Caritas Christi Urget Nos

Category: Ordinary Time

  • Tuesday of the Seventeenth Week of Ordinary Time

    Tuesday of the Seventeenth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    This morning, the prophet Jeremiah is urgently reminding the people Israel – and us too! – that every good thing we have, every blessing we receive, all of it comes from the Lord God Almighty.  Israel was trying to find blessing in the strange gods of the peoples around them, forging alliances with foreign people instead of trusting in Almighty God, and then as a result of those alliances, going over to worship their pitiful gods.

    We certainly shake our heads just thinking about this.  It’s hard to understand why they would abandon God after he had done everything for them.  But not so fast; we have our own strange gods too, I think, in which we try to find blessing.  Whether it’s possessions or wealth or prestige or career, or whatever else tends to get in the way of our relationship with God, none of these strange gods will ever grant us blessing.  We know this, and yet, just like the Israelites, we abandon God when we want what we want. 

    “You alone have done all these things,” Jeremiah observes. Sometimes I think we all need to take a step back and make that same observation. Maybe our prayer today can be an honest inventory of God’s blessings to us, do that we can give him the honest worship due to him alone.

  • Monday of the Seventeenth Week of Ordinary Time

    Monday of the Seventeenth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    We’ve had these parables about the Kingdom of Heaven a bunch lately.  At Sunday Mass over the past few weeks, and we’re now working through them at daily Mass.  One thing we can say about them is that they are head-scratchers for sure!  I am sure we can all understand how the people were confused by Jesus’ description of the Kingdom, since it even seems foreign to our ears, even though we’ve heard them so often.  One might wish that he would just say: “Okay, look, here’s what the Kingdom is like,” and stop with all the parables already!

    But as often as I read and reflect on these parables, it strikes me that no words would be adequate to express how wonderful is the kingdom.  It’s big, like a mustard tree, and expansive, like rapidly-rising dough.  But whatever we can say about the Kingdom of God, it’s going to be too little.  Our language fails us.  It will never even come close to describing the Kingdom in its fullness.

    My guess is, no matter how often we hear these wonderful parables, on that great day when we – please God! – get to the Kingdom of heaven, we will be amazed beyond our wildest dreams.  God’s heavenly Kingdom is something we certainly don’t want to miss.  So let’s not be like those Israelites in the first reading who Jeremiah rightly pointed out never listened to God, or who as the Psalmist points out have even forgotten God.

    Because if we remember our God, and listen closely, maybe we’ll hear just a tiny clue of what heaven will be like. That way we’ll recognize it when we get there.

  • The Seventeenth Sunday of Ordinary Time

    The Seventeenth Sunday of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    Think about it.  God comes to you in a dream and says that you can have anything you want—just one thing, though.  It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.  What would you ask for?  What is that one thing you’d give anything to have?

    God already knew what Solomon was going to ask for; he already knew that what Solomon wanted was something that would be good for Solomon to have.  Solomon asks for a wise and understanding heart so that he could more readily lead the people God had called him to lead.  And so God grants his servant’s request: he gives him so wise and understanding a heart that there was never anyone as wise as Solomon, before or since.

    Solomon’s answer to God’s question told us what was of most importance to Solomon. In today’s Gospel, we are asked to answer that same question. Jesus speaks, as he has been for a few Sundays now, of what the kingdom of heaven is like. A couple of weeks ago, the kingdom was like seed that was scattered and sown. Some fell on rocks, some among weeds, but some on the good soil that yielded more than anyone had a right to hope for. The kingdom of God is something like that: the more we nurture and cultivate our life with God, the more we benefit ourselves and others. Last Sunday, the kingdom was again like seed, which was carefully planted, but was interrupted by someone planting weeds in among the wheat. The landowner had the harvesters sort it all out at harvest time. The kingdom of God is something like that: the good and the bad will all be sorted out in due time.

