 It is such a blessing to be here with you tonight. And I was thinking back on how I ended up being invited to do this, and I honestly don't know because I don't claim any special expertise, really in anything. I'm a priest, I'm a bishop, of course. But at the end of the day, aren't we all simply people who love Jesus, that we have fallen in love with God? And that our falling in love with God has so transformed our lives that we want to give our whole life to leading others to fall in love with Him as well. Sometimes we make evangelization in Catechesis so complicated that we forget the simple, joyful, good news that Jesus proclaimed and that our people need to hear. Just like to start calling on the Holy Spirit upon us in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, amen. Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of thy faithful and kindle in them the fire of thy love. Send forth thy spirit and they shall be created and thou shall renew the face of the earth. Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, amen. So tonight I just want to reflect a little bit on how the Lord has called me to become passionate about evangelization in Catechesis and how those two go together so well. And I'd also like just to share that karygma with you, because as Dr. Petrarch said, we need to hear it ourselves. How often do I need to be refreshed in the simple, basic knowledge of the proclamation of the gospel over and over again throughout my life and throughout yours? So I want to go back to September of 2011. I was named a bishop in May of 2011, consecrated a bishop that July. And every new bishop in the world every year, in the year that he's named, has to go to what I would call bishop boot camp in Rome. It's nine days of intense conferences with people from the Vatican speaking to all the new bishops of the world that year. So in September of 2011, I met this nine day conference in Rome with about 116 other brand new bishops. And I have to say, no offense to your excellency, but the talks weren't that exciting. People came over, would read to us in Italian for two hours without looking up once. There was no question and answer. There was no dialogue. I didn't know Italian, so I was listening to all of this translation in my ear. And after about three days, I was having out of body experiences. Well, all I wanted to know is when do I put on the miter and when do I hold the closer? And it was never that practical. But for those of you that go to conferences, whether it's in your secular life or even in the church life, I think you often realize the most transformative takeaway that you receive is not necessarily the official talks. It's a conversation over lunch. It's an encounter in the hallway. It's meeting up with an old friend. It's meeting somebody that does what you do somewhere else and realizing that they have the same problems, the same joys and perhaps some insights that they can help you. Isn't that true? When we go to conferences, it's the human interconnection that really makes it so effective. And so it was with me. So on the fourth day of that bishops conference, I find myself at lunch across the table from a new bishop from the Netherlands. He'd just been newly appointed in his diocese in Southern Holland. And he shared with me the disturbing facts about his diocese. Mass attendance hovered at about 2% of the Catholic population and they're all in their 70s and 80s. He had zero seminarians, which meant there was no future of the priesthood. It wasn't so much that the church had collapsed as it had evaporated. So I asked him, in that daunting situation, where do you start? How do you begin? What do you do first? And what he said didn't surprise me, but it stuck with me. He said, we have to go back to Pentecost. We have to go back to the upper room, drink deeply of the Holy Spirit and then go out into the world and speak of Jesus as if people have never heard of him because in fact, in many cases, they have not. And I thought that's exactly right, to go back to Pentecost, to go back to the upper room. How I would love to have been a fly on the wall in the upper room on the morning of Pentecost. Wouldn't that be great? Like if you could be in one moment in scripture, for me, it would be Pentecost. What happened up there? We don't know. Did the apostles' hair catch on fire? Did they get thrown against the wall? What were they thinking? What were they feeling? All we know is the difference that the Holy Spirit makes. Because when they went into that room, those first followers of Christ had experienced the resurrection, but they had not yet received the Holy Spirit. And so they were silent about their experience of the risen Christ. They weren't sure what to do next. Simon Peter goes back to fishing, it's what he knows. They're not united. They're not zealous. They're not courageous. They're just kind of there. When they come out of that room, they are transformed. They're not the same people that went in. They are zealous. They are courageous. They are articulate and they know exactly what to do. Because their mission is to go into the world and to proclaim the charigma and to give their lives in the proclamation of Jesus Christ crucified and risen as the new meaning of human history. That's what they do. And they