I had a very disturbing conversation about a year ago. A person told me that they liked this parish. They liked the windows and the artwork. They liked the preaching and the music. But they were not going to stay at this parish, and they told me the reason. The person said to me, “You just have too many Mexicans.”
Apparently, they could only recognize the presence of Jesus in people who looked and spoke like them.
Not long after that conversation, one of the leaders in our Hispanic community brought a question to me. He said that it was not his question, but he heard many people asking this question, so he brought the question to me. What was the question? “When will Our Lady of Lourdes get a Spanish-speaking priest?” My Spanish is not perfect. I know that. But that question had nothing to do with language. That question suggests that my skin is the wrong color to proclaim the Good News, consecrate the Eucharist and celebrate the sacraments in this parish. Apparently, some people can only recognize the ministry of Jesus in people who look and speak like them.
Whatever word we would use to describe the attitudes behind both of those conversations – whatever way we might choose to define it – it is not Christianity. Those statements and those attitudes are wooden beams that blind the eyes to the vision of the Kingdom of God. They are obstacles to the work of the Holy Spirit. These statements and these attitudes prevent the unity that we seek in Christ Jesus.
And some of us might have these wooden beams, but we all have splinters. Sometimes we find old ideas and bad ideas and divisive ideas hiding in our minds and in our hearts. We all have splinters.
But I hope, that all of us who are here, all of us who claim the parish of Our Lady of Lourdes, want to see clearly. We want the splinters and the wooden beams to be removed. We want the vision of the Kingdom. We want to see the face of Jesus in the face of every person. We want to hear the voice of Jesus in the voice of every person. We want to recognize the splinters and the wooden beams in our own eyes so that the loving hand of Jesus Christ, extended through our life together in this community, can heal us and free us. We want to live to see the unity of faith and love that Jesus wants for us, here in this place and in this community.
What will it look like? Honestly, I do not know. God has granted me only the vision to see the next step or two that we will take. Our unity will not be uniformity. We will have unity in diversity. That is the vision of the Church. We can look differently, and we can look at things differently, and we can still have unity.
But there are some who want division. There are some who want separation. There are some who want segregation. There are people outside of our community who will fight against our unity. They will say that they know better. We will say that we know each other. We will say that we want the vision of God’s Kingdom. We want the power of God’s mercy and the light of God’s glory to burn away the splinters in our eyes, our minds and our hearts. We want to see Jesus and we want to see each other in Christ Jesus more clearly.
Our first step on the path to unity and healing is to ask for God’s mercy. On Ash Wednesday, we were united by being marked with the ashes of repentance. We repented of our sins and our failings. We were marked with the Sign of the Cross. And we received the invitation to repent and believe in the Gospel. Our journey to unity began there.
And Jesus gives us the food for the journey. We come to the banquet where people of every nation, language and race, join in one act of worship of the Most Holy God. Here Jesus will feed us and here Jesus will lead us to the Kingdom where He lives and reigns with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever. Amen.
Father Benjamin A. Roberts is the pastor of Our Lady of Lourdes Church in Monroe. This is adapted from his homily for the Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time March 2-3.