March 14, 2010
Knowing God – Cautiously
Thoughts on the First Readings – Joe Frankenfield
4th Sunday in Lent
Joshua 5:9, 10-12

What are we to make of the God of Israel? On the one hand, the God of the Hebrews extolled and commanded justice and loving care for people, including the poor and foreigners living among his people. On the other, he led his tribes in driving out the inhabitants of Canaan, allowing and even approving the merciless killing of men, women and children to create a homeland for them.

It’s a common observation that while God created humans in his image; humans also created God in theirs. That’s often true, often unavoidable and often tragic.

Faith tells us that the Creator of the universe loves us. Beings who truly love are persons. We are persons. It’s natural to give God a human face. Still we take great risks attributing our qualities to the Creator. Even our best characteristics are polluted with fear and self-interest, not because we’re evil but because we’re finite beings possessing infinite imaginations. When we ascribe human qualities to God, God always comes out looking contradictory.

People frequently ask why a loving God allows war and death. In the Hebrew Scriptures God not only allows war and death, he repeatedly commands war and death – ruthlessly.

For Christians, a lot of assumptions begin to fray at this point. We know Jesus taught: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven (Mt. 5:44-48). We can’t square this with a God who sanctions the killing of whole armies and the slaughter of widows and children to create a homeland for his favorites.

Were the God of the Hebrews and the God of Jesus two different God’s? Hardly. But we possess incompatible descriptions of the one God.

Describing God carries huge consequences. We do well to go about it humbly and cautiously. Unless we are supernaturally wonderful, imaging God after ourselves is perilous indeed.

There is much wisdom in anchoring what we know of God in the historical person, Jesus of Nazareth and holding everything else with a very loose grip.

March 7, 2010
Stop Praising the House and Grab a Hammer
Thoughts on the First Readings – Joe Frankenfield
3rd Sunday in Lent
Exodus 3:1-8,13-15

“Take off those muddy shoes before you come in! Don’t you dare track up this kitchen; I just washed the floor!” As a kid I thought my mom simply didn’t want more work. As an adult I realized how much she wanted a nice place for us all to live. Taking my shoes off outside wasn’t just for my mom’s sake; it was for all our sakes.

That insight came back to me as I reread the story of the burning bush. It sounds as though God is displaying a bit of divine egotism. But God’s admonition to Moses not to approach with dirty feet isn’t about God’s ego; it’s about seeking respect for what God’s doing for humanity and, specifically, for the Hebrews enslaved in Egypt. God wants to impress on Moses that he’s being recruited into an act of liberation implications of which are beyond his comprehension.

It’s important to remember that those who composed the Bible’s stories wrote within the customs and characters of their experience. They could do nothing else. Since magnificent undertakings were the work of kings and pharaohs, the Bible portrays God as an ancient Mediterranean potentate. In Jewish history their liberation from Egyptian servitude and their conquests on the eastern end of the Mediterranean formed the core of their identity. Honor paid to God was honor paid to God’s accomplishments.

The Gospel of Matthew [7:21] quotes Jesus, “Not everyone saying, ‘Lord, Lord’ is part of the Reign of God; only the one who does my Father’s will.” Jesus worked to get folks to realize that we don’t praise God for God’s sake. We praise God for our sake. Praising God reminds us of what God is doing in our lives and encourages us to involve ourselves with his actions. If we remember this, our faith will deepen and mature.

It will be easier to keep our home free of all those muddy footprints too.

March 1, 2010
Thoughts on the First Readings – Joe Frankenfield
2nd Sunday in Lent
Genesis 15:5-12

When ancient Hebrews told the story of how God used Abram to sire their nation, they used language and customs of their time. To guarantee that his gift of land would be perpetual, God followed a common contract ritual. Jews of that era found it natural. We find the story exotic.

We face a similar situation. To maintain a united and orthodox understanding of God and our relationship with him church authority has enshrined language and images from centuries, even millennia, past. Much of it is foreign to us.

Democracy, facile communication, universal education, the equality of all people and individual rights are fundamental realities for us. Advances in the sciences have fundamentally changed the way we perceive reality. In addition, many possess an unprecedented amount of power for controlling their daily lives. These facts make our world drastically different from the world that gave rise to our religious language and imagery.

