On Sunday, April 26th, we heard the famous story of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus and their encounter with the Jesus. Their encounter was marked by two events. The first is that Jesus explained the scriptures to them and the second is that he was made known in the breaking of the bread.
After this encounter, the disciples exclaimed that their hearts were burning within them as Jesus explained the scriptures. I’m not sure if you know what they mean, but I do. When I was in college my I took a deep look at the scriptures and was surprised with what I found.
To put things in context, as a kid I knew of a lot of stories in the bible (Noah’s ark, David and Goliath, Moses parting the Red Sea, and many stories of Jesus’ miracles) but they all seemed kind of disconnected from each other. I would hear them but they really made no sense and, like many people, the stories became unimportant to me.
But in college, after the infamous events of September 11th, I was inspired to take a fresh look and discovered that these stories were tied together beautifully and, not only that, but they were actually tied into a lot of practices in my Catholic faith that seemed to also be disconnected from scripture. It was honestly like reading a satisfying mystery novel, where little details that seem unimportant at first glance suddenly make sense and help you solve the mystery.
When I saw how so many of those stories fit together into the practices of the Church, my heart burned within me. I was simply blown away by the depth. It was something I just did not expect to discover when I looked into scripture as a college student.
I believe that this time of sheltering in place is a great opportunity for Catholics to look at scripture deeply and to be blown away by the depth of scripture. We want to help you do that and so we are going to attempt an online Bible Study beginning on Thursday, April 30th. Details are coming together, but here is what we have planned.
We will specifically be studying the Mass through a Bible study from the St. Paul Center for Biblical theology. It is called, The Lamb’s Supper: The Bible and the Mass. You can take a look at it right here if you would like: Click Here.
This study will help us see how many aspects of the Mass, including words we say and little things we do, are clearly mentioned in scripture, but we will go even deeper and look at how the Mass is really the best way to celebrate God’s work of redemption. After I learned what you will in this study, I saw the Mass in a completely different way. It truly is the worship that God intends for his people.
This study is based on a book, The Lamb’s Supper by Scott Hahn. If you would like to purchase the book I would encourage it. Sunday Evening (April 26th) at 8pm, I will be reading a few chapters of the book on Facebook Live so you can see if this is something that you are interested in.
As for how meetings will be conducted, we will be meeting twice a week on Zoom. At this time, we are preparing for meetings on Monday night and Thursday night. The Zoom session will be open around 6:30 and the teaching will start at 7pm. We will go for about an hour to an hour and a half. We will go through the study section by section and hopefully by the end our hearts will be burning within us like they were for the apostles.
If you are interested, please email Joe Buttle: paff@cni.net. He will give you the information you need to be a part of this.
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