Offer the Gift June 30

“Offer the gift.” Matthew 8:4

Let us pray: God, help us to protect the New Jerusalem where your Son dwells from all attacks by the temptation to sin or shirk our Christian duty to act in response to your love. Give us the faith to turn to you for help when we are under siege as well as when we are too comfortable.

Jesus, pour out your unconditional love on us when we hand our problems over to you through obedience in faith. Do not allow us to test you but to trust you.

Holy Spirit, help us to listen to what Jesus expects of us. Give us the strength to respond in love, in word and in deed to the mission Christ sends us forth to accomplish. Amen.

Study

http://www.usccb.org/nab/063006.shtml

In today’s readings, we see the social order attacked by external forces and internal disease and a challenge to act laid before our conscience.

In the reading from the Hebrew Bible, political opponents and military forces advance against Jerusalem, surround the city and attack it. The people in the city suffer famine and the leaders flee only to be captured, killed or taken prisoner. The poor are spared and left behind to work in the vineyards and farms.

In the Good News, the leper in Jesus’ social order is an outcast from society. He turns to Jesus with love and respect and trust. Faith like this opens the path to the cure provided by the boundless and unconditional love of Jesus. Jesus reaches back to the leper. Once cleansed, Jesus sends the leper out on a mission of action and purification that restores him back into community. The Leper exhibits his faith in Jesus so Jesus chooses to act and then asks the leper to act.

We are assaulted physically, mentally, emotionally and socially every day that we encounter evil or blind indifference in ourselves, in our family, in our community, in the Church, in our nation and in the world.

What has you under siege? Stress from work? Flood damage? Health problems? Family issues? Problems at work or at school? For what do we hunger and starve? Can we stand in solidarity with the poor, left behind to tend to the land in servitude?

How do we see ourselves as the leper in today’s Good News? Is there something that is eating away at your physical body or your mental sharpness or keeping you from fully experiencing the joy of Christian community? Where can we turn for purification? How can we welcome Jesus into our lives? How can stop from fleeing the mission Jesus is asking us to undertake?

In St. Therese's writings on The Little Way, we learn that all are called to holiness at all times including when we are the proverbial lepers. The path to such holiness (piety) requires pruning, stripping oneself to put off the old ways and put on the new person in Christ. Dorothy Day wrote of St. Therese: “She knew that she had ‘to die in order to live’ and that every wound meant a killing of the ego.” She was aiming for that perfection in which she would say with St. Paul, “It is now no longer I that live, but Christ lives in me.”

Human nature is transfigured once the choice is made to respond with faith like the leper or St. Therese – “Be it done to me according to your Word” – and follow Jesus. It is a choice that must be remade each day in order to respond to grace, to grow into the new person described in the Scriptures.Today’s readings and St. Therese teach us the necessity of knowing and loving God first, and then ‘all these things shall be added unto you.’ All these happy loves of physical health, the necessities of life like food, clothing and shelter, union with the community of family, friends, and those we love from faith and action.

Action

In his homily last week, Bishop Thomas Gumbleton had a message of action for the congregation in Detroit as well as for us. “Each one of us is called to become that new creation, to grow into the fullness of who we are as disciples of Jesus, who live with Jesus within us. Each of us is called to carry on his work. Jesus is in our midst. That’s what we hear so powerfully in the Gospel -- that Jesus is in our midst, most of all because Jesus lives within each one of us. “Let us renew our own commitment to grow as a disciple of Jesus, to grow more fully into him, to carry on his work.”

Bishop Gumbleton challenged his congregation and us “to stand up as Jesus did” with the leper and be the one who reaches out to the outcast and unloved. As we do that, what Jesus did long ago to that leper will begin to happen within our community more and more. The outcasts will be restored to communion with the community, reconciliation and purification will come about, and our church will grow in love as we accept the mission that Christ’s unconditional love sends us out to accomplish.

How will you meet that challenge next week?