There are those who say that “everyone knows” what the prayers and rituals are saying. Sometimes people do. But the language of faith is becoming more and more remote from everyday existence. Consciously and unconsciously we find religion in an increasingly isolated corner of our lives.

Theologians work on this problem. They search out ways of making faith understandable to us. In the nature of things they bump heads with the bishops whose job it is to make certain that our ancestors’ experience of God is fully handed on. It’s a messy process that never stands still and is never finished.

As profound change chases profound change today, nothing substitutes for deepening our faith knowledge. We can’t wait for someone to hand us a new dictionary that translates what we hear in church and read in scripture. We need to grow more confident in pondering our faith and making sense of it ourselves and in conversation with one another. The doctrine that the Holy Spirit guides all baptized people will become a practical reality for us or our faith will end up in the attic of our lives.

February 21, 2010 Lent
To Live With Courage
Thoughts on the First Readings -Joe Frankenfield
1st Sunday in Lent
Deuteronomy 26:4-10

“If you decide you’re going to do something, give yourself to it completely. If it’s not worth your full energy, put it aside and find something that is. You owe that to yourself and to everyone else.” A wise counselor said those words to me many years ago when I was in college.

Giving life one’s full energy isn’t easy. We want to hoard our limited resources. Others’ acceptance, our own ego, our energy, our time, possessions, all these are finite.

Still, part of us recoils from living by halves. We dislike it in ourselves and we pity it in others. Young folks scorn a guarded life partly sensing that its roots lie in cowardice and partly dreading that they themselves may ultimately yield to the same fear-filled accounting. Old folks view it with the sadness of witnessing a profound loss.

“I have come that people will have the fullness of life,” said Jesus [John 10:10]. The gift of faith is the courage to live fully, to give all of ourselves to whatever we are doing: to give ourselves without hesitation to the future that God promises.

The experience of God’s inestimable care and generosity in creating our universe and us within it and the experience of Jesus, the personal touch of God’s love in history, overcome the fear of our own woefully inadequate resources. It is unimaginable that God who accomplishes such magnificence and revealed such love will not bring its potential to fullness.

We begin every Eucharistic Prayer remembering all the good that God has accomplished. Then we pray that God will complete the work he’s begun: the work of Christ in and through us. We don’t recall this for God’s sake. We recall for our sake.

February 14, 2010
God’s Word Is Good
Thoughts on the Second Readings – Joe Frankenfield
6th Sunday in Ordinary Time
1 Corinthians 15:12,16-20

Rain was dripping from a gray March sky several years ago when a student walked into my office and plopped in a chair. “Last night I decided I have to live as though there’s a God, whether there is one or not. It’s the only way I can have any hope what I do makes any difference. On a really good day just trying to make things better works as its own reward. But there are too many tiresome days like this to make it with only an intellectual reason for getting fired up. Most days I need to really believe that what I’m doing will make a difference not just for me but for other people.

“And I really hope there is a God because winter lasts way too long around here and I’m not that good at pretending.”

I had to laugh. I knew he wrestled with this issue more, or more vocally, than most. But he was a very honest guy who needed things to make sense. His decision was so human – kind of sad, but very human. He wanted to make sense of his faith.

Why would Paul have said that if God hasn’t raised Jesus from death, our faith is empty? Millions of people have faith in God who know nothing or care nothing about Jesus’ resurrection.

The fact is that we know God’s love and promise through Jesus: God’s presence in our world. If God has allowed the good life Jesus lived to simply end denying him his role in the world he revealed, Jesus’ life failed and the ground of our faith is empty. We can differ in how we explain it. We can differ in how we imagine it. But if God wasn’t faithful to Jesus past life as we know it, then God has no meaning for us.

We need a meaningful God, a God who lives up to his promise and our hopes. There’s no faith without that. None of us are that good at pretending.

February 7, 2010
We Make a Difference
Thoughts on the Second Readings – Joe Frankenfield
5th Sunday in Ordinary Time
1Corinthians 15:1-11

Most of us respond ‘aw shucks’ to the good we do. Especially when someone notices that our good deeds appear rooted in our faith, we blush, look down and scuff our toes in the dust. Maybe this arises from an assumption that only priests and sisters are really fitting examples of faith since they’ve put aside marriage and family for their way of life. Maybe the Church’s habit of focusing on the extraordinary, even miraculous actions of those it designates saints makes our ordinary lives seem too humdrum for God to be operating there. Neither is true. Maybe it’s just how we are.

