Sat, 10 Oct 2026 10:44:37 -0700EditMySiteSat, 10 Oct 2026 01:43:07 GMThttps://www.ourladyqueenofpeace.org/just-a-thoughtor-two/10112026"On this mountain the Lord of hosts will provide for all peoples a feast of rich food and choice wines."

For all peoples! Isaiah does not say for the deserving people...or for the right people...or for the people who arrived the proper way. He says for all peoples. And then he tells us what God will do at that table. He will destroy the veil that veils all peoples. He will destroy death forever. He will wipe away the tears from every face…every face. That is the vision God sets before us today, in the midst of all the chaos that is swirling around us. A table with room for everyone, and a God who personally wipes away our tears.

And then Jesus tells us a story about a king who gives a wedding feast for his son...and nobody comes. It seems that the invited guests have better things to do. One goes off to his farm, another to his business. Some go further still; they lay hold of the servants, mistreat them, and kill them. So the king sends his servants out into the main roads, and they gather everyone they find, the Gospel says, bad and good alike...and the hall is filled with guests.

Notice who misses the feast. Not the sinners. Not the strangers on the road. The ones who miss the feast are the ones too busy with their own affairs to accept the invitation. Too busy with the farm, the business, building their portfolio. It is one of the biggest reversals in the Gospel...the insiders lock themselves out by refusing the invitation, and the outsiders are carried into the feast.

We are living in truly hard and anxious times in this country. Many of us feel it at the grocery store, where the same cart costs so much more than it did a few months ago. You feel it at the gas pump. You feel it in paychecks that do not stretch the way they used to, and in medical bills that keep families awake at night. Working families are carrying a heavy load right now while the distance between the very wealthiest and everyone else grows wider, it seems every month. Isaiah's feast is for all peoples, but too many tables in our own community are getting smaller.

And alongside that worry, we are seeing something harder stll. Immigrants and refugees, many of them our own neighbors, some of them who sit in these pews, are being treated with suspicion and cruelty as if they were not made in the image and likenness of God. Racism, which we were working toward loosening it stranglehold, is speaking more boldly and more brazenly.

Contempt for women is showing up openly in places where once people would have been ashamed to press it, and our leaders seem to have lost their way. No one seems to be standing up to these realities and calling them out for the sins that they are.

I do not name these things to take a political position. I name them because the Gospel names them. The king in this parable sends his servants into the main roads, to the people at the margins, to the ones nobody bothered to invite. That is where the feast is. That is where Christ is. And the Church has been saying this for a long time. Our own bishops, in their letter Open Wide Our Hearts, called racism a sin that divides the human family. They have reminded us again and again that the stranger is to be welcomed as Christ himself. And more than a century ago, Pope Leo the Thirteenth insisted that workers deserve a just wage, enough to live in dignity. None of this is new. It is the Gospel, applied to our own time.

So where does that leave us? Perhaps Saint Paul can give us some insight…writing from prison, he says, I know how to live in humble circumstances; I know also how to live with abundance. I can do all things in him who strengthens me. Paul is not telling us to make peace with injustice. He is telling us where our strength comes from. And then he says something we should not skip past... “it was kind of you to share in my distress.” The Philippians did not just pray for Paul, they shared what they had. They carried his burden with him.

That is what the Church is for. I remember Fr. Tony Gittens, CSSp, saying in class; “it is not so much that the church has a mission as the mission has a church”. We are the servants sent into the main roads. We are the ones who share in one another's distress. When this parish stands with our immigrant families... when we feed the hungry and provide clothing and household items to those in need...when we refuse to let contempt for anyone go unanswered...we are not making a political statement…we are settng the table the prophet Isaiah foretold…we are answering Jesus’ call to discipleship!
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Perhaps, as we head into this week we might ponder: Is there some part of Jesus’ invitation we have missed or that we have been too busy to answer? Is there a neighbor on the main road we have walked past? Do we know someone whose distress we could not only pray about, but in some way, we could share as well? The feast is ready, the great hall is not yet full, and Jesus is sending us out “to all the peoples”.

Blessings,
Fr. Tim]]>Sat, 03 Oct 2026 03:30:56 GMThttps://www.ourladyqueenofpeace.org/just-a-thoughtor-two/1052026“The kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that will produce its fruit.”

That is a hard line to hear on a Sunday morning, and I think that Jesus means it to be hard. He tells the chief priests and elders a story about a vineyard, carefully planted and fenced and then entrusted to tenants who are given everything they need to make it flourish. And when the harvest comes, those tenants decide the vineyard is theirs to keep. They beat the servants. They kill the son. They mistake stewardship for ownership. This is not just a story about people who lived two thousand years ago. This is a story about what happens when we forget who we are, and whose we are. It is a story about what happens when we forget that everything we have been given...our faith, our gifts, our community, this planet, even our own lives...has never been ours to begin with. It has all been entrusted to us. And entrusted things come with an expectation. Bearing fruit.

