Pope Francis declared this Sunday Grandparents Day. So, I ask all grandparents to stand so we can applaud these treasures in our families!
It’s baseball's high season. Some of you know that the legendary Yankees coach Joe Torre and I grew up in the same Brooklyn neighborhood. I was a little league pitcher. One day I knew I was in trouble when the coach said, “I think I better have someone relieve you.” But I argued, “I struck this guy out last time.” “Yes, I know,” said coach, “but it's the same inning and he’s at bat again.” My baseball career tanked.
The word of God takes us back over thirty-five hundred years. Abraham is talking/praying with God about the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah: two corrupt inhospitable cities. Abraham engages in a spirited conversation with God about justice: why should the innocent suffer with the wicked? Abraham appears almost brazen, but that openness indicates the closeness of his relationship with God.
We know the end of those cities. Some scholars say they were destroyed in a catastrophe, probably an earthquake. Anyway, the story may challenge us to ask ourselves: do we engage with God as a companion in our lives?
Paul, in his letter to the Christian community at Colossae (in western Turkey), speaks about the new identity we have through baptism. We have become sons and daughters of God, heirs to God's kingdom, graced to live a life worthy of our calling. God, through the death and resurrection of Jesus by the power of the Spirit, graces us so that we can live in a right relationship with God.
In the Gospel, the disciples want to know how Jesus talks to his heavenly Father. Jesus talks to God like a trusting offspring with a parent, like a close friend. Jesus urges us to persist in prayer, to ask, seek, knock, even though our heavenly Father already knows what we need.
There’s a pattern to prayer that Jesus taught us in the Our Father.
We ask God to make three dreams come true in this universe; and then to give us three gifts:
Our Father, because we are family, sons and daughters of God;
Your name be honored and reverenced;
May your kingdom of justice and peace and truth permeate everywhere;
May your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
Satisfy our basic needs: food, health, livelihood, liberty.
Forgive us for the things we do wrong as we forgive those who wrong us.
And protect us from evils that jeopardize our relationship with you, God.
Today’s word of God may invite us to reflect upon forgiveness.
I recall Nelson Mandela, who was a political prisoner for 27 years in South Africa. Forced to do hard labor in a quarry, with little to eat, he slept in a six by five cell. That he saw God's glory not only in his fellow prisoners but also in his jailers was remarkable.
Mandela's faith was practical. When he was released, he asked all South Africans to seek not vengeance for injustices done through apartheid but to seek reconciliation and forgiveness with one another. That he did this after decades of hardship and cruelty was remarkable.
Nelson Mandela recognized the possibilities for greatness within human beings. He said he wanted to be remembered as an ordinary flawed mortal, with qualities that are within reach of ordinary people, like you and me. If Jesus could forgive, why shouldn’t he. God simply wants us to ask for the grace to participate in God’s all-embracing gift of forgiveness.
We are all sinners, Pope Francis reminds us. The third chapter in the book of Genesis is a sketch about how we sin: through ingratitude, greed, the arrogance that says we can get along without God. “Sin” is one of the most basic terms in religious vocabulary, as common as “grace” and “God.” Sin means being “without,” “out of sync” in our relationships, missing the mark in the pursuit of our authentic self.
It’s interesting that the people who really upset Jesus were hypocrites, those who were smug, who refused to see anything wrong with their prejudices, who had no sense of a need for repentance.
But Jesus offered forgiveness aplenty to those who admitted they needed it. Amazing things are possible if we allow the Master to lay his forgiving hands upon us. Poems can be prayers. Here are some of my favorite lines from a poem by Myra Welch about an old, battered violin up for auction for very little. The value suddenly changes when someone wipes the dust from the violin, tightens the loose strings, and plays a magnificent melody, and the bidding soars:
…Many a person with life out of tune
And battered and scarred with sin
Is auctioned cheap to the thoughtless crowd,
Much like the old violin …
But the Master comes, and the foolish crowd
Never can quite understand
The worth of the soul and the change that’s wrought
By the touch of the Master’s hand.
May the touch of the Master’s forgiving hand change us into the best version of ourselves. And may the touch of our own forgiving hand, by God’s grace, change those who have wronged us into the best version of themselves.
