Father Randy Koenigsknecht
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Knowing the Father: An Advent Reflection with Father Randy
During Advent, we prepare our hearts for Christ’s coming—not only at Christmas, but into every part of our lives. In this heartfelt homily, Father Randy reflects on Jesus’ mission to reveal the Father and invites us to rediscover our identity as beloved sons and daughters of God.
Drawing from Scripture, the Creed, personal experience, and spiritual tradition, this message helps us understand:
• Why the Creed begins with “I believe”
• How God desires a living, personal relationship with us
• The common obstacles that prevent us from experiencing His love
• Practical ways to encounter the Father through prayer and Scripture
This reflection encourages every believer to ask for the grace to know God as Father and to allow His love to heal, guide, and transform.
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Father Randy: Jesus said to his disciples, as it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. In those days before the flood, they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day that Noah entered the ark. They did not know until the flood came and carried them all away. So it will be also at the coming of the Son of Man. Two men will be out in the field. One will be taken and one will be left. One will be left.
Father Randy: Two women will be grinding at the mill. One will be taken and one will be left. Therefore stay awake, for you do not know on which day your Lord will come. Be sure of this. If the master of the house had known the hour of night when the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and not let his house be broken into. So too you must also be prepared. For at an hour you do not expect, the Son of Man will come. The Gospel of the Lord.
Father Randy: You may remember from last week’s announcements, for Advent, Father Chaz and I will be preaching on the four parts of the Creed. This year marks the 1700th anniversary of the Nicene Council, Council of Nicaea, from which our Creed is derived. This is something that generations of Christians have professed, the very same Creed that we say at Mass each time we’re here, every Sunday. It’s not just a random collection of important ideas.
Father Randy: But it’s something that really defines us as Christians. Throughout the ages, countless numbers of our brothers and sisters have given their lives for these very words. And many more still continue to do so today, as they cling to what sometimes we can just thoughtlessly profess. Because we just go along with everyone else. Because everyone’s saying it. We say it every Sunday. And so these first words of the creed are very important.
Father Randy: They’re meant to shake us out of that kind of automatic mindset. When I was young, the first words in the translation were, “we believe.” And now they are, “I believe.” The “I” is not just a better reflection of the original language, which it is, but it also communicates something very important to us—that no one else can believe in our place. Going along with the flow of everyone else is not sufficient.
Father Randy: Our faith is not meant to be kept at arm’s length. It can’t be. It cannot just be a communal practice, something that we do together. But it is inherently personal. Each one of us must decide for ourselves, “Do I actually believe this?” I still remember very vividly an interaction I had when I was in college on this very point. One of the guys in my class asked me one day, “Do you really believe all this stuff? I mean, come on.” And I realized in that moment—I actually did. I genuinely did. It was not my parents’ faith. It was not the faith of all my friends in seminary. It was my own. And so our belief in what the Creed proclaims about God and His Church is…
Father Randy: It’s not just meant to be a mere intellectual assent. It’s not like what we give to facts or to math. I don’t believe in the Creed in the same way I believe 2 + 2 = 4. It’s not that it is illogical—it makes logical sense to me that there is a God. I was a philosophy undergrad, and so I have all those basics from logic. But our faith and our belief are meant to be experiential.
Father Randy: It’s meant to be personal, relational. The cornerstone of our faith is that God is always reaching out to us, that He wants us to know Him, to have a relationship with Him. So our faith is not illogical or blind. It uses reason. It’s based on it. But it is also meant to merge that reason with experience, with relationship. And so if our faith is personal, if it’s about relationship centered on knowing and being with someone…
Father Randy: then the question becomes, Who exactly am I supposed to be with? Who am I supposed to be getting to know? And that is God the Father, the Son Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. And over the next couple of weeks, we will go over each of these persons. But this week, we begin with the Father. Jesus’ mission really can be divided into two parts: first, to save us and give us new life; but second…
Father Randy: is to reveal to us the Father, to help us enter relationship with Him. We might remember Jesus’ words the day before He dies. In the garden He prays to the Father: “I have made known to them Your name, and I will continue to make it known, that the love with which You loved Me may be in them.” That is His mission—to make known to us the name of the Father. That’s why He gives us the Our Father.
Father Randy: And that we would have His love within us, that we would experience that. Throughout the Old Testament, we see signs of God’s paternal love and fatherly care for Israel. But Jesus makes it explicit. He gives us the Holy Spirit so that this knowledge becomes internal, so that we experience in our hearts the love of the Father—not just an intellectual assent that “Jesus called God Father,” but the lived reality that God is my Father.
Father Randy: Philip says in John 14:8, “Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.” We often speak of ourselves as sons and daughters of God. It’s a great reminder of our dignity. But if we don’t truly know the Father—if we don’t have a personal lived experience of God as my Father—those words remain largely empty. They sound nice. We get the idea. But they fail to produce the joy and assurance that come from belonging to God’s family.
Father Randy: Having the all-powerful God—the One who made everything—as my Father. Unfortunately, this encounter can be drowned out by the world. The affirming, constant voice of God can be countered by the world telling us we’re no good, broken, not worth it, that we must earn God’s love, that we must be perfect first.
Father Randy: And then there are the natural obstacles from our own parents or authority figures. We easily project their image onto God. He becomes the cruel judge we need to please, or the old man who loves everyone generically but expects nothing and has no plan. I was blessed with awesome parents. My dad was a great image of the Father, but he wasn’t perfect. Even small flaws can have big impacts. Many today are not so blessed. Many carry wounds from authority or parents that must be healed so that we can hear the Father’s voice: “You are mine. I love you. You are my son. You are my daughter.”
Father Randy: So if Jesus wants us to know the Father and His love, but we also have obstacles and wounds, what do we do? How can we overcome this? I have two recommendations. First: follow the example of Philip—“Lord, show us the Father.” Start asking for this grace. Ask for it concretely.
Father Randy: When I first entered seminary and heard I was supposed to have a relationship with God the Father, I thought, “Really? I know Jesus. I talk to Him. I pray the Our Father, I guess… but there’s more?” My spiritual director told me to begin each holy hour by explicitly asking for this grace: “God, I want to know You as my Father. I want to encounter You in this way. Help me.” And over months, that prayer began to be answered.
Father Randy: We must be persistent in asking. The second recommendation is to return to Scripture, to the words of Jesus about the Father. Scripture reveals the Father. For me, the first deep encounter with the Father’s love was through the parable of the prodigal son. I prayed with Henry Nouwen’s Return of the Prodigal Son for two months. Through that prayer, false images of God were stripped away, and I began to encounter the Father who had always been watching over me, reaching out.
Father Randy: The Word of God is power. When we engage it, it changes us—often slowly. But this is where persistence comes in again: “Jesus, show me the love of the Father. Use this passage to convict my heart. Strip away false images. Heal my wounds.”
Father Randy: When we do this, the first lines of the Creed are no longer memorized words we recite with everyone else. They become a declaration of who God is and who I am to Him—that I truly am His son, that you truly are His daughter. He is not just the all-powerful God… He is my Father.
Father Randy: Advent is the season where we prepare for Jesus’ coming. The best gift we could give the Lord this Christmas is to ask Him that simple question: “Jesus, show me the Father whom You have come to reveal.”