Notice what Jesus does not say. He does not say the vineyard was taken away because the tenants were unfaithful. He does not say it was taken away because they made mistakes. He says it was taken away because, when the moment came to give back what had been given to them, they chose violence and self-interest instead. The problem was never the vineyard. The problem was what the tenants decided to do with it.

So here is the question underneath the parable. What have we been entrusted with... and what are we doing with it? Paul, writing from prison, gives us an answer that sounds gentle next to the violence of the Gospel, but it is just as demanding. Have no anxiety at all. In every circumstance, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, make your requests known to God.
Paul is not describing a spiritual feeling. He is describing a spiritual practce. A way of living in the world and understanding
that it belongs to God, instead of fighting for ownership over the world. And then he adds to the list what so many of us know by heart... whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious... think about these things.

Put the parable and Paul's letter together and you get a great picture of discipleship. The tenants in the vineyard forgot whose field it was, and the fruit they produced was violence. Paul never forgets whose peace it is, and the fruit he produces, even from a prison cell…it is gratitude, honesty, and grace.

That is the choice in front of every one of us this week. Not a dramatic, one time choice. A daily choice. Do we tend what has been given to us as if it belongs to God, or do we start treating it as if it belongs to us.

Let’s think about what has been entrusted to us. Our family, our work, this parish, the people who come through our doors
needing help, needing to be heard, needing someone to treat them with the dignity the Gospel insists on. None of these realities are ours to hoard or to control. They are ours to tend, and to hand back, having bourn fruit. And right now this country is failing at this!

The tenants in the parable had every advantage and still produced nothing but violence because they forgot they were tenants. Paul had nothing, chained in a cell, and still produced peace because he never forgot whose he was.

So, as we head into this new week, maybe the question we bring is simple. Whose vineyard are we standing in? And what fruit are we about to hand back to the one who planted it?

Blessings,
Fr. Tim]]>Sat, 26 Sep 2026 18:50:08 GMThttps://www.ourladyqueenofpeace.org/just-a-thoughtor-two/9272026"Which of the two sons did his father's will?"

The chief priests and elders knew the answer before Jesus finished asking...and that was the trap. Because the son who said yes, and did nothing, could look, at first, like the obedient one. He gave the right answer. He used the right words. But he never set foot in the vineyard.

The son who said no... and went anyway... that's the one who did the father's will. Not because his first word was better. But because his actons were better.

This is the same reversal we hear in Ezekiel. The house of Israel complains that God's way isn't fair and God turns the question back on them.

It isn't about where you started. It's about which way you're headed on the journey. The virtuous person who turns away and falls vs. the sinner who turns around and lives...in both instances, it is their actions that matters, not their word.

We build our identities, so often, on the first answer. I said yes at my baptism. I said yes when I was confirmed. I show up, I wear the label, I know the language. And that first yes can become a kind of alibi, if we're not careful, it can become like a school permission slip, used to skip going to the vineyard.

Paul, in his letter to the Philippians, tells us what the actual work in the vineyard looks like. And it is not a vague goodness. It is something specific: humbly regard others as more important than yourselves...each looking out not for your own interests, but also for those of others.  He is not talking about a feeling. He is talking about a stance toward the other that we have to keep
choosing, today, tomorrow, the next day, each day.

And Jesus doesn't let the religious leaders or us off easy. He tells them plainly: sinners are entering the kingdom
of God ahead of you. Not because sin is good. But because they turned around. They heard John, and something in them broke open, and they went down a different road. The ones who looked righteous from the outside, never changed, they kept doing what they had been. They didn’t respond to John’s call to conversion, they ignored him.

I think the question this Gospel leaves us isn't, did I say yes once. It's, where am I right now…working in the vineyard, or still thinking about it, standing at the gate?

Maybe it’s a relationship that needs what Paul is describing, not just the intention. A neighbor, a coworker, a family member, a friend, someone at Feast on the Street, the Food Pantry or wherever someone is, who needs you to show up. Not just to agree in principle that showing up matters, but to be there for them.

The father in the parable didn't need his son's word. He needed his son in the vineyard. Jesus doesn't need our words as much as our words put into actons. He needs us walking the journey with him. Who are we walking with this week?

Blessings,
Fr. Tim

]]>Sat, 19 Sep 2026 01:18:40 GMThttps://www.ourladyqueenofpeace.org/just-a-thoughtor-two/9202026Imagine you are the worker hired at five o'clock. You spent the whole day standing in the marketplace, waiting...watching others get chosen while you did not. And then, an hour before sundown, someone finally says...come, come and work.

That is the gospel we just heard, and if we are honest, most of us have probably played every part in that story.

