Readings:  

Wisdom 1, 13-15; 2, 23-24, God formed people to be imperishable

Psalm 30, I will praise you, Lord, for you have rescued me.

2 Corinthians 8, 7-9, 13-15, As you excel in every respect, may you also excel in the gracious act.

Mark 5, 21-43, Who has touched my clothes?  

Mass

Wisdom observations:

What:  There are 39 official books in the Old Testament.  In addition to them are 12 extra books.  Wisdom comes from these 12 extra books. 

Main message: God rewards those who are good.

Author: A Jewish man who lived in Alexandria, Egypt. He wrote in Greek.

Date: 50-100 years before Christ.

Our passage: observations on life & death.  The devil & death are connected. 

Sources: Good News Bible; New interpreter’s Study Bible, Catholic Encyclopedia on line.

 

Heal a Bleeding Woman?  Are You Crazy!

There was an article early this week in The Dallas Morning News that was titled, Dallas-area Designers of Stylish Hijabs Bridge Culture Gap, empower Muslim Women.   Along with the article were two or three pictures of women with beautiful faces.  They were dressed from head to foot in, not black, but beautiful pastel colored hijabs and robes.  Jewels and perhaps diamonds decorated the hems of the robes. 

I had to laugh.  This is the classic example of the camel’s nose under the tent.  Next thing these Muslim women will not be wearing the hijab.  We have to laugh, too, because that women look beautiful was certainly not the intention of the religious men who put these dress laws in place. 

 

Sometimes you even see the real deal in Dallas, a woman all in black from head to toe with a black net covering her face.  Some women wore this attire in Tanzania when I lived there. 

I thought of this article with the pictures when I was putting together ideas about healing the two women. 

Do you realize how radical this was, especially with the woman bleeding?  Leviticus, the third book of the Bible, has a lot to say about women who bleed.  For instance, a woman giving birth to a boy is ritually unclean for 7 days; a girl baby, 14 days (chapter12).

In Lev. 15 it says that during menstruation, women were ritually unclean, which meant they were considered socially dead, not allowed in the temple, not allowed in the community, could not touch anyone and no one was allowed to touch them or their clothes or they, too, were ritually unclean.  So what does the lady in Mark do?   What does Jesus do?

Do you realize today how historic and universal this bias was against women?  Plato in The Republic says that Socrates asked, do you know of anything done by humans which is not done better by the male.

Hindus teach that a woman must immolate herself after her husband's death.  Buddhists consider it bad karma to be reincarnated as a woman.  Orthodox Jewish men are taught to pray, Blessed be God who has not created me a heathen, a slave, or a woman.  The first book of our Bible,  Genesis, blames a woman for the origin of evil in our world.  Can you see the presence of men putting this story together?

More recently, in 1873 in Illinois a case was decided against a woman.  She had passed the bar exam to be a lawyer, and the court would not grant her appeal to receive a law license.  A judge said that the place of a woman was in the home and that women did not have the fortitude to deal with such issues as the law.

The church fathers, as they are called, had their own bias.  St. Jerome says that when a woman wishes to serve God more than the world, then she will cease to be a woman and will be called a man.  You do not want to know what St. Augustine thinks about women.  What about the way the Vatican made nuns dress and would still like to?

So why this historic and universal bias against women by men (& women)?  One reason, from my research, blood.  Another is the male nervousness & weakness around women, beginning in adolescence.

So here comes Jesus along.  The woman touches him.  He could have had her killed by the crowd.  What was she doing in the crowd anyway?   And what does he do?  He calls her "Daughter," and heals her.  This is shocking to the people.  This is scandalous in the eyes of the Jewish authorities.  He will die for it.  However, despite the danger, Jesus  moves from bias to inclusion & acceptance.

In Galatians (Chapter 3) it says there is no male or female.  Just folks.  We are being called to get rid of the bias.  Women do not deserve to have men tell them how they must live, or be stoned.

