 So I'm going to give you my plug. I tell this to everyone all the time. This has nothing to do with my talk and kind of everything to do with it. I'm going to talk for those of you. I do talk fast. I apologize. I will try to consciously slow down, but I do talk fast. Usually I have people in the front. They're like, slow it. They do this hand motion. I'm like, no, you're in my world. Buckle up. Get the video. No, but what I want to say to everyone is I'm listening to all of these speakers. They're all incredible speakers, right? And you hear them, and they say things, and the way that they say it, it so moves us. And that's the point, right? But I will say this. You and I need to have our own relationship with Jesus Christ, our own image of the man ourselves. Oftentimes, what ends up happening is we have the image of what Scott Hahn has, or what Deacon Harold has, or Mike Aquilina would have stalked yesterday. We can get other people's image. And see, the thing is it's like reading another couple's love letters, right? We need to have this image of Christ in our lives. So how do we become friends with Christ, right? He says, I no longer call you servants, I call you friends. For a servant doesn't know what his master is doing. So there's two principle ways. I mean, there's several ways. Number one, obviously the sacraments, especially the whole Eucharist, right? Going to it as often as we can, sitting in front of his divine presence, receiving it, just amazing. Number two is your personal prayer life. What is your personal prayer life? Obviously the liturgical life of the church, but what does your personal devotional prayer life look like? I pray often you're doing it wrong. All the books, all the audio cassette tapes that we buy and we illegally give to our family, it's for the Lord. All the things that we do, right? All these things that we consume, right? If they aren't leading us into deeper intimacy with Christ, then what's the point, right? So our prayer life has to deepen, which is why, that's why they put Dr. Sree's talk in there. Like remember, it's good to have knowledge always. Ignorance is not a virtue. Sometimes it's bliss, but it is not a virtue, right? So we want to have the knowledge, but the knowledge, for every, this one Orthodox priest said to me one time, and I don't know why I wasn't like talking to him, but just kidding. He said, for every hour you study, you should pray an hour. And I was like, how about 10 minutes, right? So it's easy to get lost in these beautiful thoughts, but the one thing is we want to get lost in our Lord. And then the last thing, and this is the thing that I really want to emphasize, is read the four Gospels. If you do not have a pattern of Gospel reading, sit down with the Gospel of Mark and read and observe. You're not trying to figure it out. You're not trying to outwit a Methodist down your street, right, you're just reading to see the face of Christ and pay attention, pay attention to what he says, pay attention to how it describes the scene, what he says and does. And I say this to people all the time because in my heart of hearts, I find, you ever met Christians who are like rude and they're jerks and they're mean? I think the reading, I know you haven't, but other people have because they met you. Just kidding, that's a joke, that was harsh. That was harsh. I didn't mean it, I didn't mean it. But the idea is, I think some Christians, after their walk with our Lord, they tend to think, well, I'm the one who saved me. And it's only in returning to the Gospels and getting the image of Christ pressed into your brain repeatedly that you can understand who he really is. So when you hear someone that says, well, I don't think, well, I look in my heart, Jesus would never say something like that. You're like, actually, Jesus himself said that. So what did the real Jesus say and do? That's what we want to model our lives on. Not does what is this incredibly handsome guy, Michael Gormley, say Jesus said and did. You want to keep going back to the source. You want to keep returning to the Gospels because only in rereading his life, not reading, but rereading his life, can you actually begin to emulate him? That which we love, we imitate, which is actually the basic principle of the communion of saints, that which we love, we imitate. And if you love Jesus Christ, you want to reproduce in your own life the pattern of his life. We call it conforming ourselves to Christ. And because he's the Son of God and he's eternal, when you conform yourself to him, right? He can be imitated in a myriad of different ways in the pattern of each one of your circumstances, right? So that's my thing. Scott Hahn, Michael Gormley, Deacon Burke, right? We are not your standards of righteousness. He is. So let's cling to Christ, amen? Amen? Amen? Why are you yelling? Okay, so there's a man named Frank Sheed. Raise your hand if you know who Frank Sheed, you ever heard of Frank Sheed? Oh, I shouldn't even have said this is what I'm stealing from you, you wouldn't even know. Okay, Frank Sheed was originally born in Australia, ended up living in London, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, right? Basically the middle of the 20th century. He was a brilliant Catholic writer, but his writing, he's written about 20 books. All of them are basically one book in different audiences and his style is incredible. So he has a book called Theology for Beginners, Theology and Sanity, A Map of Life, Knowing God, Society and Sanity. He has a bunch of really great books. Two of them I'm gonna highlight now, To Know Christ Jesus and what difference does Jesus make? These, all of his books are the fruit of doing what's called the Catholic Evidence Guild. The Catholic Evidence Guild were men and women who would train themselves on basically street corner preaching. They would go to places like Hyde Park in London, they would stand on a box and they would say, I'm a Catholic and I'm gonna talk about the Eucharist. And then all the Anglicans who are anti-Catholic and all the Communists and all the people would gather around him and he would do a 15 minute presentation and then they would just pepper him with objections and questions. So he wrote a book called The Outlines for the Catholic Evidence Guild Training, right? And it's not like a book you read from cover to cover at all. Scott Hahn wrote the forward, so you know I have to plug it and I'm contractually obligated. Just kidding, but like, when you look at this book, it's so fantastic because he has insights. I mean, maybe you've gotten in conversations with friends or relatives who are atheists, agnostic, Jewish, Protestant, whatever, and they have objections to Catholicism or theism or a moral issue, right? And you try to figure out what's the right way to say it. Imagine if you're a super witty, engaged man and you've had thousands of objections, right? So his books are kind of the fruit of these conversations. And when I was preparing for this talk, actually four years ago when I was preparing for this talk, because I do a program at my church called Inclusion. Inclusion is a modified form of the RCIA to bring well-formed Protestants into the Catholic Church. Are any of y'all converts, any of y'all converts? Now, did you have to go through the regular RCIA where you're sitting next to the guy for a year and a half who's never opened a Bible and you're like, are you kidding me? Right, yeah, you're bobbing your head pretty hardcore there. Yeah, so one of the things I realized, so you have the RCIA actually divides people up into three categories of converts. The unbaptized, the unbaptized and poorly catechized, the unbaptized, the unbaptized and poorly catechized and the baptized and well catechized. And it talks about like, number one, uphold their baptismal dignity because their baptism is real. So don't kick them out of mass. They have every right to offer if they're baptized, the holy sacrifice of the mass and unite their sacrifices to the priest, they just can't receive communion. Okay, but they have every right to be at mass. Don't kick them out so they can have a 10-minute prayer group that's super socially awkward. What you wanna do is also understand that the unbaptized and the baptized, I'm not gonna lie, your sneeze scared me, but God bless you. It was unexpected, it was perfectly pitched, God bless you. Not to draw attention to it or anything, but we often forget that the baptized and unbaptized, right, those are two categories. But people who do not know the gospel, do not know our Lord, who have never cracked open the Bible, who don't know the great mystery of salvation, we're putting people who are reading