A homily for the Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, July 7, 2024
Ez 2:2-5, 2 Cor 12:7-10, Mk 6:1-6
“That’s amazing.”
We’ve all probably seen the Consumer Cellular ad in which the lady in the kitchen is talking with the sales rep while the gentleman is jumping into a pool, doing little tricks.
Yet what amazes her, according to the ad, is not the man’s Olympic wannabe diving prowess but the mobile phone’s features and the company’s service.
Apparently proving, once again, that we 21st-century Americans love our high-tech flashy-sparkly-shiny things.
A half-century ago, when the first Cuisinart food processor was introduced, the commercial showed a chef and a maître d’ dazzled by how the gizmo sliced and diced. Do that again, they demanded.
I’m sure the advert was implying “That’s amazing.”
Big things, noisy things, all sorts of things compete for our attention and, mostly, our discretionary spending. Subtle things, not so much.
And because of that, I suspect, many of us don’t or can’t hear God’s truth and take it to heart.
For some of us, Christ’s message is a needle in the haystack of competing — loud! — pronouncements. From political leaders, corporations, mass media, and social media. From friends gathered around the picnic table. The Law of Love is too quiet, too gentle, too hard to find, too hard to follow, some of us say.
Incidentally, someone once suggested that the best way to find a needle in a haystack is to jump in, backside-first, in the hope of sitting on it. Ouch.
The message Jesus lived and preached didn’t go over well in his hometown. His childhood friends and relatives dismissed the messenger as unlikely, inappropriate, or somehow flawed. And if the messenger is crap, so is the message.
So they thought.
Maybe, too, we think that as well. I hope not.
The prophet Ezechiel had a similar experience. Filled by God with wisdom and insight, Ezechiel tried to fulfill his mission of bringing people closer to their Creator. In today’s snippet of his writings, all he could be assured of was that, once he preached and proclaimed and prophesied and then moved on, the people he encountered would say, “Holy cow, that guy knew his stuff.”
Of course he did. He got it straight from the mouth of the Almighty.
We can, too.
And we should.
We must.
God filled the world with prophets. Not sideshow fortune-tellers, but people who see Truth, True-Truth, who understand it and can explain it. People who speak truth to power. People who see what’s wrong on this Earth and act to right it.
People who see what’s right in God’s Creation and among God’s people, and act to protect and sustain and grow all of it.
People who hear what God is saying and who pay attention to what God is filling our spiritual social feeds with, and who then repost it by word and deed and the way we live our lives.
There is a prophet standing to the left and the right of each of us. There’s a prophet looking back at us in the mirror.
We act upon our prophetic mission, which we were given at Baptism, whenever we read or listen for the message of truth that applies in whatever situation we’re in — bullies in the ShopRite checkout line, or racists or sexists or homophobes in the government — and stand up for what’s right.
Whatever the situation, whatever the reality, the truth — and the wisdom and courage to speak it and act upon it — are in God’s outstretched hand, or perhaps on his Slack channel, waiting for us to accept it.
And we will be ridiculed and dismissed as messengers sometimes. Maybe often. But even the nastiest people cannot dismiss the message, no matter how hard they try, because the Truth of the Law of Love comes from God.
And they will know a prophet has been in their midst.
