HE IS RISEN St. Lambert Parish Proclaiming Jesus Christ as Lord April 1, 2018 Easter Sunday Rectory: 8148 N Karlov Avenue Skokie, IL 60076 Phone: (847) 673-5090 E-mail: saintlambert@aol.com St. Lambert Parish - Skokie, IL Website: www.stlambert.org Sunday Masses: (5 pm Sat) 8am, 10am, 12pm Weekday Masses: 7:15 am (Mon-Fri) 8am on Saturday Confessions: Saturday at 8:30am Pastor: Rev. Richard Simon Rev. Know-it-all: reverendknow-it-all.blogspot.com Deacon: Mr. Chick O Leary Religious Education : Gina Roxas youthchurchred@gmail.com Music Director: Mr. Steven Folkers Office Staff: Debbie Morales-Garcia debbie.stlambert@aol.com Mr. George Mohrlein To Register as a Parishioner: Go to stlambert.org under About Us or by phone. Weddings: Arrangements must be made 6 months in advance. Baptisms: Third Sundays of the month at 1:30 pm. Baptismal Prep Class is the first Tuesday of each month at 7pm in room 103. For guidelines and to register email Debbie.
Page 2 St. Lambert Parish Easter Sunday Masses for the Week Holy Saturday, March 31 No Morning Mass 8:30 Confessions 12:00 Blessings of the Easter Baskets 7:30 Easter Vigil Mass Bernie Dentzer Easter Sunday, April 1 6:30 Salubong Mass 8:00 Stefan Jankowski 10:00 Lucille Wood Palma 12:00 People of St Lambert Monday, April 2 7:15 Frank Niewiadomski Tuesday, April 3 7:15 Ursula Blix Wednesday, April 4 7:15 William & Joseph Russ Thursday, April 5 7:15 Desmond & Sarath Gunawardana Friday, April 6 7:15 Holy Souls in Purgatory Saturday, April 7 8:00 Cheryl Magill Birthday 5:00 Jerome Cascino Sunday, April 8 8:00 Sally Del Rosario 10:00 Eler Perpetua 12:00 People of St Lambert READINGS FOR THE WEEK Monday: Acts 2:14, 22-33; Ps 16:1-2a, 5, 7-11; Mt 28:8-15 Tuesday: Acts 2:36-41; Ps 33:4-5, 18-20, 22; Jn 20:11-18 Wednesday: Acts 3:1-10; Ps 105:1-4, 6-9; Lk 24:13-35 Thursday: Acts 3:11-26; Ps 8:2ab, 5-9; Lk 24:35-48 Friday: Acts 4:1-12; Ps 118:1-2, 4, 22-27a; Jn 21:1-14 Saturday: Acts 4:13-21; Ps 118:1, 14-15ab, 16-21; Mk 16:9-15 Sunday: Acts 4:32-35; Ps 118:2-4, 13-15, 22-24; 1 Jn 5:1-6; Jn 20:19-31 Sunday Offertory Collection March 17/18, 2018 Envelopes: $6,321.67 Loose: 2,038.08 Total: $8,359.75 Youth Church: $10.00 Thank you for your support! For Online Giving go to: www.givecentral.org THE RETURN OF EASTER The return of Easter should be to the Christian life the call of a trumpet. It is the news of a great victory. It is the solution of a great perplexity. It is the assurance of a great triumph. Frederick Temple The Coffee Hour will be hosted next week by Couples for Christ and the contact person is Jean De Guzman. She can be reached at 847-674-8054. Your donations are very much appreciated.
