Message from Fr. James - June 21, 2026

God’s covenant in blood with Moses

Dear St. Martin’s Parishioners,

God saves us through covenants. A covenant is a relationship. A covenant feels like belonging. A covenant means experiencing mutual love and freedom. Covenants have conditions that maintain the unity of the relationship. Covenants have consequences if the relationship is broken. God used covenants to save us throughout history because covenants are such powerful relationships.

Fr. Dave announced that our Giving Tuesday 2025 project would create an art gallery of God’s covenants. From Sacred Scripture, we chose to paint eight covenants between God and us. The history of our salvation is made in God’s covenants with Adam, Eve, Noah, Abraham, Moses, the twelve tribes of Israel, King David, and, finally, the new and eternal covenant with Jesus Christ. Each of these covenants promised a relationship between God and humankind. Each one expresses God’s love for you. Each covenant saves you from death and sin. The painting of the sixth covenant, “the covenant that the Lord commanded Moses to make with the Israelites in the land of Moab, in addition to the covenant he made with them at Sinai” (Deut 28:69), is now hanging in the parish hall.

The Israelites had broken the covenant they made at Sinai by worshiping the golden calf, which is depicted behind Moses to the left. That generation wandered in the desert for forty years and died there. The graves of Aaron and Miriam – Moses’s brother and sister – are marked by piles of stones behind Moses to the left. Yet the forty desert years were also filled with blessings: God’s healing through the bronze serpent that was lifted up, God’s presence in the ark of the covenant, and God’s answer to prayer in water from the rock. These are depicted behind Moses to the right. Which way would Israel go from here? How do you react after you have made a mistake?

Moses said to the twelve tribes, “I call upon the heavens and the earth to witness today that I have set before your life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life, so that you and your descendants might live” (Deut 30:19). With Moses as mediator, God made this covenant with the twelve tribes of Israel. When the twelve tribes crossed the Jordan river and received the promised land in twelve sections, they renewed their circumcision (Joshua 5:2-9). With Jesus Christ as mediator, God made a covenant with twelve apostles of his Church. When Jesus crossed from death to life, he poured his Holy Spirit into believer’s hearts and fulfilled Moses’s words: “The Lord, your God, will circumcise your heart and the hearts of your offspring so that you might love the Lord your God, with all your heart and all your soul, and that you might live” (Deut 30:6). After each mistake, we need a mediator. You have mediators! You have Jesus Christ, the mediator between God and man, and you have the Holy Spirit, whose mediation reconciles the families that are most separated. You have Mary, the angels, and saints. If you have made a mistake in the past, today invite these mediators into your heart. Go ahead. Choose to live in a covenant of love with God.

In Christ,

Fr. James