give their lives for it. I'm afraid sometimes if Pentecost happened today, instead of immediately going out, dispersing and evangelizing, the early church would have gathered and formed a long range study committee, made hundreds of pots of coffee and come up with a long range plan of how they're gonna evangelize Jerusalem, right? You know, maybe if things get really out of hand in 10 years, we'll get to the borders of Israel. But thank God they didn't do that. They just went out and you get the sense that they just went up to every person they met and grabbed them by the toga and said, let me tell you about this man. Let me tell you about this man that I first came to know as rabbi and teacher. Then I came to realize he's a miracle worker. But you know what? At the end, I came to the conviction, this is the son of God. This is the son of God. And his death and resurrection has transformed my life and he wants to transform yours and he wants to save you. So come enter with us into this church, this new covenant sealed in the blood of the Lamb. And so in Acts chapter two, it's no one other than Simon Peter who proclaims the carigma for the first time. Simon Peter who denied even knowing Jesus in the moment of his passion, Simon Peter who ran away from the cross. It's Simon Peter who stands up and looks some of Jesus killers in the eye and says, let the whole house of Israel know that God has made both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified. It's the first time. It's the first time in the history of salvation that the carigma is publicly proclaimed. Let the whole house of Israel know that the God has made both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified. You who crucified this man. The Lord has raised him up and made him the Lord of life. And I love the response. Acts two says that the crowd was cut to the heart. What's the love that phrase? What does it mean to be cut to the heart? When have you been cut to the heart? I was cut to the heart when I was six years old and I came home from school and found out that my brother Patrick had died of cancer that afternoon. He'd been in the hospital with a long illness. And somehow in my little six year old brain, I never, I just thought he'd come home and somehow one day everything would be fine. I was cut to the heart. Sometimes being cut to the heart is that knife of sorrow and suffering. I was cut to the heart the morning I was ordained a priest because God was so real and so present and so close I could have reached out and just grabbed him. So anytime that I'm tired or sad or overwhelmed or anxious, I just think of the grace is given to me the morning I was ordained a priest. It's like sticking my finger into an electrical socket. My hair stands on end. I was cut to the heart. Were some of you not cut to the heart when you fell in love with your spouse? And there was a proposal made and an offer of marriage accepted. Were some of you not cut to the heart when you gave birth to your child? Or when we have been weighed down with sin and we made a really hard but good confession and felt the power and the mercy of Jesus? Or we received the Eucharist and we knew with the fullness of our conviction that this was the flesh and blood of the living Son of God. Whenever the gospel is authentically proclaimed, it cuts us to the heart because it demands a response. We can't go on with life as it's been because everything is different for us. That's the power of the krigma when it's proclaimed and lived, taught and catechized. We're cut to the heart and we're transformed. It's the same response that the crowd makes to the proclamation of John the Baptist. I always think of John the Baptist as this wild man in the desert, hair standing up to here, eating locusts and honey, proclaiming this very difficult message. And yet the people are drawn to him. Convert your lives because the kingdom of heaven is at hand. The Messiah is just around the corner and says the crowd was cut to the heart. When we think then of the extraordinary success of the early church, I think there's three reasons. One is that absolute confident proclamation of the resurrection of Jesus as the new meaning of human history. Secondly is the witness of the martyrdom of the early church. That those first followers of Jesus were willing to go to their excruciating deaths rather than to deny the Lord. They're willing to give up their life rather than give up their faith. And the Roman Greek world looked at that with awe and wonder. And thirdly, the extraordinary charity of the early church, see how they love one another. The early church took care of orphans and widows. During pandemics, when everybody else ran out, the Christians ran in and took care of the sick. In a culture that committed in fantasy, the Christians respected life from the moment of conception and from the beginning of the church. So those three things, this bold proclamation of Jesus, this willingness to suffer and die for the faith and this heroic charity, I think were the hallmarks of the early church that led it to such great evangelizing fruitfulness. So we have received this commission to go forth and to make disciples, to proclaim the gospel to every creature and to baptize in the name of the Trinity. When you think of how complex and