Welcome and Housekeeping
Good to be with you all, and good to be with our patron Saint Paul again. This is, above all, the most important thing here—the fact that we’re encountering our patron Saint Paul. We’re encountering his teaching, which allows us to encounter the Lord. So thank you all for being here.
This is March 8th. Glad you’re here. Next week is the last one‚6:30 to 7:30, same deal.
Saint Paul Lent Talk Series final slidesSeries Overview
This is the most important slide of the whole series. When we are starting to embrace Saint Paul’s teaching, when we’re starting to understand how he’s unpacking the Christian life for us, we have to start with the fact that the Lord saves us first, and then he unites us to the Church. Tonight we’ll talk about the fact that once he’s united us to his Church, he then feeds us with the sacraments. And then next week, we’ll discuss the moral transformation—actually living a life in Christ.
Opening Prayer: Hymn from Ephesians
All of the prayers that we’ve been starting out with are hymns that Saint Paul wrote within Scripture. We read them, we pray them, but we can imagine—as priests and religious do when we pray this in the Liturgy of the Hours—we sing them. We can even imagine Saint Paul teaching the early churches these hymns.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Praise be to God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has bestowed on us in Christ every spiritual blessing in the heavens. God chose us in him before the world began, to be holy and blameless in his sight. He predestined us to be his adopted sons through Jesus Christ. Such was his will and pleasure, that all might praise the glorious favor he has bestowed on us in his beloved. In him and through his blood we have been redeemed and our sins forgiven, so immeasurably generous is God’s favor to us. God has given us the wisdom to understand fully the mystery, the plan he was pleased to decree in Christ—a plan to be carried out in the fullness of time, to bring all things into one in him, in the heavens and on earth.
Saint Paul, our patron, pray for us. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
I chose this prayer particularly for tonight because God has given us the wisdom to understand fully the mystery—and when we talk about sacraments, we’re talking about the mysteries that he has given us.
Tonight’s Outline
We’re going to be talking about what a sacramental worldview is, what a mystery is, the centrality of the mysteries—baptism and Eucharist—holy orders and the apostolic ministry, marriage as the great mystery, and then finally: who cares? I want to get this into all of our heads and hearts—the theology and teaching of our patron Saint Paul must deeply, actually affect how we live. It’s not just about right thinking. We need right thinking, but then it must move us toward right action as well.
What Is a Sacramental Worldview?
Saint Paul in Colossians says, “For in him the whole fullness of the deity dwells bodily, and you have come to the fullness of life in him.”
How many sacraments are there? Seven. We know this. But those are the big capital-S Sacraments—the ones Christ has gifted to the Church. A sacramental worldview means viewing everything in a sacramental way. The sacraments point us to Christ. They help us to see Christ. The sacraments of the Church actually, literally allow us to encounter him. But a sacramental worldview is viewing everything—all of God’s creation—as a sign moving us toward him.
Creation points us to God. Matter, the created things—it matters. Creation has a language that speaks of God. We’ve all been there. Why, all throughout the entirety of my life, have I wanted to go climb mountains? Maybe you’ve been there too. Why do we want to go to beautiful places? Why do we want to vacation on the ocean? Because that’s where we encounter God in his creation. That’s where he reveals himself to us.
We’re not just seeking beauty for beauty’s sake. We’re seeking these beautiful things in God’s creation because they reveal a part of who God is. When you see the beautiful mountain sunset, the sun rising over the ocean, a beautiful flower with a bee flying into it—you see some little glimpse of God. And in a very real way, it reveals who God is.
The Incarnation makes a sacramental worldview possible. Because God, the second person of the Trinity, actually took on flesh and entered into the human reality, all of our life and all of these created things now take on a new meaning. They are actually able to be the things that save us. God doesn’t simply save us through ideas. He saves us through flesh-and-blood people, material actions, and the sacraments. Think about it—they use the most ordinary of things: water, oil, bread, wine, hands, words, visible things.
