 Oh, this is so awesome to be here with all of you. And with my brother Deacon, and we got a Deacon leading the music, Deacon Bob, and Deacon Ralph, the emcee, and then me here, and then my other brother Deacons. We serve with this the year of the Deacon this year. Amen. Hebrews chapter six, we who have fled for refuge have strong encouragement to seize the hope that is set before us. We have this hope as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters into the inner shrine behind the curtain where Jesus has gone as a forerunner on our behalf. So the author of Hebrews nails it. Hope is the virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness, placing our trust in Christ's promises and relying not on our own strengths, but on the grace of the Holy Spirit. So hope is not optimism. Hope is not happy thoughts or a cheerful disposition or the power of positive thinking. Hope is rooted in truth. And Jesus Christ says, I am the way, the, and the life. So truth is not an idea you form your mind. Truth is not a philosophy. Truth is not whatever I want it to be. Truth is a person. The person of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. And when we put our hope in his truth, his truth will set us free to be the person who God created us to be. And since our God is a God of hope, we who are his witnesses to this hopeless world, to this St. Paul says this crooked and depraved generation, we must be a people filled with hope because of the absolute certainty of God's promise of salvation fulfilled in Christ. Now the author of Hebrews uses the image of an anchor. But instead of the anchor going down into the ocean, our anchor goes up to the heavens, behind the veil where Jesus has gone to prepare a place for us. The hope of our future salvation is the anchor to steady our souls while we wait on God in the present storms of life. And we're all facing the storms. Father Dave talked about this so beautifully last night, the storms of false doctrine that can blow us off course, false doctrine regarding the culture of life, what marriage is, what gender is. It almost seems like a juggernaut doesn't it? You're so overwhelmed, how can we even overcome this? We overcome everything through the blood of Jesus. What about the storms of doubt when we begin to question our Catholic faith or even begin to question whether God exists at all? What does atheism say to our young people today? Unless you can see, taste, touch, measure or quantify something, it's not real. But Jesus said, remember what he told Thomas? Do you believe because you see me? The lesser are those who have not seen and yet believe. What about the storms of difficult trials where we wonder why God is allowing them in and we question whether God truly loves us. Right now, my brothers and sisters, some of you are in pain. You are in psychological pain. Some of you right now are in physical pain. You woke up this morning in pain. You're in pain right now. You're gonna go to bed in pain and wake up tomorrow morning in pain. Even if you ask yourself, God, where are you right now? And when you can't pray anything else, just say this prayer, Jesus, I love you. Jesus, I trust you. Jesus, I give my life to you. What about the storms of defeat when we fall into sin and we dishonor our Lord and our Savior? God gave us a sacrament of reconciliation because he knows we needed his incredible divine mercy in that sacrament, that we are going to make mistakes sometimes really big, scary and messy ones. And when we make those mistakes, we have the sure hope of salvation in the sacrament of reconciliation. Now, if Christ is the anchor and the ship is our life, our job is to help forge the chain that connects the ship to the anchor. There's a chain, huh? And so our job is to help forge the chain by doing what? Co-operating with the grace of the sacraments, Eucharistic adoration. Of course, the greatest chain of all for us as Catholics is the rosary. You want a chain of hope? That's gonna connect you to life in Jesus right here, my friends. And so this forging of the chain doesn't happen by accident. It has to be intentional. In fulfillment of Psalm 57, verse eight, my heart is ready, oh God. My heart is ready. Hope allows us to forge the chain that helps us to see Jesus. Now, since you're gonna talk about the chain today, it's Saturday, and today we pray to joyful mysteries of the Holy Rosary. And so I wanna offer some brief reflections on the first three mysteries of the joyful mysteries, annunciation of visitation and annativity as a way of showing how we can help forge that chain that joys us to the anchor of Christ. So the annunciation, so the angel Gabriel comes to this beautiful teenager who's just newly married to her husband. It comes to her and says, guess what? God wants to do something amazing in your life. Now, she says, yes, I am the handmaid of the Lord, be it done unto me, as you say. I'm sure she didn't fully understand everything she was getting into. I mean, for example, she asked a question, how can this be since I do not know man? Oh, don't worry, the Holy Spirit's gonna overshadow you. Episcopso in Greek, which is the same word they use for the shikana, the glory cloud that came over the Ark of the Covenant in the Old Testament. You're gonna be overshadowed. I'm sure she goes, oh wait, overshadowed? Oh yeah, of course, yeah, what does that even mean? She trusted God. And that's the lesson for us in enunciation. Co-operating with the grace of the Holy Spirit in the sacraments. That's where the power of the sacraments come from. You can receive the Eucharist at Mass every day and still go to hell, just showing up and punching the