big and broad and deep the Catholic church is, you'd think Jesus would have left encyclopedias of instructions for us. But he didn't, just those three things. Proclaim the gospel to every creature, make disciples of all nations and baptize. And I'll send you the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit will teach and do the rest. So when the crowd was cut to the heart and they asked, what must we do? Simon Peter said, repent of your sins and be baptized and come join us. And Acts chapter two says that 3,000 people were baptized that day in this explosion of the Holy Spirit. I was blessed to be in Israel this past winter on pilgrimage and our guide pointed out this empty stone cistern in front of the ruins of the temple. And he said, this is probably where those baptisms occurred. Because there's a pool of ritual cleansing from Jewish men who were going into the temple to pray. I took a picture of it, just this empty stone cistern. But I thought, here's where the church began. Here's where the baptisms began. So all of that inspired me, going back to that conversation with that Dutch bishop inspired me when I came to Madison to say, we need to evangelize and we need to cataclyse. And so two years ago on Pentecost of 2020, we launched our Go Make Disciples Evangelizing Initiative right at the beginning of COVID. A lot of people said to me, you're crazy. This is like absolutely the wrong time to be launching an evangelizing initiative in your diocese. And I said, on the contrary, this is the greatest time to be launching an evangelizing initiative in our diocese. And isn't that true? In this moment of so much challenge and so much difficulty and so much suffering to proclaim the gospel afresh with passion and zeal and conviction, that's what we must do. And that's what we're trying to do in Madison. So it's simple. It's not a three year program. It's not a five year project. When somebody asks me, when is this gonna be over? I say, when you're dead. Because evangelization is what we do our entire life, right? And catechesis. So there's three phases to it, but it doesn't follow sequentially. So it isn't like phase one ends when phase two begins. The idea is that it all goes on. Phase one is leadership formation. And the scriptural image is Jesus with the 12. So I asked every pastor to form an evangelizing team and to start meeting with his staff and really focus on evangelization and consequently catechesis. Just simply start praying together, reading the scripture, sharing faith. We can't give what we don't have. So leadership formation. Phase two is expanding that to the parish. And the scriptural image is the calling, the forming, and the sending of the 72. Who in our parish is ripe for a little bit of formation and encouragement to go out and evangelize? So we're kind of in phase two. Parishes are asked to write up a plan. Phase three is going out to the world and really going to the unchurched and those who have drifted away from the faith. It's been slow in some ways it's been uneven, but we have 102 parishes and I can honestly say there's not one pastor in our diocese who is resistant to doing this. And I am so consoled by that. They're doing it in different ways. They're doing it according to the culture and chemistry of their own parish, but everyone is seeking to grow in faith, hope, and charity themselves, to enter more deeply into a life of discipleship and to form our people, giving them the confidence and competence to go out and evangelize others. So it's not a program. It's simply a way to form others to go out and to proclaim the karygma. So it really comes down to how do we share the basic gospel message which we think everyone has heard, but in fact, most people have not. And here I'm stealing a page from Father John Ricardo of Acts 29. He came and he worked in our diocese. And as you know, if you've heard him, he is extraordinary in his articulation of the karygma. But his working with us inspired me to spend three days every month in one of our parishes. So since February of 2021, once a month, I spend three days in a particular parish. I do the Sunday Mass. I celebrate confirmation in Sunday afternoon. Then Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday nights, we have a three-night mission. And my whole focus is proclaiming the karygma. During the day, I visit the school. I say Mass, thank you. During the days, I'm there. I say Mass for the school. I visit the classrooms. I visit the sick. I meet with the staff. And our pastors, with their tremendous credit, put up with the fact that their bishop comes in and moves in with them for three days. I mean, I think about that from the other end. It's like, how would I have felt if my bishop moved into my house for three days? But they're fantastic. But I just think there's nothing more important that I could be doing as a bishop than proclaiming the karygma. Because it's the fundamental mission of the church. It's the fundamental mission of the 12 apostles. They went forth. Plus it gets me out of the office for three days. So that's fantastic. And with technology, I can still tune into meetings if I need to. But to spend our time simply sharing the basics of the faith. So I just want to talk a little bit about how I articulate the karygma in our parishes