Twenty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time, September 8, 2024
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
 Living large in the kingdom of God
Say to those who hearts are frightened: “Be strong! Fear Not! Here comes your God to save you.”
Sitting around the table with our Blue Bell treats, in Bullock Museum’s Star Café, Jasper started talking about death. History museums tend to draw out topics rarely breached.
“I don’t know what dying is,” he said. “I don’t know anything about it. I don’t know anyone who was killed. People die sometimes when they get old, I guess.”
I wish I remembered his words perfectly. Five year olds say the darndest things.
I said, “Everybody dies if they get old enough. And sometimes before.” I took a bite of my Snickers ice cream bar. All of us took bites of our ice cream and the conversation leap-frogged to something else.
Then will be the eyes of the blind be cleared, ears of the deaf will be opened, then will the lame leap and the mute sing.
Jesus healed so many, and Jesus raised some from the dead. But the healed eventually died, and those who were raised died again. Even Lazarus. Only Jesus died, was brought back, and stayed brought back.
We need to talk with Jesus.
You don’t talk about death after you’re dead. But we all talk about it, now and then, when we aren’t dead yet. I know Jasper’s opening statement will not be his last.
Henri Nouwen was sideswiped by a van while he was hitchhiking on a dark Canadian highway. He nearly died from undetected internal bleeding and after his successful surgery felt reluctant to return to life. While preparing for surgery to remove his spleen, he wrote that “I let myself enter a place I’d never known: the portal of death.”
What I experienced then was something I had never experienced before: pure and unconditional love. “Come, don’t be afraid. I love you.”
I hesitate to speak simply about Jesus. But it was not a warm light or rainbow, or an open door that I saw, but a human yet divine presence that I felt, inviting me to come closer.
I knew that he was the Jesus I had prayed to and spoken about, but also that now he did not ask for prayers or words. Death lost its power and shrank away in the Life and Love that surrounded me in such an intimate way, as if I were walking through a sea whose waves were rolled away.
One emotion was very strong – homecoming. Jesus opened his home to me. “Here is where you belong, after your long journey.”
Nouwen had been released from the “vale of tears,” but after the surgery he was back. He was confused, happy to return to his friends but full of yearning for the unconditionality of Jesus’ love. In the seven years before his death from heart attack in 1996, he lived with his feet in both worlds.
Fr. Nouwen wrote more than 30 books, many of them bestsellers. He became one of the most listened to, highly respected teachers of the Spirit in the 20th century. After teaching for decades at Yale and Harvard, he left the ivy halls for The Ark, an unnoticed community of disabled men and women in Toronto, where he lived until his death.
Streams will burst forth in the desert, and rivers in the steppe. The burning sands will become pools, and the thirsty ground, springs of water.
(Isaiah 35, Psalm 146, James 2, Matthew 4, Mark 7)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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