How is your bias barometer?  Any bias against women, men, a particular race, political party, a part of town, a school? 

Sources: The Sins of Scripture, Bishop (Anglican) John Shelby Spong; Catholic Encyclopedia on line.

 

 

 

 

Readings: Nehemiah 3, 2-10; Psalm 19, Your Words, Lord are Spirit and Life; 1 Corinthians 12, 12-30; Luke 1, 1-4, 4, 14-21

Third Sunday in Ordinary Time – Reading Reflections

Our readings today focus primarily on Readings.  Our first Reading from Nehemiah gives us a complete change from the Old Testament reading we have been hearing from for many weeks, namely the time of Exile.  For Nehemiah is writing from a time after the Exile.  The “Remnant”, as the people who had been scattered were referred to, had come back to Jerusalem.  This writing is part of a greater collection of writing composed of 1 and 2 Chronicles and Ezra, whom we hear about in our selection today.  This is the only Sunday in the three-year cycle of readings when we hear from Nehemiah, makes you wonder what he did wrong!

 

   

The last four books of the Hebrew canon are Ezra, Nehemiah, 1 and 2 Chronicles.  In our first reading today, we will hear about Ezra, so it is worth commenting about both Nehemiah and Ezra as they are both the two men most responsible for the reorganization of Jewish life after the Exile.  There are good reasons for believing that originally the Books of Ezra and Nehemiah formed the last part of a single literary work that began with 1 and 2 Chronicles. Some authors even regard Ezra himself as having been the anonymous Chronicler. c. 400 B.C. as the time of composition of this work.

   

Nehemiah was the man of action who rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem and introduced necessary administrative reforms. Ezra in turn was the great religious reformer who succeeded in establishing the Torah as the constitution of the returned community.

 

The second reading from Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians continues where we left off last week, addressing issues within the community in Corinth.  I have chosen to use the optional shorter version and avoid most of the anatomy lesson.

 

 

Third Sunday in Ordinary Time – Homily

 

It would seem that the topic for today is “Reading the Scriptures”.  In our first reading we hear of Ezra reading to the people for hours and hours, think how lucky you all are today with these short reading we have!!  In the Gospel, Luke we have the very first verses from Luke’s gospel and then a jump to chapter 4 and a very detailed account of Jesus in his local synagogue in Nazareth.  What strikes me as interesting is the detail, almost like stage directions, which Luke gives us of Jesus getting up to read.

   

And here in Plano today, we too have listened as we do each week to the Scripture being read to us!  There are not too many human activities, which have remained in place for about 2300 years.  So we must ask the question – what is it about the Scriptures, which makes it survive for so long?

 

If we start to look at the Bible, we realize that it is the story of a peoples understanding of their relationship with their God, and how that relationship played out over several hundreds of years.  With a sense of their uniqueness, they try to answer the most fundamental questions about human life, how did it begin, what is our place in the world.  To answer these questions they told stories.  Unfortunately up until quite recently we tended to view the stories as historically accurate, and there are some folks who still view them as accurate!!

   

 

As Catholics we have a very long tradition of NOT reading the bible, it was viewed as too dangerous!  Remember, it was reading and interpreting the Bible was what caused the Reformation.  Today, I know of folk who use the Bible to determine their whole code of relationships. “Wives submit to your husbands” came from a society of about two thousand years ago, and yet, in spite of our more liberated view of humans, there are folk who happily live this way.

In 1943, Pope Pius XII published an encyclical “Divino Afflante Spiritu” on Bible Studies.  This was really the first time that the Church was officially encouraging Catholics to read the Scriptures again.

   

So what about us here today?  Each Sunday, we gather and get short readings and hopefully some background to those reading so that we may understand the context. But you are probably the most educated Catholics ever to sit and listen to the Scriptures.  Remember, when Pius XII was submitting his encyclical, less than 70 years ago, most people could barely read, and had not even completed high school.  So their thinking was done for them by the Church.  Today, we are invited to read and reflect on the Scriptures ourselves.  There is much available by way of help.  Even if we use the online edition of the New American Bible, http://www.usccb.org/nab/bible/index.shtml there are helpful introductions and not too many footnotes. 