because I try to keep it really simple. So I want us to speak the karygma to you. And I need to hear it again myself. I think you know, you're the experts in all of this. But there's essentially four parts to it. God created everything good. Sin messed everything up. The whole Christ event is God's way of rescuing us from sin and death. And that that extraordinary love of Christ poured out in our lives demands a lived response. So it's creation, it's the fall, it's redemption and it's our response to that extraordinary love of God. So just to reflect on those four a little bit, God created everything out of nothing. When I was five years old, I remember asking my mother, who made God? Cause I was learning that God had made everything that exists. So I was wondering in my five year old mind, who made him? And she gave me a, my mom was a great theologian. She said, you'll never figure it out. But God always was and God always will be the eternity of God. So I immediately tried to figure it out. And in my little mind, I'm trying to imagine like before the world existed, God was somehow still there. Then I tried to imagine like a point when the world wouldn't exist anymore and we were all gone and God was still there. The mystery of the eternity of God. So 53 years and two theology degrees later, I still can't figure it out, right? The wonder of God's eternity. You know the most astonishing thing? In Ephesians chapter one, St. Paul tells us that before God even laid the foundations of the world, he already had you and I in mind. He had you and I in mind before he even made the world. And he waited until the exact right moment to bring us into existence. So we're not a highly evolved animal. We're not simply the collision of random circumstances. We are here by the express creative desire of God to share his life with us. And that's the extraordinary beginning of the karygma. G.K. Chesterton reminds us that we're all great might not have bends. I love that. And what he meant by that was to invite us to ponder the extraordinary number of circumstances that had to come together in exactly the right way for us to be conceived and to be born. So I think of that in my own life. So my dad worked in a factory in Milwaukee. He grew up in a farm. He fought World War II. We never went to high school. Went to Milwaukee after the war. And in August of 1951, he dropped something heavy on his right foot and had to go to see the company nurse. That's how he met my mother. She was the company nurse. And he kept pretending his foot still hurts so that he could go back and see her. And they got married the next year. So I always say, if my dad had not hurt his big toe in 1951, I would not exist. I mean, it all seems so random, doesn't it? And yet it was somehow all part of God's plan. So your life is part of God's plan. Like whatever circumstances had to happen exactly right for you to be born, they happened by God's express will and desire. So if you ever wondered, does God really love me? Just the fact that we exist, the fact that we breathe, the fact that we're here is abundant evidence that God willed us to be from the beginning. So Genesis reminds us that we're made in the image and likeness of God. What does that mean? It means we have a soul. It means that we're going to live forever with God or without God depending on how we live this life. So it's an urgency to conversion. We live in a culture today that often says, God's a good guy, doesn't matter how I live. In the end, everybody gets into heaven. When somebody says that to me, I always say, show me that in the Bible. Because my Bible doesn't say that. My Bible says the road is rough and the gate is narrow that leads to life. And so we're imperishable. We are eternal. We are as eternal as God himself. And he has made us for himself. And so we have this beautiful soul made in the image of God. We have an intellect, which means we can come to know God. Think of all the things that the human mind is devised. Think of this thing. I hold more in my hand right here than Houston probably had when we put man on the moon in 1969. But this pales in comparison to our ability to know God through his word, through his sacraments. Imagine if people consulted the Bible as many times as we picked up our phone. How different the world would be. Unless you have the Bible on your phone and that doesn't count. You know, you can look at it there. But we have an intellect to know God. Thirdly, we have a heart to love. Our meaning of existence is to love, to love God and others, to fall in love with God. And fourthly, we have a will, which means God gave us freedom. And that's the mysterious difficult part because it's our will that messed us up. But to be made in God's image and likeness is to have a soul and intellect, a will and a heart and to be destined for eternal life with him. To me, it breaks down to three fundamental questions. Who am I? What is my purpose? And what is my destiny? Imagine if everybody in the world had a clear and straight answer to those three questions. In some ways, isn't that the heart of Catechesis? Who am I? What is my purpose? And what is my destiny? Who we are fundamentally. And we can say a lot of things about ourselves. But who we are fundamentally is that we are beloved children of