In the letter to the Ephesians, St. Paul uses a really incredible phrase to describe our relationship to God the Father.  He describes us, our human race, as being “adopted” to himself.  We’re so used to calling God our Father that it’s easy to overlook what a significant statement that is about God’s love for us and about the kind of relationship he wants to have with us.  On the most basic level, God is our creator.  He’s so beyond and above anything in our world, that he could create it, all of it, from nothing.  He’s that far beyond what we are.  It’s good to remember that, because we sometimes imagine God with an image of a really old and powerful human, a guy with a big white beard who sits in a wingback chair in the clouds and performs cosmic magic tricks.  That’s really not right.  God is not just a really powerful part of existence.  He’s the reason that anything exists at all: he’s the source and foundation of absolutely everything that is.  He’s not an old and powerful version of us: he’s different.  And that means, on a purely natural level, our relationship with him would be completely impersonal and distant: he’s just so categorically different, we’d have no basis for a relationship. 

But in his incredible goodness and his love, he’s not content to be far-off and aloof from us: he wants to be a Father.  He wants to be Our Father.  And so he adopts us.  This relationship that before was just creator-and-creation, or painter-and-canvas, is now Father and child.  He loves us so much that he will bridge that gap.  And he continued to do so even when we turned away from him: despite this incredible gift of this relationship of love from our creator, we still wandered and chose our own path: telling the one who created us: we don’t need you: we’ll do things our own way.  But even when we wandered into sin and death, his love shined through even more.  He sent his eternal Son to join us here on earth, to take on a human nature, to live and die with us, and to give us a path back to God.  Christ is the bridge: he makes this relationship with God possible, because he’s truly God, like God the Father, and he’s truly man, like us.  He brings God and man together, in his person.  In him, the kingdom of heaven meets the realm of the earth, in the sign of the cross.  And at the center of that meeting is God’s love. 

And that love, the saving love of the cross: God wants to keep showering it upon the human race, to keep making his love real and tangible in the lives of faithful people: and he wants to do that through us.  Christ sent out his apostles with his authority: to continue to exercise his saving power, even after he had returned to his Father in heaven.  That saving power is still at work in the mission of the Church, especially in the sacraments and in the preaching of the Good News.  God means for his salvation to be spread through us as well, through every one of our individual lives.  He sent out the apostles first to begin this work, and they managed to spread the Good News to the entire known world very quickly in the face of great opposition of difficulties.  Our Lord wants us to go out into the world too, into our own little corner of the world that he has entrusted to us: our family, our circle of friends, our workplace.  He wants us to go boldly with this incredible vision we have of how reality is arranged: that our beautiful world, the miracle of human life, the love that we share:  these aren’t random accidents of nature: Our Lord wants us to go into our world with the incredible news that we have been created by a sovereign all-powerful God who loves us like a Father, who has adopted us as his own.  Therefore our life has purpose and meaning: and even amid all the uncertainties and difficulties of life, we can live in peace and in joy.   In him we were chosen, destined in accord with the purpose of the One who accomplishes all things according to the intention of his will; so that we, who first hoped in Christ, might truly live for the praise of his glory.