clock and receive it. That's not how it works. First of all, you must receive Jesus in a state of grace. And then go forward, filled with Jesus Christ in word and in sacrament to be Eucharist to the world. That's where the power of the sacraments comes from. We cooperate and say yes to what God wants to do in our life. Now the sacrament, well, confirmation is the one that's probably mostly misunderstood, but baptism. Baptism is the one that initiates us into the life of faith. And there we have again, water and the spirit. So water is the perfect symbol of baptism because it is both cleansing and destructive. It destroys the power of sin and creates sanctifying grace in the soul. So Ezekiel says, I will sprinkle clean water upon you to cleanse you from all your uncleanliness. Why? Because that prepares us to go forward to witness to the power of God's love to the world. Peter says, God's patient has waited in the days of Noah in which a few persons were saved through water. Baptism, which corresponds to this, now saves you. Beautiful. But one of my favorite Psalm 42 verse two, like the deer that yearns for running streams. So my soul is yearning for you, my God. My soul is thirsting for God. The living God. When can I enter and see the face of God? Co-operating with the grace of the sacraments helps us to forge the chain so we can truly see God. The visitation, you know, that's a beautiful story. The first thing that the Blessed Mother did was what? Take Jesus out. And after receive Jesus Christ's body bustle, the Divinity Eucharist, the Deacon kicks you out and now you have to go out. We bring Jesus out. And imagine that beautiful scene. She goes to see her kid's woman Elizabeth and Elizabeth is pregnant and she's pregnant and maybe Elizabeth was doing some dishes and maybe prepping some dinner and Mary comes in, Liz! Liz back! And what does Elizabeth tell us? The child left in her womb. Now I know some of you moms out there are going, ah, I remember that. Usually you tell your kids when you were in my tummy and you would start kicking, I'd say, Daddy, come here. Daddy come over and put your hand on the tummy. A little kick. Oh, that's so nice. That's not what's going on here! The word that's used for left is skirta'au in Greek or dala'ab in Hebrew. So if you see that word being used, for example, in Job, in Exodus, in 2 Samuel 6, in the Psalms, it's used for like an animal jumping or leaping. So John the Baptist was leaping. Bop, bop, bop, bop, bop. Kick that all in, up beside Elizabeth. Why? The monstrance walked in, he began to adore. John the Baptist was the first adore of our Lord in the monstrance, in the tabernacle of the blessed Virgin Mary. Now, how does that help us to force a chain? Just like Mary went out, she brought the message of salvation out, we are called to do the same thing to help force a chain in other people's eyes. Let me give you a couple of examples. When I first moved to Oregon, I was born in Barbados, immigrated to United States, lived in Jersey. Jersey! And now I'm in Oregon. Yeah, Jersey now. And I was working for a secular organization. There was a young lady there who was the administrative assistant that supported the four of us in that office. In her early 20s, she was baptized and that's it. No first reconciliation, no first communion, no confirmation, no mass, nothing. The parents just said, well, we gotta go just dunk her and that's it. So, I'm being a gentleman, I'm walking her to her car. It's wintertime, so it gets dark in Oregon pretty early. And so I'm walking her to her car and we walk by my car and hanging from the rear view mirror is a rosary. So she looks and he goes, that's a rosary, right? I'm like, yeah. She said, that's the thing with all the Hail Marys on it, right? I'm like, yeah, you wanna see how it works? So I got to the car and I got the rosary out and I'm showing it to her. And she says, why do you do that? Ooh, I love that. See, here's the thing. When you're living Eucharistically, when you're cooperating with the grace of the sacraments, you will recognize opportunities that God will place in your life to throw a few seeds of faith, right? So just like the problem of the sower. Through the seed, some of them are rocky soil, sandy soil, thorny soil, weeds came in, choker, birds came in, some of them are not good soil. Where the seed lands, not our problem. Our job is to be faithful and throw the seed. So when she asked that question, why do you do that? I heard the door of opportunity opening. So what's my job? I just got this little window of opportunity. You stick your foot in that door, you throw some seeds and get out! Get out of the Holy Spirit's way and let God be God. So I said to her, all we're doing, we're praying the rosary, we're reflecting on the mysteries of our salvation and our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ through the heart of his blessed mother. And so I spent about 15, 20 minutes just walking through the joyful mysteries of the rosary. Just give you one quick example. The enunciation, right? So Mary gets the message from the angels, she's become the mother of God. So when I'm in adoration, or I find time for silence and God is speaking to me, do I have the courage to respond like she did? Do I have the courage to completely trust God with every single aspect of my life and not to leave anything to chance? Do I have that kind of courage? Then the visitation went on. So I walk her to her car, never brought it up again. 