God, purchased with the precious blood of Christ and anointed in the power of the Holy Spirit. That's who we are. And everything else about us matters so much less than that. So next time you're at a party and somebody comes up and asks, who are you? Just say, I'm a beloved daughter of the Father. I've been purchased with the precious blood of Christ. I've been anointed in the power of the Holy Spirit and watched them run for cover. But that's who we are. We're beloved children of God. What is our purpose? To fall in love with God. To know, love and serve God in this life and to bring as many people with us as we possibly can into that saving relationship. And that's why all of you are here this week in Steubenville because you know that. And you live that. That's our purpose, to become saints. And the world has never needed saints more. And what's our destiny? The glorious life of heaven. Heaven. To be with God forever and ever in this mystery of the Trinity. And have everything about us that sinful, lost, dead, broken, anxious to be completely taken away. So that we glow with God's pure light. And as the gospel say, we will shine like the sun in the kingdom of our Father. About a month after my brother died, my mother had a dream of him. My brother, Patrick. And he came to her in this dream from heaven and he was absolutely radiant with light. And he said to her, mom, don't cry for me because I'm with Jesus. Imagine the consolation of that. My mother clung to that dream her whole life. Don't cry for me, I'm with Jesus. This radiant vision of heaven. So what is suffering? What is the difficulty of life in light of heaven? We keep our eyes fixed on the prize that gets us through everything. So here we are, these beautiful children of God made in his image. God made everything good and beautiful and true as we hear in Genesis. That's the first part of the krigma. I'm giving you the reader's digest version because I don't have a lot of time. The second part, original sin. All we have to do is look at the news and see the terrible consequences of sin in our world. The wars, the mass shootings, the breakdown of marriage and family, the suicide rates, the drug addiction, the conflict, the hatred, the loss of hope, all of the violence and anger over abortion in our country at this moment. And then our personal sins, all the sins of the entire world, every human being from the beginning of time to the end to contemplate that is overwhelming and where did it come from? Of course we know in Genesis chapter two, the whole story of Adam and Eve and the fall from grace. And to put it in a nutshell, the seduction of the serpent is that he convinces Adam and Eve that their relationship with God is not that to a benevolent, provident father, but rather to an oppressive dictator. But if they really want to be free, they have to throw God off. It isn't that really emblematic of so much that's going on in our culture and our world. I decide what's right and wrong. I decide what's true and false. I make up my own moral rules. I don't need to listen to God or the church or anybody. It's the call of the evil one from the beginning to throw God off. I had five older brothers growing up and to survive our childhoods, my parents had some pretty good rules. One of them was you couldn't throw things in the living room. So I'm four years old, I'm watching television, I'm minding my own business and my brother comes in and throws a ball to me. I instinctively throw it back to him only it hits one of my mother's porcelain vases on the wall that she got as a wedding gift. And it broke not into three pieces, it broke into like 17 pieces. I had not read Genesis at the age of four. And yet I immediately did what Adam and Eve did. I ran upstairs and hid under my bed. So I get like then, concupacence is built into our DNA. I immediately acted out Genesis at the age of four. My mother, like God, comes up and pulls me out from the dust bunnies and confronts me with the deed. And I immediately did what Adam did. I blamed somebody else. It's not my fault, it's my brother's fault. He threw the ball. When I look at the world unredeemed, I think of that shattered vase. And it broke because I didn't follow the rules. It broke because in that moment, I thought I knew better. So the world is a shattered vase because of sin. And how important it is for us to get in touch with our sinfulness. Because if we never get in touch with our sinfulness, we will never know the joy of being forgiven. If I wanna be healed of my wounds, I need to show them to the doctor. And so it is with our sin. We need to show our sin to Christ. And to be convicted of sin. That's something that our culture is so afraid of. Like somehow if I admit sin, then somehow I'm eternally cast off. But until I acknowledge my sin, how can I know the grace of the freedom of being forgiven? That's the beauty of St. Paul's writings. So I can stand before you and just say, I'm a sinner, I'm a mess. And I'm in need of salvation. And that's beautifully freeing to say. Because if we don't let God be God, if we don't let God be God even over my sin and your sin, then the only alternative is that we have to be our own God. And how exhausting is that? Because it means I always have to be right. I always have to be in control. I always