    Today the kingdom is like buried treasure or the pearl of great price.  The treasure is so great that when it is found, the treasure-hunter sells everything he has to buy the field.  The pearl is so wonderful that the merchant gives everything he has to buy it.  Can you imagine their joy?  What they have found is so wonderful that they give up everything to possess it.  Well, Jesus says, the kingdom of heaven is like that.

    But not just like that, right?  Because we know that worldly goods can never hold a candle to the riches of the Kingdom of heaven.  The success in our careers is nice, the nice things we have in our homes give us some pleasure, our accomplishments may even give us some pride.  But all of these pale in the face of the joy of the Kingdom.

    And so we have the invitation today.  We don’t have to look, because we have found the great treasure, the pearl of great price.  We have come here today to worship and to receive the Lord in the Eucharist, really present for those here in church, and at least spiritually for those at home.  There is nothing better on the face of the whole earth.  We know where to find that which is ultimately valuable.  But the fact is that we can come and go from this holy place today and still not have what’s truly worthwhile.  Because in order to receive it, we have to give up everything.  We have to sell everything and buy the field in order to have that pearl of great price.

    That might mean walking away from a business deal that is profitable but has consequences for the poor or the environment.  Or perhaps it means giving up a relationship that is destructive.  We may have to give up a leisure pursuit that is enjoyable but separates us from family and friends.  We have to make choices, changes and decisions that amount to selling everything in order to make room for something that is of ultimate importance: that pearl of great price which is the Kingdom of heaven itself.

    Today’s Liturgy of the Word leaves us with some very important questions.  What is the pearl of great price for us?  What is the thing for which we would give up everything else?  How important is it for us to enter the Kingdom of heaven?  What is it that we must give up in order to get there?  Our prayer today is that we would be strengthened by the Word of God and nourished by the Eucharist so that we would have the courage to sell everything for the Kingdom of heaven, that pearl of ultimately great price.

  • Friday of the Sixteenth Week of Ordinary Time

    Friday of the Sixteenth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    This morning’s Gospel passage is the explanation of the parable of the seed and the sower, which we heard on Wednesday morning (and, for that matter, two Sundays ago).  What we quickly find out is that the parable is all about us.  Clearly the ideal is the good soil which produces much fruit, and just as clearly, we don’t want to be the soil on the path or the rocky soil, or even the soil with the thorny growth.  All those soils yield nothing but dead plants, hardly an offering to God or even anything that would be pleasing to us.

    When we allow ourselves to have a surface-level relationship with God, one that is not nourished by devotion and worship, when we consider ourselves “spiritual but not religious,” we end up being easy picking for anything in the world that comes our way and would snatch us out of the hands of God.  Just like the seeds that fall on the path.

    When we think that we can live our faith without any kind of effort on our part, we end up with a very shallow basis for that faith.  We sometimes latch on to the joy of religion or religious experience, but when it becomes hard work, as any relationship will at some point, well then, we let go of that relationship and have no way to keep growing.  Just like the seeds on the rocky soil.

    When we try to live our faith and still be people of the world, we find that the faith gets choked out as our desire for more riches, more things, more prestige – or more whatever – overshadows our desire for strong relationship with God.  We can’t serve two masters, and we soon take the path of least resistance, abandoning the faith for what we think will give us more happiness, at least right now.  And when that fails us, we wither up and have nowhere to turn.  Just like the seeds that grow up with all those thorny plants.

    But none of that works for disciples of the Lord.  We have to dig deep and have a faith that goes beyond the surface so that we can really know God.  We have to have a faith that is developed by embracing the hard work of repentance and devotion so that we can continue to go deep into the life of God.  We have to have a faith that is single-minded and not subject to whatever ill-winds and thorns come along; a faith that sustains us in our life of discipleship, in good times and in bad.  We have to be that rich soil which yields not only joy for ourselves, but grace for others.

