Karolina pisze: Wszyscy jesteśmy TYLKO
"człowiekami", jak to król Julian mówi.
Dzięki.
I co?... Jutro mam kazanie optymistyczne powiedzieć?
Udało mi się coś napisać. Wstawiam poniżej. Sorry, że po
angielsku, ale tu ludzie jacyś dziwni – nie znają polskiego.
15TH
SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME A
Holy Cross, Kingston 13.07.2014
Today’s Gospel focuses on the parable, ‘ A sower went out
to sow.’ This is a story that we know very well. Before our Deacon is finished
reading we started thinking - What kind of soil am I? Am I rich soil? Do I bring a hundredfold? Or
maybe I bring nothing and maybe nothing has changed since the last time I heard
this Gospel? Before we make a deep reflection about the good fruit that we
bring, I would like to invite you to examine the first sentence of the Gospel, “Jesus left the house and sat by the
lakeside. But such crowds gathered around Him that he got into a boat and sat
there.” Jesus left the house. It sounds normal, we leave the house everyday
and we don’t think about this act of leaving the house. We think about what will happen during the
course of the day, we think about heavy traffic, will we be on time, we think
about what we will encounter at work, we think about the meetings, how will we
lead the meeting, will I learn something from this meeting, is it a waste of
time? We leave the house and we think about the people we are going to meet, we
have different feelings – are we excited to see them or not? Leaving the house
is a daily routine and we do this without even thinking about it.
In the Bible, every single sentence is valuable. It is
important to stop and examine every sentence, even those which seem trivial. ‘Jesus
left the house,’ he left the place where He felt comfortable, the place where
he felt relaxed. At home we can be ourselves. We don’t have to pretend and we
feel confident when we are in our homes. When we leave home anything can happen
- something nice can occur but something bad can also take place. When you
leave home you take a risk – like a little bird leaving the nest. Or like your
child who is not a child anymore and goes overseas to study and you worry what
will happen. To hear Jesus you must
leave home. You must not only leave your
house, shut your door and start the car – to leave home means to be open to
change. During mass, when we sit down for the liturgy of the Word, we must be
ready to take a risk. The Word of God can change anything.
To leave home and get to church, we must make an effort. In
the countryside people must walk up steep hills or long distances. In the town there is traffic. Someone told me
that at Holy Cross there used to be the adoration of the Blessed Sacrament on
Friday evenings but the traffic is too heavy. As a result of this, we have no
adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. I understand what it is to drive from
downtown to HWT during peak traffic. If you can avoid the traffic you should do
it. You should choose a different way or
a different time. You can also choose a different day if it is possible. Or you
can stay at home and not make the effort to take the risk.
Jesus left the house. We all know how important it is to
have a home. At home we make the decisions, very often the most important
decisions we make in our lives are made at home. Do you remember any important
decision you made at home? Did you lay in bed and think about the programme
that you wanted to study at university? Did you make a decision to change your
job while relaxing on your couch?
In the context of today’s Gospel, we see that it is necessary
for us to leave home. In the context of the Word for today, home means not only
a house but the system of our thinking, our behavior, our routine. When we open
the Bible we need to say ‘Lord I open my heart to your word.’ When we open the
Bible, Jesus can change our way of thinking, through His Word. We can encounter
something new which can turn our life upside down. He can change our routine.
This doesn’t mean that every time you open the Bible you must change your life.
You come today to church - don’t change that, come every Sunday. When we open
the Bible, we should also consider that maybe Jesus doesn’t want you to change
but He just wants you to refresh your outlook.
‘Jesus left the house and sat by the lakeside.’ To sit
means to find the time. We often say, ‘I have no time.’ We rush up and down in
our daily lives – we rush from work to collect our children to take them to
activities. We rush from one meeting downtown to another meeting uptown. We
rush to do our grocery shopping and then rush home to prepare a meal.
One religious sister told me that her friend who is a
priest prays four Rosaries everyday – The Joyful, Luminous, Sorrowful and
Glorious Mysteries everyday. Sister
asked me how many rosaries do I pray everyday?
I smiled. I will not share my answer with you. I just smiled at her.
‘Jesus sat by the lakeside,’ - the mountain and the lake
have deep meaning in the Bible. If Jesus came to Jamaica, He would be so happy
with our beautiful mountains and the sea all around. Jesus is in JA, the only question is – do we
have time for Him? Do we have time to sit by the lakeside with Him? Today’s
Gospel tells us that the crowd came to listen, “Jesus left the house and sat by
the lakeside. But such crowds gathered around Him that he got into a boat and
sat there.” Crowd – it means many people
and each of them left the house. They left the house to listen to Jesus and He
said ‘imagine a sower going out to sow.’
Let me interrupt this story with the words of the prophet
Isaiah, “Thus says the Lord: ‘As the rain and the snow come down from the
heavens and do not return without watering the earth, making it yield and
giving growth to provide seed for the sower and bread for the eating, so the
word that goes from my mouth does not return to me empty, without carrying out
my will and succeeding in what it was sent to do.” Have you noticed that
today’s first reading is only one sentence? It is one sentence but it is rich
in meaning. Rain and snow - we all wait for rain and we know how much we need
the rain to fill our dams and to water our crops. I guess that you don’t wait
for snow, most of you think that snow is terrible. Many of you would think that
the cold is overwhelming and that you would not enjoy living in a freezer. Let me tell you something, because I know
what snow is. When the winter is about to end and the temperature gets warmer,
everything begins to change. People start smiling even more and the sun is
warmer. When you are walking you literally feel the rays of sunshine touching
your skin. It doesn’t mean the snow is bad, it might be fantastic and so
beautiful. The world looks different, like from a fairytale and you can have
fun in the snow. But after a long time,
when the snow starts melting something amazing begins to take place. The whole
world begins to change and your body clock begins to change. But when the snow
remains, the first flowers emerge. In English they are probably called snowdrop
but literally, we call them the flowers who go though the snow. It is the first
sign of Spring, you can see the snow and the flowers. The soil was under the snow and ice but in
the Spring, the earth awakens. Melting snow provides water and the flowers wake
up. Life wakes up.
“As the rain and the snow come down from the heavens and do
not return without watering the earth… so the word that goes from my mouth does
not return to me empty.” God gives the Word and he wants this Word to bear
fruit in our lives. Sometimes this word brings a good crop, hundredfold or
sixty but sometimes thirty. When we read the Gospel, we think about our entire
life. But today I would like you to not think about your whole life but about
certain parts of your life -to see when you brought thirty or sixty and when
there was no harvest. Think about the situation you are in today. Is your heart
like the soil under the ice, or like the field full of flowers? If it is like
soil under the ice think - why? What can you do to melt this ice? Maybe you
should leave the house. Amen.
