The Lord said to Joshua, "Today I have removed the reproach of Egypt from you." After forty years of wandering in the desert, this hardheaded people have finally reached the Promised Land. No more do they eat the manna in the desert, but they partake of the fruits of their new homeland. God has kept the promise to their parents in Egypt. Even though they were a sinful people, many times questioning God and even worshiping false gods, God has forgiven them and fulfilled the promise.

The "take-away" for us is that there is no sin that is unforgivable. We may have offended our neighbors, given a bad example to someone, even worshiped the false gods of money and power. But God is a merciful God, true to the words spoken to us. God forgives all and calls us back to love.

God says to Moses, "This is what you shall tell the Israelites: I AM sent me to you...The LORD, the God of your [ancestors], the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob" (Exodus 3:14, 15). As Jesus would later say, God is not a God of the dead, but of the living, and so we believe that the dead will one day rise. At this midpoint of Lent, we pause to consider how our repentance is leading us to the Resurrection, to our reunion with the great "I AM." Part of our repentance involves working to secure justice for all and helping our neighbor to live in God's ways. We encourage each other and nurture each other, like the compassionate gardener of today's Gospel, who tells the owner of the orchard that he will nurture the tree, fertilize it, and perhaps it will bear fruit.

It is not hard to imagine, in this age of wars, evil groups bent on the destruction of humanity, and political follies, that the words of Saint Paul were so accurate, even for his time. It seems that the world never changes. Paul says, "Many...conduct themselves as enemies of the cross of Christ. Their end is their destruction...Their minds are occupied with earthly things" (Philippians 3:18, 19). The result is the destruction of innocent people and of the Earth itself.

In this third Sunday of our reading from the Sermon on the Plain, Jesus speaks of the inner soul and its outer expression. He uses images as he teaches.He addresses all of us.

We listen quite a while before we get to the “punch line” of the first reading today: even though it would be an easy thing to do, David will not harm the anointed one of the Lord. We, of course, know that Jesus is the Messiah, the anointed one of God, but the Bible uses this term for many different people. It is scripture’s way of indicating who has been chosen by God for a special place and mission in salvation history.

When we think of the word “Beatitude” we think of today’s discourse from Luke’s Gospel or the more familiar one from Matthew (which begins “Blessed are the poor in spirit . . . ”). Actually, beatitudes occur throughout the prophets and Gospels.

Confronted with God’s power and majesty, the first response of the prophet Isaiah was to acknowledge his sinfulness. “Woe is me, I am doomed! For I am a man of unclean lips,” he said aloud. Likewise, with his empty fishing nets dramatically filled at Jesus’ instruction, Peter fell to his knees and cried out, “Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man.”

The song of the angels, “Holy, Holy, Holy,” resounds from our lips at every Mass. There was a widespread belief in the first religions of the world that God stirred creation into being by a word, a song, a musical note. Music and a sense of God’s presence have always been inseparable.

Saturday’s feast of the Presentation is a day for the blessing of candles. Why does liturgy require candles? In the first years of the church, worship was often at night, and candles and torches were carried from place to place within the worship space as needed. Candles were also a mark of festivity and hospitality when people gathered for prayer in homes, and later on in large buildings with thick walls and dark corners. But even after gaslight and electricity, candles were kept.

We find it difficult to convey ideas to people unless we can actually show them something, demonstrate what we mean. God, who is invisible and truly beyond human understanding, apparently faces the same difficulty. People want to see, not just listen to an idea. So God gave us Jesus Christ, God made visible in the world.

For many weeks now, we have been celebrating the appearance of the divine presence in human form. As a child, he came to Mary and Joseph, was seen by the shepherds, and then by some wandering magi from the East. Today we celebrate another showing, later in time, to a group gathered at the Jordan River.

The splendid magi, all sparkle and dash and solemnity, march right up off the pages of Matthew’s Gospel and into our churches today. Matthew alone tells us this grand and seductive story so that we might see the light and know that the child these magi visited is the fulfillment of prophecy, the king of the world that stretches to the magi’s home country and beyond, right down the ages to us.