their way into the Catholic church, wrestling with these big issues, going to IHOP and arguing with professors. You're trying to figure all this stuff out and it's like, okay, well 12 months and sitting next to this person. We're gonna talk about a guy named Jesus today and they're like, oh my goodness, this is killing me. So I decided to do an end run around all of that and I started a group called Inclusion. Inclusion stripped away all the extras that you don't need for the baptized or you don't need all the different rights and all that stuff. There's a couple that you do. But got rid of all that and we focused on community, the community experience of Catholicism and we focused on the instruction to correct where they might be coming from into where they're coming to, right? So the areas where Catholics and Protestants disagree. Now I'm from the Texas, the beautiful, yes, the neighbor to the south of the United States called Texas and in the great republic, the majority of people are Baptists, are Southern Baptists or are non-denom. If they are other mainline religions such as Episcopalian or whatever or Methodists, they are the evangelical conservative versions of those for the most part. So I can presume that most of the people, and I don't have to presume because I interview every single one of them, but I can presume that the majority of them believe in the Trinitarian God, believe in the incarnation, the virgin birth, they believe in the atoning sacrifice of Christ, some of them have what we call penal substitutionary atonement as their main understanding of it. Some of them do not, they reject that so you gotta figure that stuff out. A lot of them holds baptism and esteem whether it's an ordinance or a sacrament, different language. So you gotta figure this out but I can presume already a lot of knowledge. And so what I do is I focus on those areas of the biggest divide between Catholics and Protestants and it amazes me that every year, year in and year out, it's the same things. It's the same things and it's so funny. There's something about Mary, right? What's going on with her? You Catholics, I mean like, I get it, she's great but really that much, right? So they wanna understand that. The communion of saints, why the statues, why the bones, why, you know, why all this? Oh, you got a piece of her hair, I need to go, right? So you will kiss grandma's hair locket, right? So for a lot of people, it can be very off-putting, right? Especially when they go to a church that has drywall that does not have statues, that does not have artwork except for the really kitsch artwork of that statue, the exhausted man holding a hammer and a nail and Jesus behind him holding it up. You know that picture? Yeah, come on. That guy looks like Scott, what's his name, the actor from Quantum Leap. Remember that? Okay, so that's neither here nor there. So when I go through, this is a weird talk, when I go through and I begin to prepare for these groups of Protestants who are coming from an evangelical outlook and I'm gonna introduce them to the communion of saints, right? Frank Sheed, I have found his model to be the very best, right? So what's the common thing that they think about the saints with Catholics? What do they all think? We worship them, right? And it's, oh, you worship God but Jesus, if they're fancy pants, right? It's a soul mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus. No other person could reconcile us to the Father except the eternal Word made flesh. So what are you doing with all these pagan half deities? You know, this is all the inheritance of pagan Rome sneaking its way into Christianity. You know, since Constantine, that's the big one, right? They're like ever since Constantine legalized it, he needed a goddess for people to worship for the Romans. And so he gave us Mary. It kills me, right? So you hear this stuff. And as a Catholic, the funniest thing to me is I grew up in St. Ann's Catholic Church in Broken Air, Oklahoma. There's a statue of Ann Joachim and Mary, the child Mary, and I was a little kid, you know, every so often my dad would give me a quarter and I'd put it in a little thing and I'd get the little taper and I'd light the candle and I'd deal down, I'd say a couple of Hail Marys. Never once in my entire life. And I was explaining to a man who was a reform Baptist and I said, never once in my entire life that I ever think I am worshiping this statue or I am worshiping Ann or Joachim or Joachim or Mary. I never once in my head was I was like, okay, there's God and then there's sort of God, Mary, right, never. And I was explaining this to him, but for him, for him to see someone light a candle in front of a graven image and then bow down, worship, worship, worship. And for him, he was like, I don't know if I can do this. I don't know if I believe in the Eucharist. He's like, but I don't know. I think you've must have corrupted it along the way. And I go, well, buddy, if you don't have a place without Eucharist as the Orthodox, they do the same thing. So maybe there's something ancient with our practice here. So, okay, I don't know, I don't know. I was like, just trust the process. Go home, pray about it, and then come to class, come to class. So the way Frank Sheed organizes it is he says this brilliant first step. This is the first step in talking about communion of saints with those who are Christian, who don't, who feel threatened that it's ruining the one mediatorship between God and man, the man Christ Jesus. Step one, do not try to minimize worship into these different categories. He's like, don't start there, that's important. But oftentimes what we do is like, no, no, no, we don't worship God, or Mary, we worship God, we adore God, we venerate Mary, we venerate the saints, we venerate the angels, right? He says, don't do that. He said, because already you're on the terms of thinking, well, you worship, but it's just a little less. He said, instead think of the everyday average way that you and I honor things. So my favorite story is the statue of the Marine Corps raising of the flag, the monument of the Marine Corps raising the flag at Iwo Jima, right? You've seen the picture, maybe the video, right? You've seen the statue of the flag going up, all the men are raising the flag up. There's one guy whose fingertips are almost touching, he was a Navajo, right? Like it's a cool story, it's incredible. There is not a single hardcore, evangelical, American loving patriot who worships that statue, who worships that image, but they venerate it, right? The amount of respect that people have when you walk into Arlington National Cemetery, all those crosses, it is like a blanket of sacredness hits you. You know, you don't do, you don't scream, you don't yell, you don't shout, you get quiet, you get reverent, right? You walk into that statue and as a Catholic, right? I can see this, right? I can do the sign of the cross, not saying like, oh, these men are canonizable saints. I don't know their story, but I can say like, blood was spilled so that others could live. My grandfather was in the Navy and he was on the boats that brought the Marines. That's what my grandfather did during the war. And I can think of his story, which he always held the same story 500 times. I love my grandpa, it was always a story where he broke his leg on the boat. I'm like, stupid CEO, it's the best story ever. But I can see, like you experience the reverence, right? We honor, this is the most important principle. You and I do this all the time, everyone does this. We honor that which is honorable and we honor those who are honorable. That's what we do as human beings. We just honor that which is honorable. Like for instance, 4th of July comes around, we think about Boston Tea Party, we think about the writing of the Declaration of Independence, the greatest breakup letter of all time, right? We think about these things and we want to honor their memory, right? We think about the sacrifices that people have made in our own communities, our own hometowns. And we're talking purely secular things, right? And we honor them and we honor that which is honorable. In fact, St. Paul talks about this in Romans 13. Let me see if I can flip to it real quick. Romans 13, seven, I love this, pay taxes, pay all of them their dues, taxes to whom taxes are due, revenue to whom revenues do, that's a hard one to hear, that's a hard one to hear. Respect to whom respect is due, honor to whom honor is due. If you do an honorable deed, I owe you honor. Do you imagine disrespecting the Marines who raised the flag on Iwo Jima? Right, like that is dishonorable to do that, right? Because it's deserving in a very natural