Dear Friends,
What is it like to be on the receiving end of our faith?
It’s a question worth sitting with. We know what we believe. We know the prayers. But what do people experience when those beliefs walk into a room with us?
In this Sunday’s first reading, God gets very specific about how we treat people: the foreigner, the widow, the orphan, the neighbor struggling to get by. Then comes a detail we could easily miss.
If you take someone’s cloak as security for a loan, return it before sunset. That person needs it to sleep.
The debt is real. So is the person. And God refuses to let us forget the person.
We may be entitled to hold that cloak. We may have an agreement. We may have every reason to say, “You owe me.” Yet God asks us to consider what our neighbor will endure while we insist on what we are owed. That reaches well beyond borrowed money.
We can hold someone’s mistake over their head long after they have tried to make things right. We can win an argument and humiliate the person we claim to love. We can become so focused on whether someone deserves help that we stop noticing their suffering. I wonder what cloaks we are holding.
In the Gospel, Jesus is asked to identify the greatest commandment. He answers with love of God and joins it to love of neighbor. The person before us belongs within the love we offer God, including the person who inconveniences us, disappoints us, or sees the world differently.
Paul praises the Thessalonians because their faith has become an example to others. Their lives are telling a story about God. Ours are, too.
Here at Saint Miriam, we have opportunities every week to make that story one of welcome and mercy. The challenge follows us home, into our workplaces, our conversations, and the comments we leave online.
This week, perhaps we can each identify one cloak to return: an old accusation to stop repeating, an apology to offer, a practical kindness we have been putting off.
Someone should be a little warmer because we took the Gospel seriously.
Love, Peace, and Blessings,
Father Jerry