Good morning, everyone. Hope that you’ve had a very nice Fourth of July week, and for many it’s been an extended weekend, since we celebrate the 4th on Thursday. I know that I had a very blessed week on retreat down in the Big Sur at the Hermitage of the Camaldolese Monks. It was a very beautiful time, and I really brought to that retreat so many intentions from people here at this parish, really in a certain way brought all of your intentions to my time on retreat. So it is a really great time to just breathe in deep God’s presence to us through nature.
One thing that we really hear pressing in the Gospel today is Jesus announcing in another way the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of God. Now, when we think of Jesus’s first public words, so to speak, that announced his ministry, he says the Kingdom of God is at hand: repent and believe in the Good News. And Jesus now sends people out to announce the kingdom of God is at hand. I think it’s important for us to really focus on what is Jesus mean by the kingdom of God, because I think for many of us we have an almost tortured type of understanding of kingdom.
In fact, the Fourth of July was all about us breaking away from a kingdom – right? We looked at somehow the kingdom of England as being oppressive to the colonists, and for most of us I think we had this kind of love/hate relationship with kingdoms. We just look at them as being oppressive, or we may look at them in awe, and almost in a sense of glory. I’m always amazed that whenever there’s like a royal wedding how many people will tune in the middle of the night to watch it, right, because we’re kind of captivated by all the glamour that goes with that. There’s something about that, and even in the United Kingdom today, in England, there’s people who still are very supportive of the monarchy, even though the monarchy doesn’t have that much real power. There’s people who find pride in the king, the queen, and the whole idea of a monarch. Yet, for us we may look at a kingdom as being something that could be problematic. Continue reading “14th Sunday Ordinary Time (Fr. Gribowich homily)”