way, it is deserving of honor. And so it is natural, right, and normal for human beings to honor that which is honorable. I think I've said that 400 times, so let's move on. Societies, so then the next step is, so you start with the normal human need to honor that which is honorable. The next thing is the societies need to honor that which is honorable. To showcase the honorable deeds that they want repeated for the sake of that society, right? People who bravely stand up to tyranny, right? Poland spends X amount of million dollars a year to keep Auschwitz in working order, Auschwitz one and two in working order, so that you can go through it and you can see what happened. You could go to the cell of Father Maximilian Colby. My priests and broken in Oklahoma were liberated from a Nazi concentration camp. They came to Oklahoma because soldiers from broken arrow of all places were a part of the liberation of what other camp they were sent to. They knew Father Colby, they were all Franciscans, he knew Father Maximilian Colby. They had the tattoos on their arms, they would tell you horror stories. They delighted in torturing priests. So you think about this and as you're walking into Auschwitz one where it says work makes you free in German, there's a sign and it tells you who Hitler had placed in these prisons and it says political prisoners and those culturally who could rally the people of Poland such as priests, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it said this, certain politicians, whatever. And I took a picture of that priest and I sent it to my mom and I was like, this is our church. They were rallying points, right? So Poland needs to also make sure everyone remembers what happened so we don't repeat it except for the heroism of those who did honorable deeds we want to remember that so that we can repeat it. We want to repeat that which is honorable. We want to raise up statues of men and women giving their lives out of service for the country because we say that kind of heroism is what we want repeated. Societies honor that which is honorable because that's what they want imitated. And so we do this in our own lives, right? Why can't you be more like your brother, right? So we do this in a million different ways, right? Human beings actually learn through mimesis, through imitation, through miming, right? We learn, right, you think of all the little girls with the little dollies and all the little kids who play mommy and play daddy and they do all these things is because they're modeling in their head the patterns of how they live. And when you watch them imitate you and then you realize, oh, I yell too much, right? So you have this understanding, it's not my fault, my parents are from Philly. So we honor, right? We honor so as to imitate. We honor so as to imitate. That's the other principle. So what does St. Paul say? Numerous times, St. Paul. 1 Corinthians chapter 11, verse one, be imitators of me as I am of Christ. So we talk about society, so the great society that is the church. Why do we hold up saints? We hold them up because first and foremost, they lived lives of worthy imitation. Be imitators of me as I am of Christ. In the same book, 1 Corinthians, same letter, in chapter four, verse six, he says, I urge you then be imitators of me. So he starts off his argument, his letter with the Corinthian church, saying, I urge you to be imitators of me. And then halfway through, almost all the way through, he says again, be imitators of me as I am of Christ. That's what every saint is. It's not be imitated of the saints because it's Christianity plus Don Bosco, Christianity plus St. Francis. Then when people saw the life of Francis, they said, there's the life of Christ. When people saw the life of Don Bosco, they said, this is the life of Christ, right? All that is good within us comes from him because he's the sole mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus. He alone is our sole mediator. One day I was with a group of junior high students and they asked me on this camp to give a talk on Mary. And I said, why is the moon the perfect symbol for our lady? And a kid raised his hand and I said, yes, sir, front row and he said, because it's round, I lost all hope for America at that moment. I was like, what do you mean? Because he's round. And she's like, no, like she's pregnant. Like all of a sudden, she's pregnant. I'm like, oh my gosh, okay, she's round. Get out of here. And I was like, why? Okay, I'm gonna have to lead you. Okay, where does the moon get its light? It's from the sun. It's all reflected glory. And yet it's the brightest luminary in the night sky, right? From our perspective, right? Obviously stars are much brighter. But from our perspective, right? It's the brightest thing in the night sky because it's the thing that reflects the sun so perfectly. In her way, in the limited finite way, Luna reflects the glory of the sun. So too does our lady reflect the glory of Jesus Christ. In fact, she even said basically the same thing. She used the word magnify. My soul magnifies the greatness of the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God, my savior. So we can see that the moon is glorious because it reflects the sun so well. And so for us, when we understand the saints, be imitators of me as I am of Christ. Sin dehumanizes us. Sin is the most boring thing about us. The goodness, the virtue that we are all called to the heroism that we all actually want to do. That is what makes us most like Christ to conform ourselves to the pattern of his life. Next, we have not only St. Paul repeatedly commanding us. He actually says that about six times. You can see, actually I'm gonna give you a couple more. In Philippians chapter three verse 17, brethren, join in imitating me and mark those who so live as you have an example in us. Imitate me, join, get together and imitate me and imitate all of those that you see in your community who are living the way I live. That's his command in Philippians chapter three verse 17. First Thessalonians 1-6. And you become imitators of us and of the Lord. You imagine if I said that, if I put myself in the same category with Jesus. Yeah, come hang out with Michael Gormley and Jesus Christ, right? St. Paul was saying, be imitators of me and of the Lord. Why? Because in the imitation of Christ, you and I also need real world examples of how to live this out. You can't just, even though I went on and on and maybe a little bit too long about reading the Gospels, sometimes life is so crazy, it is difficult to figure out how to live this life and keep our holiness and keep our wits about us and stay righteous. And so what God has given us is so great, a cloud of witnesses that we can see by their example how they imitated Christ. So for instance, when I would have these Protestants becoming Catholic, they would say, okay, I'm gonna get confirmed. What is this thing called a patron saint? I was like, number one, you can keep your own baptismal name, it's totally cool. Or you could choose a patron saint. And that patron saint can be someone that, for some reason, it's connected to your life. Or it can be someone that's a patron of a thing you do. So, you know, St. Florian for fighter fighters, firefighters, we have military and police, a bunch of, a bunch of, we have one year where we brought in like four cops into the church and they were all the people who used to patrol and direct traffic for our church parking lot after mass. And I had the one Protestant who worked at our church, he came with me and she goes, stop converting all my officers, I can't hire anyone. I'm like, well, you're gonna have to take it up with a man upstairs, there's only so much I can do. No, but all of them took St. Michael, right? Patron of police. You know, I had one guy who was a beer brewer, right? So, did you know that there are over 40 patron saints of beer and beer making? In the Catholic church, there is only one other thing that has more patrons of it, and that's wine and wine making. And all of those saints are gonna be here for the young adult event. Okay, we're gonna represent, it's gonna be beautiful. The Lord helps those who help themselves. So then we come to the great text that all Catholics go to when we talk about sacred, when we talk about the saints, which is Hebrews chapter 12. You just take out your Bibles and go to, didn't wanna do the joke, but you impelled me. Okay, now I'm gonna give you the rundown real quick. In Hebrews chapter 11, we have the beautiful passage about faith. In my, I use the Great Adventure Bible, Revised Standard Version, Second Catholic Edition from Ascension Press. I got it for free because I do a podcast with them. And I said, whatever Jeff Kavens does, and Father Mike Schmitz reads, I want two of them. So me and Father Mike are friends. We text each other, don't worry about it. Anywho, and me and Jeff are enemies. Now, chapter 11, verse one. Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen, for by the men of old received divine approval. So this is the author of Hebrews, setting up 11 and 12. And he's drawing on 11, it's also called the Hall of Fame of Faith of New Testament heroes who heroically followed and were obedient to faith. By faith, we understand that the world was created by the word of God. So that which is seen was made out of things which do not appear. Verse four, by faith able offered to God a more acceptable sacrifice by Cain than Cain, through which he received approval as righteous, Godbearing witness by accepting his gifts. He died, but through his faith, he is still speaking. That's in reference to the blood, right? Where it says your brother's blood cries up to me from the ground. I remember the first time I read that passage, that's a shocking. Did you know there are four, I don't know why I'm going on this tangent. There are four sins that cry out to God for vengeance. It's pretty crazy. By faith, Enoch was taken up so that he should not see death and on and on it goes. Then we go to Abraham. By faith, Abraham obeyed. We just call it to go to a place which he was to receive as an inheritance on and on. By faith, Abraham, when he was tested offered of Isaac, then on we go. Then we go to the faith of Moses, verse 23. By faith, Moses when he was born was hidden for three months by his parents because they saw that the child was beautiful. Oh, you ugly, we'll give you two months. It's just funny when you see these things and you're like, I know probably in the original Greek that read differently, but I get stuck. By faith, Moses, can you tell I have ADHD? Can you tell it was late diagnosis? By faith, Moses when he was growing up refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter. By faith, by faith, by faith. And then it says other, the subcategory is subchapter is the faith of other heroes in Israel's history. By faith, the people crossed the Red Sea on dry land. And what more shall I say for someone, it would fail me to tell of Gideon, Barak, Samson, and he goes through David's Samuel and the prophets, those whose faith conquered kingdoms, enforced justice, received promises, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the raging fires, escaped the edge of the sword, one strength out of weakness, and on and on it goes. And all of these, verse 39, and all of these though well-attested by their faith did not receive what was promised since God had foreseen something better for us. That apart from us, they should not be made perfect. It's not awesome. All the Old Testament saints, as good, holy, righteous, beautiful as it was, especially Moses, as beautiful as all that was, they were saved by this eager longing and anticipation. Therefore, now every time you read the Bible and you see the word therefore, you have to ask, huh, what's that therefore? Okay. Because the problem with us is, how many of y'all do this? Like, I'm gonna read a chapter a day. So you read chapter 11, and then you close your Bible, and chapter 12 starts off with therefore. And you don't even remember what you read, right? Therefore, this happens at mass all the time with St. Paul, right, because he wrote a letter. He didn't write this gospel that was meant to be memorized in little snippets. And so when you read the letter, it's like one thought that takes four Sundays to get through, and it's like, brothers and sisters, therefore, and you're like, what is he talking about, right? What are the conclusion of an argument that I don't even remember? Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, just think of that image of all the Old Testament saints as a cloud of witnesses. Let us also lay aside every weight and sin which clings so closely. See, the beautiful example of the saints who have gone before us in faith, they're yet another reason for us to repent and be converted onward, deeper, deeper conversion. And let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, how about this line? I love this line, despising the shame and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God. He endured the cross for the sake of the joy that lay before him, but he despised the shame. We tend to think of Jesus as almost inhuman, right? Like, I have a cross that I bought my mom as a birthday present and it's an Armani crucifix and not the fan, not Giorgio, his brother who was a devout Catholic. But it's like this beautiful cross and he's like a lily white Jesus and he's got very lovely hair and he's just kind of smiling, he's got a little smile on, there's no blood, it's a blood and I remember buying because I thought it was cool looking, I thought my mom would be impressed, but after I looked at it, I was like, this seems weird to me. It doesn't seem like the man who despised the shame of the cross, but embrace it for the sake of the joy that lay before him. Do you know what the joy is that they're referencing in this in Hebrews? It's the idea of you being united to God forever. That was the joy that laid before Jesus. My favorite scene is in the Passion of the Christ where Mary has John take her around and get ahead of the crowds and he falls and then she runs up to, camera switches back and forth to him as a little boy falling and then him as a man and she goes to run up to hug him and embrace him and take the boo-boos away, right? Like all moms want to do. And he wouldn't let her, right? It's the subtlety of Jim Covizel's hands, right? His arms. And it said that he just went like this and you see his arms wrap around the cross and he says, see mother, how I make all things new. And he does not let him be held, hugged, delayed, hesitated and he stands and he goes forward. Despise the shame but for the sake of the joy that lay before him. Now, why is this important? Because the book of Hebrews is trying to set up a continuity between the Old Testament and the New Testament. What we had in the old is good but it is a shadow of the good things to come. In Christ Jesus we have the substantial form in the Old Testament we have the shadow. They were good and good in and of themselves but they were great because they participated and pointed to something even better that we have in Christ Jesus. If you've been following Scott Hahn for a while you've heard the word typology, right? All of these Old Testament types and shadows that point to the reality that is Christ Jesus, his self sacrifice on the altar and his holy church. And so when he talks about the Old Testament saints gathered around us he is picturing an arena, a Roman arena and inside the arena you were doing races. I just went to the Holy Land. Has anyone here been to the Holy Land? Right, awesome, awesome, awesome. I love going to the Holy Land. All my favorite stuff was the ruins. Like, hey, here's a church I was built in the 30s by a bunch of Franciscans who forgot what architecture was and I'm like, dad, that's nice. But let me go see the ruins. Like, I loved the ruins and the first ruins was the ruins that they actually mentioned today, Caesarea Meritima. And you go there and you see there's so much of it is intact and the amphitheaters there and it's like crazy. And there's the place where they used to do the chariot races, or as my wife calls it, NASCAR BC. And so as they do that, my wife loves NASCAR. Pray for her. You see this and you imagine a race, people running a race and everyone in the stands cheering them on. Here's the difference. The saints are described as a cloud of witnesses. The Greek word for witness is martyria, martyr, right? So these are people who give testimony. And what are they doing? They're not just a witness in terms of how they live their life, they lived their life and now they are witnessing those running the race. And this is the fundamental disconnect in the idea. Protestants, there are plenty of Protestants who have the Apostles Creed and the Nicene Creed where they confess the communion of saints. But for them, the communion of saints goes no further than the testimony of their own lives lived for God. And veneration, invocation, all of that stuff ceases. But we have already shown how St. Paul, Romans 13.7 commands us to give respect to whom respect is due and honor to whom honor is due. In Philippians, he tells us, you know, whatever's true, whatever is pure, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, think upon these things. St. Paul also says, be imitators of me as I