19th Sunday Year A
19th Sunday of Ordinary Time – God is in the gentle breeze
Where do we find God? Where do we hear Him or listen for Him? Even now in our half-empty and hymn-free churches in lives that feel they have been put on hold?
The Church is under pressure; it is under challenge. There are people with doubts; people moving away deliberately and others sidling off, hoping that nobody notices they are going. There are people who are afraid to say out loud or in public – “I believe in God, the Father Almighty.” There are people who feel that there are too many demands being made of us as ‘believers’ and that the better choice is to ditch the confines of faith and embrace the freedoms of the modern society.
Does this describe the Church or the world for you? Does this sound familiar? Well – I think it should because there are certainly lots of those elements that I see and hear and encounter in my daily life. Pick up any newspaper or switch on any television and you will see the same. The church is wrong for arguing against abortion or euthanasia; it is wrong for seeking to support adopting to heterosexual couples. The church is out of step with society and society seems to be more and more about the individual and the rights of the individual.
The world should be about freedom; personal-betterment; the meeting of MY wants and MY needs. If we look after ourselves as individuals then surely the world will be a better place?
But this description is not just about where we are at right now in the Church today. This also describes how the Church, the Chosen People, were in both the time of Elijah and in the time of Mathew.
For Elijah, the people were going through one of their many life and faith swerves away from God and looking to worship any sort of tomfoolery and trickery that caught their fancy or the fancy of Queen Jezabel.
Elijah had to stand up and fight fire with fire, trickery and illusions with God’s support in very visible and in-your-face-ways. But this was not what God was about. He was not some street corner illusionist waiting for the crowd to go – OOO or AAAHH or WOW!
Has anyone been to Chester at the weekend and ended up around by the Disney shop. It is just by the famous clock.
On that corner or bend between Disney and Lush – the smelly soap shop – you will sometimes come across street preachers.
How often have you stopped and listened to them? Or are you one of the many – myself included at times – who develops an immediate anti-charge to them and feel almost forced to swerve away from them and to lower your eyes from them. In fact, to avoid any and all contact, just in case. Just in case – what?
It doesn’t seem to matter what the weather is or how many people there are –they stand there and preach in a loud voice, their understanding of the message of God. They will sometimes engage in one-to-one debates with individual and argue at great length and in great heat, their particular points of view.
I can recall two particular men with very different styles and levels of success in their engagement. One rants and rails at society and threatens or promises hell and eternal damnation and that this is going to happen very soon for all of its sins. He is very loud, very aggressive, very threatening and scary. It is no small wonder that grown-ups walk by on the other side of the road and that children grab their parents’ hands. I don’t think he has great success!
The other is much more softly spoken, so much so that you have to draw near to him to grasp what it is he is saying. He quite often bursts into song, but song that is melodic and clear and warm and always delivered with the widest of smiles and the occasional burst of laughter. Not surprisingly, his delivery receives a very different response. Yes, the vast majority still walk on by. But when you watch them, you will see that most have noticed him and pass by with an extra smile. They look happier. Even though they did not stop and listen or engage, they have caught that still small voice in his smile.
Matthew adopted the same approach in his gospel story today. He did not quote God as being in the rages of the storm or in the violence of the stormy seas. No – he showed what these barriers can do to even the strongest of believers – they can block or dampen our faith: they can dilute our beliefs and strengthen our fear and our worries – if we let them. It is all too easy to get lost in the babble of noise in our everyday lives and then in despair at times say that God never listens to us.
Matthew shows us that when we tune into God, we will hear him. When we tune out all of the extra and external interference – we will be able to receive him.
Where do we seek God? If like Elijah, we are to find him in the gentlest of breezes, how will we ever hear it or notice it in the bedlam that is our lives, even now post or mid-Covid? When we come into church for mass, how much time do we set aside to relax and listen? Not to pray or say our Rosary but to simply listen for that moment when God says to us in the gentlest of breezes, or in the flickering of a single flame or in that still small voice , “Michael, are you there?” and I can say, “Here I am Lord. I come to do your will.”
Bidding Prayers – Let us pray to our heavenly Father and ask him to hear the prayers that we make in the stillness of our heart as well as those we make aloud.
1. We pray that we can cut through the noise of life to see and hear where our God truly is and then take his message to heart in how we live our lives. Lord in your mer
2. That we recognise God’s Word and work in all the beauty around us and do what we can to reveal this to others. Lord in your mercy
3. That we make and take time to listen to God’s Word deliberately and decidedly and then take and give comfort from it. Lord in your mercy
4. That there is an increase in peace in our troubled world: across our towns and cities, across our states and countries and across all peoples. Lord in your mercy
5. That all people who are suffering from ill health or who are feeling isolated, alone, abandoned or unloved are comforted by our prayers and our loving actions. Lord in your mercy
6. That those who have died recently may find eternal rest with the Lord.
7. That Mary our Mother joins her prayers with ours as we now say together, Hail Mar
Lord, God, thank you for listening to the prayers we make through the tumult of our daily lives. Grant what you will to make our lives and our love of you better, we ask this through Christ our Lord. Amen