In the midst of the Black Lives Matter protests the weight of history continues to bear down upon us and this week we observe memorials of the bombings and destruction of the cities of Hiroshima (Thursday) and Nagasaki (Sunday). We find ourselves in the midst of a pandemic with no real national leadership or plan, over 150 thousand Americans have died, hundreds of thousands have or have had the coronavirus. We are living in scary and uncharted times. And in the midst of these scary and uncharted times our God walks with us and promises that nothing, no thing can separate us from God’s deep and passionate love for each and everyone of us.

In the beautiful first reading from the prophet Isaiah we hear the call from God to come to the water, to receive grain and eat without paying — without cost we shall eat well; we are called to come and listen, that we may have life! All who hunger and thirst are invited, such generosity...an overflowing of abundance of God’s desire that our needs be met because we are God’s beloved!

We encounter this generosity again in the Gospel, known as “The Feeding of the Five Thousand”, but that is a misnomer, as it clearly states in the last line that only the men numbered five thousand. The women and the children were not included among the five thousand. The theologian Megan McKenna posits that the real number was much greater. If the majority of the five thousand men were there with their families, she says the number would quickly soar past fifteen thousand and maybe even twenty thousand! Now if we thought the feeding of the five thousand was astonishing, the feeding of the twenty thousand is “mind blowing”! Again, showing forth the lavishness of God’s care and love for us, for all of us, of every color, every race, every ethnicity, every gender, every orientation, every ability, every socioeconomic class, EVERYONE!

And it is our duty as “the beloved” to carry this message to the ends of the earth, not just with our words but with our actions. We must stand up against all forms of racism and bigotry. We must vocally call it out for what it is whenever and wherever we see it. Like the song says “change is gonna come” but only if, as John Lewis said, only if we get into some “good trouble”.

And so I close with John Lewis’ final words “So I say to you, walk with the wind, brothers and sisters, and let the spirit of peace and the power of everlasting love be your guide.”

Blessings,
Fr Tim

In today’s Gospel Jesus compares the Reign of God to an immense treasure…a pearl of great price. Who among us has not dreamt of finding such a treasure? Imagine the impact it would have upon your life. How would you use it…what would you do differently within your life? That is exactly what Jesus is challenging us to do…to think of how different our lives would be if we “lived” in the Reign of God…all the time!

Usually when we think of finding a treasure we immediately think of financial gain and how that would change our lives and the lives of our family. But in this case we are challenged to think about how our lives would change from the point of view of how we love one another, how we care for each other…how we live the Gospel in our day to day lives. Challenging systemic racism and calling it out where we see it in public policies and practices, in our institutions and in individual interactions is living the Gospel! Finding and falling in love with the Reign of God is the whole point of the parables we hear today.

Pedro Arrupe, SJ, the former Superior General of the Jesuits, once wrote: “Nothing is more practical than finding God, that is, than falling in love in a quite absolute way. What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will affect everything. It will decide what will get you out of bed in the morning, what you will do with your evenings, how you will spend your weekends, what you read, who you know, what breaks your heart and what amazes you with joy and gratitude. Fall in love, stay in love and it will decide everything."

What is at the center of my life…what motivates what I read, what gets me out of bed in the morning? How might my life be different if I were totally and completely in love with the Reign of God; if building up the Reign of God, loving all my sisters and brothers as Jesus loves me, came first before everything else?

Blessings,
Fr Tim

Once again this week Jesus speaks to us in parables… multifaceted gems that once tumbled around in our hearts and ruminated, upon yield, unbelievable insights into the Reign of God. While the disciples certainly preferred straightforward answers, Jesus obviously preferred parables. Of the comparisons of the reign of God to a field, a mustard seed and the leaven in bread, I have always liked the comparison of the mustard seed and the Reign of God. This tiny, tiny little seed grows into a great bush…so large that the birds of the air make their nests in it. If you take the parable at its face value, it all seems quite lovely. However there is a dark side that farmers know well: the mustard bush is an invasive plant. It grows wildly and rapidly, quickly overtaking a garden, ruining the plants that had been planted with care and reducing their yield, if not completely choking them out. Mustard bushes are uncontrollable and rapidly spread across a farm if not quickly uprooted before going to seed. Surely this reality was not lost on Jesus…nor on those who heard him tell the parable. It seems that perhaps Jesus is presenting an image of the expansion of the Reign of God as something uncontrollable, invasive and fast growing! Looking through the lens of this image…the Reign of God is not something that can be domesticated or controlled…by its very nature it grows uncontrollably and bursts forth offering refuge. I believe that most of us, though, would prefer something that we could contain and control…domesticate!

But the truth is that the Reign of God is just that: ”God’s Reign”; not ours. We are part of it by our baptism and we are called to help water it so that it continues to grow and “invade” every crevice and furrow of this planet…we don’t get to tame it. Two thousand years ago Jesus’ vision of the bursting forth of the Reign of God was nothing less than radical ….and it still is today. We are called to be part of that radical vision…to feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, visit the sick and imprisoned…to love one another as Christ loves us and to reach out and to care for “the other.” To proclaim the deep and passionate love of God for all peoples, of all races and all ethnicities…a world of racial justice and an end to white privilege, an end to a world where a person of one color is valued over a person of another color or ethnicity! And wasn’t it just this radical vision of the reign of God -- where every person was valued equally -- that Jesus preached that got him crucified?

As his disciple just how radical of a life am I willing live? In a world that proclaims a “gospel of personal prosperity” with tax cuts for the rich at the cost of healthcare cuts for the poor, to what lengths am I willing to go in building up this radical vision of the Reign of God that Jesus preached? What concrete action can I take today to “water” the Reign of God? Where and how do I see the Reign of God bursting forth in imaginative and radical ways…such as the “Black Lives Matter Movement”. How can I support it and join in? How can I work to bring about racial justice and end white privilege, that is so antithetical to the most basic message of the Gospel of Jesus Christ?

