Dear Brothers and Sisters of St. Andrew the Apostle,


Please read the bulletin or our parish website for all the St. Andrew's news and events. Here is a glimpse of what is coming up in the coming weeks:


  • Our second collection this weekend will help defray the facilities costs of our church and school. Thank you for your generosity!
  • The High School Youth Group will meet after the 5:30 PM Mass tonight, Saturday, January 18, in Hannan Hall.
  • Weather permitting, the Knights of Columbus will host their Coffee and Donuts sale after the 7:30 AM, 9:00 AM, and 10:30 AM Masses this Sunday.
  • Monday is Rev. Martin Luther King Day, a federal holiday. The parish office will be closed, Masses will be at 9:00 AM and 12:00 noon, and there will be no Eucharistic Exposition and no Religious Education and OCIA classes. The church will be open for prayer from 8:00 AM until 9:00 PM.
  • We will have a Respect Life Holy Hour on Thursday, July 23, at 7:00 PM.
  • Join Fr. Wilton, me, and tens of thousands of others as we offer prayerful witness for an end to abortion at the March For Life in Washington, DC, on Friday, January 24. Our buses will leave St. Andrew's at 11:00 AM and return around 5:30 PM. For more information and to register for a seat on our bus, please visit our website.
  • In last week's newsletter, I mistakenly said Deacon Sobczynski would be continuing our speaker series tomorrow. It is actually a week later, on January 26. The deacon will talk about the Jubilee Year of 2025. His presentation will begin at 2:00 PM in Hannan Hall. To register for lunch before the talk, visit our website.


Once more there is snow in the forecast for tomorrow morning. At this time the prediction is 3 to 4 inches. We will have all of our Masses and we will work to keep up with the plowing and shoveling, but as the snow will be coming down during the Masses, and the parking lot will have cars in it, there will be complications that may lead to patches of snow and ice in our parking lot. Also, be alert to the road conditions in your neighborhood. Please be prudent.


... We have entered the season of Ordinary Time, which began on the Monday after the Baptism of the Lord. Our Sunday scriptural readings follow a three-year cycle. In Year A, the Gospel is primarily from Matthew, in Year B, Mark, and Year C, Luke. We have just begun Year C, so we will hear from the Gospel of Luke most Sundays, but not this first Sunday. This Sunday, we will hear the miracle of Christ turning water into wine at the wedding feast in Cana, which is from the Gospel of John (Jn 2:1-11).


I mentioned a few newsletters ago that the traditional celebration of Epiphany included the visit of the Magi (Mt 2:1-12), the Baptism of Christ in the Jordan (Lk 3:15-16, 21-22), and the Miracle at the Wedding Feast at Cana. Alert Mass-goers will note that we will hear these three events on successive Sundays this year, which is unique to Year C and a remnant of the ancient celebration or Epiphany. The theme of these three Epiphany events is that God reveals salvation through Jesus Christ to the world in deliberate and often mysterious ways. The visit of the Magi from the Far East shows that Christ is King of Israel, but also the King of all people from the ends of the earth. The Baptism in the Jordan reveals the Holy Trinity as the Holy Spirit descends in the form of a dove over Jesus, and the voice of God the Father comes down from heaven above saying, "This is my beloved Son." The miracle at Cana reveals the power of God's divinity at work, a sign that Jesus is God.


We take these truths for granted because we are steeped in the Catholic faith. We know that Jesus is the Savior of all. We know that God is a Trinity of three Divine Persons. We know that Jesus is God with dominion over all of creation. Yet those who encountered Jesus did not have the gift of a Church founded by Jesus, led by the Holy Spirit, and rooted in the teaching of the Apostles. In first-century Galilee and Judea, Christ was radically different. Our infinite and glorious God came to His people and they were amazed: amazed with His miracles, amazed with His preaching, amazed because of his mystery.


Being amazed is not always a positive response. We can be amazed at a spectacular play by Lamar Jackson. We can also be amazed when someone commits a shocking sin. When we hear that the people were amazed at Jesus in the Gospels, we must recognize that it is not always in a positive sense. When God reveals Himself to us, it can take us aback. It can challenge our preconceived notions about God. It can bring us great joy and awe, and it can also make us wary to give our lives over to our omnipotent and mysterious God.


We desire to be in control. We desire to know and manage how our lives will go. This is why we plan and save for our future and the future of our families. If we take it to an extreme, we want to prevent or avoid any future struggle and leave our options to do what we want as open as possible. Hopefully, we realize that is futile. We will never have that much control. So there is tension when Jesus observes a poor widow giving two cents to the temple - two cents that would make her life harder, not easier - and Jesus says that we must imitate her (Lk 21:1-4). We want control. He wants us to give our whole lives to Him because He is the one in control. Not my will, Father, but Yours (Lk 22:42).


To come back to the events of Epiphany (the visit of the Magi, the Baptism in the Jordan, the Miracle at Cana), our mysterious God reveals Himself to us so that we can know Him, that we can trust Him, that we can love Him, and that we can give ourselves to Him. We celebrate His revelation in our human history in the Epiphany events, but His revelation in our lives continues today. We can see the glory of God in our personal history: how He leads us and guides us through unexplainable events; how He blesses us with the right people and the right opportunities to help us through; how He transforms us when we give ourselves to Him; how We find His glory in the beauty and grandeur of His creation.


His goodness and truth are there for us to experience, but to do that, we must prayerfully reflect on God's presence in our lives. We must see our lives not as an accumulation of our effort and will alone, but as one intertwined and, more accurately, in the hands of our omnipotent and loving God. The more we can know and trust Him, the easier this becomes to accept and the less we are tied to our will and our control. Yet it takes time. It takes reflection. It takes prayer. It takes stepping outside of our system of control to change our perspective: God has created me to know Him, love Him, and serve Him - it is about God and for God. My life is not about me. My life is about God and His glorious plans of salvation.


So we look at His hand in our lives. We see it clearly in the blessings. We see it less clearly when He does not answer our prayers as we want, when He allows suffering and failure to remain in our lives, when He does not reward our goodness and faithfulness with ease. Of course, we only need to look at the Cross to see that the path to salvation runs through suffering. So we need to gain such a trust in God that we can be at peace, and even be thankful, in the face of even our worst situations in life.


That takes time. That takes daily prayer. That takes an effort to loosen our grip on control and start to build up trust in God. This is not to say that we do not plan for the future and the future of our families. We still ned to be responsible, but always with an eye on God and His will for our salvation.


In this new year, let us make time to prayerfully reflect on God's revelation in the Scripture as well as in our life and the lives of those we love. May we come to know, trust, and love the Holy Trinity more through our prayer and our efforts to give more of our lives over to God. In this is our peace and our flourishing in this life and the next.


As always, be assured of my prayers in this effort, and please pray for me!


In Christ,

Fr. Wagner

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