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Third Sunday in Ordinary Time

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Fr. Tom Wilson January 27, 2019

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a few years ago some very dear friends of mine went through what is an all-too-common experience with their young adult daughter very talented very successful certainly by the world's standards young woman who had a lot of a lot of academic and athletic success in in her life in her young adult years she started getting into a getting into situations in which she was making some very very bad decisions of morally and spiritually and then in life decisions and and the light and her her life began to spiral down my friend's got her some medical help that that did a little bit but certainly wasn't wasn't complete in terms of her insurance of her healing and so they they they took the recommendation of a priest and they went and saw a very very holy and an elderly priest in the in the diocese where they live who has a long history of working with families with spiritual maladies and and and other things and what they what they were told by this very holy priest after after praying with them and pray they're with their daughter for for quite a bit they weren't surprised by necessarily but it was still I'm still very very difficult for them to hear and they what they what they heard from from father who had ticklish seen it all emotionally and spiritually is that we live in a culture in which an awful lot of people just experience sadness sadness in their hearts in there in their lives it seems to that that for many many of them just feels like it's a permanent State and enduring state of of sadness and what he told them from from his experience is that it becomes very very difficult because in the end in the diagnosis it if it is a combination of so many different things it's a cocktail of of a lot of different stuff that that ends ends up leading to this at 4 during or no bring sadness in their lives part of it is certainly organic and and and medical and in can be treated in in some ways but in many cases that's simply not enough it simply isn't enough because there are other aspects to it summer that is is simply life experiences and wounds and hurts and things like that that have really nothing to do with it with a person and any decisions that they've made other parts of it are very very directly spiritual in terms of people actually reject God saying no saying no to God by pushing God out of their life and some of it is some of it is part of Simply living the consequences of decisions that they have made in their in their life and This is complicated cocktail of things that that that comes to gather during sadness that a dark cloud hangs over communities and all that sort of thing and I suspect individual conversations with everybody here this morning that almost everyone of us could probably identify a person or two in our life that that lives with that that sort of that sort of reality and it said the very very difficult thing to difficult thing obviously for the person who suffers it but also for the people who hosts around that was around that person and it can feel like a dinner probably is I think there's a lot of cultural things that that we deal with in the world today that that contribute to it and and probably make it a bigger problem and it has been the past but it's always been there in some way shape or form in our reading today from the from the Oracle Prophet Nehemiah gives us an example of that of that perduring sadness and the reality of of sadness in the in the life of a people and the backdrop of what's going on is Nehemiah and Ezra address the p is there is this is about fifty years or so give her take after the after that the Israelites have been exiled from Jerusalem and if you recall the history you know that's for years and years and years Jeremiah preach to the people of Israel he preached to the people of Jerusalem you know you've got to turn your life around you've got to begin responding to that covenantal promise that God has made with you and you actually have to begin living you can't simply presume on the promise in the Fidelity of of God without actually responding to it and or or else you will live the consequences and the consequences will be that this beautiful thing that has been built up a night in the life of the community the city of Jerusalem will come crumbling down and in fact it happened it happened and 50 years this is 50 years later and what happened is that the end of the leaders in the cultural is bowling and social and political leaders of Jerusalem where were sent out into into exile to various places in in Babylon and Nehemiah is very very likely a descendant of one of these and one of these people who 50 earlier had been had been sent out and me and my ends up with a position in the in the office of the of the king of Babylon and he's hearing the stories he's hearing stories about his ancestral Homeland his ancestral City the center of his in the center of his faith that it is crumbling it is crumbling physically is crumbling morally is crumbling spiritually he wants to do something about it and he uses his influence with the office of of the king to say you don't want to let me go back and do something let me go back and do something to try to resurrect this thing to fix the city of Jerusalem so the king gives him permission points of points in Ms basically a mid-level bureaucrat that has some administrative responsibility over that particular region of the Empire and 7 he goes back and his goal is goal is to rebuild Jerusalem the walls are crumbling the walls are crumbling and he's got he's got to motivate these people to to to overcome the sadness that they've experienced in the in their life to say you know what let's do this let's fix these walls let's let's direct our life of faith in these people are sitting there in a in a spirit of sadness and a sadness it's partly self-inflicted is partly self-inflicted that they had walked away from the Covenant and they are descendants of people who had heard