In the grand scheme of things an ‘aw shucks’ attitude about helping a friend or forgiving an enemy isn’t a big deal like turning our backs on starving people. It can even be kind of endearing. But here’s something to think about. If we don’t have a sense that God is working through us for good – even great good, we run the risk of not taking our potential to make a difference seriously. If we’re blind to that, people suffer – not directly from what we do to them but indirectly by what we do not do for them.

Being aware that the benefits we provide depend on God’s Spirit directing us as well as the matrix of enabling good that others create around us is crucial. Without that we accomplish nothing. Still, it’s we who decide to act and we who spend our energy to make things better. The love we give, the aid we provide, the life and beauty we create are gifts we give and gifts we’re given.

Too many people in our world are hungry and hurting and ignored. Too many of life’s needs are unmet. Too many human advances remain unfulfilled for us to mutter ‘aw shucks’ about our abilities – physical, moral or intellectual. In a room full of braggarts that may provide a refreshing moment but the truth is that God has done great things in us and more will follow.

January 31, 2010
Forgive – or Forget It
Thoughts on the Second Reading – Joe Frankenfield
4th Sunday of Ordinary Time
1 Corinthians 12:31-13:13

Love is always patient, kind, truthful, faithful, hopeful and persistent. It’s never jealous, pompous, rude, self-centered, hot-headed, sulky or mean-spirited. Okay, everyone still claiming to be a lover put up your hand!

Years ago the wife of a couple, considering Paul’s letter to the Corinthians for their fiftieth anniversary celebration, commented that he obviously had never been married. “You got that right,” her husband replied, laughing. “We try, and on a good day we get some of that right. On our worst days . . . ; never mind.”

We might think it strange that Jesus made “forgive us just as we forgive others” one of the four blessings he taught his disciples to pray for. We might, unless we’ve ever attempted a lasting relationship. Friendship and love teach a simple lesson: no forgiveness; no relationship.

Assuming that we’ve put aside the idea that God will establish the world of Jesus’ vision whether we cooperate or not, we’ve had to accept the idea that he’s going to work through a lot of very imperfect folks.

Stupidity isn’t going to suddenly vanish. Weak egos aren’t going to grow magically strong. All the poor aren’t going to wake up hopeful and wise or the rich as concerned with the common welfare as with their own. Enemies aren’t going to suddenly decide that their opponents are just as right as they are. How, then, will things ever change?

We have no clue how things will change! But we know how things will begin to change: we will forgive one another. We will forgive one another not because we’ve all “gotten it right” but because we realize that our future depends on forgiving one another – as we are. Everything begins with that. Each of us begins with that.

January 24, 2010
The Price of Faith
Thoughts on the Second Reading – Joe Frankenfield
3rd Sunday of Ordinary Time
1 Corinthians 12:12-30

“When the boat’s sinking, everybody bails,” my uncle Joe used to say. His point: when there’s work that has to be done, it doesn’t matter who you are, what you’ve got planned or how you feel; you pitch in till the job is finished. I hated that saying as a kid but it was hard to contest.

It’s difficult for us to identify with the thinking of the early church – even the thinking of Jesus himself. There’s urgency about it. Absolutes abound. Its judgments and demands never waver.

In our world of fluid situations and multiple visions the gospel seems naïve. “Nothing is that simple,” we find ourselves thinking. “What are the long-term consequences? What about people who see things differently? How do we know that our perspective is the right or even the best one? Where’s the fire?” we want to know. “Let’s calm down and consider alternatives.”

Jesus didn’t preach just anywhere or to just anybody. He preached to a smoldering world, a world where the smallest gust of trouble could and did stir an inferno. His world was massively unjust. Tremendous gaps existed between the rich and poor. Life was cheap. The powerful wrote and enforced the law to keep themselves in power. Ordinary people, the followers of Jesus, struggled constantly because if they stopped, they died. The sense that life had gone all wrong was deep: this couldn’t be what God wanted. Jesus offered a way forward, a path to the world of God’s promise. Wasted time meant wasted lives.

Our enthusiasm for Jesus’ gospel hangs on our ability to see the world from the Creator’s perspective. Unless the dissonance between the divine intent and the reality of the world’s powerless and suffering sets our teeth are set on edge, we’ll never make sense of the gospel’s immediacy.

