Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time – Cycle C
Reflecting on Luke 12: 49-53
The school year is starting up again, and the kids in our neighborhood are buzzing. If they’re lucky enough to have passionate and creative teachers, the kids will have a fruitful, exciting experience. But if the teachers are already dreading the year, we all know how the next nine months will go.
I am aware of one demographic that, given the right community, still finds the grace, year after year, to greet this new season with renewed energy and fascination. I hope that your parish is blessed with a vibrant community of parishioners who carry your Parish Mission into the world. And I pray you have a parish staff who are still on fire with love for the gospel of Jesus Christ.
I’ve watched this in wonder for forty years. Get any group of parish staff, exhausted from the rigors of Lent or Holy Week, and set them down at the L.A. Religious Ed Congress for a few days. It doesn’t take five minutes for the passion that led each person into this work years ago to ignite all over again.
I am part of a three-teacher team who gets to teach thirty weeks of New Testament, starting next month, at Most Precious Blood parish in Denver. Combined, we have 82 years of experience teaching scripture. And here’s our secret: we are literally shaking with excitement to begin again. We will never recover from the profound privilege of getting to open up the beautiful gospels to still another class of passionate students.
I have come to set the earth on fire. That’s the Holy Spirit. I pray that your parish is burning up.
How can you help to fan the flames of the Spirit in your parish?
Kathy McGovern ©2016