Hi everyone, and welcome to Weekly Homilies with Father Mark Suslenko, Pastor of SS. Isidore and Maria Parish in Glastonbury, Connecticut. We are part of the Catholic Archdiocese of Hartford. I'm Carol Vassar, parish director of communications, and this is Episode 24 of Season 6 for the Eleventh Sunday in Ordinary Time: June 18, 2023. Our Gospel reading is from Matthew, Chapter 9, verse 36 through Chapter 10, verse 8.

At the sight of the crowds, Jesus’ heart was moved with pity for them  because they were troubled and abandoned, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is abundant but the laborers are few; so ask the master of the harvest to send out laborers for his harvest.” 

Then he summoned his twelve disciples and gave them authority over unclean spirits to drive them out and to cure every disease and every illness. The names of the twelve apostles are these: first, Simon called Peter, and his brother Andrew; James, the son of Zebedee, and his brother John; Philip and Bartholomew, Thomas and Matthew the tax collector; James, the son of Alphaeus, and Thaddeus;  Simon from Cana, and Judas Iscariot who betrayed him.

Jesus sent out these twelve after instructing them thus, “Do not go into pagan territory or enter a Samaritan town. Go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. As you go, make this proclamation: ‘The kingdom of heaven is at hand.’ Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, drive out demons. Without cost you have received; without cost you are to give.”

The Gospel of the Lord. 

“Journeying With Our Creator,” by Father Mark S. Suslenko, Pastor, SS. Isidore and Maria Parish, Glastonbury, Connecticut

When a given Sunday's reading allow, it's a great opportunity rather than focus on one particular element of scripture to do a more panoramic view of the salvation history of God's relationship with God's people. 

And so we go to the moment when the Israelites are in the desert, and they're struggling, and they wonder if God is with them. And as we mentioned many times before, God doesn't come in spectacular events all the time. God usually enters our existence and our experience through the ordinary, the ordinary things. And so it took them a while to begin to understand. And then so one day, God beckons Moses up to the mountain, and God says to Moses, "I want you to go and tell my people that I've journeyed with them and brought them to myself." That I've journeyed with them and brought them to myself.

God knew what he was doing, and now Moses was on the same page with God and understood that they were being led, and even though the terrain was difficult, and it wasn't easy, and there was a lot of despair and disappointment in the end, it all came out to a positive place. And so Moses goes down and tells the people, and now everybody knows what's going on, and everybody's on the same page, and everybody realizes their eyes are open.

And what comes next are the wonderful gift of the Ten Commandments, and the Ten Commandments are embraced as a law of God, and they make sense and people abide by them, and they see them as the structure and the focus they need to keep on track so they don't forget the covenant with God. They don't forget all that God did for them all those years.

And things go along pretty good, and then all of a sudden, we see the prophets coming into the picture because people have to be reminded. They're moving away. They're straying. They're becoming distracted. They're becoming lost, and prophet after prophet after prophet comes along, reminding folks of that original covenant, reminding folks of what God did for them, trying to bring them back, trying to bring them back to that same page, that same original focus.

Prophet after prophet after prophet. And then centuries later, with the birth of Christ, Christ preaches. And still, we see a concern over the lost sheep of Israel. People that still do not understand, they still do not comprehend what God originally did for them. We have strayed from that original covenant, that original pact of love.

And that's because human beings forget. We get distracted. We lose focus. We get absorbed in worldly things. We wonder who God is and pretend sometimes that we are our own God and that we can do things better. And we need to be reminded time and time again. 

As we look out on our world, we don't have to look too far to realize that a lot of folks today are still lost. They're searching. Sometimes just superficially going through the motions of life. 

Not that long ago, I was talking with a young person, and he learned that I was a priest. And so we started in a just a very simple conversation about some basic things. And he says, "You know," he says, "I have this and I have that. I've done this, and I've done that," he says, "but something is missing. I'm empty. 

And as I listened and we talked a little more, he looked at me, and he said, I think you can help me with that. And what he was looking for was a relationship with God. And that was the piece that was missing. He wanted to be brought to something greater than himself, a truth, because no matter how much we immerse ourselves in the world, at some point, that world is gonna disappoint us. It's gonna come up short. No way, no how can the ways of the world satisfy the workings of the human soul? It just doesn't work. 

And the folks at the time of Jesus were bumping up against the ways of the world and its disappointment. They were troubled. They were facing despair. As Jesus noted they were sheep without a shepherd, and they needed that. And so the disciples went out to bring that message of hope and that message of healing. And we come every Sunday to be reunited with the truth of our lives: the Eucharist. We come every Sunday to be reminded of who we are, of what's important because even the most devout among us can forget. We can get so absorbed in our lives and so absorbed in stuff that we forget what is ultimately important, and we forget that our home is ultimately in God and we're being led by God, even though sometimes it may not seem as if we are.

Now that's what made last Sunday so powerful. When you stop, and you reflect upon the symbolism of what happened, when hundreds gathered here for a Eucharistic procession, all gathered around the presence of Christ and the Eucharist, being led by that presence through the main piece of town. Gathering to celebrate benediction, the blessing that we can receive from God in the Eucharist. How powerful! What a symbol that was of hope and of healing to a world that is so conflicted. The very gentle presence of love, and the power of that presence, not only in the blessed sacrament, but in each one of us in the air that we were breathing. There was an energy. There was a love that spoke, not of ourselves but of the power, and the grace, and the beauty of God himself. 

And sometimes, we're reluctant to bring our faith out into the world. I don't know whether we feel we're sometimes embarrassed by doing so. Maybe we feel awkward with doing so. Maybe we feel like we're going to be rejected if we do so, but Jesus didn't tell his disciples to go into this room and stay there and pray. He said, "Go out into the world and bring a message of hope and healing." Do something positive. Tell people what kingdom they belong to. It's not the kingdom of the world, but it's the kingdom of God. And we have an anchor. We have a root system, and it's a root system that leads us strongly and most assuredly to our creator, God himself.

So in all things of life, God journeys with us. And as always, bringing us back to himself, especially through the gift of the Eucharist. And may we, knowing that truth, go out and spread that message of hope and healing to a world that is often lost and broken. It's a message of peace, a message of justice, a message that we are not alone but journeying with the God who created each one of us.

Father Mark Suslenko is the pastor of SS. Isidore and Maria Parish in Glastonbury, Connecticut. Learn more about our parish community at www.isidoreandmaria.org. And follow us on social media: Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Our music comes free of charge from Blue Dot Sessions in Fall River, Massachusetts. I’m Carol Vassar. Thanks for joining us.