Only if we feel an inescapable bond between ourselves and all who suffer will the gospel become our passion. Only that realization can transform the image of all people united in God, our Father from a sweet thought to the central focus of our hope.

January 17, 2010
Thoughts on the Second Reading – Joe Frankenfield
Second Sunday of Ordinary Time
1 Corinthians 12:4-11

Driving back from a family gathering (not yours or mine, of course) occasions a lot of post game commentary. Why do they let their kids run wild like that? I could never be married to that man; he’d drive me nuts. Can you believe how much they spent on that couch? Those two shouldn’t be allowed to vote.

Families are strange things. The cliché that you can’t live with them and you can’t live without them is true. Most everyone, at some time, wonders if they weren’t adopted or wish that they could prove that a switch had been made in the hospital. Yet, for most of us, family is one of the most precious things we’ve ever known. In them we learned to be human. They gave us our deepest values. It’s them that we count on when everything falls apart.

Many years ago I was complaining to Bishop Ken Untener, the bishop of Saginaw at the time, about some priest that I was upset with. He replied, “You know, a diocese is like a farm, you can’t just fire Johnny if he can’t milk cows. He’s part of the family. You have to find something that he’s good at.” Of course, a couple years later when he was complaining about someone, I reminded him of the diocese’s likeness to a family farm. He suggested I remember who was the bishop at the table and who wasn’t and pass the bread.

Quirks and blind spots plague us all. When all is said and done, we all try to do our best – sometimes we get it right. We’re convinced that we know how God wants us to believe and live. Still, truth be told, we decide specifics without benefit divine cue cards. Regardless of how badly we think someone else is messing things up, we can grant that he or she is probably trying to do well. If it’s true of us, why not of them?

Maybe after getting up from the table and passing out our good-by hugs we could be a bit easier on one another traveling home.

January 10, 2010 Baptism
Baptism of the Lord

It’s About Bringing People In, Not Putting Them Out
Thoughts on the Second Reading -  Joe Frankenfield
The Baptism of the Lord
Acts 10:34-38

My father was an office manager in a large company. He cared a great deal about his people and frequently that caused him distress. Once a young woman in his division, a Catholic, decided to marry a divorced man who my father knew had repeatedly cheated on his wife. When the young woman gave my dad an invitation to her wedding, he faced a dilemma. He didn’t want to give the impression that he had no problems with this man’s behavior which had caused his wife and children such pain. He was also concerned for the young woman’s future happiness and he wasn’t happy that, knowing her fiancé’s past behavior, she would still marry him.

On the other hand, my father didn’t want to hurt the young woman by refusing her invitation. He was her friend and didn’t want to destroy their relationship. Nor did he want to damage their good working rapport. The wedding was going to take place whether he and my mother attended or not.

My parents had many discussions about the situation. It was my mother who explained the issues to me saying that I needed to understand what was going on and why the decision was so difficult. There were lots of situations without perfect answers, she said. They were searching for the best answer.

Dad and mom went to the wedding. Dad later told me, “We had to go; otherwise, no matter how I might have tried to explain, we would have been writing her off and I simply didn’t want to do that.”

Drawing lines between ourselves and others is very tempting when we’re sure we’re right and they’re wrong. Yet, lines are easier to draw than to erase. And even when we rub very carefully, it’s like our second grade homework; we usually smudge and tear the paper.

Maybe that’s why God never draws lines.

January 3, 2010 Epiphany
Feast of the Epiphany
Thoughts on the Second Reading – Joe Frankenfield
Ephesians 3:2-3a, 5-6

“It’s my bike and I can do what I want with it.” My nephew was so angry at my brother that he was oblivious of how dangerous his attitude was becoming. “Here’s the deal;” my brother calmly replied, proving himself a better person than I, “it is your bike, but if you leave it outside again and it gets stolen, we’re not getting you another one. There are other needs more important for the family than keeping you in bicycles. It’s not just about you.”

Those words, and many others, must have worked because my nephew is a caring, responsible adult now. Somewhere along the line he learned that nothing is simply his.

Most of us arrive at that awareness sooner or later. We learn that we’re responsible to others for how we use what we possess. That’s true about everything – cars, money, intelligence and – faith.

My faith is my business is a common assertion even though it’s obviously not so. We all know how we’re affected by the attitudes of people around us. We’ve all struggled to do a good job when our co-workers are sloughing off. We know what it’s like to try to better a bad situation when those around us are uninvolved and cynical.