We have been the ones who arrived early and worked hard and quietly kept score. We’ve been the ones who came late, maybe a little embarrassed at how long it took us to show up. And we have been the ones standing in the marketplace still, wondering if anyone is going to call our name at all. Here is the good news: The landowner does not pay by the hour.

The landowner pays by the heart. Whether you have labored since dawn or walked in at the eleventh hour, the wage is the same... because the wage has never been wages at all. It is welcome. It is belonging. It is a place at the table that was set
before you ever found your way to it, waiting for you.

Isaiah tells us God's ways are not our ways, God's thoughts are not our thoughts. Our ways keep score. Our ways rank and compare and whisper that fairness means everyone gets what they deserve. God's ways are higher than that. God's ways are wider than that. God's ways are profoundly more generous than we know what to do with.

And this is not just a story about heaven omeday. It is a story about who we are called to be today, as a Church, as a parish, as a community. It means the door stays open past five o'clock. It means we go looking in the marketplace for the ones still
standing there, the newcomer, the person returning, the one who feels too late to come, or too far away, or just too lost.

We do not get to decide who is worthy of the invitation. We only get to decide whether we will extend it or not. Ultimately, it is really God’s invitation, and through our discipleship we embody that invitation on God’s behalf.

So here is something to ponder for the coming week. Where in my life have I been counting hours instead of celebrating and offering welcome? Who is still standing in the marketplace, waiting for me to say the words...come and see? Because the vineyard is not full yet, and the owner is still calling, and regardless of when you come or from
where, you are welcome!

Blessings,
Fr. Tim


]]>Fri, 11 Sep 2026 21:17:01 GMThttps://www.ourladyqueenofpeace.org/just-a-thoughtor-two/9132026Peter asks Jesus…“How often must I forgive my brother who sins against me? As many as seven times?”

Now, Peter thinks he's being generous. In Jewish tradition, seven is the number of completeness, the number that says: it is enough. Peter is not skimping on his offer of forgiveness. He is trying to sound magnanimous.

And Jesus corrects him . . . not downward, toward something smaller and more reasonable, but upward, toward a number with no bottom. “Not seven times, but seventy-seven times.”

Now, just as an aside, because I find this too good not to share, some scripture scholars will tell you that number isn't really a number at all. It's an echo. Back in Genesis (4:23-24), four generations removed from Cain, a man named Lamech boasts to his two wives: “If Cain is avenged sevenfold, then Lamech seventy-sevenfold.” He had killed a man for merely wounding him . . . and turns that killing into a song, into a family legacy that says: don't cross me, because I will make you pay, not once, but seventy-seven times over.

Many scholars believe Jesus hands Peter that exact number back on purpose . . . so that Peter, and we, would hear the echo. Somewhere in the very first family on earth, a man measured his worth by how completely he could avenge a wound. Jesus takes that same number and turns it inside out. Where Lamech's seventy-seven was a boast of vengeance, Jesus' seventy-seven becomes a vocation of mercy. Same number, but moving in the opposite direction, towards an entirely new kingdom.

That is the challenge sitting in front of us this morning. Not whether we can forgive someone once, most of us can manage that, if the hurt is small enough. The challenge is whether we can stop keeping score at all; whether we can stop being Lamech's children, and start being children of the Reign of God, living like the king in Jesus' parable who looks at a servant who owes him more than many could earn in a lifetime and, moved with compassion, simply lets the debt go.

We are that servant. Every one of us. Sirach names our condition plainly this morning: wrath and anger are hateful things, yet the sinner hugs them tight. Doesn't that sound familiar? We don't let go of our grudges. We hold them. Sometimes we polish them, we tell the story of what was done to us so many times that we come to know it better than we know our own blessings. And Sirach asks the question that ought to stop us cold: can we really ask God for mercy if we refuse to hand mercy to someone else?

I want to say a word, gently, about what this particular weekend carries with it. Twenty-five years ago, our country lived through a September morning that broke something open in all of us. We remember today the men and women and children who never came home . . . the survivors who still carry that morning in their bodies . . . the first responders who ran toward danger as everyone was running out and away . . . and we call to mind every family and loved one who has spent twenty-five years learning to live around an absence. We hold all of them in prayer…not as the center of this homily, but as part of what makes this Gospel so hard to hear and harder to live, but so necessary. The Gospel is tested at the edges of human experience, where the wounds are so deep and unrelenting, so real… letting go feels like losing something we are entitled to keep…and it seems that it just can’t happen yet.

Here is what I have come to believe sits quietly underneath this whole Gospel, praying for someone who has hurt us doesn't only change them, in God's hands . . . it changes us. Not right away. Not painlessly. But something happens in a heart that keeps bringing back a name before God, long enough… even a name we can barely stand to say at the beginning. In time the grip loosens. The wound is real…but it stops being the only thing we can feel, it stops being the thing that wraps around us and weighs us down.

