8/18/2016 – Thursday of the 20th week in Ordinary Time – Psalm 51:12-13, 14-15, 18-19

      Our psalmist declares today: “I will pour clean water on you and wash away all your sins.”  We can all feel burdened by different things in our lives: past hurts, struggles with addictions, anger and frustration that we harbor in our hearts, the inability to forgive, and the sins we cannot leave behind.  Yet, we were washed away from our sins in the waters of baptism, but we can fall back into our sins and into temptation, in need of conversion and renewal.  Christ comes to us again and again in the sacraments of the Church to heal us – the Eucharist, the anointing of the sick, and the sacrament of reconciliation. In his Easter homily in his first year as pope, in the light of Christ’s resurrection that we celebrate on Easter morning, Pope Francis had this to say: “Dear brothers and sisters, let us not be closed to the newness that God wants to bring into our lives.  Are we often weary, disheartened, and sad?  Do we feel weighed down by our sins?  Do we think that we won’t be able to cope?  Let us not close our hearts, let us not lose confidence, let us never give up: there are no situations which God cannot change, there is no sin which he cannot forgive if we open ourselves to him.  God will indeed pour clean water on us and wash away our sins if we repent and continue to try to follow Christ’s Gospel in our lives.