|
Sts. Joseph & Paul Catholic Church |
Homily Archives | |
 |
13th
Sunday in Ordinary Time – Cycle B
No. 3
Wouldn’t it be great if life would always give us those happy, joyful moments? It is in these moments that we can easily believe in a loving God. These happy moments come with the birth of a child, the graduation from high school or a great vacation. We love those moments, and we want to hold onto them forever and ever. But life isn’t always a bundle of joy; as many of us well know, life can be very difficult. These difficult times come with the death of a loved one, the development of a sickness, with financial worry and with sin. And, as hard as we might try to avoid these dark times and get rid of them, we can’t. Instead, we complain about them, get angry at them, and avoid them, but the suffering does not go away. The question becomes, what are we to do with these difficult moments of life? How are we to get through them? The thing that we can best do in these situations is to learn from them. We need to allow suffering and hardship to be our teachers and help us come to experience life in a new way. In March of this year, I accompanied a group of 20 on a Hurricane Relief Trip to Biloxi, Mississippi. I had never seen anything like the devastation left in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. I saw concrete bridges that had collapsed, total neighborhoods where houses were washed off their foundations and gone, and once grand beachfront hotels that had huge wholes knocked in them from the power of the storm surge. And, this horrific devastation went on for miles and miles. One evening our group of volunteers was treated to an appreciation dinner hosted by the Disaster Relief Team of the Diocese of Biloxi. After dinner, they gathered us in the school gym to listen to a speaker by the name of Jason Green.
Jason was a mortician, who rode out the storm and was
one of the first responders to the Biloxi area. Jason was a powerful
witness to the human tragedy of this storm and how he managed to get
through it. He told a story of how for three weeks straight, he worked to
care for some 290 dead persons who were brought to a make-shift mortuary.
For three weeks he did not go home, bathe or change his clothes. For three
weeks he stayed day and night with the dead, making sure that they were
treated with human dignity. For three weeks, he slept beside the
shrimp tractor-trailer container that they were able to get to keep the
bodies refrigerated until they could be properly buried.
The morgue was set up beside a Catholic church, and every night he would light one of those tin tea-light candles that he found in the church. He would put the candle on the back of the truck. He said that he didn’t light the candles for the dead, but he lit them for himself. He said that he needed to keep himself focused on his faith. A faith that he had desperately come to depend upon. Burning these candles reminded him that he had faith and that his faith would see him through this horrible human tragedy. In the Gospel, Jesus works two miracles. He heals the daughter of Jairus and the women who has suffered for 12 years with a hemorrhage. Both of these individuals placed all of their faith in Jesus and the belief that he could heal and bring about new life from very desperate human situations. What Jesus did was incredible, but maybe, just maybe, the real miracle is the fact that they already had faith. Their faith was strong and what Jesus did was ignite their faith and strengthen their belief in God’s power. It would be great if we could always stay in the happy moments of life. But that’s not how life is. There are going to be bumpy times when we’re tossed around. And the question is: how will we respond? Are we just going to throw our hands up in the air and walk away? Are we going to be angry and stuck in a rut with it all? What we must come to believe is that we already have faith. A faith given to us at our baptism. This faith gives us the strength to go to Jesus, reach out and touch him and find healing. With this faith, we could also trust that Jesus would be willing to come to us and say “Talitha koun” -- "I say to you arise; your faith has healed healed you." What a joyous miracle.
sdrose@bellsouth.net
|
