“Let me ask you a question: what are you doing here? What are you doing her? With that question it could come to mind of what are you doing here in the world, but what are you doing here at Mass? And I think that’s an important question to ask. Sometimes we just get into the rhythm of things and it’s just something we do, but it’s important to know what we’re doing. It’s important to know what we’re doing, where we’re headed because if you know where you’re headed, then you’ll look for the source that keeps you going as well as you’re willing to endure the storms and the troubles that go along the way.
Now let me ask you another question: how many people were here last week at this Mass (if you could raise your hands)? The reason I ask is it’s good to know your audience because I’m going to tell a story that I told the other Masses, so I went on a hiking trip with twelve other men about two weeks ago. Two weeks ago I went on this hiking trip and we were raising money for foster care kids who age out of foster care and so we were raising awareness and we were raising money for this and so we were going on this hike and so we left. We left on a Wednesday. I thought we were leaving in the morning, we actually left at night and we drove through the night and we got to the mountain in Buena Vista, CO and we were gonna try to summit Mt. Harvard and Mt. Columbia. So we start our day. We have our fifty pound packs and we need to hike up to about 9,000-10,000 feet and we need to get there to kind of do our base camp and then we’ll go from there. We’ll stay there. Well when we get there, we start hiking about twenty minutes and it starts raining. Not only that it starts hailing a little bit too and so we’re prepared for this. We put on our ponchos, but it did that the whole day and I looked around at the other guys and we were miserable. We get up to about 9,000-10,000, we put our camp up and the next two days it rains. It rains and then it hails. For some reason I guess up that high it always has to hail a little bit. It was a little bummer on the trip, but the main thing was that ok, it’s not about myself, it’s not about us, it’s about getting up this mountain, also it’s about the mission. It’s about the mission to raise awareness for these kids and so it’s about Sunday. It was the last day we were here and it’s the last chance we were able to summit Mt. Harvard. It’s a sunny day. We leave at five in the morning and we start hiking up. The interesting thing is that throughout those rainy days we hiked just a little bit, so I kinda saw where we were going. The thing about this day is what I thought was Mt. Harvard was not Mt. Harvard. Mr. Harvard was past that, so this was my first time climbing 14,000 feet and so we get up there and we climb up these boulder fields and then we see over and then we have to go more. During these times I find it interesting doing these strenuous activities is that, left on my own I think I would have quit. Left on my own I would have rested a lot longer. Left on my own I would have just gave up, but with these other men there is no giving up together. You don’t even think about it. You just keep going forward kind of taking the next step forward and you find what drives you. You stop looking at, ok I got to get to the mountain and you start looking I just need to take one step ahead of me, sometimes just one step ahead of me. I just need to get over this hill and will think about the rest later. In this journey it helps to know what our focus is because it gives you the drive to go through the sacrifices, to go through the pains. In the end we all get up to the mountain top and it’s the most beautiful view I’ve seen. You’re up, Mt. Harvard is about 14,420 feet and it was a clear sky and you could see all the other fourteeners, all the other mountains around. I have this beautiful panorama I took. And the thing is is from that high up you could actually see our campsite. You could see where we came from. You could see more clearly. It’s at the summit that you can see things much more clearly then when you were kind of going down from it. The thing in scriptures is that it’s at the summit or mountains that we encounter God. There are many stories in the Bible that it’s the mountain where you encounter God. There is Mt. Sinai where Moses goes up the mountain and he gets the Ten Commandments and establishes this covenant with God. It was Mt. Carmel where Elijah today who wants to die. He’s fed for the forty day journey so that he can get to this mountain to in the end show that it’s God alone not these false prophets of Baal. It’s Mt. Tabor where the transfiguration happened, this last Friday we celebrated where Jesus is transfigured into this glorious form before us to give us hope for the journey. It’s the Mt. of Olives that Jesus is praying to God before the crucifixion and ultimately Mt. Calvary where the crucifixion of God is. The Church teaches that there is one source and summit of our faith. The source and summit of our faith is the Eucharist. The Eucharist is Jesus. We don’t need to hike up a high mountain to get to the summit, but really the summit is brought before us here at the Mass. It’s the summit because everything should come in to the Mass when you come here. You bring everything from the week, the sacrifices, the struggles, your joys, your successes, you bring it to the Mass and when you receive Christ everything should flow out of it. Now that you are nurtured with Christ himself, the source of your life, really the source of where we’re going. It’s to be in communion with God. Now you take that back out into the world. That is why the Church says this is the source and summit of our faith. It’s because through the scriptures we’re fed with the words of Christ and through not only the words, but now the sacrament itself is Jesus present with you. It’s the source of life. From this summit we recalibrate our vision of our lives. We can see much clearer kind of like at the top of the summit of the mountain you can see the whole landscape. Things are put into perspective. In some ways we no longer see as men see, but now it’s to see as God sees it to do what we can to let go and then receive the grace of God. That is why the Church calls the Eucharist the source and summit of our faith and in the Gospel today and last week and not next because we’ll have a solemnity, it’s chapter six of John which talks about the Eucharist.
