Never lose hope

16th Sunday in Ordinary Time—A

The church would be a great place if it weren’t for some of the people! Am I right? We can chuckle until we weep because of the truth in that thought. The continuing revelations of sexual abuse by clergy, the focus by some leadership on minor infractions of subordinates as they ignore the criminal offenses of their cohorts, and the blaring silence from our pulpits in response to the normalization of racism and violence—these would make any reasonable person want to torch the entire field and beg God to just start over.

This is why God is God and we are not. “It is easy—and it is even a natural tendency—to hate evil persons because they are evil. But it is good—although rare—to love them because they are human” (St. Augustine, Letters, 153). God’s inexhaustible mercy and patience is divine justice, and these reveal God’s complete power. We, on the other hand, claw at every bit of power we can grab, and our fear of losing status makes us lash out against those we deem unfit to share the same patch of dirt as ours.

Yet God’s mercy never loses hope in us. So we should never lose hope in God to transform us—all of us, whether wheat or weed—into a bountiful harvest in due season.

This post was first published in “GIA Quarterly: A Liturgical Music Journal.”

Image credit: Photo by Sandy Millar on Unsplash.