When we have a sacramental worldview, we start to encounter Christ not simply in the seven sacraments of the Church—we encounter him there, to be sure—but then we start to actually encounter him everywhere. When you’re kneading dough and baking bread, your heart starts to think, “Oh, this is pointing me toward the Eucharist.” When you’re having a glass of wine at the end of the night, you think: imagine the fact that all of these grapes grew on vines, and the Lord planned from the beginning of the world to have these vines growing—but he didn’t just want to fill me with this delicious glass of wine. He wanted to fill me with his precious blood. When we start to have these kinds of thoughts, we’re starting to live the sacramental worldview.
What Is a Mystery?
The sacramental worldview helps us to actually encounter the mysteries. The word “mystery”—mysterion—is a Greek word, and that’s the word we translate as “sacrament” in English, sacramentum in Latin.
Maybe you’ve heard it when your kids ask you a super complicated question: “Oh, it’s a mystery, don’t worry about it.” We’re really saying, “I don’t have time for this.” But when Saint Paul uses the word mystery, he’s not saying it’s not important or that it’s the man behind the curtain that you’ll never really know. He’s saying it’s a revealed truth, but it’s deeper than our full understanding. It is made visible. It’s something you can encounter, but you can’t exhaust it. It’s a well that doesn’t run dry. Can you take a drink from it? Absolutely.
Think about the Gospel today. We encountered the woman at the well. Did that well ever run dry? No. A few years ago, I was able to go to the Holy Land and drink from that exact same well. A mystery is something we can dip into, something that can satiate us, but it never runs dry.
Saint Paul says, “Great indeed, we confess, is the mystery of our religion.” And what is that fundamental mystery? He was manifested in the flesh. God shows himself to us in the flesh. All of the sacraments of our Church are ultimately rooted there, seated in Christ the Sacrament.
Jesus is the Sacrament. What does he reveal to us? God. When we look at his body, God—who is invisible—becomes visible to us. The Incarnation makes us able to see God again. This is why it’s so fundamental for us as Catholics: when we look at the crucifix, we see the body of Jesus, because God is not invisible anymore. We can see him. We can see the depth of his love for us when we look upon the body of God on the cross.
What Is a Sacrament?
If you’re really wanting to learn more about your faith, what a gift we have in the Catechism of the Catholic Church—published in 1993, the year I was born. Many of us didn’t grow up with the Catechism, so we wonder, “What do we believe?” We go to this, and the Church reveals to us what she has taught.
The Catechism tells us: the sacraments are efficacious signs of grace, instituted by Christ and entrusted to the Church, by which divine life is dispensed to us.
Let me break this down. First, an efficacious sign. Think about a stop sign. When you see a stop sign, does it cause you to stop? No—you see it and make a decision to stop. An efficacious sign is a sign that brings about what it signifies. If you were driving up to a stop sign and you were just impelled to stop because of it—it wasn’t your decision, it just brought it about because the sign was there. The signs that are the sacraments cause what they signify.
Baptism is an easy one to break down. When you pour water over a baby, what is being signified? Washing. A bath. I baptized a couple of babies this morning—I only waterboarded one of them. It’s fine. I’ve got a bad record. But what is actually being caused? Spiritual regeneration—the washing away of original sin. The sign of washing, when the water is being poured over, is actually causing the reality of sin being washed away.
What are they signs of? Grace. God’s life being placed into us. And it’s important that each of these sacraments, we believe as Catholics, was directly instituted by Christ, directly given to us by Christ. We can point these out in Scripture. “Go therefore, and baptize all nations.” “You must eat my flesh and drink my blood.” “Is there anyone sick among you? Send for the priests of the church, that they pray over them and anoint them with oil in the name of the Lord.” “Confess your sins to one another.” “Whose sins you forgive, their sins will be forgiven them.” All the sacraments of the Church—directly given to us as gifts from Jesus, entrusted to the Church, in order to give us his divine life.
Above all, what do the sacraments allow us to do? I like to say it like this: the sacraments allow us to bump into Christ. Sometimes I start to think, “I’m really glad God became flesh 2,000 years ago. I’m really glad he walked around and encountered all these people, cured the sick, raised the dead, preached the Sermon on the Mount. But wouldn’t it be nice if he was here now and I could see him?”