Blessings,
Fr Tim

In today’s Gospel Jesus once again instructs the crowds with a parable, about a sower and the seed. But this parable raises as many questions as it seems to have answers. Ones such as, who sows costly seeds among the weeds and the thorns, and why? The good farmer, the successful farmer, sows seeds on good rich soil that has been prepared, fertilized and tilled and yields a rich and abundant harvest! So why does Jesus tell the parable of the farmer who scatters seeds on bad soil, indiscriminately, throwing it among the weeds and the thorns…why sow it there? What is his point?

Parables are meant to get us thinking…just as we think we understand the point of the story, upon further reflection another layer is revealed. Like a fine gemstone, as we mull it over and turn it around in our minds, we discover more and more facets of the story that at first glance may not have been so obvious. That is the amazing quality of the parable. In this parable, some interpret the sower as God and the indiscriminate sowing of the seeds as an example of God’s all-inclusive love for all peoples. The seed sown is “the Word” offered to everyone, regardless of the potential that they will accept it and allow it to grow within them…or not. Perhaps God sees possibilities of growth and abundant harvest and transformation amongst the thorns and rocky soil that we cannot even yet imagine! It seems to me that “the Word” being sown today is “the Word of Justice”, sown in the thorns and rocky ground of racism and bigotry. And “the Word” is crying out for racial justice in the midst of unjust structures that systematically favor one race over another: white privilege. And God’s “Word” will take root and grow, as we have seen it do in the hundreds of thousands of the Black Lives Matter protesters across this country and around the globe.

For Isaiah told us that God said “so shall my word be that goes forth from my mouth; my word shall not return to me void, but shall do my will, achieving the end for which I sent it.” That “end” is justice and equality for all God’s children! What are the “thorny or rocky” parts of my life where the seeds of the Gospel have yet to yield an abundant harvest? Where in the world is the rocky soil on which God has sown seed from which is springing new growth at this moment that both surprises and delights? Where am I being called to tend to “the Word” that needs to be cultivated and nurtured in the rocky and thorny world around me?

Blessings,
Fr Tim

Today’s Gospel invites us to “rest in Jesus”…to turn our burdens over to Jesus and allow the power of the Spirit, dwelling within us, to empower us to push on…ever forward…knowing that we do so not alone but with the presence of the very one who created us and loved us into being. Jesus does not dismiss the burdens of life. On the contrary, Jesus recognizes just how heavy they are and in the midst of the struggles of our lives he offers to be with us and help us. We are not asked to set our burdens down at the door of the church as we enter…but rather we are invited to bring them to the altar and place them side by side with the bread and wine which we offer to be blessed and broken, transformed and shared. This Jesus, the Christ, knows first hand of our human burdens and understands our suffering….we need not fear that our God does not understand, or does not care…the message of all of Jesus’ preaching and teaching was just the opposite: Our God knows us and deeply and passionately loves us and walks with us in the midst of our sufferings…Our God weeps with us when we weep and suffers with us when we suffer. Our God is out there with all the protesters demanding racial justice, crying out “my children’s Black Lives Matter”! And as the Body of Christ, we are invited to reach out to others whose burdens and pain overwhelm them…to be the compassion of Christ to them…to help carry their burdens and to walk with them in the midst of their suffering demanding racial justice for them and for all who suffer discrimination, racism and bigotry! All God’s children, all are made in the image and likeness of God, female and male, in God’s image!

Karen , Amy, John, Tim, White privilege (freedom, honored, favored) until that day when we who are white are willing to come to terms with our white privilege, our freedom, our honored status, our favored status, to sit in the discomfort of it and to own it and accept the social devastation and genocide that it has caused there will be NO RACIAL JUSTICE! News Flash, white people, take off our “white privilege blinders” that blind us to the TRUTH that being white in America, South America and Europe gives us a special status that non-white people do NOT get to enjoy as freely as we do! There are people who are shot for sleeping while black, driving while black, jogging while black, protesting while black, and I want to remind you all of our First Amendment rights! And so, I would like to point out that the “framers of the Constitution” put first the right to protest the government before the right to bear arms!

It’s all just too much…I cannot sit back, as a disciple of Jesus Christ, and remain silent, we have a president who is bent on dividing us as a nation on issues of racial equality, income inequality, lack of access to basic healthcare and quality education for our children, food programs that provide the most basic human needs as outlined in the Catholic Catechism! These are basic human needs that governments are required to provide according to the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church and repeated over and over again by our present Pope, Pope Francis. It is plain and simply the Gospel of Jesus Christ put into action! It is all there -- use your “Gospel lenses” to look at the situation and then make a decision…but really and truly, honestly, use your “”Gospel lenses” and apply them to what is happening today in our country, and ask yourself, that horrible, life-changing, re-centering question that no one really wants to HONESTLY ask themselves…”what would Jesus do” in the midst of the “Black Lives Matter” movement?

Welcoming the stranger, the immigrant, the refugee, the one who is “other” from me, is an authentic living out of our discipleship. It incarnates -- fancy word for “makes flesh” -- the Gospel in the midst of our community. Ironically in our reaching out to others, often our burdens are lightened, our wounds begin to heal and we become more and more the living Body of Christ in all of its diversity, in all of its colors, sizes and shapes.

Do I have burdens or old wounds that I am holding on to and not giving over to Jesus, that getting rid of might allow me to be more available to my sisters and brothers of color? Whose burden or pain am I being called to help carry right NOW?...How might I do that?

Blessings,
Fr Tim