   

 

If we accept that the Scriptures are inspired by the Spirit, then careful reading and reflection can help us to deepen our relationship with God and allow us to better our relationships with one another. 

The Vatican II council issued a document on the Scriptures called “The Constitution on Divine Revelation” and urges us to “learn by frequent reading of the divine scriptures the “excellent knowledge of Jesus Christ” (Phil 3:8) and that prayer should accompany the reading of sacred scripture, so that God and man may talk together; for “we speak to him when we pray; we hear him when we read the divine sayings”. #25.

   

So what is to be our take-away for today?  “Be careful how you read the scriptures” Take the time to understand who wrote it, why it was written, whom it was written for and what was the culture.  Remember, spin-doctors are nothing new.

 

Sources:  New American Bible, http://www.usccb.org/nab/bible/index.shtml

  

 

Picture 1:  Mass begins with Tony

 

Picture 2:  Lilly with her Grand daddy, Buddy

 

Picture 3:  The Donut Shoppe, Ron & Chloe & C.C.

 

Picture 4:  Sacrament of the Sick, Curtis, Barb, & Tony

 

 

 

 

 

Welcome in out of that 26 degree cold, Dear Emma and Dear Beth.

 

 

Readings:

Leviticus 13, 1-2, 44-46,  If a  man is leprous, the priest shall declare him unclean

Psalm 32,  I turn to you, Lord, in time of trouble.

 Corinthians 10, 31-11, Whatever you do, do for the glory of God.

Mark 1, 40-45, A leper came to Jesus

 

 

 

I bet I can guess why Ben & Olivia are not here today.   Like 26 degrees!

 

 

On the readings:

• The book of Leviticus is the third book of the Hebrew Bible. Most of Leviticus is written as God’s speeches to Moses on Mt. Sinai which Moses repeated to the Israelites. It’s almost all about rituals and moral practices to follow in order to live in ritual purity. It describes the many ways you can be ‘unclean’; today’s reading is one example. Leviticus describes many rituals and rules to be followed. Like the stories in Genesis and Exodus these rules were created to give the Israelites a special identity, to help hold them together during the Babylon captivity in the sixth century B.C. And it worked.

 

 

Our dearest Candle Lighter of The Week in action.

 

 

• In First Corinthians Paul tells the early Christians in Corinth to not be obsessed about Jewish food laws when eating with others. In this same letter before today’s passage Paul said, “I’m not going to walk around on eggshells worrying about what small-minded people might say; I’m going to stride free and easy, knowing what our large-minded Master has already said. If I eat what is served to me, grateful to God for what is on the table, how can I worry about what someone will say?”
• Mark’s Gospel reinforces that caring for another is more important than rituals and rules. I’ll talk more later about how this might relate to how we practice Lent, which begins on Ash Wednesday this week.

 

 

Who let these characters in here, Joe (Geri's brother), Geri, and Mike?

 

 

Homily:

 

Mark’s story of Jesus and the leper is a good example of how Mark used stories to highlight the Good News Jesus preached. From Leviticus we know a leper could neither approach nor talk to Jesus. As a leper, he was unclean and would have to stay totally apart from others in out-of-the-way places and speak only to cry out ‘Unclean’. So, already, Mark is telling Jewish followers of Jesus that the old rules no longer apply.

 

 

 

Hi, Leo.  You are looking terrific this morning.

 

 

This Gospel story turned Leviticus on its ear concerning the idea of being ‘unclean’. [Leprosy was incurable then, so their best survival practice was a strict quarantine. Since about 1880 we have known leprosy is caused by a particular bacteria; for over 60 years now it is treatable and curable with antibiotics.] The old rules said: lepers were ‘unclean’ and had to stay out of the way of others, and they were not to touch or be touched. In Mark’s story he has the man with leprosy not stay out of the way away and has him dare to speak out; and he also has Jesus talk to and touch one known to be ‘unclean’. So, in Mark the rules are changed, and Jesus is approachable by anyone.