am of Christ. That, him saying that does not take away Christ's mediatorship, does it? No, it allows us to see the mediatorship through the prism of Paul's life. It lets us see, oh, this is how you live as an apostle. This is how you live as a mother. This is how you live as a father. This is how you live as a police officer, whatever it might be. We see the gospel written into the lives of ordinary men and women that have become disciples. It's not that these disciples have replaced Christ. How many of you have had a mentor or a teacher who has led you into your Catholic faith? Has taught you maybe one-on-one or worked with you? You ever have that? It's just audio cassette tapes? Okay, yeah, no, we have, for many of us, we have a teacher who took extra time. Someone who went out and got a beer with us or got coffee with us or whatever and poured into us the faith and taught us how to think about things or maybe he was a priest who was homilies at church. That person does not replace Jesus, a missionary or an evangelist that goes and tells you the good news. Does not replace or somehow remove Christ's one-soul mediatorship. In fact, he hopes that Christ is the one-soul mediator because he's banking his entire ministry that Christ is gonna send his grace into these people's lives. He's living from a place of that. That's why Christ calls him ambassadors of reconciliation. He's the mediator and I'm going forth to tell you about him. And so for us, we can understand that there's this cloud of witnesses that surrounds us. It's not weird, it's not bizarre. As Catholics, we believe that we are not alone. Aliens, no, we are not alone. We know that the angels and saints who have gone before us marked by the sign of faith are cheering us on. If St. Paul repeatedly states how much he is praying for his people, right? Whether I'm with you in person or in spirit, right? He constantly says, we pray for you without ceasing. He says this in almost all of his letters to the churches that he started or whatever that he wants to come and visit. He's telling them how often he remembers them in his prayers and he prays to them. Do you think that's gonna go away when he dies? Because this is the principle objection is, yes, an example, note of veneration. And we show that every society venerates, every society honors, every society does that. In fact, one of my favorite stories, so I'm talking with the same Reformed Baptist guy, such a great guy, and he was telling me about one of his favorite Baptist preachers whose name I am blanking on. He lived in London, he's buried in Kansas City. Oh man, super famous. This is embarrassing, I can't remember, but anywho. So there is a, he was telling me, he's like, oh yeah, this guy's writings, blah, blah, blah, dude's super anti-Catholic and stuff. I would go through his writings from time to time, just try to be able to speak to these things and he just had no love for the Catholic faith. His main opponent was Anglicans because he's writing in England a lot, but as a Baptist, he was taking shots at all liturgical and sacramental kind of churches. And I was like, well, tell me about, he goes, oh yeah, I was driving through Kansas and we went over to, they have a memorial and a museum for him. I was like, oh, a museum in his honor, right? So, and he's like, yeah, it's actually great. They have his office and they plexiglas in the room where he studied. And it's awesome because the cigar he was smoking before he died, they have it encased in glass and I go, oh, like a third-class relic, right? And he's like, no, no, no, it's nothing like that. It's not like we go up and touch it and kiss it. I was like, yeah, that'd be weird if you'd kiss the cigar, right? But I was like, no, but isn't it funny though that your impulses, this man was a great example for me in the faith, slap plexiglass around it, like freeze frame it so that we can honor this man and build a museum around it. This is what humans do because it is good because you wanna keep honor rolling. You want more people to live an honorable life in imitation. And so for the saints, then the next question is, okay, yes, yes to example, yes to veneration. There are plenty of those who can, Martin Luther actually has a part where he says, yes, it's not immoral to venerate images or to venerate a crucifix. He said that in 1530, later some of his language would get a lot more harsh. But then the question is, but are they aware? Have you heard this objection to the saints? They're in heaven, they don't care. They're so caught up in the glory of God, they don't know what's going on here. Why would they care about what's going on here down below? So the answer to this is first and foremost. All right, before we address whether or not the saints have knowledge, have knowledge of us in heaven right now, and whether they use that knowledge to pray for us, what we call intercession, let us ask two questions. Are there any other spiritual beings that exist in heaven that interfere or get involved in the lives of men and women, also known as angels? Now we know that saints are not angels, especially you, no, I'm just kidding. We know that. We know that saints are not angels, right? They're fundamentally, you know, it's not humans waiting for a bell to ring. They are fundamentally essentially different beings, right? Saints are not angels, and angels have a role. The word angel means a messenger, message from whom to whom, from who to whom, right? From God to humanity. Angel is what they do, right? Spirit is what they are, or intelligence is what they are. If you wanna learn more of theology, the angels, you go to St. Thomas Aquinas, the angelic doctor, but the idea of this is we find in the Old and New Testaments, angels who are constantly doing things with human beings, right? You have the three angels that visit Abraham in the Old Testament, but let's just talk about some examples in the New Testament real quickly. I love this, right? So you got the shepherds at the Nativity, right? That angel, Gabriel, got so many frequent flyer miles, right? He's going to Zachariah in the temple, he's going to Mary in Nazareth, right? He's going to Joseph, don't divorce her in the dream, right, all this stuff. He's going to the angels, he's appearing, or to the shepherds, he's going to the wise men and being like, go back a different way, right? Like all of these things, right? This angel is moving and shaking. Jesus says, yeah, Jesus says to the, when he says to the guy, I saw you under the fig tree, and the guy responds, you are the Messiah of Israel. And he's like, well, you called me the Messiah because of that? And this is the line that Jesus says in John 1.51, truly, truly I say to you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man. And that phrase on the Son of Man is a reference to Jacob's ladder in the book of Genesis, where Jacob had a dream of a ladder. And on that ladder, angels were ascending and descending. The ladder is the humanity of Jesus Christ, where he communicates the divine to us here. And so that's why he says, you'll see angels ascending and descending on the Son of Man. In Luke 15, oh, I love this one, Luke 15, right? Whenever you get to Luke 15, this is the three parables of forgiveness, the parable of the 99 and the one lost sheep, the parable of the nine coins and the one lost coin, and then the story, the much longer story of the prodigal son, right? Luke 15, what does Jesus say when you find the lost sheep, when you find the lost coin? This is the great line, Luke 15, 10. Just so I tell you, there is joy before the angels of God over one sinner who repents. Now, why is that important? Because the angels rejoice every time a sinner comes home. They're aware of what's going on. Now, you might say, well, maybe, well, think about what Jesus says in Matthew's gospel, and I totally forgot to write the chapter in verse down. And Matthew says, for the tape, it's an audio problem. When Jesus talks about guardian angels, right? And he says this, see that you do not despise one of these little ones, for I tell you, and that phrase after Mike Aquilina's talk, that you do not despise one of these little ones? Oh man, that was, I just watered my veins when he was telling that story. For those of you who didn't come to the early bird, you're gonna have to buy the videos. See that you do not despise one of these little ones, for I tell you that in heaven, there are angels always behold the face of my father who is in heaven. So they're the guardian angels of this kid, while also simultaneously, because they're angels, able to behold their heavenly father, right? I love that. So we got the angels repenting or rejoicing over the