We, who are still in the middle of the great ordeal, have been given to each other as a blessing. Look at each other. Memorize the faces you see here. Learn to look upon the face of your neighbor as though you were seeing their image through the light of these votives, as though each person you encountered was among God’s elect. Carry these faces with you wherever you go, knowing that God’s face is revealed among us.
If the reformations of the past in science and society have anything to teach us, it is that there is life on the other side of these upheavals. It’s too early to know with any certainty where the church will be on the other side of this moment of evolution, but if we can pull back from our obsessive interest with describing what is and look at the signs of what is becoming, we might be encouraged to notice that there is a movement taking shape at the intersection of religion, politics, economics and identity. People around the world are crying out for new ways of ordering their life together in ways that are ethical, sustainable, and hospitable. More and more we want to find ways to live with dignity in the presence of diversity, to engage difference rather than to simply tolerate it.
Jesus, like any good teacher, won’t do all our work for us. Jesus won’t fall prey to the intellectual or political traps we lay that try to neutralize him by making his call to discipleship so ideological that it can be ignored. Instead, Jesus lays a question before us and demands that we really listen to it, that we consider its many angles, that we search our religious tradition, our scriptures and the witness of those who have gone before us. Then, having done that, that we tell the world what we think with courage and humility knowing that each of us is working out our own salvation with fear and trembling.
By Proclamation 