedded in a bunch of fires, they're all red. You pull one out, it goes black real soon because it dies. They need the encouragement and accompaniment of others. We need to learn to preach to the heart. To be concerned for the hearts of others. And so what is... Sammy said all that. Let's think about the context that we live in nowadays. Itching ears. People will develop itching ears. It says people become novelty seekers. And this is one of the... People are interested in entertainment. We live in an entertainment world. Oversaturated. Oversaturated. A context in which people are never satisfied. Because there's always the thirst for more. It's clear that, in many ways, rationality is no longer the guide. It's really the passions. So every... You go online and you look for graduation addresses. And what are these highly accomplished people offering to these young graduates? At least, of course, everyone. I can make up a statistic, but that'd be a lie. There's so many of them that just says, what's your path to greatness? Follow your passion. Have you heard that before? So when I do high school, graduations addresses, as a bishop, I get up and say, don't follow your passions. Follow your purpose. And he goes, passions. Oh yeah, I'm all for that. But that's penetrated. So much of our society is driven by passion. We no longer understand what a common good is, because a common good is identified rationally, objectively. We've replaced that with a popular good, driven by sentiment. Right? Whatever is kind of like the newest thing, the newest thing to emerge as, this is really important for a while that was being green. Now I'm not sure exactly what it is. Well, it's probably more about the racial unrest that we face, which is a really important thing we need to deal with. But we range. If we dealt with a common good, we'd be dealing with that as much, perhaps. But we're just driven back and forth to now, well, this is the thing and now that's the thing. We've replaced rationality, the common good, with the popular good. And that goes on the winds of fashion, the winds of fashion. Turning away from the truth and wandering off into myths. I want to take a little bit of time on this, because I want to talk about myths. And I think this is fundamental to the era that we live in. For most of us, myth means lies, right? It just means something that doesn't correspond to reality. But myth is actually a literary genre, a literary form. You see elements of it in the Bible. I know that freaks people out. Even the creation stories, a lot of us were taught, well, it's a myth. That means it doesn't mean anything. Well, it is a myth in a literary genre sense, but it's true. That was the thing that Tolkien said to C.S. Lewis. C.S. Lewis says, well, this is all a myth. And Tolkien just looked at me and said, yeah, but it's true. It is the myth. What's a myth? A myth is a narrative that explains questions that reach far back beyond the reach of history. So it's dealing with the origins of things. Like when I speak about the first chapters of Genesis, I speak of them as stories of origin. It answers the big questions. How did all this come about? What does it mean to be a human? Why are there two different kinds of humans, men and women? Why do we do bad things? The question of sin. And if you look around different cultures, everybody has that kind of baseline narrative that explains the world and why the world works the way it does. When I was in college, I took a course on North American, Native Americans. And we looked at the different stories of origin among the different peoples that populated North America. And they all had slightly different understandings, whether it was humans were created between the sky, in fact, the marriage between the sky and the earth, or between the water and the earth. But there are different ways. How do we explain where we came from? What we're supposed to do? How do we explain the reason where there's tension between us? We as Christians have a baseline narrative of creation, of a fall, of a redemption and eternity. It explains life. Consider the baseline narrative that we live in now, right? There's the Big Bang. That was the beginning. Which is awesome because that's a point of contact. For a while, we were trying to say, well, no, there's no beginning. It just always was, but then the Big Bang theory came off, which was first discovered by a Catholic priest, a scientist, which is really cool. And it's just the thing, but it corresponds with a beginning. But if you take it, you know, so what is the earth? Well, it's just part of this enormously large, we don't even know how large, system of galaxies and planets and suns, and it's just the universe. What is a human being? An essentially isolated entity that determines for itself its purpose, its meaning, its identity. Nowadays, its gender. These things aren't given. There's no givenness to being a human being. That I am, well, I mean, it's that other poem that you always hear at a graduation star. I even heard it at a Catholic high school and I wanted to scream. But Invictus, I am, I always get this wrong, but it's