6th Sunday Year B

6th Sunday Year B – Unemployed and Unwanted

Hi everyone. How are you? How are you keeping? No – seriously! How are you all doing?

Who here knows somebody who is sick?

Who here knows somebody that is unemployed?

We can all possible answer these questions, unfortunately, in the positive. We all probably know at least one person who is either sick or unemployed. That is life. That is life today within our country and time.

Who here knows somebody who is in receipt of food from a foodbank? This one is harder to answer because people, we, keep this sort of thing secret. We hide it from others because we are ashamed at not being able to provide for our families or even ourselves. We put on a brave face; we keep a stiff upper lip. But we are in need: in need of food and in need of prayer.

Do you  not find it strange or amazingly coincidental how appropriate our readings are each weekend to what is going on in our lives and in our world at this time?

This weekend, where we are praying for the unemployed in our churches across the world. In our societies where companies and businesses have folded and where hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions have been laid off or put onto short time: and again, where even those in employment are trying to survive on the minimum wage or on Zero-Hour-Contracts.

This weekend we are scheduled to pray for the unemployed. How many there are among us! Far more than we would normally and usually see or expect in our country or locality today: and also, their related families who are hit by all of these restriction and impositions. Never, I think, has a weekend’s prayer been more or better targeted than now.

As I was writing these words, I have just finished readings today’s papers and looking at the pictures of the ever-dramatically-increasing lines of homeless people and now also unemployed people as they queued for food at a soup kitchen. It was disheartening and dispiriting! These queues have increased in quantity and in size just as the calls at our Foodbanks have.

Now is the time when we need to remember them, all of them, in our prayers. I think it is sad but true, that we can become focused on just one part of society when we target our prayers. I know that I have done this so often, where I have aimed my prayers at and for the sick and the housebound, OR the lonely and the isolated, OR the dying or recently deceased OR – and the list of separate groups goes on. But when I pray like this, I can forget and exclude other groups from my prayers. I can almost assume that that if they are not in the groups that I select that then they are not in need of my prayers. It is not my intention or aim but it can happen this way.

And I think that it can then be replicated within and across society that these groups of people are forgotten or overlooked in our thoughts and in our prayers.

Aside from when we actually come across someone begging in the streets, when or how often do we think of the homeless? Aside from our weekly or fortnightly or monthly or ever, donation to the Foodbank , how often do we think about those who are struggling to get by, struggling to feed themselves and their families. This hugely increasing group of people who are no longer at “the edge of society” – they ARE our society. They ARE among us and within us and part of us. We just don’t know them; we just don’t see them; we just don’t recognise them.

Unlike the lepers of old, they don’t have to rough up their hair or wear sackcloth or ring a bell to let people know that they are unclean, unworthy and unwanted. The Jews of their time wanted to be able to see or hear them from afar so that they could deliberately and clearly ignore them and avoid them.

Jesus tackled this whole societal approach by doing the opposite of what the society and the Law commanded. He sought these people out. He welcomed them. He included them in his teachings. He made them know that they were loved by him and by their Father in heaven. He made the point to everyone who was present that how they were treating these people was wrong, not simply by telling them but by showing them; by his actions repeated time and time again, sometimes, oftentimes publicly and sometimes less so, but always deliberately and always with love and tenderness. They were the unwanted of the day. They were they sinners of the day, the unloved, despised and rejected of the day and they were made to know this and to feel this every day. Except by Jesus.

Our unemployed are not lepers, not in the least. Our homeless are also not lepers. But if we were to think honestly and ask ourselves, “How often do I think about those  that are unemployed at all? How often do I think of them with any level of concern, with worry for their situation and with any degree of anxiety, positive anxiety, about their families and them? Seriously – how often?

How often do we include them in our prayers, asking God to look after them and their families and asking Him to care for them and in some way, in any at all way, improve their lot? How often?

There are too many people in an ever-growing list who are now on the ‘edges of society’, who are now becoming unemployed and feel unwanted by and in our society. We must seek out ways to include them in our prayers just as we have targeted them this weekend, but, BUT . . .

But we must do more than this. We must do more than pray. We must seek out ways to show by our actions that we do not want edges to our society; we do not want people falling into or off the edge of our society. We do not want them to feel unwanted or forgotten. We may not be able to give jobs to the unemployed but we can give them some of what we have in abundance – our time, our thoughts, maybe some of our bread and some of our drink.

Think on this – If each person here brought in just one tin of food or packet of pasta or loaf of bread each weekend when you came to mass – how big as basket of food would we be able to contribute to the foodbank and through them to our hungry brothers and sisters across our parish and locality. Ho huge an impact could we make by working together in  such a small but coordinated way? What an impact that could be if we sustained that across a month or maybe even a year? Wow!

When I needed some food, were you there, were you there?

When I needed a drink were you there, were you there?

When I needed support, energy, comfort or love, were you there, were you there?

Please Lord, let me say, “Here I am Lord, I come to do Your will.”