 

 

 

 

The Best.
 

 

 

In Paul’s letter to Corinthians he turns the rules in Leviticus upside down by questioning the rules about food and the eating habits of Jewish Christians. Paul said they should relax and “eat your meals heartily.”  

So, considering these teaching stories from Leviticus and Mark and Paul, what do you do for Lent to prepare for Easter?

 

 

 

 

Somebody finally gave that man a job.  

 

 

1) Some may give up sweets or do something else healthy. In the 60’s every Lent I would say “I’m giving up watermelon.” (I even used to get a laugh, since back then everyone knew watermelon wasn’t available till summer.)

2) Some will go to south Texas to work with victims of Hurricane Harvey—people struggling to get their houses and lives back in order. You are the community sending those who go; they represent us and this community’s caring for those in need. They will come back to our community members with stories of fun and comradery. They may also have stories about primitive lodging. (Ask Bill what he’s taking ‘just in case’.)

 

 

 

Peace, Angela and Cathy. 

 

 

3) A third possibility is to consider a teaching quoted in Ash Wednesday’s Mass from the prophet Joel 2:13—a favorite Bible verse of Stack’s: “God is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and rich in kindness.” Why on Ash Wednesday?     This verse is also found in Psalms 86, 103, and 145; and in the books of Exodus 34:6; and Jonah 4:2; and Nehemiah 9:17.

 

 

 

Bill, updating the plans for a dozen or so of our community heading to Dickenson, TX to join Professor Jim Mahar of St. Bonaventure U. & his 50 or so students, to help with the clean up after the hurricane.  There is still lots to do.

 

 

What if everyone prepared for Easter by imitating that verse?—withholding acts of anger; performing acts of mercy and kindness.   What will you do for Lent?

 

 

 

 

An old geezer taking the Sunday off thanks to John Cade.

 

Jeremiah 23, The days are coming when I will raise up a shoot.

Psalm 23, The Lord is my Shepherd

Ephesians 2, He is our peace

Mark 6, Come away and rest a while.

 

 

Welcome Home, Ben, so good to see you & to hear you.

 

Thanks……

Music,    Ben

Readers,  Warren & Brent, & Buddy, our candle blesser 

Gospel,     John Cade

Homily,   John Cade

Eucharistic Prayer A & B,  John Stack & John Cade

The Magic Zoom makers,     Richard, Hue, & Mike

Final Blessing, Rosemary

For hosting us at Legacy for all these years & will miss you enormously, Becky

Warren reading.

 

Readings:

Download Readings 16th Ordinary Time 7-18-21

 

 

Homily by John Cade

Download Homily John Cade 07-18-21 Good Shepherd

 

 

 

Brent reading.

 

Remember these special people:

For John & Karen Anderlick's unborn grandson;  For Alan Stryker;   For Candice Taht, friend of Mary Hall;   For Rosemary's great niece, Rylie ;  For Richard's grand daughter, Madeleine;   For Esparza's new great grandson baby, son of Monique, & Frank with shingles;  For all the medical personnel struggling to treat the tsunami of sick people, in particular, locally, Cindy's staff at Presby, Dallas, and at Frisco Presby, the mother of Harper and Betsy, Kendle, working in labor & delivery, and for Hue & Linda's daughter, Doctor Rosemary Beavers;   For Mary & Dave Hall's g-daughter Allison Keller working at St. Lukes, The Woodlands,   For Loretta's aunt Alicia;  For Sir Charlie & Jan;  Shonda's mom & Cody &  Leo & all of Shonda's dear family; For Ursuline Sr. Mary Troy, 

 

Today's team John & John

 

Jackie's mom, sister, & friend, Lynn;  For Rick Turner searching for a kidney donor, Type O neg.; For Meredith, cancer free & John Schanot;    For John O'Donnell & Jean;   For Jean & Cliff Wright;  For Dee, and for her daughters, Lisa & Lauren  ;  For Anthony & Sabrina;    For a young man who is suffering from depression;  John Cade's mother in law, Kalliopi Piskiouli and Lambrini, plus John's daughter, Joey, with cancer; from Barbara, a little 4 month old baby boy named Ford recuperating from an operation; for David McKeon's brother, Hugh; For Beth's friends & brother;   for the medical staffs, teachers, and coaches in our public & private schools.

