| Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
First Reading: Ezekiel 2:2-5
Responsorial Psalm: Psalms 123:1-2, 2, 3-4
Second Reading: Second Corinthians 12:7-10
Gospel: First Reading: Amos 7:12-15
Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
First Reading: Amos 7:12-15
Responsorial Psalm: Psalms 85:9-10, 11-12, 13-14
Second Reading: Ephesians 1:3-14 or 1:3-10
Gospel: Mark 6:7-13
God sends us. God sends us to be prophets. Prophecy does not mean foretelling of the future. This is the job of seers. Prophecy comes from two words meaning to “speak out”. God sends us, all of the baptized, to speak out a message of liberation, justice and nonviolence.
(14th Sunday)
Ask any actor – no crowd is harder to play to than a crowd that doesn’t clap, doesn’t laugh, is nonresponsive. Or ask a speaker, how difficult it is to engage an audience that is apathetic and bored. Or any preacher would tell you how uncomfortable it is trying to reach a congregation that is distracted or looking down.
Jesus today meets up with the most nonreceptive crowd in his ministry. And who were they? Those that know him best. The people in his own home town. He could not find faith there, because they know his relatives and knew him growing up.
In the first reading as well God sends the prophet Ezekial to a nation who God knew would be heard of heart, stubborn and rebellious. Nonetheless, Ezekial was commissioned to go speak out to them, and, at least, they would have known there was a prophet in their midst.
Oftentimes our children, when they reach adolescence, experience what it’s like needing to speak with their own voice and their parents not giving them the freedom to experience the maturity that is happening. Parents’ expectations keep them the child parents wish them to remain. The familiarity comes stifling instead of liberating, and children need to leave home.
Nor did God send the powerful or the most persuasive to do the speaking. Paul speaks in the second reading of his weakness.
(15th Sunday)
Amos decribes himself in the first reading as a very simple tender of fig trees. And in the Gospel Jesus sends his followers two by two, in all simplicity, with barely the clothes on their backs, to speak out about the kingdom. Prophecy seldom visits the most eloquent or the most highly visible people in the community. Paul himself had a speech impediment. It is in our simplicity that we are sent. The power, the eloquence, the status is not ours. Our simplicity makes it clear that the message has a higher power.
Though we are not sent afar, we are sent to the toughest of audiences. We are sent to our families, our neighborhoods, our workplace, where we are well known to all. It will be in the simple changes that our message will be heard. In an attitude of kindness. In practices of fairness. In tolerance of one another. In working tirelessly to subtly influence or quietly stand against those systems in our own experience where there are oppression, or injustice, or violence.
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