Saturday of the 13th
Week in Ordinary Time
July 5, 2014 8:30am
This morning I am taken by the
words of the psalm, “The Lord speaks of
peace to his people.”
They are warm, beautiful words.
They also say something that we
need to hear today.
If we look around the world, we
can develop quite a list:
civil war in Syria, Iraq
descending into chaos, violence in Nigeria and Kenya, all too frequent mass
shootings in our own country.
Our world needs the peace of
today’s psalm.
The question is: what are we as
individual persons to do?
I for sure do not have an easy or
all-encompassing answer.
But I do think God invites each
of us to peace on this earth.
And I think God expects us to be
persons of peace in very concrete ways.
So, we pray for an end to war and
violence and the injustice that usually causes that.
We seek ways to promote peace in our
community and nation and world.
We try to heal broken
relationships in our own lives and to use the way of understanding and kindness
instead of retribution.
It is important that we maintain hope
that as we cultivate peace in our personal lives, this will have an affect on
the broader community and world.
It is possible that new ideas and
approaches will emerge.
New paradigms for personal and
international relationships are needed.
That is one way to understand the
new wineskins that Jesus talks about in today’s gospel.
Old hurts and misunderstandings
and approaches may need to give way to something new in this quest for peace.
In this, we need to be open to
new wineskins.
So today we pray that our
individual efforts at peace and peaceful relationships will have an effect
beyond us and on our world.