April 1, 2018 Proclaiming Jesus Christ as Lord Page 3 Office of the Archbishop 835 North Rush Street Chicago, IL 60611-2030 312.534.8230 archchicago.org Easter 2018 Dear Sisters and Brothers in the Risen Lord Jesus, The news today seems to be dominated by death-dealing forces and foreclosed possibilities. This past year has brought us a plague of gun-violence, streams of helpless refugees in different parts of the world, struggles in our own nation around questions of immigration and racism, countless victims of natural disasters, and large numbers of people who are in the words of Pope Francis discarded. There seems to be scant room for hope and optimism. Yet, we know by our own experience as believers and our common bonds of faith that this is not the full story of reality. There, indeed, is other news, the good news of our Easter faith. Christ has conquered all death and evil. Christ is risen! When we profess our faith in the risen Lord, we do not deny the pain and suffering at work in our world. The risen Christ himself bears his wounds of his suffering, but he is risen. He has conquered sin and death, and our victory is certain. We hold a great hope in him who leads forward. But, it does not end there, for as St. Paul tells us, all of that we celebrate in these days has taken place so that we might live no longer for ourselves but for him who died for our sakes and was raised. In the Archdiocese of Chicago, our commitment to Renew My Church means that we take our Easter faith seriously to the point that it becomes the source of new energy for communities and individuals who share our faith with the world and bring it hope the world cannot take away. May our faith in the Risen Lord be alive in our hearts, and may we share that gift widely and generously with others. Sincerely yours in Christ, Cardinal Blase J. Cupich Archbishop of Chicago
Page 4 St. Lambert Parish Easter Sunday The Reverend Know-it-all What I don t know I can always make up! Dear Friends, I know I promised to write about priest s wives, but it s Easter and I would like to talk about something else, so next week I ll continue to talk about the fascinating topic of the possibility of priests in the Amazon basin having wives or of wives having priests, if you are not a chauvinist like me. Fascinating. Can t wait. Dear Rev. Know it all, I want to recommend a movie. It s called Risen. (2016 starring Joseph Fiennes) It s the story of a Roman soldier who is assigned the task of finding the body of Jesus of Nazareth after his tomb is discovered empty. He finds the body sure enough; the problem is that it is alive and walking around. The movie is excellent archeologically, theologically and really a cliff hanger. The first thing about the movie is that there is no hill of Calvary. Jesus is not taken up a hill to be crucified. That s exactly accurate historically. Jesus was not crucified on a hill far away. He was crucified in a quarry downtown. The traditional site of Jesus crucifixion was just outside one of the main gates of ancient Jerusalem. Romans didn t want to waste a perfectly good execution. It was meant to be horrible and very public. The point was, Do bad things against Roman rule and this is what will happen to you. The movie is not explicit about the location of the tomb, but the scriptures say that the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea in which Jesus was buried was right there in the same abandoned quarry. Therein lays the problem. Because Jesus execution was public, his burial and his empty tomb were also public. The movie spins out the theory that they had to find the body in order to end the ridiculous story that Jesus had risen from the dead. That is the central point of the movie. No one can deny the tomb is empty. No one has ever denied the tomb was empty. They just want to explain the empty tomb with anything but a miracle. Another great point about the movie is its tremendous portrayal of the resurrection. Most people think of the resurrection as resuscitation. Jesus wakes up, stretches, yawns and walks out of the tomb. Risen portrays the resurrection in a completely different way. The resurrection is an EXPLOSION! Jesus doesn t walk out of the tomb. He explodes out of the tomb. I am sure you know about the Shroud of Turin. It is the most mysterious archeological artifact in existence. It has been the subject of more man hours of scientific research than any other similar artifact and still they cannot quite explain how it was made. There were radio carbon dating tests in the last century that claimed to date the shroud to the middle ages, but those tests have been pretty much proven to be only those of a medieval patch that was sown on to the cloth. In other words the sample taken from the cloth was not really the cloth. More recent tests of vanillin content and other linen properties date the Shroud to the time of Christ. Whether you claim that the shroud was the burial cloth of Christ or a medieval forgery, you still can t explain how the burn marks on the cloth were made. That s what makes up the image, faint burn marks that rest on the top fibrils of the top fibers of the cloth. Take a razor blade and scrape the cloth and the image disappears. So, there is this perfect negative image of a tortured spear-pierced, thorn-crowned, crucified Jewish man that couldn t be really be seen until the invention of photography. The cloth is covered with a kind of limestone dust that comes only from Jerusalem, and soaked with blood and blood serum that was invisible until the invention of ultra violet lights. There also seem to be coins on the eyes of the fellow that were minted by Pontius Pilate around 29 AD. The cloth is covered with