Think about right before the Ascension. He gives us the sacraments and says, “I will be with you always. I will not depart from you. I will not leave you orphans.” How does he fulfill this promise? By giving us the gift of the sacraments. In the sacraments, we still bump into him, we encounter him. In the same way that every person who bumped into Jesus throughout his life on earth was changed—think about the woman with hemorrhages who said, “If I just go and touch the tassel, I know I’m going to be healed.” She bumps into him, touches his tassel, and she’s healed—and even greater than the physical healing, she receives faith. The sacraments that the Lord has given us perpetuate throughout time, throughout space, throughout history, our ability to still bump into Jesus.
The Centrality of the Mysteries: Baptism
Paul says, “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?”
Baptism is not simply a christening. It’s not simply a welcoming into the Church. There’s a dramatic battle happening at baptism. You see Christ crucified, the blood and water pouring out from his heart over this child while the priest pours water over them—and then over in the corner, the demons cowering, fleeing. This is the reality of what takes place when we baptize a child.
What is baptism? It’s a dying and rising with Christ. Not symbolic, not optional, but something we need. The effect of baptism is a true death to sin, new life in Christ, and incorporation into Christ’s body. Paul says, “For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ.” And through Titus: “He saved us by the washing of regeneration and renewal in the Holy Spirit.”
When Paul talks about baptism, he means so clearly that when you are baptized, you die and then you rise to new life with Christ. For most of us, this happened as an infant, as a child. What a blessing—the gift that our parents gave us, to die and rise before we could even choose it.
One of the symbols of the pouring of water is washing; another, more dramatically, is drowning—death. The chaos of the waters is a constantly fearful image throughout Scripture because the chaos of waters represents death. When we enter into the baptismal font, we are truly dying. Our old self, captive to original sin, dies. But then—it’s that seed that falls to the ground and is able to actually begin to bear fruit, to rise, to grow into something even greater than simply a seed.
The Sacrament of Penance
Penance is related to baptism. Paul says, “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.”
What happens in the sacrament of penance? The restoration and strengthening of our baptismal grace—the life of God in us, the ability to die and rise. Many of the sins that we confess are typically, “I rejected this cross. I pushed away the suffering and chose something easier. I chose a pathway that fled from the cross.” I was Peter—I saw Calvary and said, “I’d rather just go and save my own skin.”
But the sacrament of penance allows us to say: what was planted in my heart at baptism was the ability to die and rise constantly. I repent of all the ways I’ve refused crosses, and now I’m going to embrace them. I’ll actually live them out, and I’ll trust that if I continue to die throughout my life, then I’ll continue to rise with him.
The Centrality of the Eucharist
When Saint Paul understands the Eucharist, it’s a real participation, a communion with Christ. He says in First Corinthians—the book to read for the Eucharist and all of the sacraments: “The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ?”
He’s laying this out to the Corinthians, who were treating the Eucharist as a simple meal. They were getting drunk on the Eucharistic blood of Christ. They were being exclusive—saying, “You lesser people, you can have your Eucharist over there, but us people who have it together, we’ll have it here.” They had started to divide how they celebrated the Eucharistic meal. Saint Paul tells them: do you not understand that what you’re doing when you consume the body and blood of Jesus is a true communion in his life, in his flesh? This must unify you, not divide you.
He says further: “Whoever eats the bread and drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of profaning the body and blood of our Lord.” I think all of us agree that we have to truly examine our hearts when we walk forward to the altar, week after week. Have we understood that what we’re doing when we receive him is saying we want to be unified with him? We want his blood to flow through our veins. We want his body to be built up into our muscles. This is a true union with him.
Paul even says to the Corinthians: some of you—the reason you’re dying, literally dying—is because you’ve forgotten what you’re doing here. The fact that you’re eating and drinking the body and blood of Christ without actually discerning what you’re doing—it’s killing you. What a shocking thing to say. But it’s true for us as well.
