This weekend brings about the conclusion of a program that our parish has been offering for around eight weeks entitled “The Choice Wine.” This program focuses upon the importance of the sacrament of marriage and its need to be rooted in Christ. At the Wedding Feast of Cana He gave a wine that was found to be far superior to anything else which was offered at that wedding feast. It is for this reason that we have the couples who have participated in this program sitting together. Today they will have the opportunity to have their marriage blessed using the current ritual for the blessing of marriage.
Our Lord addresses us in our Gospel, “No one who sets a hand to the plow and looks to what was left behind is fit for the kingdom of God.”
The Lord is inviting each of us to follow after Him. It is easy to allow excuses to give rise within our life. There is always something else that we can chase after that leads us far away from Him. The sacraments are a beautiful gift that comes to us for through the sacraments we come to encounter Christ and the gift of God’s grace. If we are to set the ultimate goal of Heaven before our sight and strive to get there we must make this journey with the help of God’s grace.
A vocation is a call that comes to us from God towards a distinctive state in life. It is through embracing this call and state in life that an individual can reach holiness. As the Second Vatican Council document, Lumen Gentium, states that there is a “universal call to holiness in the Church.” Therefore, there are those who become priests, join a religious order, entered into marriage, or have embraced the single state as their vocation. We are all called upon to embrace holiness in our everyday life. Again in all these matters this is a call which comes from God who calls out to us, “Follow me.”
Concerning marriage we are told in the Marriage Exhortation from the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite, “This union, the is most serious, because it will bind you together for life a relationship so close and so intimate, that it will profoundly influence your whole future. That future, with its hopes and disappointments, it successes and its failures, its pleasures and its pains, its joys and its sorrows, is hidden from your eyes. You know that these elements are mingled in every life, and are to be expected in your own. And so not knowing what is before you, you take each other for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death.”
On this day that we bless marriages may each of you come to be strengthened Christ. In the midst of the sorrows and pains of this life set your sight upon Him. In this midst of the joys and pleasures of this life set your sight upon Him. So many take their sight upon Him and by doing so they stumble about lost for it is Christ for whom they long. May the sacrament marriage come to be strengthened in our parish and world. Let us embrace our vocation and set our sight upon Christ and the coming of the kingdom of God as we set out to embrace this call towards holiness. It is this universal call to holiness that restores all that which has been broken down by sin and death.
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