 

Birthdays:    Beth (Monday)

Anniversaries: 

 

 

Applause from Meredith.  Community applause for you, Meredith.

 

Community Finances,   July 18, 2021

Expenses: $535.00

Outreach: $320.00 

Thanks again, Folks, for doing what you can.

 
 

Thanks for the Blessing, Rosemary.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   

Rosemary's Blessing:

A Summer Blessing

May you walk with God
This summer
In whatever you do
Wherever you go

Walking with God means…
Walking with honesty
And with courage,
Walking with love
And respect
And concern for the feelings of others

May you talk to God
This summer
And every day and
In every situation

Talking with God means…
Praying words of praise
For the beauty of creation
Saying prayers of thanks
For friends and good times,
Asking God's help
In all your decisions
Expressing sorrow
When you have failed

May you talk with God
Every day. Amen.

Author unknown

Found on https://www.xavier.edu/jesuitresource/online-resources/prayer-index/summer-prayers

Readings: Isaiah 49, 1-6; Psalm 139 (good); Acts of the Apostles 13 22-26; Luke 1, 57-66.

Isaiah: One of the 3 great Old Testament prophets, he lived about 700 years before Christ.  Actually the book itself has about 3 authors. The section we read this morning emphasizes the call Isaiah received from Yahweh to be a prophet. It ties in with John the Baptist, today’s feast. 

How to Get There

Last week when we confirmed Erica & Susie we talked about six qualities of the person who is becoming more mature and more whole. The qualities were curiosity, hope, gratitude, love, zest, and humor. 

This morning I would like to focus on the road to these qualities. How do I get there? I have five suggestions plus one. The first five I picked up somewhere, liked them, and wrote them down. 

The five plus one suggestions are: no hatred, no worry, give more, expect less, live simply, and accept.

With hatred I would distinguish between the feeling of hating a person and the state of being a person of hatred.  It is normal to hate. It is a feeling. To deny it if I feel it is more dangerous.  Because of guilt I may try to stuff the feeling. Then watch it become a state. If I hate, process it and then for me it has helped to forget.  Note that underneath hatred is probably anger & hurt.  That was where I was when I got kicked out of East Africa. After talking about it with trustworthy people, I had to just forget. And it worked.

Worry often involves the game of "What if?"  What if my child gets hurt?  What if I fall down? The opposite can be used as the antidote: "What if not?" Worry does not mean that I do not care or take care. Worry involves fret over a future I have at most limited control over. 

What is the hardest thing for me to give more of? Money, things, time, my attention?  That is where the path to greater peace lies. It may even involve giving care to myself, what I call self nurturing. I occasionally see people fearful of nurturing themselves because they consider it selfishness. 

Expecting less can really get tough when I focus on people. When my expectation of a person’s behavior is up here and they behave down there, I get mad & hurt. My dad always used to get upset on Saturday nights when he & my mom were going out. Mom was always late & dad’s expectation of being on time was up there where mom did not go.

Living simply takes work these days. When I lived in Tanzania, it was pretty easy to live a simple life style. In Dallas there is so much stuff. Wardrobes can go out of sight.  Cars, houses, things.  They weigh us down.

Finally, I add acceptance. Acceptance involves not only things & events, it involves me, accepting myself. It comes up constantly in daily life. 

Using these six little rules for happiness, we can become more peaceful and more whole people. One may be more challenging than the others. 

Which challenges you more?

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