Love Your Dysfunctional Family
17 May 2018
Do you ever feel like you belong to a dysfunctional family?
You were created out of love, for love. The life you were created for is to be lived in communion with God and with one another. Somewhere along our way, we allowed sin to enter our lives and fracture this communion of love, bringing dysfunction into the human family.
Today’s Gospel shows us the deepest desire of God’s heart. Jesus is praying to His Father: God, the Son praying to God, the Father. It is out of this relationship that the Holy Spirit flows forth into the world.
So, what is Jesus’ prayer? That you and I, all people as one family, may be united in God. To rid humanity of its dysfunction – sin – and bring us into the unity of the Trinity, to allow us to be immersed in the pure love of God.
Christ’s prayer is also a call to action. We are called to participate with grace and seek the presence of God in our lives. If we do, Jesus speaks of three things that come from our communion with God: peace, power and protection. A peace that comes from walking alongside Jesus. A power that comes from the Holy Spirit that allows you to rise above the chaos. A protection from Our Father, allowing us to continue to walk on the path to holiness, against the ways of the world.
The only way we as a Church can enter into communion with God is through Christ.
Jesus is the gateway to God. In Christ, we see the face of God, for the Son is in the Father, and the Father is in the Son. In Baptism, we are united in Christ’s death and resurrection; immersed in the love that both sent Jesus to the cross and breathed life into Him within the tomb. It is through our Baptism that we become one with Christ and one with God.
Today, may we open our hearts and minds to the love of God in new and exciting ways. May this openness bring us into the fullness of life, a life lived in union with God and one another, as one family grounded in love.
Amen.