God gives us good news to proclaim – Rom 5:12-15, Matt 10:20-33

12th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year A; Mission Appeal at St. Augusta's, Lake Village, IN

When St. Paul talks about a gift over-flowing, he doesn’t just mean a benign trickle. He knew what it was like to be bawled over by a torrent of over-flowing gift, Jesus Christ’s gift of self, an act of love that changes the world. The gift of the resurrection is that Jesus gives everything to show us that God’s love for us is so intense that not even death, death at our hands, could keep him from being with us. It’s a gift that finds its first installment in God’s own Spirit, dwelling to closer to us than we are to ourselves, praying in us; a gift that will find its perfect fulfillment when it leads us to live forever lives of such love ourselves, standing shoulder to shoulder with the saints in heaven. It’s a gift, as we heard Jesus say, that’s spoken into the darkest parts of our world, and of ourselves, daring to go to places we’d balk to reveal, and lovingly transforming them. It’s a gift that compels us to speak of it, wherever there is light, Jesus says. And God has bathed his whole world in light.