I encourage all of us to reaffirm our faith in the real presence of the Lord and to know that every time I approach him, every time I draw close to him, I want to do so with the purest of hearts and the deepest desire to actually be united to him. When we think of all the sacraments that give us an encounter of bumping into the Lord, this is the most profound, because it gives us not just a bumping into the Lord but his true life, his true body within us. What a blessing we have as Catholics to know that our Lord wants to be this close to us.
Holy Orders and Apostolic Ministry
Saint Paul to the Corinthians says, “This is how one should regard us: as servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God.” When he says this is how you should think about what priests and bishops are—fundamentally, they’re stewards, servants of the mysteries of God, servants of the sacraments.
The fundamental reality of what a priest is—it’s not something he’s taken for himself. He didn’t become a priest because he simply wanted it. It was given to him: this gift, this authority to be a steward, a slave of the sacraments. How does he steward the sacraments? By making Christ’s presence visible through his teaching, sanctifying, and governing authority.
Every single Christian, through baptism, has the priestly, prophetic, and kingly abilities to rule, to speak on Christ’s behalf, and to sanctify their lives. But then Christ gives to his ministerial priests, the stewards of the mysteries, the ability to act in persona Christi.
Think about this: when a priest says “I absolve you of your sins,” there are two options. Either he’s blaspheming—making himself to be God—or the reality is actually taking place. There’s no in-between. It’s not a good psychological pump-up talk. Either he is the worst of idolaters, or God is actually working through him.
The same thing at Mass. The priest doesn’t say, “And then Jesus said, ‘This is my body.’” The priest actually says, “This is my body. This is my blood.” He’s speaking on behalf of Jesus. Again: either he is making himself to be God, or the reality is actually taking place. Those are the only two options.
A priest is a minister, a guardian, a steward of the sacraments. He makes Christ present to us through this gift of holy orders—ordering one’s life toward making the sacraments present. Priests do many other things, sure, but the most fundamental gift is making the sacraments present to us.
Marriage: The Greatest of Mysteries
I truly think this is the greatest of mysteries. Ephesians 5—maybe you’ve heard this. This is the passage where all of you elbow your husbands really hard, and then the husbands elbow you back. When I’m working through marriage prep with couples, I just go for the jugular—we’re going to read Ephesians 5.
“Wives, be subordinate to your husbands. Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the Church.” We all get glazed over and angry at that point. But at the very end of the passage, Paul says, “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and this mystery is a profound one—and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the Church.”
When we think about marriage, it’s not just a contract, not just an institution for emotional fulfillment. Above all, it’s a participation in Christ’s self-gift, where he weds himself to his bride, the Church. The way a wife loves her husband is meant to be an image of how the Church loves Christ the bridegroom. The way a husband loves his wife is meant to be an image of how Christ pours his life out for the Church. There’s a reason Scripture all throughout uses marital imagery for the relationship between Christ and the Church.
What is the sacrament of marriage supposed to bring about? Your responsibility is that when someone sees you loving your spouse, when someone sees you sacrificing for your spouse, they’re supposed to see an image that brings to reality their understanding of what Jesus is doing for his Church, and how the Church responds to Jesus. That’s the highest of responsibilities, the highest of callings.
Sometimes we think, “If you really want to be serious about your faith, go be the foreign missionary.” But the dignity of being able to represent within your daily life Christ’s love for the Church and the Church’s love for Christ—and to reveal this to others—that’s a profound responsibility.
We know this when we see couples actually living this out. When we see holy couples that for decades—maybe half a century—have lived out that kind of self-sacrificial love, we sense the presence of God. When I’m around them, I’m at peace. When I walk in their homes, I’m at peace. Is that simply because they took couples therapy and know how to communicate well? I don’t think so. I think it’s because the reality of their sacrament—which didn’t happen simply on their wedding day but has been lived throughout their whole life—is coming to fruition.
The deepest image I have of this is walking into my Nana and Papa’s house. They were married for 67 and a half years. They never locked the door. At one point someone just walked in and grabbed a couple things—“Lock the doors, for goodness’ sake!” “Oh no, it’s fine, we don’t need it anyways.”
