10th Sunday in Ordinary Time

So often when I am reflecting on the readings in the Lectionary, I find a phrase I never focused on before or that jumps out at me.  It happened to me today as I considered the readings for this Sunday, the 10^th Sunday year B in Ordinary time.  The phrase was in the second reading from St Paul’s 2^nd Letter to the Corinthians, Chapter 4 verse 13.  St Paul says, “we have the same spirit of faith, according to what is written, I believed, therefore I spoke, we too believe and therefore speak…”. 

There are a myriad of ways to consider this phrase.  If we believe, are we compelled to speak?   What if we believe and don’t speak?  Or, what if we speak without believing?   There seems to be an assumption in here that whatever we speak will be the truth.  What if we don’t speak the truth?  And, finally, what if we don’t share that same spirit of faith? 

Some of these questions are answered in today’s first and second readings with very graphic examples.  In the first reading from Genesis 3: 9 – 15, the serpent tricked Eve with a lie.  God’s punishment was to ban the serpent “from all the animals and from all the wild creatures; on your belly shall you crawl,

and dirt shall you eat all the days of your life.”  In today’s gospel, Mark 3:20-35, the scribes spoke without believing.  They accused Jesus of being “possessed by Beelzebul." Jesus quickly refuted their claim.  Jesus’ own family spoke without believing accusing him of “being out of his mind.”  In these readings, only Jesus spoke because he believed. 

There are many risks for people who actually speak what they believe.  For the prophets, John the Baptist, Jesus, the Apostles and many faithful Christians, speaking up for what they believed lead to their martyrdom.  Most of us fall into the category of believing and not speaking. Given what usually happens to people who believe and speak, this stance is understandable. 

While this sounds very bleak, there is an element of good news.   Jesus told his followers, the scribes, his family and he tells us that “all sins and all blasphemies that people utter will be forgiven them.”  There is, however, one unforgivable sin and that is blaspheme against the Holy Spirit: “whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never have forgiveness but is guilty of an everlasting sin.”  The Catechism of the Catholic Church, Paragraph 1864, defines blaspheme against the Holy Spirit as the deliberate refusal “to accept [God’s] mercy by repenting,” rejecting “forgiveness of sins” and rejecting “the salvation offered by the Holy Spirit.”

God our Father,

we experience within us and around us

the ongoing struggle between good and evil.

Make us recognize the evil we have done,

give us faith in your immeasurable mercy

and bring us the joy of your pardon,

for which your Son Jesus paid with his life.

Make us rise again in him,

become free again through him,

and overcome with him all evil

in ourselves and in our world.

We ask this through Christ our Lord.

Amen.

Absent From Our Own Lives.

St. Augustine, in a famous prayer after his conversion, expresses this well: "Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved! You were within me, but I was outside and it was there that I searched for you. In my unloveliness I plunged into the lovely things which you created. You were with me, but I was not with you." (Confessions, Book 7).

''You were within me, but I was outside." Few phrases more accurately describe how we relate to God, life, love, and community than does that line from Augustine. We can have so rich a life and yet be so deeply restless; it's why we all generally look everywhere else rather than to our own actual lives for love and delight; and it's why we are perennially so deeply restless.

This restlessness cannot be stilled by a journey outward. It's inward that we need to go. Inside of our own actual lives, beyond our restless yearnings and fantasies, God, love, community, meaning, timeless significance and everything else that we search for, are already there.

~ Ron Rolheiser

Hope

Staying in the Present

"Having spent the better part of my life trying either to relive the past or experience the future before it arrives, I have come to believe that in between these two extremes is peace." ~ Anonymous

How hard it, often seems, to quiet our minds so we can experience the present. We know that we're missing God's message now when we're obsessively caught in thoughts of another time. But too often we allow them to plague us anyway.

We're not failures if we need to repeatedly remind ourselves to be quiet, but we may think we are. It might be well for each of us to observe a small child who is learning to walk. She stumbles and falls and tries again and again, often with peals of laughter.

We, too, are children trying to master a new skill. That we didn't learn how to quiet our mind in earlier years is unimportant. We are here, now, and the opportunity to practice this skill, will present itself many times today. And we will become proficient at knowing peace with practice.

Today I'll willingly quiet my mind rather than let my thoughts carry me astray.

~ In God’s Care by Karen Casey

God Won't Ask

God won't ask the square footage of your house,

but He'll ask how many people you welcomed into your home.

God won't ask about the clothes you had in your closet,
but He'll ask how many you helped to clothe.

God won't ask about your social status;
He will ask what kind of class you displayed.

God won't ask how many material possession you had,
but He'll ask if they dictated your life.

God won't ask what your highest salary was,
but He'll ask if you compromised your character to obtain it.

God won't ask how much overtime you worked,
but He'll ask if your overtime work was for yourself or for your family.

God won't ask how many promotions you received,
but He'll ask how you promoted others.

God won't ask what your job title was,
but He'll ask if you performed your job to the best of your ability.

God won't ask what you did to help yourself,
but He'll ask what you did to help others.

God won't ask how many friends you had,
but He'll ask how many people to whom you were a friend.

God won't ask what you did to protect your rights,
but He'll ask what you did to protect the rights of others.

God won't ask in what neighborhood you lived,
but He'll ask how you treated your neighbor​.

Does God Show Through You?

A little girl, on the way home from church, turned to her mother and said, "Mommy, the Preacher's sermon this morning confused me."

The mother said, "Oh! Why is that?"

The girl replied, "Well, he said that God is bigger than we are. Is that true?"

"Yes, that's true," the mother replied.

"He also said that God lives within us. Is that true, too?"

Again the mother replied, "Yes."

"Well," said the girl. "If God is bigger than us and He lives in us, wouldn't He show through?

Dandelions

A man who took great pride in his lawn found himself with a large crop of dandelions. He tried every method he knew to get rid of them. Still they plagued him.

Finally, he wrote the Department of Agriculture. He enumerated all the things he had tried and closed with the question: “What shall I do now?”

In due course the reply came: “We suggest you learn to love them.”

“… accept the things we cannot change…”