long lines of I am the master of my fate, I'm the captain of my destiny. That kind of encapsulates something about, but it's part of a baseline narrative, that that's the fundamental understanding I have of myself. And even more, the human person has become unto oneself alone. That we are like atoms with no, there's no possibility, we're buffered, we don't interact. And so we've lost an understanding of what community is and what the basis of a community is. Because I define myself in opposition to you. Maybe we share the same ideas. Maybe, you know, we'll talk about the soccer community or the online community. The community is no longer identified by a common interest, a common good, a common purpose, but it's more by our passions or by our activities or by our recreation. We've lost an understanding of what is a community. But because that's the results, some of the results of our baseline narrative. So yes, our culture is wandered off into a myth. It's a new myth, but it's trying to explain, it's doing what every society has ever done, trying to explain why we exist. That actually opens up for us a tremendous advantage. Why? Because the truth asserts itself. The truth is not some kind of remote system of ideas kind of floating out there that you can acknowledge or not acknowledge, but the truth is a person and a person who created this earth and therefore evidence of him just is thoroughly throughout the universe. And that truth, even the truth of the human person, it asserts itself. Somebody was, Father Francis Martin was reflecting on this and he was working through his tremendous, famous commentary on Romans. Many of you would know Father Martin, Father Francis Martin, you'd have heard of him before. Maybe some of you have, so many of you have said, awesome, awesome Bible expositor. And I wish he had written more, I wish, but he did most of it just by speaking. But he's commenting on Romans 118. He says, for the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. Why do we have such militant atheism rising up among us? He was trying to explain why the anger? If you're a convinced atheist and you should just, and you look at a Christian, you should just say, well, forget it, you know, you're an idiot, you just pass them off. Why the anger? Why engage so strong? And what he was saying is it takes a lot of energy to suppress the truth, the truth that there is a God. You have to work really hard. You've got to be really committed to suppress that truth because God asserts himself through all of the creation. It's hard to do and you need some anger with it to suppress that truth. Well, not everybody can muster that anger. The truth asserts itself. The baseline narrative of our age is unsustainable. You know, and because people need the transcendent, they need to know there's something beyond. And so, you know, instead of acknowledging that beyond, they try to create it for themselves. You know, I shop at REI, which is a recreation, I forget what it all stands for, but you know, I go there often because it's about outdoors stuff. And it's just hugely popular. It makes a killing, I think, because why? People are seeking in the outdoors some experience of the transcendent because we're made for that. And life just gets boring without something beyond. Another part of this myth of the human person is that, you know, well, I'm my DNA. I am who I am. And I'm just kind of stuck. You know, this is the way I see myself, this is the way I understand myself. I was born this way. I'm stuck with it, you know. And so, you know, some people do something really, really wrong. And they need to, you know, oh, I got to say I'm sorry. Well, that was not my best self. You know, which is kind of odd because you say, well, then whose self was it, you know? Or, you know, you'll go to the stand and see, you know, these public apologies that get made. You know, well, that wasn't me. Who was it? I mean, I'm being facetious here. We had a really horrible, horrible incident in Detroit. I won't even describe it, but it had to do with a woman killing her children. And this is what the woman said. She says, I did a really bad thing, but I'm not a bad person. There's this disconnect. We can't penetrate, you know. But what it offers us is that I'm just stuck with who I am. There's no possibility of transformation. Is there something better out there for me? Well, no. This is you. So what's the work? It's the work I'm an evangelist. Evangelist, first of all, announces the good news. We've got good news, life-changing news. We announce what is for our society now a new baseline narrative, a new fundamental understanding of what the world is, what human beings are. And it's a worldview that's true, that actually meets the desires, the passions, the affections of this age. It's a worldview and an opportunity that allows for transformation. You're not stuck with, this is just who I am. It opens up not over in the possibility, but often the power to become who you were made to be. Our evangelization has to take on a, in a certain way, in this instance, a different kind of apologetics, because people's difficulties