repenting, angels ascending and descending. Hebrews 12, right? Going back to Hebrews 12 verse 22, it's so powerful. But you have come to Mount Zion, to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem. Scott Hahn in his book, how many of you have his new one, Holy is your name? Okay, have you read it? Have you got to the part? Yeah, get to the part on Hebrews, on the book of Hebrews. It is incredible. But he talks about this and he says, this context is the mass, but you have come to Mount Zion, to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem. He's not talking about the earthly Jerusalem. And to innumerable angels in festival gathering, and to the assembly, the gathered ones, the ecclesia, the church, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to a judge who was God of all, and to the spirits of just men made perfect. So where are we? We're at Holy mass. We are surrounded by angels in festival gathering. Love that. We are surrounded by the assembly of the firstborn. Don't entirely understand what the firstborn is, but we'll roll with it. And the spirits of just men made perfect. So we're in there, he's saying to his audience, you are here at Mount Zion, the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem. And this is what we experience when we're here. Then we go to that other beautiful sign of heaven, right? Whenever we talk about heaven, we're like, well, what's it like in heaven? We argue, I don't know if you know, so there's a big debate in Protestantism, certain groups of Protestantism, where it's called soul sleep. Have you ever heard of soul sleep? Soul sleep sounds what I did the other night after being on multiple airplanes, but it's kind of like dreaming, but not. No, so soul sleep is where they believe that when a person dies, they just go into an unconscious state until the resurrection of the dead, right? So we don't believe that as Catholics, when you hear the phrase has fallen asleep, right? Or rest in peace, that phrase refers to bodily death as their soul goes right to judgment before the judgment seat of God and goes on to heaven hell or purgatory, right? So you have this understanding within the Protestant world, there's an argument. No, no, no, the saints, the spirits of just men made perfect, they're in heaven beholding God and celebrating God, and they often use the very Bible versus Catholics use to talk about the awareness of the saints, not just being conscious, but their awareness of activity here on earth. So let me go through a couple of them. In a Revelation chapter five verse eight, it says, and when he had taken the scroll, the four living creatures and the 24 elders fell down before the land, each holding a harp and with a golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints. So here you have men who are sitting on thrones, who have crowns, who have golden sashes, which sounds pretty nice, and they're holding golden harps and they have incensors and in the incensors are the prayers of the saints. Isn't it amazing when you think about it from a Catholic worldview, the book of Revelation seamlessly aligns with the Catholic understanding of the role of the hierarchy, as well as the three modes of the church, militant, suffering and triumphant, because here there are angels and saints who are participating in the worship of God. It's not like God's like, man, these prayers are so heavy. I wish someone would put them in an incenser and bring them over to me, right? No, that's not, but God is, see, this is St. Thomas Aquinas, this is what he says, he says the glory of the governed is on the governed govern themselves, right? That's when you know, like you've internalized the law, but he also says God, who's the first cause, loves operating and letting us share in as real secondary causes. So he gives us dignity, he gives us authority, which is always participatory. The sun is the sole mediator and we get to participate in that mediatorship. In different ways, as a parent raising kids is different than me as an evangelist, right? Is different than a priest doing sacrament of baptism or confession or holy communion, right? Like we can see that these are participations in Christ because we are in him. These are unique ways that we participate in his sole mediatorship. But in the book of Revelation, it talks about that these 24 elders, most probably the 12 patriarchs of Israel and the 12 apostles, are there sitting on thrones, Jesus does say in Luke's gospel, you will sit on 12th thrones and judge the 12 tribes of Israel. It's pretty epic. And so here we have 24 elders and here they are crowned and they have incensors and they're carrying the prayers of the saints. If God, you know, if you say, well, I don't need to go to the saint, I go directly to God. God doesn't. God sets up his heaven, his Mount Zion, his heavenly Jerusalem. And we have tasks to do in heaven. The saints are participating in the reign of God. See, this is the Catholic worldview. It is full. It is thick, right? We still believe miracles happen. We still believe heaven touches earth. We still believe that the sacraments actually give us the grace of Jesus Christ. They don't just sign it, point to it or signify it. They communicate it. They're efficacious. They actually accomplish that which they signify. It's awesome. Okay, so I'm getting bogged down. Holy moly, it's 251. Okay, Revelation eight, oh man, I had a great story here, so I better hurry. Revelation eight, three through four. And another angel came and stood at the altar. Isn't that fine? There's an altar in heaven. Why is there an altar in heaven? I thought he said it was finished. If he said it was finished, and you Catholics are adding with your holy sacrifice in the mass and your confirmation, your pope with big hats, why is it, but in heaven, there's an altar and there's a lamb on top of the altar. He's standing as one slain. Isn't that amazing? So when you go to mass, you're not going to the altar. You're going to the altar, right? Okay, there's so much I want to talk about that. The altar with a golden censor. So here's another angel and he stands before the golden altar and he has a golden censor. And he was given much incense to mingle with the prayers of the saints upon the golden altar before the throne and the smoke of the incense rose with the prayers of the saints from the hand of the angel before God. This is beautiful that God uses the angels and the saints to offer up prayers to the father. Revelation 19, seven and eight. And his bride has made herself ready. So this is the climax of the book of Revelation. The wedding feast of the lamb to the bride prepared, the heavenly, then I saw a heavenly Jerusalem prepared descending, prepared as a bride, adorn for her husband. And this is what the choir is saying. And his bride has made herself ready. It was granted her to be clothed with fine linen, bright and pure. And then there's a parenthetical remark. For the fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints. So even in heaven, the bride, this spotless bride, remember Ephesians five, a lot of women don't really like that one, but Ephesians five, right? Wives be submissive to your husbands. Husbands love your wives as Christ loved the church he gave himself up for to present her holy and without blemish, right? This is what Jesus does for his bride. And she is clothed with the righteous deeds as fine linen of the saints. How awesome is that? Revelation chapter six, verses nine and 10, when he opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of all those who had been slain for the word of God and for the martyria, the witness they bore. Do they know what's going on? Are they conscious? This is the most pointed at passage that Protestants arguing with other Protestants against soul sleep will say, look at the saints. They are under the altar of God. They are under the shadow of his protection, right? And these are dead, these are slain, but it's their spirits and they are crying out. How long, oh Lord, holy and true, until thou judge and avenge our blood? So I point out to those who don't believe in the intercession of the saints or their awareness of earth is they see that their blood has not yet been judged and avenged, that the murderers are so like they see it, they're aware of it. They understand what's going on. So then the question becomes, how do we understand this? As Catholics, the basic, yikes, it boils down to the fact that we all belong to the body of Christ. We belong to the body of Christ. There are not two bodies of Christ, one for the dead and one for the living. And St. Paul in Romans chapter eight verses 30 and following is very clear. Who shall separate us from