Pretty much nobody I know is satisfied with how things are in the world today. There is so much political, social, religious, and even family division. The media doesn’t help the matter. If you leave the news on, it is very easy to think with Chicken Little in the classic children’s story, “The sky is falling, the sky is falling, the sky is falling.”
If you remember that story, you will recall that an acorn fell on Chicken Little’s head. As far as Chicken Little could tell, what hit him on the head came from overhead where the sky was, and so it must have been the sky that fell on him. If the sky was falling, then it must be the end of everything he knew.
We read stories like that to children to help them understand that a small calamity is not the end of the world.
As adults, when we listen to the news and hear of calamities and potential calamities around the world, it is easy to wonder, “Is the end nearing?” “Is the sky falling?”
Today’s Scripture
Yet if we look at the times in our scripture readings for today, 2700 years ago or 2000 years ago, things were not good then either.
It seemed as if the sky might fall soon when Hosea prophesied—and, indeed it did about twenty years later. The people of Israel continued to disobey God; as a prophet Hosea names their sins—accusing the people of harlotry with God. Today’s selection, however, lets the people know they sky is not falling YET. God tells Hosea to tell the people:
My heart is overwhelmed,
my pity is stirred.
I will not give vent to my blazing anger,
I will not destroy Ephraim again;
For I am God and not man,
the Holy One present among you;
I will not let the flames consume you.
In the Gospel
In a land occupied and ruled by a foreign power (Rome), today Jesus sends his chosen twelve out to “proclaim the Kingdom of heaven is at hand” without extra clothes, money, or knowledge of where they might stay. It is early in Jesus’ ministry. The battle lines with religious leaders are only beginning to be drawn, but how are these apostles supposed to proclaim? As ordinary men, they are to cast out demons, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, and cure the sick. They’ve watched Jesus do these miracles, but now they are to do them. Suddenly they are no longer disciples (learners). They are apostles, “those who are sent.”
In a back-handed way, Jesus lets them know at times it will be difficult. He included instructions for what to do if they are rejected. He said, “Whoever will not receive you or listen to your words, go outside that house or town and shake the dust from your feet.”
The disciples-turned-apostles probably did not sleep well the night before Jesus sent them off. They may well have thought the sky might soon fall on them because they could not possibly be equal to such a task.
But Jesus did send them and gave them the power to cast out demons, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, and cure the sick.
And so, instead of the sky falling on them, the heavens opened for those who heard them or were healed. The world began to change in a Christian direction. The Kingdom of God was proclaimed.
St Benedict
Yesterday the church celebrated the feast day of St. Benedict. When St. Benedict lived in the 5th century, the sky of the safe Roman world was falling. The world of Europe was in chaos—where it would remain for the next 500 years. What did St. Benedict do? Personally, he could cast out demons, raise the dead, and cure the sick.
But he organized and sent his followers to do something simpler: his followers lived together to pray and work AND ESTABLISH CHRISTIAN COMMUNITIES where peace, order, learning, and goodness could reign—even in the midst of the sky-is-falling chaos of the Dark Ages.
It was as if God sent Benedict to show people how to “not let the flames consume you,” as the final lines of the reading from Hosea today say, as the security of Roman rule ended. Indeed, history shows that gradually the monasteries of the Middle Ages showed people how to farm the land, live in peace, and form agrarian communities of ordinary people. As that happened, those who invaded the lands were changed toward civility. As leaders changed, the lands of desolation and war gradually became a Christian culture.
Let Not the Flames Consume You
Read The Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes, from Vatican Council II. I remember the 1960s when the Council met. It seemed the sky was falling. The Cold War raged. During the Cuban missile crisis, right before the Council, I remember wondering as a ninth grader if the world would still be here when I woke up the next morning.
The Council named many of the troubles and cultural sins of that day–and today. Yet it called the Church, especially us laity, to go forth–and bring the Gospel to the world. A sample of its message I love is,
“Thus the church, at once a visible organization and a spiritual community travels the same journey as all of humanity and shares the same earthly lot with the world: it is to be a leaven and, as it were, the soul of human society in its renewal by Christ and transformation into the family of God. “(Gaudium et Spes, paragraph 40)
Vatican Council and our faith itself sends each of us and all of us laity to become apostles, like Jesus’ Apostles in today’s Gospel. It does that by calling us all to be Benedicts in our sky-is-falling world. As Steven noted yesterday, we are ALL called to do that.
We don’t have to cast out demons, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, or heal the sick. Some people do. But we can live a Christian witness with a lifestyle of “love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your mind, and with all your strength…and love your neighbor as yourself.”
We can be apostles of civility and Christian behavior.
It might be by inviting the widow next door over for dinner a night or two a week.
It might be to fund a grant so families with less income can attend Catholic schools.
It might be to travel every weekend to spend time with your mother, lonely, in a nursing home.
It might even be keeping your house, tending your children, working together with your husband or wife in ordinary family love. In our sky-is-falling world even ordinary family love is not ordinary. When they can, children and youth migrate to the homes of their friends who have homes with ordinary family love. Your home can be a little monastery of Christian love in your neighborhood.
We all yearn for human love, as we all yearn for awareness of God’s love.
Sometimes, for an individual, the sky falls. Her husband dies. His wife divorces him and prevents him from seeing his children. A trusted friend moves into a new friendship. A job is lost. A mistake is made that has long term, serious consequences.
When that happens to someone we know, we can be apostles—we can be SENT. We can be sent to listen and simply be with the person whose sky has fallen. We can give practical help with children, meals, yardwork, errands, or money. We can pray that each and every person whose sky falls can discover God in the calamity.
We can be Benedicts. We can create outposts of love in the middle of troubles. When we do, the flames do not consume you–or those you witness to.
Our civility can bring order again. Order can bring some sense of peace. Peace can bring hope. Hope can bear to wait for the sky to clear, the heavens to truly open, and a fullness of God’s love to again shine through.
Prayer:
This prayer, popularly known as the Prayer of St. Francis, comes to mind today:
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace,
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is doubt, faith;
Where there is dispair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light;
Where there is sadness, joy;
O Divine Master,
Grant that I may not so much seek
To be consoled as to console;
To be understood as to understand;
To be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
