Feast of Saint Simon and Saint Jude, Apostles
“God doesn’t do those things anymore.” Ever heard that statement, especially in relation to thinking about miracles? I hear it a lot. If the people I talk to don’t outright disbelieve in God, they think that somehow God just stopped caring a century or so ago. God doesn’t work miracles in our lives in the ways that God used to, in the Bible, and in early and medieval times. God has stopped speaking to us, even.
Today’s scriptures invite us to see miracles in a bit different way. In the first reading (Ephesians 2:19-22), Paul speaks with awe and wonder about the fact that all of us are now part of God’s household. “In him, you are being built together into a dwelling place of God.” Paul writes. If that’s not a miracle, I don’t know what is. Sometimes when I’m waiting for mass to begin on Sunday mornings, I look out at the people gathered there: Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, and independent, from solitary individuals to families of eight or nine or more, coming from India and African nations and other nations, from upper class and lower class neighborhoods, employed or unemployed, with kids or spouses who are angry or upset at being there, with the old and the young and the disabled, and so on. I think about all the reasons why people come to mass: their parents made them, they felt a desire to meet God, they’ve always come (and why stop now?), they wanted a time of silence before the Lord, they wanted to “have some Jesus”.
Isn’t it a miracle, indeed, that our motely bunch has managed to gather at mass? This decidedly imperfect collection of humans are “being built together” to become God’s temple. It is the way that God reaches out, not only to us, but to our world. Note that we cannot become this dwelling place of God alone. We do it together. We learn to see God, and God’s miracles, together. Jesus, himself, Son of God, does not do his ministry alone, but calls the twelve disciples, as we see in today’s gospel (Luke 6:12-16).
In our culture, getting together for church seems so ordinary, that we just don’t see the extraordinariness of it. So I wonder: how many other supposedly “ordinary” things do we not recognize as one of God’s miracles? This morning, I was hurrying to get my baby and my preschooler into their respective classes because I was late, late, late for a meeting. My daughter stopped and picked up a leaf, proclaiming, “Look, Mommy, it’s a purple leaf with water all over it.” She was so enchanted that I, too, felt compelled to smile and wonder at the leaf.
We live in a culture that refuses to be enchanted - that’s not just about “believing” in some kind of supernatural happening, it’s about the fact that we, collectively, have little time for children’s wonder at purple leaves covered in dew because we’re running late and the world is moving on….We, collectively, don’t have much time for poetry or art or music or silence or any of the other, actually rather ordinary, means by which God has spoken to his people and say, “Hey, look! Listen! This world and all that is in it is bursting with signs of God.”
On today’s feast of the apostles Simon and Jude, let us reflect on the good news of what it means to be “built together” to be Jesus for the world, to be the ordinary miracles that the world longs for.
- Jana M. Bennett