have to be the answer. I always have to be strong. Faith allows us to let our weakness shine. To even take pride in it, as Paul says. I boast of my weakness so the strength of Christ can reign and live in me. How important it is for us to acknowledge our sin and to go to confession and there to receive the power of Jesus' forgiveness. And in doing so, we help to heal the world. So the second movement of the krigma, that original sin in our sin. Third movement, Christ event as rescue. So I picture the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit talking amongst themselves before the sending of the Son, looking down at the world. Looking down at all the confusion, all the hatred, all the violence, all the selfishness. And I hear the Father say, the world is really a mess. This is not how we intended things to go. And I hear the Holy Spirit say, yes, they've forgotten about us. They don't know us. They don't realize that we love them. And I hear the Father say, one of us has to go down there. And I imagine the Son raising his hand and saying, Father, I'll go. Father, I'll go. So the whole Christ event as rescue mission, as God coming to rescue us from sin and death because he couldn't bear to leave us in the throes of evil. So compassion is what mercy does when it faces human misery. We just had the parable, the Good Samaritan on Sunday at Mass. So when I think of Jesus, it is incarnation in his ministry and in his death and resurrection. Is that now, is that not how he heals the gap between us and the Father? Christianity is astonishing because it's the only world religion that believes that the universal mysterious, all powerful, invisible God humbled himself to become one of his own creatures in order to save us from inside our own human experience. The wonder of Christmas that the church has never gotten over. God coming as a baby. The wonder of the incarnation. Jesus fully God, fully human, one divine person, two natures healing the rift between us and God in his very being. Secondly, in his ministry, he always has eyes for those on the margins. He's always putting together the broken pieces of people's lives. He's fixing the vase. And think of the healing of the paralytic where these four friends bring their friend to Jesus and they can't get in because of the crowd. You know the story. So they go up on the roof of the house, they make a hole in the roof, lower this man down. They were friends, they loved this man and they knew all they had to do was get him in front of Jesus and everything would be good. Scriptures don't come in on what the owner of the house felt about his roof being torn apart. But the love of those friends, it's like we have to get our friend to Jesus. He can heal the man, he can heal our friend's paralysis. But Jesus doesn't start there. He forgives the man's sins and then he heals his limbs. As if to say, no, let me start first, let me get to the heart of the problem. Because the heart of the problem isn't the fact that you can't walk. Heart of the problem is that you're a sinner and you need to be forgiven. And so Jesus gets to the heart of the problem with everybody that he meets and invites them into this new relationship of freedom and forgiveness and love and salvation in his ministry. And then ultimately in his death and resurrection. So we can never contemplate a crucifix. And here we have the beautiful San Damiano crucifix. We can never contemplate a crucifix within difference. We can never pass one by and say, oh, I've seen that before. Because in every crucifix we see Jesus with his head bent to kiss us, his arms open to embrace us and his feet nailed fast to pardon our sins. Here we see the totality of God's love poured out for us. The God himself took upon himself the weight of our sin, the totality of the weight of all of humanity's sinfulness and dressed himself in it, embraced it. Everything within us that was lost, sinful, broken and dead, he takes that on and lifts it up to the Father. So in every crucifix we see Jesus with his head bent to kiss us, his arms open to embrace us and his feet nailed fast to pardon our sins. When I try to explain what that means, that Jesus died for our sins, I use this perhaps homely example but I say imagine you're eight years old, you're sleeping at night, you're on the second floor of your house, it's the middle of winter, you live in the north, it's 20 below zero and you wake up at 2.30 and you smell smoke and you realize that your house is on fire. And you know enough not to open the door but you go to your bedroom door and you touch it and it's too hot to touch. So fire is right on the other side. It's the only way you're gonna save yourself is you're gonna open that second floor window and you're gonna jump into the night, into this cold night and you're eight years old. So you open the window and you stand there and you're frozen in fear, you're dangling between life and death and the smoke is getting thicker, the fire is getting closer and you can't move. And just then fireman breaks into your bedroom, grabs you and throws you out the window, throws you. And somebody catches you, you're thrown into life, you're saved, you're not gonna die. But you find out to your tremendous grief and sorrow the next day that this fireman who saved your life himself