And the more sincerely we can ask God to actually bless someone who has wronged us, when our prayer becomes not only “help me forgive them, Lord” through gritted teeth, but becomes a prayer for their wellbeing…the more healing seems to come back to us, through that very prayer.

Forgiveness is never primarily a gift we hand away. I think it is a door we open . . . and Christ walks through that door, with a healing touch for them and for us as well.

So here is an examen I would propose for all of us for this week…is there a name I have been keeping score against, someone whose debt, real or perceived, I have quietly decided I am entitled to hold onto? If there is, let’s pray… not “help me forgive them,” but “bless them, Lord . . . give them what is good”. Repeat it, register how it sits…not because they have earned it. None of us has ever earned the “seventy-seven” (bottom-less) mercies God has already given us. But let us do it because that undeserved mercy of God is exactly what we have been living on, our whole lives.

And may you all remember just how deeply and passionately you are loved by God, just as you are.

Blessings,
Fr Tim]]>Sat, 05 Sep 2026 21:27:54 GMThttps://www.ourladyqueenofpeace.org/just-a-thoughtor-two/962026Imagine for a moment that someone has hurt you. Wronged you. Wounded you in some way that will not let you rest. What does Jesus tell us to do? Go to them. Not to the whole community. Not to a group chat. Not to everyone, but to them. Go to that person, alone, and speak the truth in love. It sounds at first like a manual for handling conflict. Step one, step two, step three. A tidy process for a messy world. But listen again, and you will hear something deeper underneath it. Jesus is not really giving us a policy. He is trying to create family. A community bound together closely enough that when one member falls, the others go looking. Closely enough that reconciliation matters more than being right. Closely enough that where people gathered in his name, he is there in the midst of them.

And Paul, writing to the Romans, tells us exactly what holds that family together. Owe nothing to anyone, he says, except to love one another. Not one suggestion among many. Not one virtue on a long list of virtues. Love is the whole law, gathered up and fulfilled. You shall not kill, you shall not steal, you shall not covet... all of it is contained in this single command because love does not do evil to the other. But here is the reversal. We think this Gospel is about correcting one another's faults. It is actually about the depth of love required to do that correcting in the right manner. We think the law is a fence keeping us in line. Actually, I think it is more like a doorway to a deeper relationship, and love is what walks us through the door.

This past week, Pope Leo spoke to the crowds gathered in St. Peter's Square, and he asked something of us that felt like it belonged in this same Gospel. He called us to unmask the contradictions of our world. We have never known more, he said, and yet we have never been more uncertain of where we are going. We produce more than enough food for every family on this earth, and still our sisters and brothers go hungry. We speak of peace, and still convince ourselves that war can somehow build it. These are the masks, he said, the world wears... progress on the surface, and underneath, a poverty of love. A lack of care for the less fortunate and a lack of care for our planet.

Unmasking. That is the work Christ asks of his Church. Not simply to remove the mask from the world's contradictions, but to remove the mask from our own hearts, where we too can look like people of love on the outside while walking past the poor and the stranger in our midst. Jesus did not say, love one another when it is convenient, or love one another once you have addressed everything else. He said, as I have loved you, so you also should love one another. His love came first. Ours is meant to be a reply to his unbounded love for us.

Today opens the Season of Creation, that stretch of weeks the Church keeps from the first of September until October 4th, the feast of Saint Francis, and it belongs in this same unmasking. We can speak of loving our neighbor while forgetting that the earth itself is the house we all share with that neighbor. We can call ourselves people who do no evil to others, and still pollute the rivers our children and their grandchildren will drink from, still waste what a hungry family down the street
could have used, still treat creation as something to use up rather than a gift entrusted to us.

Love of neighbor was never meant to stop at the neighbor's front door. It reaches into the air we breathe together, the soil
that feeds us all, the common home Pope Francis asked us to hear crying out. Caring for creation is simply love of neighbor
extended across time, to the great-grandchildren who are not yet born and cannot yet ask us for anything, and yet we know what they will need and what they have a right to expect from us.

Let us think for a moment, who is the stranger for us today. The neighbor without enough this month. The immigrant family down the street, uncertain and afraid. The parishioner sitting alone because grief has hollowed out their heart. The fellow student, or coworker that nobody checks in on. Christ is not distant from any of them, but in their fear and sorrow, in their hurt they may not feel Jesus’ presence near. He told us that whatever we do for the least of his, we do for him. This is where the Gospel moves from what Christ has done, to what his Church must become, and ultimately, to what is asked of each one of us personally. Christ loved first, without condition, going to the cross for people who had not yet loved him back. Because of that love, the Church exists as a body, a living breathing community, that goes looking for its wounded
members, that should not let a sister or brother who is struggling travel that road alone, a community that focuses on binding up wounds not just counting faults. And because the Church is that body, a body of real people, each one of us is
asked today to examine where love might have grown thin in our own heart.

