14th Sunday in Ordinary Time – 4 July 2021 – Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Sunday.
How often we can fail to recognise the presence of God in the ordinary things of life. We want God to come in the grand scheme, in a form that takes away all our doubt and anxiety, in the miraculous gesture. This is at the base of the apocalyptic cults such as QAnon amongst others. And in so doing, we miss the presence of God in the smile of a stranger, the challenging word of a friend, the simplicity of the scene outside our window.
This is at the heart of the gospel this Sunday. Who could think that this peasant from Nazareth was the prophet long expected? The people in today’s gospel cannot accept Jesus: he is just too ordinary. There is a part of us, just as with the Palestinians of Jesus’ time, that expects the encounter with God to come in a grand, luminous, unmistakable way.
But the ordinariness of God’s presence is a key feature of Christian faith. Indeed, Christian faith is the ability to recognise the extraordinary in the ordinary. We are alert for the presence of God clothed in ordinariness and simplicity. We are the ones who rejoice at God’s presence in this way. There is nothing sensational about God’s coming. It is quiet, unobtrusive. This is the most remarkable thing: when God wants to get serious with us, God appears in the most humble form. The more serious God becomes with us, the more humble God is with us. God comes as a baby, as one socially marginalised, as bread in the Eucharist.
The writer, James Finlay, puts it wonderfully when he says, “when we drink water, when we silently watch children play, when we walk in the cold and feel cold, we are in life, and hence one with God . . . In the foundations of the heart, God is present in our simple presence to life. [What] are extraordinary are the ordinary concrete realities of daily life . . . It is our desire to be extraordinary that, in fact, makes us less than ordinary whenever such desire moves us to pull away from, reject or even just ignore God manifesting himself to us in the . . . the cold wind of a winter evening.”[1]
On this annual Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Sunday this is something especially we can learn from our Aboriginal people for whom all elements of life are sacramental. As Pope Francis writes, “Certainly we should esteem the indigenous mysticism that sees the interconnection and interdependence of the whole of creation, the mysticism of gratuitousness that loves life as a gift, the mysticism of a sacred wonder before nature and all its forms of life.”[2] Yes, the gifts of God are evident and intertwined into every aspect of life, so that Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann, 2021 Senior Australian of the Year, can say: “My people today recognise and experience this quietness, the great Life-Giving Spirit, the Father of us all. It is easy for me to experience God’s presence. When I am out hunting, when I am in the bush, among the trees, on a hill or by a billabong; these are the times when I can simply be in God’s presence. My people have been so aware of nature. It is natural that we feel close to the Creator.”[3]
Yet further, the God that Jesus reveals to us is the One that comes to us at those times we least expect, and though those circumstances that we would rather not occur. Is this not Pope Francis’ great challenge to us during the pandemic? As he remarked last week, it has “tested everyone and everything. [Yet] only one thing is more serious than this crisis, and that is the risk that we will squander it, and not learn the lesson it teaches. It is a lesson in humility, showing us that it is no possible to live healthy lives in an unhealthy world, or to on as we were, without recognizing what went wrong.” According to Pope Francis, “the present crisis is an invitation to distinguish, discern and sift between what is enduring and what is passing. We cannot go back to doing what we did before, “relying on false securities, habits and projects that aim exclusively at pursuing wealth and personal interests, while failing to respond to global injustice the cry of the poor and the precarious health of our planet.”[4]
God comes to us in our grief; God comes to us in our disillusionment; God comes to us in our failures. In all these situations we are faced with our undeniable vulnerability. When we can accept just how vulnerable we are, and yet, find the courage to reach out and touch another, then we experience that power which is beyond words, and which lives in the very heart of God, and which God wishes to manifest amongst us. Again, this is the invitation to us on this Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Sunday: “The more we share with each other, the more we realise that as humans, we have more similarities than differences. The differences between our cultures should not be seen as weaknesses, for they can also be where our strength lie . . . To sit, talk and listen is the first step towards acceptance and understanding.”[5]
The miracle that God wants to work in our life, requires faith. But the faith that we are called to is the capacity to perceive the extraordinary in the ordinary. With this faith, we begin to see and hear things in an altogether new way – we see the miracle of life at work all around us, and within us.
Perhaps then we might take this little Celtic poem into our hearts:
I saw a stranger yesterday
I put food in the eating place,
Drink in the drinking place
Music in the listening place.
And in the blessed name of the Triune
he blessed me and my house
My cattle and my dear ones
And the lark sang in her song
often, often, often
Goes the Christ in the stranger’s guise,
often, often, often
goes the Christ in the stranger’s guise.
[2] Pope Francis, Querida Amazonia, “Beloved Amazon,” Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation (12 February 2020), n 73.
[3] Drawn from The National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Catholic Council, Homily Notes in Heal Country: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Sunday 4 July 2021.
[4] See https://cruxnow.com/vatican/2021/06/pope-says-pandemic-a-lesson-in-humility-warns-against-doing-what-we-did-before/. Accessed 2 July 2021.
[5] Drawn from The National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Catholic Council, Homily Notes in Heal Country: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Sunday 4 July 2021