  • The Sixteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time

    The Sixteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    Today I want to talk about the way we worship.  And I’m not talking about wearing a mask, or social distancing, or even the rudimentary parts of worship like genuflecting or singing or observing silence, as important as those things are.  In fact, I’m not talking about worship in the sense of what we do here at church at all.  I’m talking about what we do before and after Mass; the worship we do out there in the world—the whole business of living our lives, and letting worship affect everything, because it should—in fact it has to.  The thing is, as challenging as it is to worship when we’re here in church, it’s still way easier than worshipping out there in the world, isn’t it?  But Jesus has always been clear that worship has to mean something in our daily living, or it’s not true worship at all.

    You know the issue quite well, I’m sure.  We may intend to work hard, and pray reflectively, but life almost always throws us a curve ball and all our pious plans go out the window.  You know what I mean, right?  People at work don’t do what they’re supposed to.  Others in our family get into rough situations and test our patience.  Our commute is exacerbated by the pouring rain.  And it can go even deeper: news about a loved one’s illness, news about our own illness, the fear of a pandemic, and on and on.  And then we can slip up and fall into sin, that sin we have been praying hard to overcome and doing everything we can to avoid.  Our pious plans can turn into a very rough week indeed.  Really, among the blessings – and we have to admit, there are blessings – life can derail us and bring us to a rather frustrating place.

    The good news is that our Liturgy of the Word speaks to all of that today, I think.  The wisdom writer in the first reading praises God who has the care of all, and who permits repentance for sins.  The Psalmist extols God who is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in kindness and fidelity.  Saint Paul tells the Romans, and us, that the Holy Spirit comes to our aid in our weakness, helping us to pray the right way, even praying in our stead when we cannot.  We need all that consolation when our week doesn’t go the way we hoped.

    And then we have the Gospel, which continues the theme of planting seeds that we heard last week.  Here we hear of the wisdom of God who allows the weeds to grow among the wheat and is wise enough to sort it all out at the harvest time.  This Gospel talks all about the Kingdom of God and what it will be like.  It will be like a tiny mustard seed that grows up to become a huge shrub.  It will be like a measure of yeast mixed with flour to become a loaf of bread.

    Here are a couple of things I want us to take from this Gospel.  First, the Kingdom of God is now.  Jesus made it real, showing us that the kingdom is present in ordinary ways: a mustard seed, a measure of yeast.  He wants us to see that we don’t have to wait for a far-off distant Kingdom or some kind of extraordinary sign, but instead to live in the Kingdom now, where he is our King.  That means we have to put the whole of our being and our lives and everything we do in his service.

    Second, the mustard seed, the yeast – that’s us.  We are the ones to come to life and make the Kingdom happen.  Jesus needs us to go out and proclaim the message, to witness to the presence of the Kingdom, to make people want to be part of it.  Our prayer, our love, our joy, all of that make it possible for people to come to know Christ.  The Kingdom of God is our true home; the rest of the world is just a road along which we are traveling.  When we live in the Kingdom here and now, when every moment of our lives is lived in anticipation of the holy presence of God, we will be ready for the great coming of the Kingdom in heaven, where all will be made right and we will live forever as one with our God.

    If we’ve had a less than stellar week, we need that good news, we need that Kingdom. We need to know that God is patient, and forgiving, and allows us to come to maturity before there’s judgment. We need to know there is mercy and forgiveness, and a Spirit that prays with us and for us in our weakness. And we need to hear Jesus call us to be leaven in the world, even though we’re not perfect. He needs us to work on changing sadness to hope, directing all eyes to the One who is our true King. That, friends, is true worship.

  • The Fifteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time

    The Fifteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time

    Todays’ readings

    I’m not very good at it, and I don’t do it much any more, but I used to help plant a family garden.  I don’t have much of a green thumb, and I’m short on patience for that kind of thing, so for me it just doesn’t work out very well.  But I’m grateful for those times when I did plant a garden, because it really gives me an insight to the spiritual life.  What’s remarkable to me about a garden is that the seed that is planted looks, for all the world, lifeless … like something that is already dead.  It’s shriveled up and dry, so it’s really hard to believe it could give life to anything.  But when you put that dried up old seed in fertile soil, give it some water and nourishment, let the sun shine on it, well eventually it grows up to become something wonderful: flowers to delight us, vegetables for our table.

