God urges us on in struggle – Luke 18:1-8, Exod 18:8-13

Twenty-ninth Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year C; Holy Infant parish.

I wonder what you might come up with if you were asked to tell a story that encapsulates your image of prayer. I think that could actually be a really interesting spiritual exercise, especially for people who naturally like to make up and tell stories, to think through what story you would tell if wanted to talk about prayer through a narrative. It could be something from your life, a story from the life of a saint, or a completely made up story that nonetheless is deeply true. To maybe spark your imagination, and I hope not to shut it down, Exodus and Jesus’ parable in Luke give us two such stories, or maybe, actually, three, and I’ll get to why I think there are three stories there later

God heals the fear that makes us shun – Luke 17:11-19, 2 Tim 2:8-13

Twenty-eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C; Holy Infant parish.

I think the worst thing we could ever teach someone is that they should keep their distance from Jesus.  Yet, this is what these ten lepers were taught.  Not specifically from Jesus, of course, they’d been taught to keep their distance from everyone who didn’t share their disease.  When the first signs of leprosy were noticed on someone’s skin, there would be a funeral style liturgy in which the victim would be mourned as if dead when cast out of the community, shunned, told to remain perpetually separate, to cry out to warn people not to come near them.  They were taught that their skin was so dreadful, literally, something that people dreaded so, that they must keep away, because they were dangerous, because they were to be feared.  They were taught to hate their own skin, taught that the only useful thing they could do with their lives was to help others avoid them.