As you read this note this weekend, our Mission Team will be returning from Buffalo, NY. I hope we will have more information we will be able to share with you at the printing of another, future bulletin. For now, we welcome them back and we pray that their experience will have been a blessing for them and for God’s people whom they have served!
The image of the Good Samaritan looms large in the readings of this, the 15th Sunday in Ordinary Time. Power, weakness, alienation, mercy, risk and reward are all at play in one of the most powerful parables recorded as coming from the lips of Jesus.
We are challenged to consider carefully what it means to be in need, and to be able to respond to need when we see it. We are challenged to consider carefully the barriers that constrain us and those that constrain others. We are challenged to risk to bear and to bare the wounds we nurse within and to risk to see and to help address the wounds of those whom God has sent across our paths.
Were it only I stepping into this encounter, or only we gathering our common resources, our hope of “success” might be slim to none. However, if we know and live the truth that it is Christ who suffers and Christ who heals, that it is Christ who has bridged the chasm between heaven and earth, between pious and pariahs, between death and life .....Ahhhhhh .....it surely is or can be a different and life-giving path we follow, into and beyond such an encounter.
Trauma comes from many sources and in many forms. Forgive me, Lord, if I have caused it. Forgive me more if I have chosen to walk past it.