This last Wednesday we had our third family catechesis night after our evening Holy Hour of Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. Those who attend the class and perhaps even those who don’t know how much I stress that you, and not me, are the primary educators of your child in the ways of faith. I stress that quite frankly because many parents sadly are not.

I can only guess how many Catholics in this town regularly come to Mass each Sunday. I suspect there are more Catholics that don’t attend Mass each Sunday than do. I don’t know why. Maybe no one ever told them. Maybe their parents didn’t teach them the faith. Perhaps they don’t know how to teach the faith. Perhaps they just take it all that seriously. I don’t know.

I can’t even begin to imagine the stresses on a mom and a dad to try to raise a child in this culture in which we’re living. I can only imagine how easy it is to fall prey to mentality that says that the single most important thing a mom and dad can help their daughter to do is to make the local soccer team. Or their son to make the travel baseball team. Or to help their child get into OSU or OU, or Notre Dame or Stanford or Harvard. And there’s nothing wrong with any of those and so much more. That’s great to have lofty goals for your children. But those are not the most important tasks of a parent.

The single most important task of a mom and a dad is to help their child to know God. Not to “be religious.” I could care less about being religious. That’s external, peripheral, incidental to one’s life. To know God. To introduce a child to the person of Jesus. To model for them that there is no better, more intelligent way to live life that to love God with our whole, heart, mind, soul, and strength, and to love our neighbor as ourself.

Only God, because he is real and has made everything that is, who has loved us and proven his love for us by his death and resurrection for us, only God can reveal to you and to me and to all our children what life’s about. Why we’re here, where we’re going, and how to get there. I can’t tell say how many times I’ve heard it told to me by children in confession, children whose parents do not take them to church, “I wish my mom and my dad would take me.” That might surprise some of us.

I was asked recently, “what does it mean to be the primary educator of my child in the ways of faith? What concretely does that look like?” Well, it looks like many things. It means to help a child understand that this life, as good as it is, is not it. This is not home, we are all pilgrims, sojourners as St. Peter puts it in our second reading. Means to model for a child how to pray. Not how to say prayers, how to pray. How to talk to and listen to God. It means to model the importance of reading Scripture. It means to model mercy and forgiveness and care for others, especially for the poor.

But let me make one particular observation in light of the Gospel and perhaps with special importance for mothers. The two travelers in the Gospel are sad. Luke tells us that they are downcast. They walk from Jerusalem to Emmaus on Easter Sunday. They’re downcast, they’re sad because they don’t know it’s Easter Sunday. They haven’t seen Jesus alive. They haven’t met him. They heard the news they he’s raised but they don’t know the reality. But once they know the reality - Once they meet him - once they recognize the stranger who walked in their midst, who broke open the Scriptures for them, who revealed himself in the breaking of the bread, is Jesus and that he is alive forever, everything is different.

The news of the resurrection is not just news. That’s particularly hard for us to grasp who live in the midst of a culture that is bombarded with breaking news. Many Christians apparently relate to the news of the resurrection the way we relate to other bits of news. But imagine this ticker going along the bottom of your tv screen: floods expected in the south, unemployment at 9%, Thunder make it to the playoffs, Jesus rises from dead - shatters powers of hell, triumphs over Satan, opens up gates of Eternal Life forever, more rain in the forecast.

Which of those is not a tidbit!? And yet, for many Christians, the news of the resurrection is just a tidbit. We are like the two travelers in the Gospel. We have heard the news of the resurrection; we don’t know the reality. What’s that have to do with teaching the faith?

I can remember almost to the day when my mother discovered that Jesus was alive. She had been a Christian almost all her life but I think she’d tell you she never knew him. But once she met him, but once she figured out that the news of the resurrection wasn’t just news, once she found out that it was a reality, everything was different.

And perhaps the most striking difference in my mother was her joy. Or perhaps, in light of the Gospel, it was her seeming inability to be overcome by sadness. Don’t get me wrong, it doesn’t mean she doesn’t get sad. She did and she does. She got sad when she got divorced. She got sad when her mother died. She got sad when her father died. She gets sad when her friends die. She gets got sad when she got sick. she got sad when financial troubles came. She got sad as she watched me and my siblings make dumb choice after dumb choice. Sadness is just a human reaction.

But she never, ever, since she met the Lord and knew the truth that he is alive was overwhelmed by sadness, or overcome by sadness. Why? Because of her faith. Because of her reckless confidence in our heavenly Father’s love. Because of the certainty in Jesus’ power which is able to do infinitely more than we can ask for or imagine. Because of her knowledge that all things - all things - work for good for those who love God. And that joyful, unshakable confidence and trust, which certainly marked the two travelers from that day forward for the rest of their lives is one of the most important ways a parent can model the faith. And I think one of the most significant ways we can teach the faith to our children.

So let us pray today, perhaps especially for those of us who have heard the news that Jesus is alive but do not know the reality. That we will meet him here, in this place. In the breaking of the bread which about to happen before our eyes. Let’s pray for our moms and dads, both living and deceased, that they will come to know the Lord and his good pleasure in them. And that He will help them hand on the faith. And let’s pray for us, that we may be joyful, confident, witnesses of the reality that Jesus has risen from the dead.

Sunday Mass begins at 11 a.m. with the sacrament of reconciliation at 10:15 a.m. Come pray with us at St. Michael Catholic Church located at 1004 W. Gentry in Henryetta.