Sunday, 9/6/15
With Jesus opening
the ears of that mute, we might ask him to open our ears and eyes. He is
telling us, “I was homeless, and you welcomed me,” This September, with three
hundred thousand homeless people wandering about Europe, there is added force
to Our Lord’s words. People or either welcoming him, or turning him away.
The news this week
has been focused on 170,000 homeless from the Middle East who crossed into
Macedonia from Turkey, going on then to trek across Serbia into Hungary.
Last Tuesday the
Hungarian government loaded them onto six trains, saying that they were going on
to new homes. But, then, they unloaded them into an underground plaza near
Budapest. This Friday, the chancellor of Austria and Angels Merkel of Germany
offered them a welcome; and yesterday, they loaded all of them onto forty
ancient busses. There were cheering crowds in Vienna, welcoming them with water
and bananas.
Jesus also told us, “You shall love your
neighbor as yourself.” I always took that to mean you must love your neighbor
as much as you love yourself. But, it could also mean, “You shall love your
neighbor as though he or she were yourself.”
When a homeless
person is stinky and dirty we find it had to identify with them. And St. James,
in the Second Reading tells us that it is the shabby, rather than the decked-out
whom we must welcome.
Fortunately, though,
the homeless people we see on the news are often easy to love. Some of them
look nice, even nicer than us.
There is a
Vietnamese couple who come to my Mass every morning. He is a Math teacher, and
she is an X-Ray technician. Yesterday, I asked about their hard times.
After squeezing into
fishing boats they spent seven days battling fifty foot high waves. Then, they
spent two years in a Philippine refugees camp.
When my
great-grandparents, fleeing from Ireland’s Potato Famine, searched for
employment, they had to walk west past the Mississippi, because, all through the
East they were met by Irish Need Not Apply signs.
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