11 years later, 11 years later, I'm leaving my friend, I was police chief at a university. I left that job to start doing this full time and I posted on social media. I had not heard from this young lady for 11 years. She wrote me on a Facebook post. It's great to see you doing the things that you were meant to do. You were definitely a stepping stone on my path back to the church. Now, hold on, hold on. What does that have to do with me? Nothing. Remember what our job is here, my friends? We are the instruments, God's the musician. So all I did was help to forge the chain, the link between her life and the anchor of Christ. That's what the Holy Spirit calls each one of us to do. And she wanted to say, your love for the church was always inspiring and thought provoking. Your what? Love, not your vast theological knowledge, not your facility with biblical languages. Your love, that's what she saw when she interacted with me was the love of Christ. And there's so many people, my friends who are broken, so many people who are hurting, so many people who don't know Jesus. They don't know his love. And we have to be the face of Jesus. We have to be the chain of hope in people's lives that are longing and yearning for truth. The truth that doesn't enslave them like the culture, but the truth that sets them free to love. Another little funny example. I was doing theology on tap once. And during, and this group was large enough where the pub where we had theology on tap assigned a bartender to the group. And so, boy, it's only 11 o'clock in the morning. Y'all can, woo! The Holy Spirit is working something here right now. All right. So they assigned a bartender to the group and during the talk, I asked a rhetorical question, how many of you would give your kids drugs and alcohol? And of course, no one said anything except the bartender. And so I thought he was trying to help with me, right? So I said, look, I'm gonna have to talk to you when we're done. And everybody laughed, I went on with the talk, I finished the talk, I'm packing up my stuff, ready to go home, the bartender comes over to me, I thought we were gonna talk. So I sit down with the dude, I'm like, okay, what parent in their right mind would ever wanna give their kids drugs and alcohol? He said, it's like when I do the shrooms, man. So now I'm thinking to myself, not only do I not wanna be talking to this guy right now, I'm now talking to Shaggy from Scooby Doo. You are telling me that you ingest hallucinogenic mushrooms? He's like, yeah, man, and I'm not making this up. Yeah, man, there's like this energy and this force of the universe. And we have to connect and become one with the universe. And so I drive out into the gorge, he means the Columbia River Gorge, which is a beautiful part of Oregon. I drive out into the gorge and I walk into the woods and I find a beautiful spot and I sit down, I eat the mushrooms and I get high, hey, man. And when I get high from the mushrooms, I feel connected to the rocks, into the trees, and to the universe. Now I'm thinking, what do I say to this dude? So, but I was listening. So when he finished, I said, let me see if I understand what you're saying. You believe that there is something that exists that's beyond yourself. You call it force, energy, universe. And you feel this need, this desire to connect with this energy and this force. And the way you do that, you go to a beautiful place and when you get to that beautiful place, you eat these mushrooms and get high, and in that euphoria, you feel connected to everything around you and to the universe. He said, yeah, man. I said, you know what? I can totally appreciate where you're coming from. I said, let me tell you how we do it as Catholics. We also believe that there is a energy of the universe. We call him God. And we also feel this need, this desire to connect with the God of the universe. And the way we do that, we also drive to a beautiful place. It's called church. And in that beautiful place, we don't eat mushrooms and get high, but we consume what we call the Eucharist, which we believe to be the body, blood, soul, and divinity of the God of the universe. And when we consume that Eucharist, we're one with everyone we're worshiping with. We're one with nature and we're one with God himself. He was like, yeah, man. And I'm like, yeah, man. And then I left before you could ask me anything else. But you get the point, you get the point. So we have to sometimes physically go out and help create opportunities for that chain to be forged to God. Finally, the nativity. We must give birth to hope in a world of hopelessness. We must have the spiritual joy that becomes the vehicle of mercy to others. So the whole key to the defeat of hopelessness is giving birth to joy. What kind of joy are we talking about? Because joy and happiness are not the same thing. We talk about joy, joy is something that comes from within. Happiness is something we seek from without. So let me tell you where joy comes from. Romans chapter eight, starting at verse five, Paul says, for those who live according to the flesh, and the word that he uses for flesh is sarks. And one of the meanings for sarks is earthly, worldly things, possessions, stuff. Those who live according to this flesh, according to the world, according to possessions, set their minds on the things of the world, on the flesh, makes sense. But those who live according to the spirit, to the mind and the heart of God, set their things and minds and things on that spirit of God. Easy. Here's the issue. Here, here, here comes. To set the mind on the flesh is death. So to set your life, focusing on worldly things, earthly things, possessions and stuff, say Paul says, is death. Death is mavet in Hebrew or Thanatos in Greek. That's where Marvel got the name Thanos from. Remember the guy that snaps his