aren't so much in their head. We need to get to the head, but we need to start with the heart. It's a kind of a preacher I know calls it presuppositional, I can't even say it right, presuppositional apologetics. What he means there is, how do we undermine their confidence in the contemporary culture's base narrative and propose instead a new narrative, a new view of the world, a world in which Jesus reigns to solve their problems. You know, a lot of young people deal with moral relativism. And, you know, so there's plenty of kind of like logical things that deal with relativism. You know, like you say, as soon as you make, so you're telling me that it's an absolute truth that everything is relative. Well, yeah, it's self-contradictory. You know, it's one of those things that, you know, intellectually, you can undermine it, but the problem is for most people it's like, oh, you know, you're just making that up, you're just making fun of this, you're not dealing with it. What are they dealing with? What are young people dealing with? Well, they're dealing with a society in which everyone thinks that they are their own entity. They were so multicultural, so pluralistic that they have such a variety of characters to deal with. It's like their relationships are like a house of cards. And it doesn't help that everybody's life is out in social media. It's very, very delicate. Relationships are not kind of, in general, they're broad strokes, not like really firm and hard. And one of the real thirsts of young people is community. Where can I find people that actually will accept me, actually accept me, not just like tolerate me, but actually accept me? Where can they go? You know, the main virtue of relativism is tolerance. You tolerate medicine that tastes bad, right? That's what you tolerate, but you like, I love a Snickers bar. Let's propose love. Let's offer solutions to the difficulties that people have with the gospel. That's what we're called to do. To meet people actually where they are. Sure, there's rampant relativism. There's questions about identity in so many elements of identity. St. Paul says, be sober. Part of what it means to be sober is to take people where they are. Be realistic. This is where they are. St. Ignatius would say, his idea of evangelizing was, it's an opportunity to meet people on their terms and come to know them in order to lead them to Christ. That is to say, he says, enter by their door, receive them where they are, so as to come out by our door. Do we have time? No, not much time. So what I want to offer is that one of the parts of the work of an evangelist really is to set a new context, to deal with the contemporary context of individuals and offer them a new possibility, a new context. The second work of an evangelist is to accompany. St. Philip was called an evangelist. And he's the one who famously converted the Ethiopian. So what did he do? He ran, because remember the Ethiopians traveling back home on his chariot and Philip ran to his chariot and climbed in with him and rode with him. It's a great image of accompaniment. He entered the door of the Ethiopian. And when the Ethiopian came, got out of the chariot, what happened? He was baptized. That's the work of an evangelist. And I can't break it down, you know, in all its intimate parts. But what our parishes need to become is hugely challenging. And he'd become places of a kind, or environments, of a kind of radical acceptance. Not radical acceptance to the mass. That's the deep end. I was talking with people yesterday saying, we need to develop shallow, we need to develop opportunities for people to come and touch the church that go beyond the mass. That's a different talk. I can't get into all that. But our parishes are hard to get into. Because, you know, we were just saying last night, for those of you who were here, we were saying, come as you are. And honestly, my brothers and sisters, for a lot of us Catholics, we don't really mean it. We don't really mean it. At least we don't live it. We have the, in general, our course has been believe, behave, belong. We need to change that order around. If we're going to really be evangelizing. We need to have an opportunity for people to belong. Maybe not in a full way. But they need to be able to enter our community so that they might come to believe and then to behave. Evangelization is a process. We're hoping, you know, if somebody will say, well, we'll just do door-to-door campaigns. It doesn't work. Evangelization is one-to-one. And really, often for most of us, the best we can do is simply invite them to some place where other people can help. Evangelization is a group activity. The first thing that has to change for us is our hearts so that we can really honestly say, come as you are. We will meet you where you are so that you can meet the one who will make you amazing. The charge is clear. It's been given to you and me. The context is difficult, but it's always been that way. And the work is the same. The work of an evangelist. That's one way that we defend the truth. That's the way we preach the truth in a secular age. Thank you very much.