I remember sneaking in once, and they had their two rockers next to each other. One of them had their hand on the other rocker, and the other had their hand over them, and they weren’t saying anything. I stood there for a few minutes and watched, and I was pierced to the heart, realizing: what I’m seeing here is not just a couple that’s really in love. They were 90 years old. But what they expressed in that presence between them was the outpouring of Christ’s love and the response of the Church giving herself back.
I pray to God that all of us have seen something like this in our lives—a couple we’ve seen as an image of that love. This is something that can happen. It’s a gift, because every single sacrament is not something we simply work for. It’s Christ working through us.
I want to encourage you to know that this kind of love is possible. Maybe some of us have had broken love, disappointing love. But whatever has happened in our lives—whatever failures, whatever ups and downs of married life—our ability as individuals to live out that ecclesial love is still possible. That longing in our heart to give ourselves to Christ as the bride, or to pour ourselves out like Jesus for his bride—that’s still possible, no matter where the Lord has you.
Who Cares? How the Sacraments Change How We Live
The sacraments change how we live. Saint Paul commands us: “Glorify God in your bodies.” Allow God to actually move in and change you through these tangible things. Christ forgives, strengthens, and feeds us. These are not simply symbols—they’re true graces, and causes of grace.
When we walk out of Mass, the final words are, “Go and announce the Gospel. Go in peace.” That’s not just “Go rest.” It’s: go actually bring the peace that is dwelling in your heart right now because of Christ’s presence. Bring that peace to everywhere you go, to every encounter, every conversation, every person that is longing for him.
Even calling to mind the sacraments we received long ago—calling to mind our baptism—is something we should do often. In those moments of doubt, when we ask, “To whom do I belong? Who am I?”—whether we’ve been retired for ten years and are wondering, or we’ve changed jobs and are questioning the decision—when we return to those sacraments, we ground our identity on something stable: we are sons and daughters of God.
The sacraments tangibly affect our lives. Who’s ever been to confession and said, “That’s like a weight off my shoulders”—a physical weight, even? I remember a time when it had been long since I’d been to confession. I went and walked out of there floating. These spiritual things have actual, tangible effects in our lives. When Saint Paul talks about the weight of sin, I think he might be speaking literally. Sin weighs us down. It makes us hunched over in shame. But when we receive the spiritual reality of God’s forgiveness, we stand up. We look up to God. We walk confidently.
How do I see the world? Am I living a sacramental worldview? When I see water, when I drink wine, when I eat bread, when I hear words of forgiveness—are these stirring up in my heart the sacraments that actually give me those realities? Allowing ourselves to live a sacramental worldview will help us encounter the sacraments better.
Without the sacraments, we’re starving. Saint Paul’s teaching on the sacraments helps us see that we need them—we’re desperate for them. What are our hearts actually desperate for? To bump into Christ, to encounter him, to have his life actually within us. Call back to mind the time during COVID, when we couldn’t come to Mass and receive our Lord. How much were you hungering for him? How much did you desire to be united to him? How much did you even just desire to worship him together with your brothers and sisters in the body of Christ? Or even if you’ve missed Mass—there’s something that’s just off that week, something that’s not right. That’s a good feeling to have, because it reminds us of how much we actually need these encounters with Christ.
Practical Advice for This Week
Read the First Letter of Saint Paul to the Corinthians. This is his most Eucharistic and most sacramental letter.
Take Sunday Mass seriously. Actually take time. When you show up early—I get it, if you’ve got kids running around, grandkids that you’re trying to wrangle—but take some time, even 30 seconds, to call to mind before you walk up to receive Communion: “I’m about to enter into the divine worship of God, where I am participating in being unified, body and blood, with him.” Stir up the desire: I need that.
Celebrate your sacrament days. Who knows the day they were baptized? Have cake. Go out to eat. Get some party favors. Walk around with a little party hat all day. Celebrate these days for your children and grandchildren. These are profound moments in our lives where God broke in and claimed us. Know your baptism day as well as your birthday—your first birth and your second birth. Celebrate them both.
