Reflection on the 20th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Well, we have Jeremiah down at the bottom of a well, Paul exhorting us that we haven’t shed any blood yet in our effort to do God’s will, and Jesus telling us He brings not peace but division. Yes, this is our moment, this is the time in which we live.

Jeremiah wasn’t, as I remember, an easy man, and I imagine he railed against his imprisonment. And he was released. The psalmist tells us the Lord heard his cry and put a song in his mouth. Perhaps Jeremiah sang down in his cistern. Enslaved Africans sang when they were brought here in chains. They gave us great music. “Sweet Honey in the Rock” made music of Ella Baker’s cry that we who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes. I thought about just playing that as my homily. It’s the point Paul is making, that we cannot rest while God’s work is there to be done. But I realized I did have a point I wanted to make. I wanted to talk – so no music in lieu of a homily. 

What does Jesus mean about bringing division? When I was little, just beginning to read the paper, Ann Landers wrote that you should never talk about religion or politics at the table. We talked about religion and politics all the time, and I asked my father. He said, well, what else would you talk about?

Loretto is blessed in Charles Nerinx’s admonition to have one heart, one soul, one mind. But in fact we talk about big ideas, and we disagree, frequently, among ourselves, with pastors and bishops and the Vatican, and with government. We’ve had enormous moments of grace at several Assemblies where we argued and tested with straw ballots and listened with all our hearts and souls and minds and found pathways to agreement. We don’t like being in opposition, maybe because we are women. We don’t like feelings of anger and the sense of hardening our hearts against one another. Nonetheless, we talk. We speak the truth as best we know it, and in those moments of grace we have been able to listen and be modified. I think that is some of what Jesus means – not peace at any price but a struggle for the truth.

It took four lifetimes, 250 years, for Americans to hear the cry for freedom in the songs of enslaved people here in the United States. It is taking lifetimes for us to hear the cry of the earth, the cry of the poor, the cry of victims of our capitalist system. Archbishop Wester said about nuclear war that it’s not a topic people want to talk about. But we have to talk. Ann Landers was wrong. We have to say where we stand even as we strive to bridge the divide, mend the gap is what Reverend Barber says. We have to try a lot of different ways to get our families and our neighbors and those people on the other side of the world to listen. That’s exactly why we stand and hold signs in Lebanon. 

And we have to listen. Sometimes it seems like listening is the work that is going to draw blood from our pores, making the effort to try to hear the other point of view, to hear the other person, to hear their cry.