Where in my life this week will love cost me something? Maybe it is a phone call to someone who needs to hear a kind
voice. Maybe it is a donation that actually pinches, but really helps. Maybe it is simply noticing the stranger I usually walk
past without really seeing. Love that stays in the mind is not yet love fully alive. Paul insists that love is what we owe, a debt
that is never fully paid, because there is always another neighbor in need of our love.

“Owe nothing to anyone, except to love one another.” Not a rule to be filed away, but a debt that follows us out these doors, into our homes, and our workplaces, into our text messages, and into our quiet decisions about who gets pieces of our time and who doesn’t.

It is Christ’s love that has gathered us here today, all in his name. Let us hopefully, by grace, leave here a little unmasked, even just a little, of any resistance in us to Christ’s love... and let us go put that love into our daily actions this coming week, as we reach out to the other.

And may you continue to discover how deeply and passionately you are loved by God, just the way you are.

Blessings,
Fr Tim]]>Fri, 28 Aug 2026 23:09:37 GMThttps://www.ourladyqueenofpeace.org/just-a-thoughtor-two/8302026"You duped me, O Lord, and I let myself be duped."

That is about as honest a prayer as you will find anywhere in Scripture. Jeremiah is not thanking God this morning; he is accusing him. He took this call to preach because God overpowered him, and now the word has cost him -- he is being mocked and laughed at, and the loss of friends he once had. And here is the part that gets me every time I read it. Jeremiah says he tried to stop. He tried to hold it in, to say nothing more in God's name, and he simply couldn’t do it. "There is in my heart as it were a burning fire, imprisoned in my bones. I grow weary holding it in, I cannot endure it."

That is what it looks like when the word of God actually takes root and springs to life in a person. It is not a comfortable feeling. It is a fire. And fire, once it catches, cannot be talked back into staying small, it grows… remember when Jesus compared the Reign of God to a mustard bush and how uncontrollably that grows, well that is how the Word of God is when it takes root in someone.

The psalmist knows this same fire, though it comes out as longing rather than complaint. "O God, you are my God, for you I long. My soul thirsts for you, my flesh pines for you, like a dry weary land without water." That is not polite religious language. That is the language of someone who has fallen in love and has no other words to speak than amazing truth.

And then St. Paul, writing to the Romans, tells us plainly what gets in the way of that kind of love. Conformity. He begs them not to be conformed to this age, but to allow themselves to be transformed by Christ, so that they can actually discern what God is asking of them. Paul knew, and we know, how easy it is to let the world's priorities quietly become our own, comfort over conviction, safety over sacrifice, until one day we look up and realize our zeal is waning.

Which brings us to the Gospel, and to Peter, who I have a real soft spot for, because Peter is me, Peter is all of us. Just last week, remember, Peter proclaimed Jesus the Christ, the Son of the living God, and Jesus praised him for it. This week, when Jesus starts talking about suffering, rejection, and the cross, Peter pulls Jesus aside and rebukes him. He wants the Messiah without a cross. He wants the glory without the Passion. And Jesus, in that same breath, calls him Satan…get behind me. Because whoever wants to save their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life for Jesus’ sake will find it.

That is the hardest sentence in the Gospel this week, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Discipleship costs us something. It always has. It is not a decoration we add to a comfortable life, like we see happening all around us. Sometimes it is a literal cross. Many people have died for their discipleship of Jesus Christ, and still do! More often, for most of us, it is figurative, but no less real. It is the courage to say the true thing when silence would be easier. It is choosing mercy and compassion when the world around us is choosing suspicion, fear and cruelty.

And I have to name where I see that cost being asked of us right now, because I would not be honest if I did not. Our country continues to turn away immigrants and refugees at our doors, families fleeing violence and desperation, and calls it strength. People of color and women are still struggling for real equality in this country, and everywhere we turn we see erasure instead of inclusion. Real discipleship this week means refusing to let that become normal to us. It means remembering that the God we thirst for in Psalm 63 is the same God who told us plainly, whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me. Carrying that cross is not glamorous. Most days it looks like showing up, speaking up, and refusing to look away when it would be so much easier to conform, to keep the conversation comfortable, instead of speaking the truth of the Gospel…love one another as I have loved you, feed the hungry, welcome the stranger, clothe the naked, house the homeless…that has become counter cultural. But it is the heart and soul of discipleship.

But I want to go back to the beginning of todays thoughts, because Jeremiah's story, and Peter's story, and our story, do not end in the fire alone. They end in relationship. Jeremiah, for all his complaining, never actually walked away from God. He kept preaching. The fire that exhausted him was also, somehow, what sustained him, because underneath the anger was a love he could not extinguish even if he tried. That is the paradox of real discipleship. It costs us, and it fills us, both at once.