First in the first chapter of chapter six of John is the feeding of the five thousand. That whatever you give to Christ no matter how small, just a few fish, some loaves that he will be able to multiply it. Whatever we give to Him, that’s what we come to the Church for. We give to Him whatever the sacrifice of our lives, conform it to His sacrifice so that it becomes our daily bread, becomes the source of our life and then he tells the people, the people are fed and then they come back to him. So he goes away and he prays, but the people come after him because they’ve been fed by Christ and they want more and so they ask him, ‘Where can we get this? Show us a sign? Our ancestors were fed with manna in the desert. Now what can you give us?’ Jesus says, That manna in the desert, those people ate that manna and they died, but what bread of life he’s gonna give us we will never die. That bread, he says, is his very body, his flesh and actually the word to eat, he says you have to eat my flesh and drink my blood to have life in you. The very word itself is translated. It’s actually a more descriptive word to eat. It actually means to gnaw, to gnaw on my flesh, to chew on my flesh, so there’s even in the words there’s no confusion about if he really means eat my flesh. The thing is that Jesus, Jesus is what the Jewish people were looking for this whole time. He was what they were looking for the whole time. The Passover in the Old Testament where the angel of death passes over the house because of the lamb they sacrificed, the blood, that is the new Passover. Jesus is the lamb of God now. The manna in the desert, the forty years in the desert that fed them day to day is really the example of our life, the pilgrimage of our life that now Jesus feeds us every day with His body. The main thing is that Jesus wants us to be with him and what you eat is what you become and so we bring our sins to Christ so that we can be more like Him. That is what the Eucharist is there for is to nurture and sustain our souls with every desire you have in your heart will be fulfilled, the longing you wish for, the confusion of the world you will see more clearly if you surrender and believe that Christ is truly here before us. This is an important teaching of the Church that’s why it says the source and summit.
In next week’s Gospel which won’t be read because of the Assumption, people say in the scriptures they murmur again and say, ‘This teaching is too hard. This is too hard. How can we eat your flesh? How can we drink your blood?’ The law of Leviticus says that you shouldn’t drink anyone else’s blood. The thing is is believing that Jesus is not just a prophet or another human, but believing that He is God, but that takes faith. That’s why Jesus doesn’t pull people back and say, ‘Actually you know I think you misunderstood me. Let me clarify that for you.’ He let them go and then he asked his disciples because he knew they were questioning the same thing and he says, ‘Will you go as well?’ And Peter, the rock of the Church says, ‘You have the words of eternal life. You are the son of God. Where else would we go?’ So it’s in letting go in the sense of seeing as we see and now to see with the eyes of faith to listen with the ears of discernment of what God is calling us to and we practice that every single week, every single day. So as you come before the Lord today where Christ is truly present before you in the Eucharist where he says, ‘Eat my flesh and drink my blood.’ If we don’t believe that, ask. If you have the yearning to have the understanding, ask God to open your eyes. Ask him, ‘I want to believe. Help my unbelief.’ For it’s in this belief that we have the source and summit of our faith. Amen.”