Happy Easter everyone! Easter is our most important celebration of the year.
The Resurrection of Jesus gives credence to everything else in our faith, that’s why we celebrate today with so much extra.
One great thing about celebrating Easter is that it kicks off “Sacrament Season.” Without the Resurrection, we wouldn’t need Sacraments.
Last night we celebrated one adult baptism and two confirmations, and today we will have a first communion as well. The gal that got baptized last night is named Grace, and she is a senior at Wahlert. Grace announced her desire to be baptized about a year and a half ago while on her Kairos retreat as a junior.
You know at least twice a year I am gone for the weekend helping to lead a four day Kairos retreat. Often people ask me what is the difference between Kairos and TEC, and I am guessing most of you went on TEC like I did in High School, basically, the biggest difference is that TEC is led by adults, and Kairos is led primarily by Students.
Students attend Kairos as Juniors, but then seven of them are chosen to lead it as Seniors, and the brilliance of that is sometimes it is difficult for Juniors to see themselves as adults, but they can see themselves as Seniors, one little step up, and it is highly effective that way. Us adults go to oversee it, but the Seniors lead it, that’s the biggest difference.
Kairos is my favorite thing at Wahlert because it is there that the students finally realize how much they are loved by God, some describe it as being “surrounded by Love.” This was no different for Grace who understood how much she is loved by God, and there she made that decision to fully encounter Jesus in the sacraments.
Last weekend Grace was a student leader on Kairos where she gave a great talk to the juniors entitled “God’s Friendship,” and one of the things she said that really stuck with me was this: “Our challenge isn’t to prove God exists, our challenge is to make space for Him.”
I thought that was such a good insight - there is overwhelming evidence for the existence of God, especially when we look at the Resurrection, we have very reliable evidence that it happened and God exists, if we want to see it. Jesus claimed to be God and He proved He was through the Resurrection.
Roman historians like Flavius Josephus, scientific evidence like with the Shroud of Turin, it’s all there if we want to believe it.
As Grace said, our challenge really is to make “space for God” in our busy lives. God exists and He loves us, He shows that in how He became one of us that first Christmas. He shows us His love in the Last Supper. He shows us His love when He suffers a cruel death on the cross.
He shows us His love tangibly still today in all of the blessings that we’ve been given. The only question for us is how we will respond to His love? Will we make space for Him? Will we get to know Him? Grace also said in her talk, “We cannot come to know Him if we are not willing to spend time with Him.” We cannot come to know anyone without spending time with them, it’s like any relationship, we must spend time with them.
Time is the most important commodity we have, we are probably even more careful with how we spend our time than we are with how we spend our money. Yet we tend to waste our time on things that don’t really matter all that much in the grand scheme of things.
The thing about time is we really don’t know how much we have left, and because we don’t, we neglect Heavenly things in favor of earthly things. This is what St. Paul said in our second reading, he said, “If then you were raised with Christ, seek what is above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Think of what is above, not of what is on earth.”
Like the last few days, I was so torn between watching basketball and praying, but I tell you what, if I knew I was going to die this week, I wouldn’t watch even another minute of basketball, no offense to Caitlin, it’s just not as important as getting to know the God who I want to spend my eternity with.
The Resurrection of Jesus opens the gates of Heaven to us, and we all want to go to Heaven. We all want to go to Heaven. The rub is that we don’t often want to “spend time” and “make space” to be with God now.
We have to realize that not only does God love us and bless us here and now, Heaven actually starts here and now.
If we want to go to Heaven, we must get to know the God that we will spend eternity with, here, that relationship begins here. When we die, we are locked in at that spot, we are locked in to the level of love we have for God and for others. Our growth in love happens here.
If we are still alive, that means we still have time to grow in love, to grow in that relationship. Don’t waste time. Time seems to go more quickly each and every day, it seems like we are racing to our eternity.
If we all lived as if we wanted to go to Heaven, then we wouldn’t constantly do things that we know won’t help us get there.
Make space for God. Come to Church. Read the Bible. Pray each day. Make space for a relationship with Him. He loves you and He is waiting for you to get to know Him more.