Faith is a commitment to realize life’s promise. It’s attitude in action. In our religious language it’s living the way of Christ or living for the Reign of God. Our faith affects everyone around us. If it’s strong, it elicits faith from neighbors and co-workers. If it’s weak, it drags everyone down.

The issue of faith isn’t the words we use to express it. It is the vitality that we promote through it. From what we know of Jesus, a person couldn’t be touched by him and not be more in love with life – their own and everyone else’s. We eventually came to know that power as God’s Spirit. When we have faith, it’s shared faith. It’s never just about me.

December 27, 2009 Holy Family
Getting the Roster Right
Thoughts on the Second Reading – Joe Frankenfield
Feast of the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary & Joseph
1 John 3:1-2, 21-24

How large is our family? That’s always an uncomfortable question for religions. The larger a religion’s communication circle the more acute the issue. Who belongs? Who’s related? Who’s out? Who’s on the outs? Who’s special?

And through it all, God just keeps on creating everyone.

What do we do with people who don’t worship like we do? What if they don’t believe what we do? If we let them in the family, won’t folks think we don’t care? What if they don’t even think of God like we think of God? What if they don’t even call God God? Won’t God think we don’t care?

And God just keeps on creating everyone.

What about people who think they’re right when we know they’re wrong? How can we invite them to the table? If we make them welcome, won’t we look weak? And what if we get into a fight with them, will God be on our side or theirs? How can we fight them if God is on their side too? How will they ever take us seriously if they think that God loves them just as much as us? If we say God is on their side too, does that mean that God doesn’t care who’s right? Aren’t we special to God because we’re defending what’s right?

And God just keeps on creating everyone.

We’re God’s people. God chose us; he couldn’t have chosen others too, could he? If we’re not God’s only chosen, are we really chosen? How can people who don’t like us also be God’s people? If everyone’s in the family, what does it mean to be family? Sooner or later, won’t we forget who we are? Sooner or later, won’t we forget God?

And babies keep coming, people keep finding love and God keeps on creating everyone.

Maybe God doesn’t understand. Or maybe . . .

December 20, 2009
But Can We Really Trust Him
Thoughts on the Second Readings – Joe Frankenfield
Fourth Sunday of Advent
Hebrews 10:5-10

A priest I worked with many years ago had the reputation of being a simple, straight forward man. You got what you saw with him. He told you what he thought or he said nothing. He was kind to your face and kind behind your back. Folks loved and trusted him.

We all look for this you-get-what-you-see honesty in a friend. We deeply value knowing where we stand with people. This causes some people a problem with their faith in Jesus.

Scripture presents Jesus as having such a close relationship with God that he sometimes seems to merely play-act humanity. Paul writes “Through one man’s (i.e., Jesus’) obedience all shall become just.” [Romans 5:19] and “Though he was (God’s) son, he learned obedience from what he suffered.” [Hebrews 5:8]. “God so loved the world that he sent his only Son . . .” [John 3:16]. And in the back of our minds an itch begins: Are people just pawns in a giant chess game between God, Jesus and, maybe, Satan? Did Jesus actually love us or was he being loyal to a higher relationship? Do we have the Jesus we think we see?

The gospel-writing communities faced hard questions. How could God die? How could the Messiah, the promised world leader, end up executed as a third rate rabble-rouser? One way they answered their questions was to present Jesus as a Son obeying his divine Father’s request.

We may or may not find such an explanation credible or helpful but our core faith remains: Jesus, the true presence of God, was a real human loving us with a deep, human love. The gospels hold hints of the deeply human Jesus that those who lived with him knew. They tell how Jesus mourned when he visited the tomb of his friend Lazarus and felt the grief of his sisters. They narrate the real pain Jesus expressed when he was unable to convince the people of Jerusalem to accept his vision of God’s love.

Jesus lived and loved as one of us. In prayer, after his resurrection those who knew him realized that he was much more as well.