Holy water. Every single time we place holy water and make the sign of the cross, we’re not just dipping our fingers into water. We’re reminding ourselves: we’ve been baptized into his death, into his resurrection. Our life as baptized Christians is meant to be a continual dying—choosing to hold fast to our crosses so that we can rise to life with him. Become intentional in these things.
Frequent confession. Saint Paul tells us, “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.” Don’t let more than a month or so go by without going to confession. Sometimes we think, “What am I going to confess? I haven’t done anything.” Someone once told me: are you comparing yourself to Al Capone or Mother Teresa? If you’re comparing yourself to Al Capone, you’re doing good. But if you’re comparing yourself to Mother Teresa, you’ve got some more work to do.
Mother Teresa—when her sisters were complaining that there were too many people dying on the streets of Calcutta and they didn’t have time to pray—what did she say? “We’re actually going to have two holy hours today instead of one, because we need to have our life founded on Christ in our prayer.” Compare yourselves to the saints. Have them as your models, especially when examining your life.
Who’s the saint that’s closest to you? The saint you’re in love with, that you talk to every day? Read up on the history of their life. Think about the things they did, the virtues they possessed, and use that to draw into your examination of conscience. I love Saint Sebastian—he’s my guy. He was fearless in proclaiming that he was a Christian before the emperor, even though he knew it would get him killed. And I didn’t even want the guy at McDonald’s to know that I was a priest. Use the saints to help us examine our consciences.
Know that marriage is a mission. Am I aware of what I represent? Calling to mind on a regular basis: me and my spouse represent Jesus loving the Church and the Church receiving that love and giving it back. Maybe a tangible way to put that into practice is praying before a crucifix. You’ve got your coffees, you’re trucking off to work—you’ve got a crucifix right at the door. “Honey, let’s make the sign of the cross. We’ll see you tonight.” Things as simple as this help us live out the sacraments.
Get to know the little sacraments of your life that reveal God’s presence. We have the big seven, but then we have those little sacraments where we encounter Christ. What are they for you? Is it a nice glass of wine at the end of the night? A walk around the neighborhood as the sun goes down with your spouse, where you simply know the Lord is here because it’s so beautiful? For me, it’s being in the tree stand in the fall—and missing the shots at all the deer. But when I’m there, it’s quiet, it’s still, there’s a serenity and a real beauty, and the Lord is there. I’m truly encountering him. Call to mind what those little sacraments are for you.
Questions and Answers
Q: How did the mysteries work in the Old Testament, before Christ and the sacraments?
Everything in the history of salvation—from the moment God spoke “Let there be light”—was leading up to the Incarnation of Christ. When we read the Old Testament, we see all those Old Testament signs of the sacraments. The Passover meal—as Christians, what do we think of? That’s the Eucharist. The passing through the Red Sea in the Exodus—that’s baptism. Moses and the burning bush—that’s like the fire of the Holy Spirit coming down on Pentecost; that’s confirmation.
All of these Old Testament events—we call them theophanies, God manifesting his presence. Did they allow us to encounter the presence of God in the way the sacraments do—namely, giving us his life within us? No. But did they allow us to see that God was working toward that throughout history? Yes. They don’t give us the same one-for-one encounter, but they were training us to understand that this is what it was all leading toward.
Q: Can you explain the relationship between the Baltimore Catechism and the Catechism of the Catholic Church?
The Baltimore Catechism came from Baltimore—there it is. It was a question-and-answer form of the Council of Trent’s teaching. In the 1800s or early 1900s, the United States bishops said, “We’re going to take the teachings of the Council of Trent, put it into question-and-answer form, and give it to people so they know the teachings of the faith.”
In 1993, we got the first Universal Catechism—every single catechism, every language throughout the world, the same thing, just translated differently. What a gift that is—the clarity and beauty of the Church’s teaching. Go listen to Father Mike Schmitz’s “Catechism in a Year.” What a gift we have in this.
Closing
Next week we’re going to be talking about Saint Paul’s moral teaching—what he means by being transformed to live a life in Christ.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. All glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen. The Lord be with you. May Almighty God bless you—the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Go in peace.
And a reminder: we have Saint Paul’s relics up here if you want to venerate them. Spend some time with them. God bless you.