Episode Transcript
[00:00:12] Speaker A: Welcome to the Blessed Sacrament Homilies podcast where our mission is to help everyone recognize and experience the presence of God. We hope you are nourished and encouraged by the Word. Thank you for joining us.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: The Lord be with you and with your spirit. A reading from the Holy Gospel According to John. Glory to you, O Lord.
God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish, but might have eternal life.
For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through Him.
Whoever believes in him will not be condemned, but whoever does not believe has already been condemned because he has not believed. In the name of the only Son of God.
The Gospel of the Lord.
Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.
Corporations and sports teams literally spend millions of dollars researching and creating trademarks and logos.
And ones that are created, well, are instantly recognizable with whatever the organization they are representing.
And when they are done well, these organizations can make a lot of money off of marketing those trademarks in those logos.
Examples being if I held up a glass bottle and it had a certain shape to it without even reading it, you would know it's a Coke bottle.
They worked on that for years and patented it.
Sports teams, the ones that are truly the classics, it's hard for me to say, but the Yankees for one, or the Old English D on a Tiger uniform, or the Winged Wheel on a Red Wings jersey, they're classics. They've kept them for decade upon decade and they use them to market.
Universities do the same thing.
Michigan actually trademarked the block M.
And because of that, no matter where you go in the country, you can see people wearing University of Michigan wear famous.
Heck, Ohio State even trademarked the for some strange reason, right?
And they're important.
Well, as a church, we have a trademark, we have a logo, and we use it in multiple ways.
We use it as a prayer unto itself.
We use it as the beginning and ending of prayer.
We use it as a not so secret handshake.
And we use it to teach us not just about the God we worship, but also teach us about our relationship to God and our relationship to one another.
And you already know exactly what I'm talking about. It's the sign of the cross, right? We begin every Mass that way and we end every Mass that way. We mark ourselves with our identity as God's children, father, son and spirit.
And in fact, people can pick us out of a crowd.
If you're sitting in a restaurant and you make the sign of the cross, people immediately know, oh, there's a Catholic.
It's our identity, it's our logo.
And the depth of that identity, that logo, that reality, teaches us that our God is forever relational.
Father, Son and Spirit, One God in three persons in loving relationship together.
And that since we are created in the image of God, we are by our very nature relational as well. It's not just us as individuals out there. It's not just me and God.
It's very much us and God.
We do things together, we pray communally, we care for one another.
We're relational as our God is relational.
And I encourage you because it can become so rote sometimes. We don't pay attention that every time you make that sign of the cross, be it as you bless yourself at the font, we start Mass, you start grace at the family dinner table.
Remember that truth, that our God is by definition relationable the persons of the Trinity, and so are we, that we work together as one family, known as the Body of Christ, to make sure all are called to salvation.
