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Exploring the word

05 Jul 2020 - Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle A

Look out over the average assembly and what do you see? For one thing, you see that there is no average assembly. A parish in a wealthy suburb may present a sea of nicely dressed and clean-shaven folk, none of whom seem to have gone gray despite their AARP cards. In a city parish, exhausted young mothers pass out Cheerios to pacify squirming children, while homeless folk sleep in the back pew or wander the aisles in agitation, presenting the constant possibility of a full-scale liturgical interruption. In a small town, miners have cleaned as much soot from under their nails as possible for Sunday morning, while the unemployed slump despondently next to the children they are unsure how to feed. In all of these parishes and many others, people bring their burdens to church. In that sense, then, there is an average assembly; which is to say, everybody’s got problems. You don’t have to watch the evening news to find out what people are worried about. Think back on the past year of ministry. The bereaved family carried their loss to the church. The woman seeking an annulment from a bruising marriage was sitting in the congregation. So were the teenagers anxious about their burgeoning sexual awareness, the families in financial crisis, the depressed office worker who could hardly function on the job anymore, the mother of the boy who was arrested, the gay man who felt rejected and denied by God and the church, the woman who’d just been diagnosed with cancer. People have all sorts of troubles with their relationships, their health, their careers, and their bank accounts. They worry about moral choices and what God thinks of them, too. They wonder if anything they do has meaning. They suspect sometimes that they have made irredeemable mistakes. Come to me A stockbroker who’d been raised in a Catholic family was in trouble, and he knew it. He made a lot of money and enjoyed a fabulous lifestyle, but none of that mattered anymore. He drank too much; he lived to drink. It was starting to affect his career. It had already cost him many significant relationships. He was lonely. He was full of self-loathing. He didn’t know what else to do, so one Saturday night he stumbled into the nearest church, something he hadn’t done in a long time. He didn’t come for anything in particular—impulse and buried memory had brought him there. He sat in the pew uncomfortably and looked into the face of a small boy in the arms of his father in the pew ahead of him. The child was smiling at him over the father’s shoulder. He returned the smile painfully. Mass was in progress, and the stockbroker had arrived in time for the gospel: “Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest.” Rest! Tears sprang up in the troubled man’s eyes. Wouldn’t it be astonishing, wonderful, incredible, to find rest somewhere? To find it, so simply and unreservedly, in the embrace of Jesus? The small boy smiled benignly at him again from the forward pew. The man took it as a sign from God. He wept, rocking and softly repeating those saving words: Come to me, come to me. You will find rest The story above is true. The stockbroker later became a priest and is now preaching the same gospel he once heard so acutely. But it’s a true story in more ways than one. These words from Jesus are immensely powerful, and we cannot discount how important they could be to someone, or many someones, you preach to this weekend. Say them like you mean them, like you believe them. Do you believe them? It will help if you do. We all know that religion isn’t just about consolation—but there is consolation in it for those who seek and find the arms of Jesus. And we face a world out there badly in need of some good news, something to hope for, something to help with the pain of living. Some folks will turn to therapy, Prozac, and 12-step programs, and some would be well advised to do so. But others will move deeper into addiction, numbness, bitterness, or despair. Jesus offers to take up all these burdens and to make possible what seems absolutely impossible. That is his offer, and he is most serious. People will ask: But how can you know this? We have only to point at the cross. Some may wonder: How you can trust someone you do not know to help you? Ah, but we do know him. We can share our experiences. Folks will look to us to show how Jesus makes a difference in our lives. Let’s hope we have some evidence of this! The people in the parish will say: Please don’t lie to me. It would hurt too much to hope and be disappointed again. So we must be sure that we tell the gospel truth and not some platitude we were told ourselves that allows us to hide the suffering world away. Applying the word A dominion from sea to sea No one and nothing is beyond the compassion of Jesus. Sinners, lawbreakers, and others who feel unclean are welcome to come to him. It is our job to issue the invitation and to make that welcome authentic. I know a priest who, at the start of every Mass, acknowledges Catholics who have been away with an encouraging word. Another greets Christians of other denominations and those of other faiths who may be worshipping with us. Statistics bear out that there are lots in both categories in our midst. We might also greet those who almost didn’t worship today, those who are not yet sure of the forgiveness of God or the love of Christ. If our communities hear a word that speaks to them and rouses their faith, they may be tempted to come back for more. Related scripture links Prayers for the troubled: Pss. 13, 27, 46, 51, 57, 70, 91, 130, 131; Mark 14:36 Words of consolation: Isa. 9:1-6; Luke 1:46-55; Matt. 6:25-34, 19:26; John 6:37-40; 2 Cor. 12:9-10; Phil. 4:4-7 Reason to hope: Luke 17:20-21; John 3:16; Rom. 5:1-11; 1 Thess. 5:8-11 Speaking the truth: John 8:31-32, 14:6, 17:17-19, 18:37