And through every mile of that costly road, Jesus is not sending us out alone. He walks it with us. He told us plainly that whoever loses their life for his sake will find it, and that is not a casual comment, it is a profound promise. He comes with us into the valleys, into the hard conversations, the moments when standing up for the vulnerable makes us unpopular, and he does not leave us there. Even when we cannot feel him, even when the fire feels like exhaustion rather than comfort, he has not abandoned us. He never will.

So let that fire burn in you this week. Let it be uncomfortable if it needs to be. And trust, the way Jeremiah eventually had to trust, that the God who placed that fire in your heart is walking every step of this road right beside you. And never forget that you are deeply and passionately loved by God, just as you are!

Blessings,
Fr Tim]]>Sat, 22 Aug 2026 01:34:26 GMThttps://www.ourladyqueenofpeace.org/just-a-thoughtor-two/8232026In today’s Gospel, Jesus asks his disciples a question that he really only asked once, but it has been asked of every generation for the last 2,000 years. "Who do people say that the Son of Man is?" And then, more pointedly, "Who do you say that I am?"

Peter answers with some of the most profound words anyone in the Gospels speaks. "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God." And Jesus tells him that mere flesh and blood did not reveal this to him. It came from the Father. It came from somewhere deeper than reasoning, deeper than some intellectual understanding. It must have come from that quiet place within where God speaks, and if we are still enough, we can hear him. And Peter heard that still, small voice. And Isaiah gives us some insight into how God works that might be helpful to us. Shebna, the palace official, is stripped of his office and his royal clothes because he used his position to build himself up instead of serving the people entrusted to him. And God raises up Eliakim in his place, clothes him, and gives him the key of the House of David on his shoulder. Whatever he opens, no one can shut. Whatever he shuts, no one can open. That same language of “the key” returns in the Gospel when Jesus hands Peter the keys of the kingdom of heaven. The pattern is consistent from Isaiah to Matthew. Real authority is never about elevating yourself. It is about opening doors for people who have been locked out! And here is where I have to be honest with you, because I cannot preach on these readings and pretend I do not know what door locking looks like in our country right now. Families fleeing violence are being turned away at our border. Immigrants who have lived here for years, who have worked, paid taxes, and worshiped with us and raised their children among us, are being rounded up and deported without the mercy that the Gospel demands of us. And at the very same time, funding that keeps food on the tables of the poor and healthcare in reach of the sick is being cut, with out fanfare, in budget lines we are not supposed to read. The doors that should be open, for the stranger, for the hungry, for the sick are being shut. And I will not stand up here and pretend that does not grieve the heart of God.

So where is God in all of this. That is the honest question underneath headlines these months. And Saint Paul gives us an answer this morning that does not resolve the mystery, but does something better. It holds it. "Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God. How inscrutable are his judgments and how unsearchable his ways." Paul is not offering us a tidy explanation. He is telling us that God's ways run deeper than we can trace, deeper than any single news cycle, deeper than any single lifetime. The arc of God's justice does not bend on our timeline. It bends on his. And that is not an excuse for us to sit back. But rather, it is an invitation to trust that even now, even here, God's wisdom is at work guiding and guarding what belongs to him from the plunder of those who would take it for themselves.

But guiding and guarding through what? Through whom? Most often, through us. Through our voice raised for the voiceless. Through our hands that feed the hungry and welcome the stranger…at our food pantry, through Feast on the Streets meeting up with the unhoused and meeting their needs. God’s guiding and guarding through our feet that walk into rooms other people have decided to avoid or have decided should be locked. The still small voice that spoke to Elijah on the mountain is the same voice that spoke to Peter when he called Jesus the Christ. It is the voice that speaks to us, if we are quiet enough to hear it, telling us where the Kingdom needs our hands today.

And through it all, hear this promise, because it is the one thing I most want you to carry out of this church today: Jesus does not stand at a distance watching us struggle through the darkest valleys of our lives, or the darker chapters of our nation's story. He is with us. He promised that we would remain in him and he in us, and that promise does not depend on whether we feel his presence in a given moment. It does not depend on whether the headlines look hopeful this week. He is already there, in the valley, before we even know we need him, walking beside the immigrant family, standing beside the person deciding between groceries and medicine; present in every place where the doors have been shut, waiting for someone, with a key.

We may be those keys. Our hands, our voices, our willingness to see Christ in the stranger and to act.

So let us breathe deeply this morning, and rest for a moment in that Divine presence, dwelling within each and every single one of us.

The God who holds galaxies in balance holds you too. All things, he holds. All things, including you, including this weary, struggling world are held in his hands, and he has not let go. And, he never will let go. Amen.