    I often like to go on walks around the parish.  I’m a person who likes to see patterns and the big picture of how things are organized.  So when I pass by one of the cornfields around here, I’m often struck by the straight and orderly rows of corn that grow there.  The farmers take great care, it seems to me, to make sure they are planted that way: in orderly rows.  So when I hear the story we have in today’s Gospel reading about seed being scattered willy-nilly all over the place, some of it not even landing on suitable soil, well, it makes me wonder.

    But the original hearers of the parable would have understood what Jesus was saying.  It was a method used at that time: seed would be scattered, and then the soil would be tilled thus planting the seeds.  And so they would have understood that sometimes the scattered seed falls in places that the farmer didn’t intend, and those seeds don’t come to life, or if they do, it’s not for long, but, either way, it’s no big deal.

    So Jesus explains the parable for his disciples and for us.  The seed is the seed of faith.  God scatters it with wild abandon, pouring it out freely that his chosen ones – which obviously includes you and me – would come to know him.  He tills the soil of faith by sending us the sacraments, the Word of God, and his great love and mercy.  Sometimes it works: we receive the seed of faith, it’s watered in the sacrament of baptism, fed with the Eucharist and the other sacraments, and we make of ourselves fertile ground, letting it come up and grow and give life to the world.  But sometimes, of course it doesn’t work out that way.  We all know people who have received that seed of faith but haven’t let it blossom.

    The seed might fall in a place where the faith is not nourished and Christ is not known.  Maybe it’s a foreign land without benefit of missionaries, and in those cases it’s understandable that the faith wouldn’t take hold.  But it could even be a little closer to home.  Perhaps the seed falls on those whose turbulent lives can’t give the seed any roots: they receive the word of God with joy, but the trials and tribulations of daily living upset everything and the faith never really sinks in.  Or, maybe it falls on us embroiled as we are with the cares of the world.  The “weeds” of our living are improper relationships, too much time playing video games or surfing the wrong places of the internet, watching too much television, wasting time on passing things.  There is so much that can distract us from our faith, and too often, we are not as diligent about weeding the gardens of our souls as we should be.

    We, dear brothers and sisters in Christ, are called to be rich, fertile ground to give life to the faith planted in our hearts.  That means that we must keep ourselves fresh by renewing the waters of baptism in our hearts.  We do that by continuing to grow in our faith: by studying the Scriptures, by nurturing our prayer life, by intentionally going deeper in our relationship with Jesus who is the tiller of the soil of our faith.  We must feed that seed of faith by dedicating ourselves to the Eucharist and coming to Mass all the time, whether it’s convenient or not.  We must weed out the distractions of our lives and give that seed of faith room to grow.  We must shine the brilliant sunlight of God’s love on that faith by living the Gospel and reaching out in love to brothers and sisters who are in need.

    God scatters the seeds of faith with wild abandon, because he created us in love to return to him, fully grown and abundant in the faith.  We have to be intentional about caring for the crop we are meant to be.  God gives us the seed, gives us the things we need to nurture it, but he doesn’t do all the work for us.  We have to respond to his great love and abundant grace by using what he gives us so we can become what he wants for us.

    We are the ones who have been called to yield “a hundred or sixty or thirtyfold.”  The seed of faith comes in the form of something that might, for all the world, look dead – Christ’s saving action on the cross.  When we water and feed and weed and let the light shine on that faith, we can give life to the world around us and give witness that the world’s death is no match for the salvation we have in Christ.

