Signs on the Path of Life
Boys and girls, I know some of you know this about me,
I love to go hiking.
Some years ago, I did this famous hike
that is 500 miles long, it is in Spain and
called the Camino de Santiago de Compostela.
We hike about about 10 to 15 miles a day,
every day for about thirty days.
Now, I only did two weeks of it,
but it was a really tough hike and it was really fun.
When we walk along this hike,
we follow these tiny little signs
and sometimes we miss them.
Here are a couple of pictures
that shows what some of it looks like. Right?
It is just regular farmland.
Then the next one looks like this.
Very easy to find.
But then all of a sudden we come to a crossroads and say,
“Oh, well which way do I go?”
We did not know which way to go
because there are two identical looking trails.
One leads to one place, one leads to another
and we do not know which is the right one.
We look for these everywhere in Spain
and even in Southern France shows the way of the trail.
There are these little symbols here.
That little yellow arrow and a yellow scallop shell.
That is the way you follow the road.
We see those everywhere all over Spain
and all over Southern France, even in Portugal,
they have a trail that goes from there to show you the way.
The reason why I said the signs, boys and girls,
help you to stay on the trail.
There was a couple of days when we took the wrong trail.
We were chatting or talking.
We did not see the sign.
We just did not see it.
And we went the wrong way.
All of a sudden, there are no signs anywhere.
It looked like we were in the middle of a farmyard.
We had to backtrack until we found one of these signs,
and then we realized we had missed the trail,
we had missed the signs.
Those signs keep you on the trail.
But you have to keep an eye out for the the signs
because if you miss the sign, well then you miss the trail.
The reason I bring this up, boys and girls,
is that life is kind of like that.
We have these signs that keep us on the trail of life,
keep us safe, keep us on the right trail.
Right? The right journey.
But occasionally, we make mistakes
and we do not see the sign.
We do not see the signs at all.
Oh, look. We did not see the sign.
What happens is when we do not see the sign like that,
we go off and we make mistakes,
we go off a different trail.
So what we are called to do, boys and girls,
is to pay attention to the signs.
Now, for your life the signs do not look like those signs.
But your parents are signs in your life.
They keep you on the right trail.
They are the ones who most often tell you
that you are on the right path.
Or your teachers, or other adults in your life
who will teach you where the right trail is
and why it is important.
In today's gospel, Jesus is trying to teach his disciples
how to keep on the right trail.
Remember, he has died and is raised from dead.
They were in a little bit disbelief.
They were trying to figure out if is this really Jesus.
They were in in awe.
There are a couple of really important signs
in this gospel that Saint John uses.
So I am going to ask you about a couple of them.
I doubt if you know the answer.
I actually doubt if your parents even know the answers.
The charcoal fire is a sign.
In this gospel, the charcoal fire points us to another charcoal fire,
and that is the charcoal fire when Peter was
outside the Sanhedrin where Jesus was convicted.
And what did Peter do there at that charcoal fire?
He denied Jesus three times.
He said, “I do not know you.
I do not know who he is.
I do not even know who you were talking about.”
Jesus has another charcoal fire,
and he asks Peter three times
to heal the wound of his denial.
He asks him three times,
“Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me?”
And he says, “Feed my sheep, tend my sheep, feed my lambs.”
In other words, Jesus is pointing to
his loving forgiveness by pointing to that fire.
Now there are a lots of other signs in here.
Here is another sign.
How many fish?
Did anyone remember hearing
how many fish there were in this catch?
153. Very good. Yes.
Why was it such an odd number?
It is a sign.
It points to the known number of fish categories at that time.
In other words, it was a symbol
to say everybody was caught in the net.
Jesus came to catch everyone.
Jesus came to save all.
Boys and girls, today,
this sacrament is a huge sign for you
because this is the body it points to,
the body and blood of Christ,
and it is not just a sign.
We call this a sacrament.
A sacrament is what it points to.
It just does not point the bread and the wine,
just does not point to the body and the blood of Christ.
It is what it points to.
It is the body and blood of Christ.
That is the difference between a sign and a sacrament.
Today, boys and girls, we celebrate
this really important sacrament for you.
Because here is what you say
when you come up for the first time,
you are about to say “Amen”
to receiving the body of Christ.
And what you are saying amen to is
you are promising to become what you receive.
You promise to become that sign for others to follow.
You promise to become the sacrament for others to follow.
You promise to become the bread of Christ for others.
You promise to become the blood of Christ for others.
The living and presence in our world.
Now boys and girls, that is a huge huge challenge,
but here is what we,
all of us who are here,
we say that every single week.
So you are joining us.
It is not that we do not make mistakes, we do.
We sometimes lose and miss the signs in our life too,
and we make mistakes and we turn back.
But that is why we keep coming back every single Sunday
because it is like coming back to the marker
and looking at the signs,
“Oh, this is the way back to my path,
this is the way to stay on the trail.”
Like me on my trail, we come back each week
to remind us to stay on the trail and the journey of life.
Boys and girls, what your promise today is
when you come forward, when you say amen,
you promise to become what you receive.
You promise to become the bread of life
or the body of Christ for others.
That means that you promise to be a sign in this world,
that you are going to try your hardest
to be the best boy and best girl that you can be.
You will not be perfect, that is okay,
because every weekend you come back
and you try a little bit harder.
But that is your promise,
that you were always going to try to tell the truth,
You were going to try to love your mom and dad,
love your brothers and sisters even when they are in pain.
Then you are going to promise to be good to other people,
your friends in school, and
even those who are strangers you do not know.
We promise to be the witness in the world.
We promise to be a sign.
And what are we pointing to?
We were pointing to Jesus, and
we are pointing to God's love in the world.
That is what Jesus is.
He is God's love in the world,
so we promise to that.
Can you do that? Okay.
Head on back to your seats.
To all the adults now:
The reality is in all of our lives,
we sometimes wander from the trail of life,
in this journey of life, we do miss a sign or two.
We get thrown off, and
we follow a path that takes us to a place
where we may sometimes take us a little time to figure out
that we were down the wrong path.
But then all we have to do is work our way back to that sign,
the sign that points to God's love,
and that sign is Jesus Christ in the world.
But what we say when we come here
is we say we become what we receive.
We become the body of Christ.
We become the bread of life and all.
We become the sign that points the way
for others in this world.
Now, my friends, all of us know
that the world desperately needs some signs
to keep us on the path of life.
In this modern world, we veer off.
We have veered off desperately in different directions.
We need to commit to being the body of Christ.
That is what these young boys and girls are relying on.
They were relying not just on their parents
and their godparents to be the witnesses
and the signs to keep them on a journey.
They need all of us to do it too.
So our commitment by being here today
is that we promise to work real hard
and be that authentic sign of Christ
and to God's love in our world.
That means there are going to be days
that we we would not like to,
but we were going to backtrack.
We are going to say we were sorry
when we have made mistakes.
That we are going to choose the higher road,
the one that points the way to the truth,
the one that points the way to life,
the one that points the way to love and forgiveness.
Now all of us know how hard that is to do,
and that is why these young people today
need our witness as well.
Today, we all commit to these boys and girls
to pointing the way to Christ
because Christ points the way to God's love in this world.
We all know that.
We need that.
This bread of life, this love of the world.
Christ is the way, the truth, and the life.