Blessings,
​Fr Tim]]>Fri, 14 Aug 2026 19:22:19 GMThttps://www.ourladyqueenofpeace.org/just-a-thoughtor-two/8162026
In today’s Gospel we hear that Jesus withdraws to the region of Tyre and Sidon... foreign territory... Gentile territory, and a woman comes running after him. She is not one of his own. She is not part of the covenant. She is, in the language of that world, an outsider... a foreigner... a Canaanite.

And she will not stop shouting.

"Have pity on me, Lord, Son of David. My daughter is tormented by a demon."

And Jesus... says nothing.

Let’s sit in Jesus’ silence for a moment, because it is an uncomfortable silence. The disciples want her gone. "Send her away, she keeps calling out after us." She is a nuisance to them. She does not belong in their story. And when Jesus finally does speak, what he says is harder still, even more uncomfortable: "It is not right to take the food of the children and throw it to the dogs."

Friends, that is a slur. Let us not soften it. Jesus, in that moment, speaks the language of exclusion that his own people used against her people.

And she does not walk away. She does not even argue the insult. She faces him and takes the very words thrown at her and turns them into a door. "Please, Lord, even the dogs eat the scraps that fall from their master's table."

Frist she asks for mercy. Then she recognizes who Jeus is, “Lord, Son of David”…the Messiah of Isreal, then she recognizes that even the crumbs of his mercy are more than enough to heal her daughter.

And everything changes: "O woman, great is your faith. Let it be done for you as you wish."

That is the reversal at the heart of this Gospel. A woman with no standing, no claim, no place at the table, becomes the one who challenges Jesus, and teaches us, what the table is actually for.

Because look at what surrounds her story this Sunday in our Scripture. Isaiah promises that foreigners who love the Lord
will be brought to God's holy mountain, (foreigners on God’s holy mountain), and then God says, "my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples." Not some peoples. All peoples.

The psalm cries out, "let all the nations praise you." And St. Paul, writing to the Romans, tells the Gentiles plainly that the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable, and that God has mercy on all peoples.

“All”. That word will not let us go this weekend.

I cannot preach on this Gospel and pretend we are not living in a moment when the word "foreigner" is being used again, in our own country, the way it was used against that woman at the border of Tyre and Sidon. Immigrants and refugees are being spoken of today the way the disciples spoke of her... as a nuisance, as someone to be sent away, as someone who does not belong at the table. Families are being separated. People fleeing violence are being turned back. The stranger among us, whom Scripture again and again calls us to welcome, is being met not with hospitality but with open animosity and even cruelty.

I say this not to make a political point but because it is impossible to read Matthew 15 honestly and not hear our own headlines echoing inside it. The Church has never asked us to abandon prudence or the rule of law. But she insists that we look for and discover the face of Christ in the migrant, the refugee, the one who comes to us from outside our borders and outside our comfort zones. Isaiah's house of prayer for all peoples is not a slogan. It is a description of what God's own house actually is, from the very mouth of God’s own prophet.

But here is not where I want to leave you, because this Gospel does not end in confrontation. It ends in healing. The Canaanite Woman’s daughter is made whole. Jesus does not simply tolerate this woman...he is moved by her, he praises her, he holds her up as an example of the very faith he has been searching for. The outsider becomes the model disciple. The religious leaders of his time have missed who he is, his disciples are often bewildered as to his true identity, and here, this foreigner, a pagan, a woman, really sees him for who he really is, believes in him, and names him out loud for all to hear.

And that is good news for every single one of us because every one of us knows what it is to feel like when we are on the outside. We all have had reasons when we called out and it seemed like heaven gave us silence. A diagnosis. A broken relationship. A child, a sibling, a parent, or a friend, we cannot reach. A grief that will not lift. We have all stood, at some point, in the space of that woman, crying out into what feels like an empty void.

Here is the promise this Gospel leaves us. Jesus was never actually walking away from her. He was moving toward her the entire time...he chose to go into Gentile territory, into the very place she lived, before she ever called out his name. That is who God is. God does not wait for us to arrive at the right address. God comes to where we already are, and is with us!

So when you walk through your own dark valley, and it feels like the silence is winning, remember the Canaanite Woman. Do not stop calling out. And trust that the Lord who seemed silent for a moment was never absent for a moment. He is already there, before you even knew to ask. Remember “the Lord is with you” always!

Blessings,
Fr Tim]]>Sun, 09 Aug 2026 03:22:39 GMThttps://www.ourladyqueenofpeace.org/just-a-thoughtor-two/892026I want to take a look at our first reading today, because I think Elijah is having a very significant moment. Elijah is a man who has given his whole self for God. He has preached in the name of God, he has confronted the powerful, he has stood his ground against political leaders when standing his ground was genuinely dangerous. And now he is hiding in a cave on a mountain, exhausted and afraid, waiting for God to show up and make it clear as to what God wants him to do next. And God does show up, but not in any of the ways Elijah expects. First comes a wind so fierce it splits mountains and shatters rocks. God was not in the wind. Then there was an earthquake. God was not in the earthquake. Then fire…God was not in the fire. And then, after all of that, a tiny whispering sound. A still, small voice. And that is where Elijah finds God.
I think many of us feel as though we are in that cave right now.