  • Friday of the Fourteenth Week of Ordinary Time

    Friday of the Fourteenth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    Our God never promises that the life of faith and discipleship will be an easy one; only that it will be blessed. One thing is certain: that life will certainly entail hardship, even suffering. That’s pretty evident in today’s Gospel reading. Faithful disciples have to worry about being betrayed by even their closest family members.

    None of this is a surprise to anyone who has tried to live the faith. Perhaps at times the hardest people to evangelize are the members of one’s own family. I’m sure we all can think of people close to us who have abandoned the faith or practice it rarely. Maybe the ones who receive the Church’s teachings least are those we would hope would get it and be partners with us as we journey to the kingdom. It happens all the time – in your family and in mine.

    These are trying times. It is hard to give witness to the Truth when the culture around us wants to make its own truth. The evils of abortion and impure relationships are all but normalized now, and those who take a stand against them are considered intolerant at best, and hate-mongers at worst.  And it’s painful to see our brothers and sisters fall for the lie hook, line and sinker.  It’s hard for parents to see their children go astray, when they’ve done their best to pass on the faith.  So how do we stand for the Truth when our loved ones tune it out?  What do we do when our loved ones reject what we’ve tried to give them to bring them to eternal life?

    Our Gospel tells us that what we do is persevere: we continue to live the Truth and witness to our faith.  If those close to us tune out our words, then we have to be all the more attentive to our actions, to our lived witness, so that they can see that we live what we preach and believe.  We have to depend on God to give us the right words and help us to do the right things so that we won’t be a stumbling block.  And then we have to trust in God to work it all out in his time.

    None of this is going to be easy, but Jesus tells us that the one who endures to the end will be saved.

  • The Fourteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time

    The Fourteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    In my study of Scripture, the Liturgy, and the Lectionary, I’ve always been encouraged by the fact the Liturgy of the Word for these summer Ordinary Time Sundays is designed to offer us a kind of toolbox for living our Christian discipleship.  And that’s important because discipleship isn’t an easy thing to live, and it would be far easier to just throw it aside and never give it a second thought, which is what too many people do.  But it can’t be that way for us; we know the Lord and have experienced his love, and so the only thing we can do in the face of that love and mercy is live the life he has called us to live.  The only option for us is being disciples.  And it’s not insurmountable for us, because we have the roadmap, the instructions if you will, for living that life.  We call them the Gospels.

    So these Gospel readings during the summer and fall give us the tools we need to live the Christian life.  The tool we are being offered today is the tool of the virtue called humility.  Now, you may be thinking, “Well, no thanks, actually.  I may just leave that particular tool in the toolbox.”  Because being a person of humility in our culture can be seen as something of a character flaw.  For decades, maybe even longer, our society has encouraged us to toot our own horn, to look out for number one.  “Believe in yourself” has been the mantra of Oprah and Joel Osteen, and all those other self-appointed gurus.  But we have to remember that we have not been breathed into existence in the image of Oprah or Joel Osteen.  We have been created in the image and likeness of God, and so we need to emulate our God as closely as we can.

    So what does our God look like?  Well, Zechariah gives us a pretty clear portrait today: “See, your king shall come to you; a just savior is he, meek, and riding on an ass, on a colt, the foal of an ass.”  So our Savior was prophesied to be meek and just, and far from coming into the city riding on a mighty horse of a king, he comes in on a donkey, the beast of burden employed by the poor.  And that’s just how Jesus was, wasn’t he?  He could have insisted on his glory as our God, could have chosen not to take on our feeble and flawed flesh.  But he didn’t.  He humbled himself, becoming like ourselves in all things but sin.

    So today, Jesus invites us to that same kind of humility.  He invites us to take his yoke upon our shoulders.  A yoke back then was an implement that kept the oxen together so they could work the fields. 

    So a yoke implies a few things.  First, it’s going to be work.  That’s what yokes are for.  So when Jesus says he’s going to give us rest, that doesn’t mean that there won’t be some work involved.  Disciples have work to do in this world, living the Gospel, witnessing to God’s love, and reaching out to a world that needs hope and mercy and grace.