Authors Alice Camille

Rest average assembly burdens jesus' compassion invitation come to me

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Homily stories

05 Jul 2020 - Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle A

A troubled boy was brought into a childcare facility, and from the time he hit the front door of his new dorm he disrupted everything. He was loud and abusive, and he refused any help and defied all instructions. He was given new clothes but flung them on the floor. He was shown his new bed, and he kicked it and pulled the blankets and sheets off it. Though he calmed down a little as days progressed, his defiance continued and his attitude remained unchanged. He felt everyone was against him, and he took every sign of kindness as an attack. The dorm’s head counselor had a secret strategy, however: enormous patience. She kept offering him a safe, respectful environment, and when he reacted negatively she was firm but never responded negatively herself. She said, “He resisted all my instructions, but what he really was resisting was his own goodness. He didn’t realize that if he could give in and do what he knew he ought to do, he’d finally find peace in himself and in the world.” He learned that lesson finally and today is busy teaching his own children how to find that inner peace. In today’s reading, Jesus not only offers peace to those who are burdened but also a way that we can find that rest for ourselves. The first step is to stop resisting what’s good for us—including our own goodness.

Authors Tom McGrath

patience burdens Rest

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Featured Exploring the Word

03 Aug 2025 - Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle C

"Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain wisdom of heart." Beautiful if somewhat lacquered words from today's Psalm 90. What that means in plain English: Because we’re not going to live forever, let's learn to live wisely and well. It's a far cry from that other, more famous biblical phrase: "Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die!" (Ecclesiastes 8:15; Isaiah 22:13). That was the song of soldiers reveling on the night before a battle—which many were not expected to survive. Both phrases are frank about our chances of getting out of here alive: nil. Or as my old theology professor used to put it: "The cosmic joke is, everyone who's ever lived has died. So what makes you think you'll beat the odds?" The great biblical tradition agrees with science 100 percent: Our mortality is a given. We've got "seventy years or eighty, for those who are strong," as Psalm 90 also tells us. Despite longevity studies that claim the next generation will see lots more people live to be 100, we're still talking a mere century. A drop in the bucket of time, a century gets you from the Revolutionary War to the Civil War, from the buggy whip to the SUV, from the tuberculosis vaccine to chemotherapy. Advancement, to be sure, but on a rather modest scale as chronological history goes. But let's suppose you do get a century of living. What would you do with all that time? Would you use it any differently, achieve any more than you would with 80 years, or 20? We've all met 6-year-olds who have their act together more admirably than their parents. Age guarantees nothing. Time is in no way a measure of wisdom, only experience—or, more accurately, experiences. And when we take time to reflect on those experiences, we may come up with the same assessment as Qoheleth: What a lot of vanity is accumulated herein! An enormous percentage of life is spent in pursuit of money. We can't live without it, yet its pursuit is often uncreative and leaves us unfulfilled and yearning. Money gets us stuff, some necessary, some useful, but much of which is burdensome, disappointing, and pointless. According to the foregone ending, we die and leave it all to someone else. No wonder Qoheleth was unhappy. Jesus tells a story about a man who made a simple plan for the future: Eat, drink, and be merry! The fellow conveniently forgot the other half of the saying, so it never occurred to him that death was near. Jesus warns us that the only way to "gain wisdom of heart" is to be rich in what matters to God. Time to clean house, inside and out. Related scripture links The biblical Jabez: 1 Chron. 4:9-10 Blessing theology in the OT: Gen. 1:28, 5:2, 12:2-3, 26:3-4, 32:29, 39:5; Deut. 7:14; Isa. 19:24 Blessing theology in the NT: Matt. 14:19, 26:26; Luke 1:28, 42, 6:28, 24:30, 50; Rom. 12:14; 1 Cor. 10:16 Lazarus at the door: Luke 16:19-31 The Alpha and Omega: Rev. 1:8, 18, 21:6 Catechism links Material goods and their moral significance: CCC 2401-2449 Adapted from a previously published Exploring the word.

Authors Alice Camille

mortality burdens money qoheleth

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