April 1, 2018 Proclaiming Jesus Christ as Lord Page 5 pollen from plants that bloom in spring only in the area of Jerusalem. So maybe it s a really, really good medieval forgery, or maybe it s the real thing. Either way, there is no way to explain exactly what made those burn marks which have such unique photographic properties, including photo negativity and three dimensionality as well as holographic information. Well, there wasn t until recently. It seems that an intense explosion of ultraviolet light can make those kinds of marks, at least according to researchers from the National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development (ENEA) in Italy. The Shroud is far beyond the capability of medieval forgers. "(Our) results show that a short and intense burst of UV directional radiation can color a linen cloth so as to reproduce many of the peculiar characteristics of the body image on the Shroud of Turin. The explosion of intense light would have had to be only billionths of a second in duration to make the marks without destroying the cloth. Furthermore at the present time there aren t enough lasers in the world to scorch a cloth so instantly with such perfect precision. So there you have it. The Shroud of Turin was formed by an instantaneous explosion of light brighter than the sun. Another interesting observation comes from Dr. Isabel Piczek, a particle physicist. She holds that the image on the Shroud shows the total absence of gravity. The shroud represents an event horizon. In other words the laws of the universe demand gravity, space and time, a least since the Big Bang in which the universe began. The Shroud seems beyond time, space and gravity. The body represented in the cloth seems to stand outside these physical necessities. I think of the words of the Nicene Creed, Light from light, True God from true God. I think, too, of another quote from the Gospel of Luke (16:31) 'If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead. Rev. Know-it all Bishop Robert Barron The death of an Evangelical titan March 7, 2018 I had the privilege of hearing Dr. Billy Graham preach about 20 years ago in Cincinnati. At the time, Graham was around 80 years old and clearly in frail health. He came to the podium and commenced to speak, but the crowd of young people, stirred up by the Christian rock bands who had performed earlier, was restive and inattentive. Graham paused, folded his hands, and quietly said, Let us pray. With that, a stadium of 50,000 people fell silent. Once a spirit of reverence held sway, the preacher resumed. I remember thinking, What an old pro! That old pro, arguably the greatest Christian evangelist of the past 100 years, died Feb. 21 at 99, and it s difficult to overstate his impact and importance. It is said that he directly addressed 215 million people in 185 countries over the course of his ministry. No other preacher, in the entire history of Christianity, has had such a range. At the height of his powers, he filled arenas and stadiums, for weeks at a time, in some of the most jaded, materialistic and skeptical cities in the world. And when preachers and other religious celebrities all around him were falling into scandal and corruption, Billy Graham stood tall, a man of integrity. His moral heroism was on particularly clear display in the early years of the civil rights movement. Especially in his native South, it was the unquestioned practice to seat black people in segregated sections of churches and arenas. Though it cost him quite a few of his traditional supporters, Graham insisted that his crusades should be racially integrated. Impressed by this show of courage, Martin Luther King Jr. became a friend and appeared with Graham at a crusade in 1957. What was it about his preaching that was so compelling? I suppose in his early years, he demonstrated a fair amount of flash, prowling the stage, waving his arms and moving dramatically from whispering to shouting. But as he matured, a fair amount of that theatricality faded away. What remained was a gentle sense of humor (usually self-deprecating), an obvious sincerity, a keen intelligence and above all, a clarity in regard to the essentials of the Gospel. Practically every Billy Graham sermon had the same basic structure: you have sought happiness in wealth, pleasure, material things, fame, etc., and you ve never (Continued on page 6)
Page 6 St. Lambert Parish Easter Sunday (Continued from page 5) been satisfied; I want to tell you about what will make you happy. At this point, he would speak of Christ crucified and risen from the dead. Now please don t get me wrong. As a Catholic, I affirm that there is more to salvation than accepting Jesus Christ in faith; there is the full integration into the life of Christ that happens through the instrumentality of the Church and her sacraments. Nevertheless, Catholics and Protestants come together in asserting as Billy Graham consistently did that we are sinners who stand in need of Christ s saving grace. In point of fact, a generous ecumenism was one of the marks of Billy Graham s approach. It didn t bother him in the least if someone whose religious journey commenced at one of his crusades con nued and came to fulfillment in the Catholic Church. Much has been made of his relationship with presidents, monarchs and prime ministers. He did indeed minister personally to 12 U.S. presidents, and the wonderful Netflix series The Crown shows something of the impact he had on Queen Elizabeth II. But I ve never been particularly taken with this dimension of Graham s life, which seemed, to me anyway, more sizzle than steak. In fact, one of the low points of his career had to have been his meek acquiescence to Richard Nixon s anti-semitic musings, captured on White House tapes. To his credit, Graham repeatedly apologized for that lapse. He was far more powerful and spiritually efficacious when he prayed over the thousands of ordinary people who had responded to an altar call at the close of a crusade. I love the story of Billy Graham s first encounter with my evangelical hero, Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen. These two titans of preaching were on the same train from Washington to New York. Archbishop Sheen found out about Graham s presence, and he knocked on the door of the Protestant s berth and said, Billy, I wonder whether we might have a chat and a prayer? Though he was preparing for bed, Billy Graham acquiesced and the two of them spent several hours in spiritual conversation the beginning of a friendship that endured until Sheen s death. I ve always taken great pleasure in that image of brotherhood across denominational lines. I believe that anyone who reverences the Christian Gospel owes Billy Graham a debt of gratitude. Requiescat in pace. About the Author: Bishop Robert Barron is an auxiliary bishop for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles and founder of Word on Fire Catholic Ministries. He was ordained a priest of the Archdiocese of Chicago. (Catholic New World )
Resurrection of Jesus (Matthew 28:1-6) After the Sabbath, at dawn on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary to see the tomb. And, behold, there was a great earthquake: for the angel of the Lord descended from heaven, and came and rolled back the stone from the door, and sat upon it. His appearance was like lightning, and his clothes white as snow. The guards were so afraid, that they shook and became as dead men. The angel said to the women, Do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. He is not here: for he is risen, just as he said. Come, see the place where the Lord lay. Copyright 2018 All right reserved. This site is a project of MMBOX PRODUCTION