    Second, a yoke meant that more than one animal was working; they were working together.  So as we take Jesus’ yoke upon us, we are yoked to him and we are yoked to other disciples.  Jesus calls us to work for the kingdom, but never expects us to work for it alone.  That’s why his burden is easy and light: it’s still a burden, but we never ever bear it alone, Christ is always with us, and we always live our discipleship in community with other believers.

    This model of working for the kingdom leads us right back to humility.  If we are yoked to the community and to our Savior, that means that we can’t take sole credit for the mighty things we are able to do.  Yes, we can do great things, but we do them because he has transformed us and has taken the yoke with us; we do them with the help of other disciples to whom we are yoked for the particular purpose of being God’s presence in the world.  We are no longer men and women in the flesh, as Saint Paul says today, we are people of the Spirit, with the Spirit of Christ in us, and so in Christ we cast aside those deeds of darkness and, taking his yoke, we accomplish the work Jesus has given us.  Saint Augustine once said, “Humility must accompany all our actions, must be with us everywhere; for as soon as we glory in our good works they are of no further value to our advancement in virtue.”

    And that is our goal as disciples: to advance in virtue. Some days, that’s very hard work. But we never have to go it alone, if we are truly humble people working in the image of our God.

  • Thursday of the Thirteenth Week of Ordinary Time

    Thursday of the Thirteenth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    Amos and Jesus are prophetic voices that we hear in our Scriptures this morning.  Unfortunately, as is often the case with prophets, neither is a welcome voice.  Amos makes it clear that he is not speaking on his own, or even because he wanted to.  If it were up to him, he’d go back to being a simple shepherd and dresser of sycamore trees.  But he knows that the Lord was using him to speak to Amaziah, and he had no intention of backing down. 

    In today’s Gospel, Jesus could have cured the paralytic with one touch and without much fanfare.  But that wasn’t what he was there to do.  He was there to preach forgiveness of sins by the way he healed the paralyzed person.  Jesus used that simple situation of healing to be a prophetic voice in the world, saying to everyone present that real healing only comes about through the forgiveness of sins.

    I think it’s important to note that being unwilling to accept prophetic witness has its price.  By refusing to hear the word of Amos, Azariah was doomed to destruction.  Not because our God is a capricious, spiteful deity, but because Azariah was unwilling to accept God’s mercy and protection.  On the other hand, the faith of the people who brought the paralytic to Jesus opened that man’s life to God’s healing and mercy.  Prophetic words are often hard, but they also bring healing.

    That unnamed paralyzed person could be you or me today, or someone we’ll meet during this day. Who among us is not paralyzed by sin in some way? To whatever extent we are the ones in need of healing, may we all hear the prophetic voice of Jesus saying to us: “Your sins are forgiven. Rise, pick up your stretcher, and go home.”

  • The Thirteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time

    The Thirteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    There’s a little Christian Science church in the town where I grew up, on Main Street, just north of the downtown area.  They don’t anymore, but they used to list their upcoming sermon topic, followed by the line “All are welcome.”  Imagine my surprise when one day, the topic was going to be eternal punishment.  So the sign read: “Eternal Punishment.  All are welcome.”  Yeah, I had to drive around the block to make sure I read that right!

    But that sign came to mind this week as I was reflecting on the readings for today.  There is a strong theme of welcoming, of hospitality, in today’s Liturgy of the Word.  But it’s not just a matter of saying to someone who’s new, “Hey, how are you?  Welcome here!”  The hospitality that we’re being called to in the readings today is a welcome of the Word of God.  And that sounds much easier than it actually is, so hang on to that, because we will come back to it.

    In our first reading from the second book of Kings, Elisha the prophet is extended hospitality by the Shunemite woman.  Beginning by giving him food, eventually she builds a little room on the roof of her house so that Elisha could stay there whenever he was travelling through town.  We don’t know if she was a believer or not, but she recognizes that Elisha is a holy man and uses her influence and means to see that his prophetic ministry could flourish.

