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9/23/26 An Abundance of Nothing · Omnia Christus

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SPEAKER_00: I think the most significant line from this gospel,
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SPEAKER_00: perhaps, is Christ's instruction to take nothing for the journey.
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SPEAKER_00: And I think we really don't think about that.
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SPEAKER_00: I think we think that while we need to take something,
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SPEAKER_00: we take a few things, we take the essential things, take the things we need.
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SPEAKER_00: And no, Christ says, take Nothing for the journey.
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SPEAKER_00: And he goes through that list.
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SPEAKER_00: It's typical of the gospel radicality that Christ is calling us to,
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SPEAKER_00: that he's going to say things that are so crazy in a sense
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SPEAKER_00: that we don't even really listen to them and don't even really take account of them.
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SPEAKER_00: And yet we are all called to this journey.
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SPEAKER_00: We're all called.
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SPEAKER_00: To this way, we are all priests, prophets, and kings in virtue of our baptism.
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SPEAKER_00: We're all sent out by Christ into this world as his missionaries.
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SPEAKER_00: And he says, we are supposed to take nothing.
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SPEAKER_00: What does that mean for us?
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SPEAKER_00: Well, I don't think that it means quite literally nothing in the physical sense.
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SPEAKER_00: Because there's certain things that we actually do need and we do have to get around
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SPEAKER_00: and so forth.
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SPEAKER_00: But the attitude of our heart has to be to take Nothing.
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SPEAKER_00: Not to prepare, to trust totally in Christ.
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SPEAKER_00: We're used to taking all sorts of things.
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SPEAKER_00: Many of us are planners.
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SPEAKER_00: I myself am certainly a planner.
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SPEAKER_00: Want to have everything planned, figured out, programmed.
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SPEAKER_00: And Christ is saying, take nothing.
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SPEAKER_00: Don't depend on yourself.
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SPEAKER_00: Don't depend on anything other than me.
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SPEAKER_00: That radical detachment that we've talked about or radical attachment
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SPEAKER_00: Because you can only be detached from things if you are attached to Christ.
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SPEAKER_00: That's what John of the Cross talks a lot about.
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SPEAKER_00: We do have to take nothing,
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SPEAKER_00: not because we have nothing, but because we have everything in Christ.
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SPEAKER_00: That's the point.
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SPEAKER_00: We have to be connected to everything.
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SPEAKER_00: And in as much as we're connected to anything else,
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SPEAKER_00: As much as we're taking anything else and as much as we're placing everything
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SPEAKER_00: with anything and as much as we're replacing God with any other thing,
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SPEAKER_00: That is the sense in which we are taking something and not nothing
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SPEAKER_00: because we have God alone to rely on.
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SPEAKER_00: It's a difficult saying, obviously.
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SPEAKER_00: It is the most difficult saying to take God alone and it is the central challenge of the Gospel.
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SPEAKER_00: To rely on God.
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SPEAKER_00: To let go of ourselves.
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SPEAKER_00: To be fully present with God in the moment where we are.
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SPEAKER_00: Not to worry about the future.
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SPEAKER_00: Not to go over the past.
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SPEAKER_00: To be with Him now.
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SPEAKER_00: On the weekend we talked about this idea of radical presence.
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SPEAKER_00: Of trust.
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SPEAKER_00: Of receiving.
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SPEAKER_00: That's the way in which we need to live.
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SPEAKER_00: That's the way in which Christ is asking these Disciples to go out.
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SPEAKER_00: Go out open.
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SPEAKER_00: Go out ready to receive.
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SPEAKER_00: Don't cling or grasp onto anything.
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SPEAKER_00: Don't hold anything else but me and go out.
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SPEAKER_00: It's like Christ walking on water.
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SPEAKER_00: You can't walk on water if you're too heavy.
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SPEAKER_00: You have to be light.
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SPEAKER_00: You have to have nothing but this trust and focus on God alone.
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SPEAKER_00: This difficult saying is what the Lord is calling us to.
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SPEAKER_00: He's calling us to implement this in our lives little by little.
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SPEAKER_00: And we can't start out that way.
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SPEAKER_00: Obviously there's a long process to get there,
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SPEAKER_00: but hopefully throughout our lives,
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SPEAKER_00: as we grow spiritually,
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SPEAKER_00: there's a process of letting go that little by little,
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SPEAKER_00: God is showing us those things in our lives that we don't need.
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SPEAKER_00: What are those things that are your money sacks, your sticks, your sandals, your food?
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SPEAKER_00: Little by little we can let go of those things because we're trusting more and more
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SPEAKER_00: in Christ,
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SPEAKER_00: because we're learning more and more that he's going to take care of those things
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SPEAKER_00: if we let him.
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SPEAKER_00: That's being in the school of the Holy Spirit.
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SPEAKER_00: Every day the Holy Spirit is speaking to us at every moment about everything that we're doing.
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SPEAKER_00: We don't want to listen because we want to do it our own way.
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SPEAKER_00: I've got this all figured out.
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SPEAKER_00: And the more mistakes we make as we go on and continue to make mistakes,
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SPEAKER_00: continue to fail, get back up.
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SPEAKER_00: Like, gee, you know what the Holy Spirit was saying?
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SPEAKER_00: Maybe it wasn't such a bad idea.
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SPEAKER_00: If we continue in that walk with him, little by little, he shows us he didn't need that.
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SPEAKER_00: That wasn't essential.
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SPEAKER_00: All you need was to trust in me.
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SPEAKER_00: All you need is to be with me.
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SPEAKER_00: Let's ask the Lord for that grace today to implement that a little bit more
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SPEAKER_00: in our lives,
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SPEAKER_00: to let go of what we can let go of,
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SPEAKER_00: to hang on to what we need to hang on to,
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SPEAKER_00: to do those two things as we go forward so that we might trust in nothing,
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SPEAKER_00: nothing, nothing other than the Lord our God.