died of smoke inhalation in the flames. He traded his life for yours. He's dead so that you could live. Would you go to that man's funeral? Of course. How would you honor his memory? Or would you say to his family? He gave his life for you. You're gonna live your life completely differently because you've been saved and he saved it. As astonishing as that is, as amazing as that sacrifice is, it pales in comparison to what Jesus does for us on the cross because that man bought you another perhaps 70 years of earthly life. Jesus buys us eternal life and the forgiveness of sins. So I have to get that in order to understand Christianity. I have to understand not only in my heart or not only in my head but in my heart, not only in my heart but in my guts. Jesus traded his life for me. Jesus traded his life for me so that I could live forever and be forgiven. When I know that, when I come to realize the immensity of the infinity of Christ's love for me, it changes everything because then the only thing that makes sense is for me to live my life as a response to that remarkable gift. It's the only thing that makes sense anymore. And so that's when we come to fall in love with God because we realize the immensity of his love for us and that moves us into the fourth part of the karygma, our response. One of my favorite passages in all of the gospels is John chapter 12. It's the anointing at Bethany and I'm sure you're familiar with it. It's the last week of Jesus' earthly life and right before his fearful passion, he goes to have dinner for the last time with his best friends, Martha, Mary and Lazarus. And in the course of that meal, Mary does something extraordinary. She breaks open this aromatic jar of nard and pours it over the feet of Christ. And it says that the whole house is filled with the fragrance. And it's nobody other than Judas Iscariot who questions the expense and he says, why wasn't this sold and given to the poor? It would have brought in 300 days wages. I have never spent 300 days wages to buy a gift for a friend, have you? Not even an engagement ring necessarily caused 300 days wages. So what Mary did was this extraordinary lavish over the top gift to Jesus. She spent 300 days wages on this perfume and poured it over the feet of Christ. Why did she do it? Maybe it's because in the previous chapter, Jesus raised her brother Lazarus from the dead. It was like, it was her way of saying thank you. Maybe it was an anticipation of Jesus' burial, the narrative hints at that possibility. Or maybe it was simply that she loved the Lord so much that she wanted to give everything that she had. So I use that scripture to talk about moving from a position of minimalism to maximalism. Minimalists ask the question, what do I have to do? What do I have to do to pass this test? What do I have to do to keep from getting fired? What do I have to do to be saved? What's the bare minimum? Maximalists are in love. And because love looks to possibilities, maximalists don't look at the bare minimum. They say, what can I do? Not what do I have to do? What can I do? So when we fall in love with God or with others, we stop measuring, we stop counting, don't we? Imagine a married couple saying, I kissed you twice this week. That's my quota, you know, no more. All right, I cooked the last 786 meals. Now you're gonna cook the next 786 meals. When you're in love, you don't count. You just give everything and you never feel like it's enough. When you're not in love, the little bit you're giving already feels like it's too much. So how do we create environments in our parishes, in our catechesis, in our families, in our places of work, in our parishes? How do we create an environment where people can more easily fall in love with God? They realize that our faith isn't just this joyless fulfillment of duty, but that we're called to something greater. And once we fall in love with God, we know what that greater is. When I was seven years old, my mom went back to work as a nurse half time. And she worked every other weekend. And on those weekends, we would go to Mass on Saturday night because she had to leave at the crack of dawn on Sunday to go to work. So on those weekends, we'd go to Saturday night Mass. My mom would go off to work the next morning. My dad would wake all of us up and make us go to Mass again on Sunday. And I never resisted going to Mass on Sunday or the weekend. I resisted going to the same Mass twice within 11 hours. So my dad would wake us up and I'd say, your dad, it's gonna be the same priest, the same homily, the same music, it's the same Mass. Priest is gonna think we're fanatics so we were just here last night. And he always said two things that stuck with me. One was, I don't care. And you know you're losing the argument when that's the response. But then he would say this. And I really think this is partially why I'm a priest. He would say, don't you think that God has done enough for you this week that you can give him two hours of praise and thanks? Don't you think that God has done enough for you this week that you can give him two hours of praise and thanks? What do you say to that except get up and go, right? But my father understood the Mass as our response of gratitude and praise to the enormous gift of Jesus crucified and