My dear sisters and brothers in our Lord Jesus Christ,

Peace and blessings to you.

Today, Tuesday of Holy Week 2008, as I prepare for the Chrism Mass, which we will celebrate this evening at the Cathedral on this beautiful day in San Diego, I rejoice in the blessings God has provided to his Church.

This year thus far has proven to be one of personal challenge and challenge for the Church as we embark on new territory of our ministry. I am humbled to come to you in this my first year as your presiding bishop of the American Catholic Church here in California.

In today’s liturgy we will be blessing the oils the Church will use in ministering the sacraments to the people of God for the coming year. We will be renewing our priestly vows taken at our ordination and we will gather as a community of faith with open arms and hearts to all.

Each year I long for this week. I do so because it is the very symbol of who we are and who we hope to be as followers of The Christ. Each year the church universal fills our senses with sights, sounds, smells, and tastes of our faith. If we choose, we can be deeply impacted by the liturgies we celebrate by allowing the Holy Spirit to do her work among us as we commemorate the everlasting gift Christ gave us in the Holy Eucharist and the otherworldliness we experience each time we come together on sanctified ground in communion with each other in this great feast.

Last Sunday we celebrated Christ’s entry in His City; Jerusalem and began our journey this week of discovery of Christ’s suffering, death, and resurrection. We walk that path trod so long ago to bring into our life the real presence of Christ in our midst, and make all that we say and do truly REAL. This faith we profess, this faith we live, becomes even more of who we are. All this is accomplished through our assent to the power of the Holy Spirit in our personal lives.

I was reading an article this morning about the upcoming presidential election and one of the candidate’s responses to comments his pastor had made in the past and a quote stood out in glaring clarity of our sad divisions we still have, “…the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning,” This was in reference to how churches, even today, in what we strive to be a loving caring people of the LIGHT, we have not reached the ideal Christ calls us to, but hold on to angers, hates, elitisms, separateness, lack of understanding, and sinfulness; old ways which are not the way of the Lord.

People of God and followers of Christ, how do we personally and as a body; the Church, respond to our failure to be all we are capable of being? We must, and I repeat we must, always respond with love. When we say we are an Open and Affirming Community of Faith, have we internalized this to our very being? This is the challenge we must always be aware of. The draw of darkness, of evil, is a powerful force. We know we are children of the LIGHT; of God!  We should use this Easter Season to dig deep in the fiber of our being and, through the power of the Holy Spirit alive in the Church, pull ourselves up and our neighbor along with us to an even brighter life in our Savior. This is the Season of our God. May we, as the body of Christ, live the state of Grace.  May we purify ourselves and be Saints of God, sanctified and made holy each day we wake and live the Gospel, making this image or ourselves, where we can say: CHRIST IS RISEN, ALLELUIA ALLELUIA!

May the Lord be in our hearts and on our lips that we may worthily proclaim His Gospel.

Peace and Joy of our Risen Lord be with you all. I am,

Sincerely, Christ’s servant,