The Twelfth Sunday After Pentecost

“…share what you have…” — The letter to the Hebrews


I have vivid memories of those first months after my adult conversion to the Christian faith. I wanted to know everything! I couldn’t get enough. I wanted to know what the Christian “answer” was to every question I could conjure! I was quickly introduced to the vast world of theological reflection among Christian authors living and dead. I discovered words like, justification, sanctification, expiation, incarnation, trinity and homoousios.

Though these words are common parlance for me now, in those early days, my head and heart were swimming in these blissful theological reflections. My mind was being renewed and my heart was being reformed by what was new to me. I still love to pick up some thick tome written by some long forgotten saint and follow him or her along the ascending path of contemplation. It can be an ever new experience.

But some things in the Christian life are not discovered as something new, but as reminders of things we learned when we were little—far away from the Church’s formal teaching or catechetical efforts. Take for instance, the short quote from Hebrews above. “Share what you have”… I didn’t learn the duty to share what I have in Sunday school but rather on the playground—where many of us learned it. There is something deeply comforting about this for me—and something we see over and over again in the new testament. All Christian morals are not new discoveries, or commands revealed from on high… oftentimes they are simply those simple but profound truths that we give credence to in our speech but fail to accomplish in our lives.

This Sunday, I would like for us to consider a short list of practical virtues appended at the end of the letter to the Hebrews that demonstrate this ordinariness—virtues and values that are (or at least should be) taken for granted among Christians. See you on Sunday!