Greetings in Christ, all!
This weekend, as a Church, we celebrate The Feast of the Baptism of the Lord. This is generally seen as a bit of a kick off to our Ordinary Time within our Church calendar.
Fr. Benedict Baur wrote a neat summation of this feast in his article on The Baptism of the Lord. He wrote: “Today we celebrate the baptism of Christ in the Jordan. This is the second epiphany, or manifestation, of the Lord. The past, the present, and the future are made manifest in this epiphany. The most holy one placed Himself among us, the unclean and sinners. The Son of God freely humbled Himself at the hand of the Baptist. By His baptism in the Jordan, Christ manifests His humility and dedicates Himself to the redemption of man. He takes upon Himself the sins of the whole world and buries them in the waters of the Jordan.”
I invite each of us to focus on gratitude to God for the gift of our Baptism; may we always strive by His grace to be faithful to our promises!
To my Holy Family parishioners, I wanted to circle back to why we needed to move our Christmas Eve Masses out of our school gym. The short version is this: a former employee contacted us and informed us that, as far as they knew, our school gym was not rated to hold the amount of people we assumed we were going to have at Christmas Eve Mass.
By presenting this to us, we were not morally free to just continue; we simply had to investigate and that process ate up a lot of time and money. In the end, we were able to buy the original blueprints and had professionals analyze them. We discovered that it would have been more than fine for our Christmas Eve Mass, but we found it too late.
So, the good news is that we now know beyond the shadow of a doubt that our gym could have hosted the Christmas Eve Mass. More than that, perhaps, we discovered the wonderful folks at the Grand Blanc Public School system were a joy to work with and made this as easy as possible for us. I want to take this opportunity to thank them for their kindness; we are blessed to have such a school system right next door.
I am so very blessed to be your priest. Thank you for letting me serve you.
fjk
