Don’t worry.
Don’t worry about what you eat and drink. Do not worry about the clothing you
wear. Do not worry about the
future. We get good advice from today’s Gospel, reminding
us not to spend all our time worrying about those things that are not the most
important things in life. But sometimes,
it seems like all we human beings do is worry. The poet Mary Oliver had this to say in her poem “I
worried”:
I worried a lot.
Will the garden grow, will the rivers
flow in the right direction, will the earth turn
as it was taught, and if not how shall
I correct it?
Was I right, was I wrong, will I be forgiven,
can I do better?
Yes, there
is so much we can worry about, isn’t there? We worry about things that matter, about things
that we can change, but unfortunately we also worry about those things we have
no influence over at all, things that we can’t control. Mary Oliver
is able to conclude her poem this way:
Finally I saw that worrying had come to nothing.
And gave it up.
And took my old body
and went out into the morning,
and sang.
Some of us might be worried about the changes we
see around us: changes in the world, changes in our Church, and even changes in
our parish. Think about, that in the last year, we at St James
have a new pastor, a new bishop, even a new pope. One of the prisoners I write to on a regular basis
sent me an article he found in a magazine, entitled: “Pope Francis: The Times
They Are A-Changin’.” I love that Bob
Dylan song. The title of that article is
so apropos, because the times are definitely a changing’.
We celebrated the Year of Faith recently, which was
called in part to commemorate the convening of the 2nd Vatican
Council in the Catholic Church in 1962 by Pope John XXIII. People usually remember that one of the goals of
Vatican 2 was to update and modernize the Church, to have it speak to the
modern world in a way that the world can understand, to read the “signs of the
times.” But many forget that Vatican 2 also called us to a
return to the Early Church, to the apostolic traditions where we started.
If you look around us here at St James, we are
trying to reach out to people in our modern world. We live in a world where technology cannot
only keep us better connected with others, but this technology can also isolate
us as well. As the
pastor here, I want us to have the best liturgies possible, to see how we can
be faithful both to the teachings of the Church and to the reality around us as
well. Pope Francis wants us to be a warm, welcoming
Church, so we are reaching out and welcoming those around us at the beginning
of mass with a greeting. We are also trying to incorporate the traditions
and devotions of our faith in our liturgies and in our Lenten observances in a
very meaningful way.
I’ll give you an example. We are now going to have
3 opportunities during Lent to journey with Jesus with the Stations of the
Cross – after the 12:10 mass and at 6:00 pm in English, and at 7:00 pm in
Spanish. I think you’d be very hard pressed
to find many parishes that offer 3 different chances to pray the Stations of
the Cross every Friday during Lent, 2 of which will have Benediction aftwards.
Where are these changes coming from? Some of them come from a desire to have mass here
at St James as an engaging, faith-filled, joyful encounter with God. We come not only as individuals practicing the
Catholic faith, but we are here to be a faith community, a community where we
not only live out our vocation as disciples of Christ, but a community that
makes disciples as well. When I first came to St James, some of the priests
told me that our parish here is one of the hidden gems of our diocese, and in
many ways, I have found this to be true. We do a lot of things very well here at St James,
but we always want to find ways to energize and engage ourselves constantly as
disciples of Christ.
We can worry about the changes that are going on in
the Catholic Church, in our parish, about where we are going as a community of
faith, but we trust in the Holy Spirit to lead us and guide us on our way. And I use our parish’s patron saint as our
inspiration as well. James went to Spain to bring the Gospel to the
people there, but when he came back to Israel, he thought that he had been a
failure in his missionary efforts. And
we know from the Gospels that James was the first of the apostles martyred. His body was brought back to Spain for burial after
his death, where it was forgotten and then found by accident about 800 years
later. People from all over the world now travel as
pilgrims to the place where James is buried – they come to James in this
ancient pilgrimage tradition in the midst of the modern world in their search
for God. Last year alone, more than
215,000 people officially arrived as pilgrims to Santiago de Compostela – to
the Cathedral of St James.
As we get ready to begin our Lenten journey, we are
called to set aside our worries, to trust in the Lord, to live out our Catholic
faith to the fullest, to journey with Jesus during this holy time. I know that many of us here have a great passion
for our parish – of wanting it to be a place where we all can seek the Kingdom
of God, and then proclaim that Kingdom to the community around us. As we seek God’s Kingdom, we enter into the holy
time of Lent this upcoming week as we come to mass on Ash Wednesday to receive
that smudge of Ash on our foreheads, to turn away from sin and proclaim our
belief in the Gospel. We’re called to pray the Stations of the Cross each
Friday and to come to our Lenten Reconciliation Service later in this month of
March. We are to pray, to fast, and reach out to others in
works of charity. No matter where we are in the our journey, we are
to seek God in all things, even in the midst of the things that are worrying
us.