risen. He understood and my mother as well that our faith isn't just this joyless fulfillment of duty that we're called into this divine romantic adventure with the Lord and to invite everyone else into that with us as well. So when I think of the new evangelization, when I think of the Second Vatican Council, I really think Bishop Barron has it right because I read a reflection from him on this. And when you look at Pope John the 23rd's original intention regarding the Second Vatican Council, it was this, he wanted to renew the church. So the church was more equipped to evangelize the modern world. It wasn't renewing the church for the sake of renewing the church, it was to renew the church for the sake of the mission. What does Noah do the second the ark hits land? He opens up the ship and he lets the life out. So I think Pope John the 23rd's vision was let's open up the church and let the life out. I think it's, I don't think it's a coincidence that the Second Vatican Council opened in October of 1962 in the exact same week that the Cuban Missile Crisis was going on. Here the world was on the verge of destruction and the Pope was talking about the renewal of the church for the sake of proclaiming the gospel. So perhaps it's taken us this long to really understand the implications of the Second Vatican Council. And I think of Paul the sixth apostolic exhortation, evangely Nunciandi, we talked about how it isn't so much that the church has a mission as it is that the mission has a church, that the church is the embodiment of the mission of Jesus through time and space. We think of St. John Paul II's focus on the new evangelization. We think of Pope Benedict's attention to the saints and to beauty. We think of Pope Francis with missionary discipleship. All of that is the church calling us to be renewed in the Holy Spirit and to summon the vast energetic forces of global Catholicism for the sake of the mission. And yet as big and universal as that sounds, I love what we were reflecting on at dinner tonight about the power of the personal and the beauty of the small. Because when you think about how Jesus did his ministry, I think of the one, the three, the 12, the 72. He had a very distinct relationship with Simon Peter because he was forming Simon to lead the church. Then think of Peter John and James as the three that were at the transfiguration and at the agony of the garden. And then the 12 apostles and then the 72. So to focus, perhaps not on numbers, but to really focus our energies on those that are most ripe for evangelization, those who are most ready for catechesis. That when we pour our energy into them, we gain another disciple to go into the world. In my diocese, we're moving in a very profound way towards family catechesis. And I see tremendous fruit in that. That we need to somehow capture the hearts and the minds and the souls of the parents rather than simply catechizing the children. And it's working to the surprise of some of our pastors. It's like, you think, well, how could this possibly work? And yet it is. Which shows that the perennial hungers of the human heart for God are pervasive. And to proclaim the karygma is attractive. And to live the gospel is compelling. So when I do these three night missions, it's amazing to me how many people say, I've never heard the gospel presented this way. I've never heard the whole thing. I've just had bits and pieces. So I always say the karygma is like our 10 minute elevator speech. If somebody comes up and asks us, why are we Catholic? You figure out a way to say in your own words in about 10 minutes, the karygma. And invite them into that relationship with Jesus. So my deepest prayer for you is that you come to know in an ever deeper way, the extraordinary infinite perfect love of Christ. And to realize and to treasure as the pearl of great price your particular vocation in the church, whatever it is. God has given you a particular vocation in the church and that you live with ever greater courage, generosity and joy, this calling that you have received. So I think in the moment we live in, we can either wring our hands in despair and fear or we can open our hands and joy and hope and say, Lord, bring it on. Cause we have opportunities to do things that no other generation has had to evangelize, to cataclyse and to lead people to Christ. So I just like to end with a prayer. Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, amen. Or Jesus, pour forth your Holy Spirit upon us. May we feel the intensity of the flames of your sacred heart, help us to fall ever more deeply in love with you and assure that love with others, this power of the gospel, this truth of the karygma, pour forth your spirit upon us that this week together may be a transformative moment, a Cairo's moment, a moment in the upper room where we are anointed and transformed, that we can go into the world and say to everyone we meet, let me tell you about this man. And we ask this blessing, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, amen. What a joy and a blessing to be with you tonight. On behalf of all of our bishops, I just wanna offer my love, my prayers, my gratitude to you. What a gift it is to see the church in action and such a beautiful room full of missionary disciples. Thank you, God bless you.