finger, everything dead? So it comes from the Greek where Thanatos, which means death. But in the Hebrew understanding of death, it's not just physical death. Death means to cut yourself off from the life of God. You see, when you live according to the world, you sever the chain that joins your life to the anchor of Christ. What we have to do with the spirit you enjoy, the joy of the Holy Spirit, is to reconnect that chain between our life and God. So to set the mind on the spirit is life and peace. Now many of us don't have peace because we are chained to the hurts of the past. And I know many of us in here are hurting. The loss of a child, your kids are away from the church. Maybe you were bullied when you were in high school. Maybe people make fun of you because of your color or because of your accent, because you're from another country. Maybe you were the one who was doing the bullying. God knows you, my brother, sister Christ, better than you know yourself because he made you and he wants you to be free. Sometimes we have brothers and sisters who are not linked to the chain. They're in the water drowning. And what's gonna save them when they reach up and they grab that chain. But they can't grab the chain, brothers and sisters, if the chain is not there. Remember, we have to be the ones to forge the chain. So what does that look like? Sometimes we have to ask forgiveness from the people who hurt us. Now, last time I was here, I re-hashed a story about my father. But when I reconciled with my father, I didn't speak to him for 18 years because of the things that happened in our house. And when I finally reconciled with him, one of the things I did, I asked my father to forgive me for hating him for 18 years. Now, why did I do that? Because the Holy Spirit sometimes caused us, brothers and sisters, to be vehicles of mercy in the lives of others. And we forged that chain of God's divine mercy. Have you ever seen a beautiful divine mercy image? The rays are coming out from the heart of Jesus into the world. Sometimes Christ calls us to be those vehicles of mercy in the lives of others. So I asked my father to forgive me for hating him for 18 years. I asked my father to forgive me for telling his grandchildren he was dead. I, deacon Harold, whatever that means, I held on to anger and hatred in my heart for a long time. And that's quite frank. I think that's one of the reasons why God waited so long for me to start doing this work. He needed that healing to happen first. And so many of us, God wants to do amazing things in your life and you can't because you won't let him. And this conference this weekend, there's a reason why you're here. There's a reason why every single person is sitting in this room right now because you need hope. And here's how you're gonna get it, my friends, by being a vehicle of mercy. Imagine this. This is an image I'm gonna leave you with. Imagine you walk into your kitchen and your four-year-old granddaughter is holding a knife, a large, sharp knife in her hand buys a blade. You walk in, you see that, you say, oh my goodness, honey! And would you reach in and grab the knife and take it out of her hand? No, why? You cut her hand. What would you do instead? Oh, honey, what you got there? What you got there? Let me see that. Look at that! That's a big knife! Honey, come here. Can you show it to grandpa? Can you show it? And she walks up to you and she... He's like, oh, honey, can you open your hand and give that to... Oh, sweetie, can you open your hand? And what's the kid gonna do? She trusts you because she loves you. You open your hand. Oh, honey, thank you so much. You reach in and you gently take the knife out of her hand. My brother, sister, and Christ, that's what Jesus wants to do for you right now. Right now. You've been holding on to that knife of pain, to the knife of sin, to the knife of slavery to your passions, of hatred of memories of the past for too long. God wants to free you with his hope. So during our time together this weekend, God is saying to you, let go. Let go of the angry anger and the hatred and the resentment and the pain because I love you. Open your hand. God is saying to you right now, what have you got there? Let me see. Oh, that's the rape. That's the alcohol. That's the abuse of husband who beat you when he was drunk. That's the people who mocked you because of your accent. That's pornography. Can I see that? Open your hand and give that to me. And God, lovely, wants to reach into your heart, to reach into your life. And once and for all, take that away from me. He wants to help forge that incredible chain of divine mercy in your life. So that you will never be a slave to your past again. I speak from experience, my friends. And here's one thing I've learned. Your past helped shape you into the person that you are today, but your past does not determine your future. A deep intimate relationship with Jesus Christ determines your future. So my brother and sister in Christ, when we extend divine mercy to others, that's the chain that allows others who are drowning to grab on. And I leave you with this, a little excerpt from Psalm 27. The Lord is my light and my help. Whom should I fear? I'm not gonna fear anything in this culture. Why? The Lord is the stronghold of my life. Before whom shall I shrink? Though an army and camp against me, my heart would not fear. Though war break out against me, even then would I trust. I am sure. Why? Because I have the sure hope of Jesus Christ. I am sure I shall see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. Hope in him, hold firm, take heart, hope, trust, love, the Lord. Amen. God bless you. Thank you.