    In the Gospel reading, Jesus speaks of those who would welcome the apostles as they went about their preaching mission.  “Whoever receives you receives me,” he tells them.  When someone accepts the messenger – and, importantly, the message that he or she brings – one receives the giver of the message.  This is the basis of our Catholic teaching that Christ is present in the word of God proclaimed in church.

    The true prophet, of which Elisha was one, always brings the Word of God.  The Shunemite woman reacted to the Word of God by making it welcome, in the person of Elisha.  She is a model for us of the hospitality and welcome of the Word that we are asked to consider this day.  So we too have to feed the Word and make a home for the Word.  We can feed the Word by exposing ourselves to the Scriptures in prayer and reflection.  I had a professor in seminary who used to beg us to read the Bible every day – even just a few verses.  He would say, “Then, brothers, when you close your eyes in death, you will open them in heaven and recognize where you are!”  When we feed the Word, we are able to grow in our faith and the Word will bring life to our souls.

    From feeding the Word, we then have to build a little room for it, on the roof of our spiritual houses.  It’s instructive that Elisha’s room was build on the roof, because then the Word of God was over everything in the Shunemite woman’s life.  The Word of God was the head of her house and the guiding principle of her family life.  When we build that room, figuratively in our own lives, it must take top precedence for us too.  Jesus makes that a commandment in today’s Gospel.

    And so we feed the Word and give it a home in our lives, and then it becomes the guiding principle of our own lives, as it should be.  But here’s the thing about that, and maybe this is why so many people don’t want to do this.  Because there is a cost to welcoming the Word of God.  Remember that the prophets were not always as welcome as Elisha was in the Shunemite woman’s house.  The prophets were often berated, ridiculed, even imprisoned, beaten and murdered, because the Word of God isn’t always welcome.  Jesus says in the Gospel reading today, “Whoever receives a prophet because he is a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward.”  We have to be clear about the fact that we fully expect that reward to be in heaven, because it’s tough to be a prophet in the world, in any age.

    Because the Word of God calls us to live a certain way.  The Word of God wants us to be open to change, the Word of God actually usually demands that we change.  The Word of God wants us to be Christ to others, because Christ is the Word of God.  And so we must be forgiving of those who harm us, loving to those who test us, reaching out to those who need us (even when it’s inconvenient, or they’re not the people we want to be around), welcoming of those who are different than us.  Welcoming the Word of God means that we have to take up our cross and follow our Lord, meaning that there will be death involved and we might have to give up a whole lot.

    In today’s world, the Word of God calls us to be Christ in the midst of a pandemic and a time of social unrest.  We have to be people who stand for what is right and not just wait for the whole racial thing to “blow over.”  We have to demand that our society gets this right once and for all, so that no one will ever be marginalized because of their race, not ever again.  And we have to be people who, in the midst of a pandemic that is demanding a lot of us, give as much as we are called to.  We have to wear our masks out in public because we could be protecting someone else.  We have to social distance when it’s hard to do that, because we have to stop the spread.

    We may have to die to what we think is important, die to our own self-interests and desires, die to what makes us feel comfortable.  That’s what giving up one’s family meant in Jesus’ day: being cast out of the family was a form of death.  So not loving mother and father and son or daughter more than Christ meant dying to life in this world.  And dying to life in this world is exactly what welcoming the Word of God will cost us.  That’s the message of the Gospel today.

    But giving up our lives will not be without its reward.  The Shunemite woman was rewarded with a child, even though her husband was advanced in years.  Jesus says the same.  Giving the Word of God even just a cup of water to nourish it and let it grow will be rewarded in ways we cannot even imagine.

    So welcoming the Word of God will definitely cost us something, but it will also change everything.  Are you willing to embrace the cost and build a home in your life for the Word of God?