the love of God? Not death. If death doesn't separate me from you because we are all, and this is the preposition, it's the most important preposition, you will ever see in. We are in Christ. So if I'm in Christ, what can separate me from the love of God? Nothing, not pestilence, famine, tribulation, terror, the sword, death, neither angels, principalities. The only thing that can separate me from the true vine and I being the branch, the only thing is my desire to leave by mortal sin. And when a branch cuts itself off from the vine, it dies, mortus, death. Right, and when the finger removes itself from the hand and it's no longer part of the body, death. And so too, you and I have life within us as long as we remain in this state of grace, this beautiful loving relationship with Christ, we are in the body. St. Paul would go on in Romans to say to the Gentiles, listen, you're a wild branch, you're a wild olive branch that's been grafted onto the cultivated olive tree of Israel. And he says, note then the kindness and the severity of God, kindness to you who have been grafted in but severity towards those persist in unbelief. He's torn off branches and thrown them away. So what we want to do, brothers and sisters, let me summarize this, is that by virtue of our faith and baptism, we are grafted into Christ. We are incorporated, we've become one body. He's the head. The only reason why the body functions is because he is the head. He is the soul mediator, all goodness, all graces come through him. And all of us who are in him can receive him. That's why in Ephesians chapter one, and here's my encouragement to you. Read Ephesians chapter one and just go through and every time you see your preposition in, circle it. Jeff Kaavan's having on his show. He's doing a Bible study show that'll come out in a couple months. And he said, when you underline stuff in your Bible, do you do that? And I go, yeah. He said, do you use pen, colored pencil, pencil? You know, wait, what do you use? And I go, oh, I use pencil. And he goes, is that because you're not really sure if that's what you believe? And I was like, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, that was sick, that was sick. Don't worry, I keyed his car afterwards. But circle every time it says in because it says it like 11 times in seven verses. You are in him, in Christ, in the beloved, in whom we have forgiveness, the remission of our sins by the shedding of his blood, in, in, in, in. That's the preposition of the sacramental life. As long as we are in the state of grace and we've been baptized, we are in him. So what is predicated to him as head becomes ours by virtue of being members. And St. Paul says, do you not know that we are all one body in Christ and individually we are members of one another? That's the phrase of St. Paul. Individually we are members, not just of Christ, but individually we are members of one another. In short hand, I need you. When one is lifted up, all are elevated. When one is cast down, all are brought low. So if I need you now and you die, do I cease to need you? Do I cease to need your prayers? If we're imitators of Christ Jesus as beloved children, as brothers and sisters of our Lord, and the book of Hebrew says he never ceases to make intercession for us, seating at the right hand of the Father, then guess what you'll be doing? You'll never cease to make intercession for us because that's what we do. Pray for me. Right now, what's the difference between prayers of the saints and necromancy, right? Because we know that necromancy is condemned, right? Number one, necromancy is used to gain information to advantage you in this life, right? You consult mediums, mediums, mediums, sorcerers or wizards, and we're trying to think of the third Hebrew word that they use, okay, whatever. But these are people who try to invoke spirits in order to communicate to get future knowledge. That's why when it's condemned in Deuteronomy, it literally says, for I will send you prophets to tell you. Like, you want information about the future? Stop going to Satan, basically. Stop going to these demonic things. Come to the prophets and that I will send to you. Now he's not saying, like, think about this. It is, what is closer to the community than saints are necromancy? When you see, so today, okay, I knew I was gonna do this. So today is the anniversary of my daughter's, of a miscarriage that my wife had, the perpetua. So when Mike Aquilini was talking about the diary of Saint Perpetua, I started crying. I mean, there was something in my eye from the air conditioning. But she died in the womb. My wife almost died. It was horrific. It was an ectopic pregnancy, ruptured. She didn't even feel it. And the guy, if we didn't have that surgery when we did, the doctor literally said you would have died on the way home. So it was crazy. It was crazy. And it's cost us everything. We've never been able to have kids awful. So when I think of perpetua, which is a name we gave her, which I love. When I think of perpetua, I say, we say hope, benedict and perpetua. Those are the three miscarriages that we had all back to back. It's a rough year. Pray for us at the end of our prayers. Does that sound like necromancy? Am I trying to divine the future today? I said, hope, benedict and perpetua. Pray for me today, right? So the idea is how many people go to the tomb of their parents? They go to the grave site of their parents. They're like, I really miss you, mom and dad. Hope you're doing well. I love you. Thinking of you. You're speaking right now to a stone, to the grave marker, to the body six feet under. Are you engaging in necromancy? So here's how we know there's a fundamental difference between Christian prayer to saints, right? And asking for their intercession versus necromancy. Now, obviously we all know. I've never once been like, wow, saying that literally, the saints sure felt like a seance. I've never felt that way. But the difference, and this is this thing that changed it for me, it actually took place here in the Porte d'Yuncula, the Porte, right? The Adoration Chapel. It was 2002. My buddy had just gone to a Christian concert and he was super excited as his favorite Christian ska band, Five Iron Frenzy. And he went on their message board on their website and they're evangelical Christians. And he said, hey, I just heard this amazing talk about Mary. You guys should love Mary. She's so great. She's so wonderful. And he made this post. And he left to go eat dinner. And he came back from the calf and there were 215 messages underneath. And he came in, he was pale, and he was like, I don't even know where to begin. So I go in there and I sit down. I open up his laptop. And he had a 400-year-old laptop, so it took a while. And I'm going through and I'm reading. And it was bizarre. So it starts off mocking idolatry, mariolatry, the standard lines. But then as it gets further, it's like Mary wasn't really a mother. The sin comes from having an imperfect genetic code. God gave Jesus a perfect genetic code. I'm like, genetic code. And then placed the nine-month-old baby in Mary's womb in a day or two later, she had it. I'm like, where is this coming from? And I was like, oh, wow, would you detach yourself from tradition? Because here's the deal. St. Thomas Aquinas, he read a lot of the Bible. And he could hold those things in his memory. So I would go through and I'd pick one off. I'd be like, hey, in Mary conceived, the Holy Spirit conceived Christ within the womb of Mary. Prove it. And I was like, OK. In Isaiah, it says, behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son. And then the angel says, you will conceive. And you will call his name Jesus for you to save his people from their sins. And the guy responded to it. And he said, wow, OK, I'm corrected. Thank you, brother. And I was like, that's weird. So I kept going. So I was trying to figure out all of these objections. It was all the things. No, they're dead. They don't care. They're seeing the face of God. They're worldly concerns don't matter. It's a necromancy. And I was trying to figure out, how do I respond to any of them? What's the organizing principle? And I couldn't do it. I was up till 2 o'clock in the morning trying to do it. I wrote like six pages on a Word document, deleted it all, went to bed. And the next morning, I woke up early and I went out to the port. And I was praying. And I had painter's jeans. Do you remember those when those were cool? I don't know if they were cool, but I wore them. And I'm praying. I do a holy hour. And I hear the bells ring. And I was like, ah, the bells. It's mass time. So I went over to mass. And now I'm in mass. I'm