Homily Video

>>There’s a beautiful book that I once read, it was a memoir called ‘Saving Grace.’ It was written by Elizabeth Edwards, the wife of John Edwards. And you may remember that in the early 2000s. He was a vice president nominee. Their son, Wayne Edwards, waskilled in a tragic car crash on a North Carolina highway. And in her memoir, ‘Saving Grace,’ Elizabeth recalls the anguish of confronting every mother’s darkest fear. And she said that she carried her son’s picture with her everywhere, and that any time or place, if her grief felt like it was going to overcome her, she would excuse herself. And she would go to the restroom, take out the picture and just hold it close to her heart. Now, when she was at public events and she would do that in the restroom, there were others that would also be in the restroom. And she remembers and recalls how she would show them her son’s picture and tell them about her son. She said you can imagine that many people felt awkward. She said you could just feel that awkwardness. And then she would tell them how much it meant that they just listened. And after she fell composed, she would return to whatever function she was at. And this is the interesting thing that I recall about her memoir and what she wrote in ‘Saving Grace.’ She said, “What made this all work, was the willingness to take a chance and the kindness and the decency of strangers.” “No one ever ran out of the restroom,” she says. “They always listened.” Her memoir, ‘Saving Grace,’ reminded me of today’s scriptures about the challenge of being a prophet. It reminds us that God speaks to us in the voice of prophets of every kind and every time and place, and even in the darkest and the most challenging circumstances of life. Without realizing it, those who took the timeto listen to Elizabeth and her grieving, they became the prophets of compassion, generosity, consolation, and peace. In our gospel today, Jesus preaches that God’s love extends to all, not just to the Jewish community. But his Nazareth hearers are not pleased with that message. And we hear that they actually run him out of town. Today, what I’d ask us to consider is how are we being challenged to be prophets in the circumstances in our lives today? How are we being called to be prophets that show through our love and our compassion and our care, the dignity that each and every one of us possess as the children of God?