I'm happy to be with you here today on this happy occasion to inaugurate, and recognize, and bless this newly-renovated church. And I'd like to thank Fr. Brian for his invitation for me to join you today.

I think it's perhaps God's providence that this Sunday occurs within this series of Sundays, four Sundays, in which the Gospel reading is an excerpt from the Bread of Life discourse that Jesus gives in St. John's Gospel. You can remember a couple of weeks back we heard about the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and the fishes.

Jesus was feeding the people physically. They had been following him around all day, didn't bring food, it's toward the end of the day. He was moved to compassion for them and performed this miracle of love. And then they continued to seek him out, so he uses that as an occasion to feed them spiritually, and takes that occasion of the physical feeding to speak about the spiritual feeding, referring to Himself as the Bread of Life, this Bread of Life come down from heaven, as He came down from the heaven, the Son of God, to become one of us, to earth, and took our human flesh. And He continues that mystery through the sacrament of the Holy Eucharist.

We hear today in the excerpt, this particular excerpt, about the conflict He had with what St. John calls the Jews, who cannot accept His origins; therefore, they cannot accept his teachings and eventually reject Him and even try to do him in.

St. John speaks about how they murmured against Jesus. This is reminiscent of what their ancestors did in the Sinai Desert when they were wandering for those 40 years. They kept murmuring, that is, complaining, lamenting, crying out against Moses and against God. And so now these people are doing that against Jesus. The Jews St. John refers to are really the leaders of Jesus' own people. That is, the scribes and the pharisees, the ones who were expert in the law, and the prophets, the ones who knew the scriptures, who should have understood and known better.

Let us be mindful that there were others of Jesus' people who did accept Him for who He was and followed Him, most notably, his apostles, and also others from the poor and poorly-educated classes. It might sound easy to us to take Jesus at His word and follow Him. But if we really do that, if we really abide by the truth that He teaches and the truth that He is, we will in some way or another be tested.

We have as sort of a pre-figurement of this the example of the prophet Elijah. As we heard from the reading, he was fleeing King Ahab and Queen Jezebel. There was a great temptation, and which practically everyone gave in to, the ancient people of Israel, to go over to the worship of this pagan god called Baal. Their pagan neighbors worshiped this god, and they seemed more powerful than Israel. And Jezebel, in fact, was the one who convinced King Ahab to go over to the worship of this idol.

So they sought Elijah's life, and he was fleeing for his life, and he fled into the desert. Elijah was the only true believer left in Israel, or at least so he thought. Later on we hear that he does find others, but they're still a small minority. He gets himself into trouble by not only standing by the truth, but even proclaiming it as being a prophet of the one true God. He's so weary, though, that he asks God to take his life; he just can't take it anymore. Instead, God gives him food, food for the journey, for his journey to the mountain of God, Horeb or Sinai, the place where God revealed Himself to Moses, where He gave Moses the law, the Ten Commandments; Sinai, the place, that mountain, the place of encounter between God and human beings. Strengthened by that food, then, Elijah goes to the mount of God.

God gives us, too, food for the journey. The word we use in the church -- perhaps you've heard of it at some point or another, especially if you had a loved one toward the end of their life in this world. We call that Viaticum. Viaticum literally means food for the journey. And in our Church language, we refer to that as Communion, Holy Communion, given to someone who's on the point of death and is about to make that final journey to the mountain of the Living God, to the encounter with God face to face. But this is the food that sustains us all throughout our journey in this world, all throughout our Christian life, because our Christian life really is a journey or a pilgrimage to that mountain of God, to our final encounter with God when we depart from this life.

The question then, I believe we need to ask ourselves and that the Church proposes to us through our readings for these Sundays, is do our lives correspond to this mystery which we profess, to this mystery which we dare to receive. After all, if we see ourselves in the light of the readings, we now are the ones who should know better. We have been enlightened by the truth of our faith. Do we really behave accordingly? St. Paul speaks about how the Christian is to be different from nonbelievers. What characterizes the Christian life? He says we need to do away with all bitterness, fury, anger, shouting, reviling, malice, and instead we should be compassionate, forgiving, and imitators of God.

If we are to claim the name Christian, we're going to call ourselves Christian, our lives have to be different. They have to be noticeably different. If our, lives the way we live our lives in our day-to-day lives, and especially on this day, the Lord's day, if our lives are indistinguishable from nonbelievers, even nonbelievers of goodwill, then something's wrong and we're more like the leaders of Jesus' own people than his apostles.

This requires living the demands of the Gospel with integrity, holding nothing back from Christ, even something that perhaps no other human being may know about. We confess that sometimes at the beginning of Mass in the Penitential Rite, that prayer, the Confiteor. We confess to having sinned in my thoughts, and in my words, in what I have done, and what I have failed to do: thought, word and action.

The Christian's life is also one characterized by a devotional life: Keeping the priority of the Lord's Day, worshipping Him with God's people, praying regularly all throughout the week, availing oneself of the Sacrament of Confession frequently. It also means participation in the life of the parish, because that is how, practically speaking, we keep ourselves connected to the Church, in a practical communion with the Church. That, I think, is one key indicating factor of how one is doing in living authentically their Christian life.

Today, the occasion we've marked today, is an example of how you are living this priority. The renovation of the church could not have been accomplished if it were not for the involvement and support of the parishioners here, keeping yourselves connected to the church in that practical way of participation in the life of your parish.

It takes a lot of work and a lot of money, I know. I had to do that once myself, actually. I had to renovate a church, and it seemed like an unending process. You know, I didn't have a chance to speak to Fr. Brian about this yet, but he probably had the same experience. You look at something that needs to be fixed, and you follow a line, and then you see something else, and then you keep -- oh, there's something else. You keep going and going. It's that principle of life that everything is interconnected. So it's a very complex, demanding project.

So I congratulate you on accomplishing it, especially in four weeks. I'm really impressed. It took us a lot longer than that. (Applause.)

Yes. I think it's providential that I'm here when our readings speak about the mountain of God. Because each church building is in a sense a mountain of God, a place of encounter with the living God, because it is in the church building where the Blessed Sacrament is reserved, the building which gives Him honor. Your stewardship, your generous sharing of time, talent and treasure has made this church a more worthy place to be that mountain of God to house the presence of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament.

So it is all a matter of priorities, keeping our priorities, knowing what they are, and keeping them in place. Respect for the house of God, respect for our conduct within the house of God, preserving a prayerful spirit of silence in the way we participate and worship, in the way we dress, in the way we prepare for Mass, the way we reflect upon Mass afterward -- in so many ways we show that we are worthy members of God's people, that we are striving, at least, to be among those who accepted Jesus at His word.

Let us then do strive to be like His apostles and not like the leaders of His people at the time. Let us accept Him for who He is and take Him at His word. And let us live lives in accordance with that truth so that we might be worthy to receive Jesus, Who is the Bread of Life, Who is the Food that sustains our journey to the mountain of God, the life of heaven. (Applause.)

cml