We are living through a moment in this country that feels like sustained wind, earthquake, and fire all at once. The political noise is deafening, the chaos is destabilizing. The divisions are deep and painful. There are policies being pursued right now that are causing real harm to real people: to families living in poverty who cannot stretch a paycheck to cover rent and groceries both, to people of color who continue to carry the weight of systems that were never designed to see them fully, to women whose dignity and autonomy are still subject to political negotiation, to immigrants and refugees who came here seeking safety and found fear and discrimination instead. These are not abstractions. These are the people God has placed in our path. Many of them are in this church. And in the middle of all that noise, God says: I am not in the earthquake. I am not in the fire. Listen for the whisper.

That is not a call to retreat from the hard work of justice. It is a call to make sure we are rooted in something that the storm cannot blow away, because the storm is real and it is not going away anytime soon, and if all we have is outrage, eventually the outrage runs out. But if we are rooted in the God who speaks in the still small voice, we have something that does not run out.

Which brings us to Peter...soaking wet and embarrassed, getting back into the boat. I love this story, and I love Peter, because Peter is us. The disciples are out on the water in the middle of the night, the wind is against them, and they are terrified. And then Jesus comes walking toward them on the water and they think he is a ghost, which honestly I think is a reasonable response given the circumstances. And Jesus says to them, take courage, it is I, do not be afraid. And Peter, in his desire to please Jesus, says: Lord, if it is really you, tell me to come to you on the water. Now think about that for a second. The other disciples are gripping the sides of the boat. Peter is the one who says, Lord, call me out onto the water. There is something genuinely beautiful about the real faith displayed in that impulse. He wants to go where Jesus is, even if where Jesus is happens to be the middle of a stormy sea in the dark.

And Jesus says, come. And Peter gets out of the boat. And he actually walks on the water. For a moment, Peter is doing something that defies every reasonable expectation. Because his eyes are on Jesus. Then he notices the wind. He looks away. And he sinks. Jesus reaches out immediately and catches him, and says, O you of little faith, why did you doubt? And I want to be careful here because I think this line is sometimes preached in a way that makes Peter feel small and makes us feel guilty every time we struggle. That is not what I hear in it. What I hear is something closer to tenderness. Why did you doubt? Not as accusation. As an honest question. You were doing it, Peter. You were walking on the water…then what happened? Because here is the truth: Peter didn’t sink because he lacked faith entirely. He sank because he shifted his gaze from Jesus to the storm. He sank because the wind was real and loud and frightening, and for a moment it was bigger in his eyes than the One who had called him out onto the water. I think that is the spiritual challenge of this particular moment in our national life. The wind is howling. The waves are real and crashing on our shores. The suffering of those pushed to the margins of our society is real, and it should grieve us, and it does grieve us. Paul in the second reading describes a grief that is almost unbearable, a sorrow and constant anguish of heart for people he loves who are struggling. Paul knows what it is to be broken open by the suffering of others. And he does not dismiss that grief. He carries it. But he carries it in Christ.

So the question I hear the Gospel putting to us today is…where are our eyes focused?
Because if our eyes are fixed on the storm alone, we will despair. The problems are too large, the forces arrayed against the poor and the marginalized are too powerful, the political dysfunction is too entrenched, and despair starts to feel like the only honest response. But despair is not what Jesus calls us to. Not because the suffering is not real, but because the storm does not have the last word. We are not a people of despair, we are a people of hope!

Jesus has the last word. And Jesus says come.

Come out onto the water. Come toward me. Come into the places where the comfortable will not go, to where the powerful have turned their backs to, where women and people of color and immigrants and the poor are told their lives matter less. Come there. I will be there. Keep your eyes on me.

And when we sink, and there will be moments when we sink, Jesus will do the same thing he did for Peter. Immediately, he stretched out his hand and caught him. There is no hesitation in God's mercy. There is no delay while Jesus decides whether or not Peter deserves to be rescued. He just catches him. Jesus will catch us.

The psalm today gives us language for what we are asking God to do. "Lord, let us see your kindness, and grant us your salvation. And justice and peace shall kiss." That is a beautiful image. Not justice in place of peace, not peace as a cover for injustice, but justice and peace together, inseparable, embracing one another. That is the world God is building, God’s Reign. That is the world we are called to work toward, even on the days when the wind is howling.

So this week, when the noise gets loud, find the whisper. When the waves rise, fix your eyes on Jesus. And when someone around you is sinking, be the first one who reaches out a hand. Because that is exactly what Jesus would do.

And remember Jesus’ words…“Take courage. It is I. Do not be afraid.”
​
Blessings,
Fr Tim]]>