the words of Jeremiah and said forget it we're not listening to you and then when it actually happened they have this they have this experience of an act of of the of the Jeremiah's words coming true and some of them probably look at God and said you're not faithful cuz you let this bad thing happened to us some of them are are probably living in in an almost complete ignorance of the word of God where in the scriptures is it hadn't been read to them it had and talk to them the people who knew it the people who do it well we're all gone they were all gone I didn't necessarily have the ability to learn it and in through no fault of their own they don't know the word of God and so the first that Nehemiah does as he's coming back to face this is incredible challenge of having to rebuild Jerusalem is to bring the word of God before the people and as for the high priest in the Mi that get together essentially this big prayer service and azra begins reading from the word of God to everybody who can understand and that reading of the word of God elicits elicits the power of God's word being explained read before that play the raising their hands in prayer the raising their hands and excitement having been a been exposed to the truth of God but right next to that these people who have lived with his cloud of sadist also begin to they also began to weep and why in the world are they weeping is there is the word of God is exposed to them is as the power of the goodness of God in his word as it is is exposed to that the reality of their own Souls is all so exposed to them and they begin to realize that they had turned away from God to realize it was some of their own decisions that have created this mess around them and they recognize probably more clearly than ever the mess is not necessarily just at the walls of Jerusalem are crumbling down it's also it's also a moral and spiritual reality within their souls and so they begin weeping they begin Weeping at recognizing what they had done and I would one expect what would one expect in a moralistic and divided world and culture that we live you could almost you could almost expect in our cultural context Nehemiah shaking his finger at the saying see look what have now you got to  it up and do it but that's not what he said it is not what he says he looks at them directly and says today is Holy to the Lord your God do not be sad and do not weep for rejoicing in the Lord must be your strength rejoicing in the Lord must be your strength and it's there as the reality of their own sins and their own failures in the history of their people gets revealed to them also the power of the goodness of God's word is revealed to them and the response that is that is called for by the liter is rejoicing in the presence of God the Holiness and the presence of God and in their life and it's a it's that rejoicing that responds to that Geneva has called to rejoice in the presence of God that actually lifts them up physically spiritually and morally and they are able to pull off something that really historic Lee looks to almost miraculous it is. if these walls are crumbling around the city of Drew so if you ever been to the Holy Land very very similar to what they are not be two days they rebuild these walls play fix these crumbling walls and that is just the physical stuff they're also resurrected spiritually and morally as they turn themselves back to God where does it begin it does not begin in the shaming of people for having turn their backs on God and actually begins with them listening to their leader who looks at them and sees what has to be done and says no today is Holy to the Lord your God do not be sad and do not weep for rejoicing in the Lord must be your strength and they could have listened to all sorts of Temptations in the midst of the cloud that hung over them and that cloud of sadness that people experience so often I could have easily gone into the gun into a mode of finger-pointing and saying this is somebody else's fault almost all the people there probably could have said you know what it was my parents and grandparents that did this not me I did do this or they can look at they could they could be blaming somebody else or they could worse yet they could listen to the Diabolical Temptation that has us wanted to go nose-to-nose with God she say this is your fault you were unfaithful to that's why this is happened but they don't they don't respond to that Temptation because they hear the word they hear the word of God presented to them Faithfully clearly and truthfully and that word in fact tells us of the greatness of God it also reflects the reality of the weakness of our own Souls but the response to it is not to wallow in shame not to live in a spirit of discouragement it's not to point fingers at anyone else and say it's your fault not mine is to rejoice in the Lord it is to recognize the goodness and the presents and the Holiness of God in all of our circumstance clouds of sadness rain they're all over the place they're all over the place as individuals and as communities in the world and in all of that and we have a choice as we face it and we are present with a beauty of the word of God in our lives do we point fingers do we get angry do we blame it on somebody else worse than even worse than that we blame a God or do we listen to the words of Nehemiah the word Nehemiah God's Comfort God's Comfort which is which came to the people and comes to us every single day that says today is Holy to the Lord your God do not be sad and do not weep for rejoicing in the Lord must be your strength I can get a calling card for every single person who is a disciple of Jesus Christ and every single one of us. Who will face the reality of sadness and Moon hurt in our life whether it's individually and our families are communally or Nationwide or worldwide wherever it comes from but the response is still the same listening to the words of Nehemiah reminding us that today everyday is Holy to the Lord Our God we do not do not be sad and do not weep for rejoicing in the Lord must be our strength

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