Gospel Reflections for Challenging Times

13 th Sunday in Ordinary Time Gospel – Mark 5:21-43 Faith in Action Chapel, Magdala There’s a story about a little girl living on a farm with her family.   One morning, before sunrise, her dad asks her to go out to the bar to milk the cows.   She was terrified!   She was afraid of the dark and making that long walk to the barn.   So her dad gave her a lantern to light her way.   And he gave her these simple instructions – just go as far as the light will take you!   Don’t worry about the entire journey to the barn; just follow the light and it will guide your way. Just have a little faith!   And isn’t that what today’s Gospel is all about?   Faith!   And wasn’t that the same message of last week’s Gospel as well?   But what a contrast!   Last week, the Apostles lost faith while they were in the midst of the storm on the Sea of Galilee.   Even though Jesus was right there with them, they feared for their lives. And in today’s Gospel, we hear of 2 separate instances o

  12 th Sunday in Ordinary Time Gospel – Mark 4:35-41 Calming the Storm Tennessee Sunrise I am sure that, like me, your childhood was filled with a dizzying assortment of bumps and bruises!   Maybe you fell and skinned your knee!   Maybe you ran into the door that rose up out of nowhere!   Maybe you cut yourself!   Maybe you got into a ‘disagreement' with one of your siblings and you started bleeding.   Whatever it was, I bet Mom came to the rescue!   She comforted you til you stopped crying!   She cleaned and bandaged your wounds!   She calmed you down and told you it would all be ok!   You trusted in her nursing skills and you felt loved and cared for!   You believed she would and could make it all better. You had faith! And then we grew up!   And, for many of us, all we had to do was just look back on the past 9 months and wonder – I feel so alone!   We deal with illness of friends and family; we deal with emergency room visits, hospital and ICU visits and s

  11 h Sunday in Ordinary Time Gospel – Mark 4:26-34 One’s, Two’s, Trees! Heiskell, Tennessee   I’m sitting on the front porch of our daughter’s home , looking out over a scene of natural wonders- mountains, valleys and hills and all of them filled with an abundance of trees.   Not your ordinary trees!   Not simple 10-foot pines but massive and majestic trees, dozens of feet in height and age measured in decades!   It all looks so perfect! And yet if you look, you’ll see that just isn’t the case.   Many of the trees have bark peeling off the trunk, bare spots high up, branches broken and twisted, others slowly aging and turning brown.   And yet with all that decay and age, with all that life and the elements that have battered it, the tree still stands!   It still lives!   It still grows toward the sky! It reminds me a lot of Jesus’ parables in today’s Gospel and how much the elements of nature play a role.   The mustard seed, smallest of all and yet it grows and sprea