Optional Memorial of Saint Paul of the Cross, Priest
FIRST READING: Romans 6: 19 - 23
19 I am speaking in human terms, because of your natural limitations. For just as you once yielded your members to impurity and to greater and greater iniquity, so now yield your members to righteousness for sanctification.
20 When you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness.
21 But then what return did you get from the things of which you are now ashamed? The end of those things is death.
22 But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the return you get is sanctification and its end, eternal life.
23 For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
PSALM: Psalms 1: 1 - 4, 6
1 Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers;
2 but his delight is in the law of the LORD, and on his law he meditates day and night.
3 He is like a tree planted by streams of water, that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers.
4 The wicked are not so, but are like chaff which the wind drives away.
6 for the LORD knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish.
GOSPEL: Luke 12: 49 - 53
49 "I came to cast fire upon the earth; and would that it were already kindled!
50 I have a baptism to be baptized with; and how I am constrained until it is accomplished!
51 Do you think that I have come to give peace on earth? No, I tell you, but rather division;
52 for henceforth in one house there will be five divided, three against two and two against three;
53 they will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against her mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law."
