Word to the Wise
Wednesday, November 12, 2014 - Wednesday in the 32th Week in Ordinary Time
[Titus 3:1-7 and Luke 17:11-19]For we ourselves were once foolish, disobedient, deluded, slaves to various desires and pleasures, living in malice and envy, hateful ourselves and hating one another. But when the kindness and generous love of God our savior appeared, not because of any righteous deeds we had done but because of his mercy, he saved us through the bath of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit.....[Titus]
A popular form of newspaper or TV ad for dental care or weight loss programs is the "before-and-after" message. Photos are shown which dramatize a promised result (even if the fine print may say, "Your results may be different!"). St. Paul describes a kind of before and after result today in the Letter to Titus!
The difficulty that many of us may have in reading this comes from the fact that most of us were baptized when we were infants. We may have been a difficult baby, but not as difficult as the description of "before" that St. Paul gives! At the same time, some of us may know individuals who experienced dramatic conversions and turned their lives around. When I preach on the power of baptism in our lives, I try to encourage everyone to recover the power of the "bath of rebirth" and put it to work. We may not be as dramatically awful as St. Paul describes in the "before," but we can try to renew the "after" and be, as he says a few words earlier, "peaceable, considerate, exercising all graciousness toward everyone." AMEN
config
view
logs
3840.0 KB
83 ms
4
