3 July 2020 – St Thomas the Apostle – Friday of 13th week of ordinary time – Ephesians 2:19-22, John 20:24-29

        Paul tells us today that we are no longer strangers or sojourners, but rather citizens, holy ones, and members of God’s family.  When you think about it, we all want a sense of belonging in life.  We want to feel a sense of belonging in our family, our school, our work, our community.  Hopefully we feel that sense of belonging as followers of Jesus in a very special way, a belonging that fills a lot of the gaps that exist in our lives. As a priest, I have served in a lot of different parts of Mississippi.  Each parish has its own personality and its own story, its our history, from the Delta and the historic African American parishes, to Northeast Mississippi and our parish of St Jude in Rankin County.  

         Thomas wanted proof in order to believe.  Yet, sometimes we don’t get the tangible proof we want.  We receive different signs and graces from God all the time.  Sometimes they are not the signs or the proof that we asking for, but that is what God gives us on our journey.   Tradition has it that Thomas, the one who is known as the doubter, went to India to bring the Good News of the Lord to the people there.  We have many priests from India working as missionaries here in our Diocese of Jackson, part of the tradition that Thomas brought to that country.  

           Religious Freedom Week in our country as declared by the Bishops concluded this past Monday.  This is a challenging time for us as a nation and as a Church.  Not only are we going through a pandemic, but we see a government and a society that is becoming hostile to the message of Christ and to the way we are called to live out our faith.  Just this past weekend, I saw a video posted to the internet that showed a young priest trying to defend the statue of St Louis IX in the city of St Louis. This was part of a prayer rally of Christians that was disrupted by protestors.  Louis IX lived in the 13th century.  He led a very interesting life and tried to do good for his people and live the values of the Christian faith.  He died in the midst of one of the Crusades in Tunisia.  He is the only King of France to be canonized a saint, which happened just a few decades after his death.  Louis IX and statues of him are the subject of desecration and protest right now in our country; I wonder how much those protestors know about him and the history of his era. In the context of all that is going on in our country and in our world today, we are called to witness to the world.  That is the mandate we receive from Christ: "Go out to all the world and tell the Good News" as it says in the psalm.  Proclaiming that Good News is not easy, especially in our modern world.  But that is what we are called to do. 

          “Blessed are those who have not seen and who believe.”  We hear this statement made in our Gospel today in conjunction with Thomas.  May we thank God for the grace to believe, even in the midst of the challenges and struggles that we go through in life.