celebrating mass. And it was awesome because the readings, the readings, all of a sudden, he finished the gospel. And it was as if I had a moment of divine illumination, about three dozen Bible verses went through my head. And in my painter's jeans, where the brush goes, it was a bunch of pens because I'm a nerd. And I pulled it out. And I wrote up and down my arm and my hand all these Bible verses that were flooding my head because it was the Feast of the Transfiguration. Also known as the Feasts were two dead guys, appeared on either side of Jesus, the sole mediator between God and man. And three living guys, Peter, James, and John, listened to their conversation and responded with an act of veneration. Let us build, remember? What did they say? Let us build three tents or booths, right? Do you ever think that's weird? Right, how many times you've been on a retreat and they're like, now I know, we all wanna build a tent and stay on the mountain top but you gotta go down the mountain. That is not what that means. That is not what that means. They're like, let's just stay here, right? That's not what that means. You know what that means? There was a festival. You ever heard of the Feasts of the Booths or the Festival of Tabernacles? You know what they did? You know what ancient Jews did when they celebrated? They would go out. It's a pilgrimage feast. They would go up to Jerusalem, even if they were north of whatever. They'd go up to Jerusalem and they camp out and they lived for seven days in handmade tents or booths. And they had a whole thing where they had to make them out of palm fronds so you could see through the ceiling and see the stars, which was a sign of hope. But then they took out seven planks of wood and in Hebrew wrote the names of the seven patriarchs and placed them all around them in the tent. I didn't know this until literally three weeks ago. I had no clue. So the Feasts of the Booths was meant to remind them of their pilgrimage through the wilderness to the Holy Land. But it was supposed to be a sign of hope so you could still see the stars. That's what that was meant to invoke. And you are here because you are surrounded by witnesses that gave us our faith. Oh, I don't know. The great heroes that are mentioned here in the book of Hebrews. And so they have this image. So of course, a Jewish man who sees the greatest hero, the law and the prophets, Moses and Elijah talking to the Messiah, the Messiah, right? The clear, his first reaction is a Jewish reaction. We will make three booths for you. We will build tents for Moses and Elijah and Jesus to remain with us so that our patriarchs don't leave us so that the scriptures can be for all the things that they wanted and the coolest things they overheard. Do you remember what they were talking about? Yes, they discussed his departure, which in Greek is Exodus. So there was Moses talking to Jesus about his Exodus. And this is the beautiful thing. So when I said this to him, I said, listen, I understand your apprehension. Yes, on the surface it can look like you have a little Roman idol and you're praying to it. You have a statue of Minerva. It's really cool if you go to Italy. There's all these churches called Sancta Maria Sopra Minerva, Holy Mary over Minerva and they literally just smush the Minerva, temple down and build the Marian one on top of it. The best one's in Assisi, it's amazing. And this is a plug for the Austria program for Franciscan University. It's so beautiful, but the idea, like you can understand as non-Catholics, like as Catholics you can understand why non-Catholics would be apprehensive. But then you understand this, this understanding of here is Christ and because of Christ, the living can see the faithful dead. In fact, Jesus says that God is not the God of the dead but of the living. And he was referencing Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. And so here we see the Catholic thing that it is a universe far thicker than we've been led to believe. That it is filled with angels and saints ascending and descending. That the angels who have fallen are now replaced by the saints who are elevated. That we are in communion with them now because we are all one body and not even death can separate us. Amen? Amen? Amen. Last, this is the last point. Okay, everybody said it like three times. Okay, the guy, my reform Baptist buddy goes, I don't know, this Mary stuff's still too much. I said this, I said, okay, let's take the most common prayer ever prayed to Mary, the Hail Mary. I said, let's just walk it. Hail Mary, full of grace. Who said that? Gabriel, literally before it was called the Hail Mary, it was called the angelic salutation. Hail full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Ooh, okay, blessed are you among women. Blessed is the fruit of your womb. Who said that? Okay, so now we just have two Bible quotes from Luke's gospel. And then we added the word Jesus. I don't think that's a stretch. The fruit of thy womb, Jesus. We added that part. Now we come to the next part. Holy Mary, mother of God. Now I said, ah, I don't know about that, some of the problems, a little nervous. I said, okay, we'll just think of it as mother of my Lord when Elizabeth said that. Who is it that the mother of my Lord should come? Because when she said my Lord, she meant Lord God, Adonai in Hebrew, right? Referring to Yahweh, right? Who is this that the mother of my Lord, so we can argue over it, but it's just a title. Holy Mary, mother of God, and then here it is. Here's the culmination of all of our Mary worship. Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death, amen. We get a two for every time we pray the Hail Mary, you ask for a double blessing, right? Now and at the hour of our death. I said, look at that, look at that. And he sat there, and I remember I had it written on the board and he was just like, some of you Catholics say you don't really pray to the saints, you're invoking the saints to pray for you, that's what you mean? Now when we have a litany, you guys ever pray a litany of the saints, right? All of a sudden you're at that part of the mass and they're like, we're gonna do a litany today and you're like, oh, okay, right? God the Father, creator of the world, have mercy on us. God the Son, Redeemer, have mercy on us. God the Holy Spirit, have mercy on us. Blessed Virgin Mary, isn't that funny? Because we ask, only one can have, can truly is a source of mercy. So when we do our prayers, we cry out to God for mercy, God for grace, and then we say, when we invoke the saints, pray for us, pray for us, pray for us, until your jaw is tired, pray for us, pray for us, or a prone obese, or a prone obese. And I'm gonna end with this, I just said that because you smiled the last time I said that. Revelation chapter one verse four ends with grace to you in peace from him who sits upon the throne and from the seven spirits. And John Henry Cardinal Newman said, note the power of one sentence. Grace to you and peace from him, from God, and from the seven spirits who are around the throne of God. Grace and peace. If you look in Paul's letters, every time when he starts his salutation, grace and peace to you in the name of Jesus Christ, to all of his faithful ones, to this person, this person, this person, but he's saying from, from God and from the seven spirits who are around the throne. So it's impactful, it's powerful, there's more there than meets the eye, transformers in the name of the Father and the Son of the Holy Spirit, amen. I don't think this video is gonna sell very well. Okay, since therefore we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and sin which clings so closely and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider him who endured from sinners such hostility against himself so that you may not grow weary or faint hearted. In your struggle against sin, who you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood. Lord Jesus Christ, you know that we need discipline and you have for us so many examples of brothers and sisters marked by the sign of faith who were obedient in faith, who have lived and run this race before us. So Jesus, surrounding ourselves actively by such a beautiful cloud of witnesses, martyrs, virgins, confessors, priests and lay people that we might run so as to win, that we might with them receive an imperishable crown and they might cheer us on by their prayers mixed with the incense of thy angels. Jesus, I trust in you. Jesus, I trust in you. Jesus, I trust in you. And in your matchless name, we pray, amen. In the name of the Father, Son, Holy Spirit, amen. This has been a talk that went 11 minutes over. God bless you. Have a beautiful day.