December 13, 2009
Faith’s Strength
Thoughts on the Second Readings – Joe Frankenfield
Third Sunday of Advent
Philippians 4:4-7

Every high school freshman class has a big kid: the guy who stands a foot above everyone else. In my class it was Tom. He was friendly, gentle, had an amazingly deep voice and a great laugh. He was the strongest guy around – no question. I saw him get physical with someone only twice – unusual in an exclusively male group of highly competitive teens. Once, when two guys were slugging it out, he picked one of them up and simply carried him to the other side of the room. That ended that fight. Another time he walked right into the middle of a fight. He got hit twice before the kids realized what was happening. “You really don’t want to do this,” he said. They immediately agreed, whether out of fear from having hit him, a loss of adrenalin or both.

The memory of Tom came back to me as I thought of Paul encouraging kindness among the Christians of Philippi. He wasn’t giving them an order or rule. He was reminding them of their strength: the power they had as a result of knowing Jesus’ promise to be with them always.

Others might wonder if caring for others and giving their energy and resources to those in need were worth the time and risk. Christians knew. The knowledge of how God overcame tragedy in Jesus’ life and promised to do the same for his disciples provided them the freedom to reach out with assurance.

Paul wanted more than just good public relations from the Philippi Christians. He counseled them to share the gift of faith with those around them. By sharing their own faith-given freedom they would bring freedom to others. The point wasn’t more notches in their convert-belts it was increased joy in everyone’s life.

Christians today are concerned about how to present our world an attractive picture of Jesus. Only one way makes sense. Love and serve people as Jesus loved and served us. Demonstrate the astonishing freedom we have to love. People will respond.

December 6, 2009
On Good and Bad Days, We’re Family
Thoughts on the Second Readings by Joe Frankfield
Second Sunday of Advent
Philippians 1:4-6, 8-11

I recently heard a news story about a small business owner facing dwindling sales over many months. He gathered his workers together and explained that, if things continued on the same trajectory, the business would fold. They discussed various options and agreed that everyone would take a ten percent cut in pay to save the business and everyone’s job. The owner took a twenty percent cut. I don’t know the final chapter of the story but the wisdom of the people boded well.

Recently Bill Gates, Sr. spoke about the importance of realizing that none of us stands alone. We live because of those who came before and those who now make up the network of our existence. He spoke of entrepreneurs and inventors who could easily believe that they are self-made if they disregard their dependence on the skill and sweat of those who give life to their schemes and form to their ideas. It’s easy to overlook taxpayers who pay for educations, laborers who build roads and farmers who raise food making everything we do possible. It’s ignorant and dangerous, Gates maintained, not to realize that without all these people and millions of others, the smartest and strongest of us does nothing and has nothing.

We all “believe in God, the Father almighty.” When, as a child I walked out the door for school each day, my mother’s last words were always, “Take care of your brothers and sister; watch out for them.” Calling God Father and Creator is easy, living the implications is another matter. Claiming God as our father means claiming one another as brothers and sisters. Claiming to be brothers and sisters means watching out and caring for one another, whether we’re “feeling gushy, as my niece used to say,” or we’re fed up with everyone.

Being Christian is about caring for people. Every rule, every ritual, all our reasoning about God is for the sake of people. We learned that from Jesus.

November 28, 2009 Advent
Friends With God
Thoughts on the Second Readings -Joe Frankenfield
First Sunday of Advent
1 Thessalonians 3:12-4:2

A number of years ago a couple returned to visit the parish I was working in after having moved out West several years before. They now lived in a Mexican-American community. “We never expected to find a parish as good as this one,” they said, “but we did. The church is poor and every free foot of wall holds a statue painted in primary colors but the priest is nice and his homilies are short. The people make it though. They’re so welcoming whether it’s at Mass or on the streets during the week. Everyone’s really there for one another. We wish you could visit.”

When folks evaluate a parish they generally look for two qualities: friendliness and supportive liturgy. Of the two, friendliness comes in first especially if the parish is small and people work and socialize with one another during the week. If the parish is bigger and people rarely see each other outside of Mass, the focus tends towards church and clergy.

The importance of friendship in faith is worth reflecting on because it highlights important facts. Ninety-nine point nine percent of the time we follow Christ without need of hierarchical authority or clerical services. We rely on our own and our friends’ common sense, knowledge, courage and energy to build our bit of God’s creation. We pretty much know what needs to be done and the values we want to uphold doing it. We count on our friends (those easy to get along with and those “not so much”) to support us, our work and our values.

When we take part in Eucharist, we do so as friends. The prayers remind us of who we are together and our union with Christ for the world. It is we who receive Christ in communion – not just I as an individual – we who work together and with God through the week.