Category Archives: Gumbleton

by Bishop Thomas Gumbleton
Pax Christi USA Teacher of Peace

Sometimes things are happening in the world around us that provide a very good context to listen to the Scriptures, as we’re doing this morning during this liturgy. What’s going on, you may have heard about, is controversy within our church. This past week, there was a demonstration [in Detroit] of people who call themselves Fortunate Families. They were demonstrating in front of the archbishop’s office because they’re families who have committed gay members within them, or lesbian members.

They refuse to say, “I can’t go to holy Communion because I accept my child into my home,” so they’re demonstrating. This evening, there’s going to be a Mass at Marygrove, and it’s sponsored by Dignity, a Catholic organization of gay and lesbian people. We’ve been notified that there’s going to be a group there demonstrating, protesting. They call themselves the Cardinal Newman Society. They feel Dignity — this group — ought not to be able to celebrate Eucharist.

This is a very difficult struggle going on in our church — trying to come to grips with church teaching regarding homosexuality and perhaps a need for some new understandings on our part. But if you were listening, that’s nothing new that there would be this kind of dissention going on in the church. It was there right at the very beginning. When you listen to the Acts of the Apostles this morning, Luke has kind of glossed things over so it really doesn’t seem as difficult as it was, but this is a struggle that went on for probably 30 or 40 years. Luke was writing in the late 80s, but the struggle started right at the beginning, practically, 30 or 40 years before.…

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by Bishop Thomas Gumbleton
Pax Christi USA Teacher of Peace

Many times we have spoken and heard the Gospel at different times express ideas about the reign of God, the kingdom of heaven. What do we mean by that reign of God, what Jesus spoke about at the very beginning of his public life? “The reign of God is at hand. Change your lives. The reign of God is ready to break forth into human history in its fullness.” We can speak about the reign of God as God’s dynamic role of saving love over all of creation, over each one of us, over all of humanity, where God’s love becomes the dynamic force energizing all of us and all of creation. The reign of God is the human community embracing God’s saving love made present in Jesus.

I think if we listen deeply to our second lesson today, in very beautiful prophetic words, the seer John describes the reign of God: “I saw a new heaven and a new earth. The first heaven and the first earth had passed away. No longer was there any sea. And then I saw the new Jerusalem, the holy city, coming down from God out of heaven, and a loud voice came from the throne: ‘Here is the dwelling of God among mortals. God will pitch God’s tent among them. They will be God’s people and God will be God with them — Emmanuel.’”

That’s the vision of what God is bringing about — a new creation, everything made new, given fullness of life and energy. What happens then is we experience in this fullness of life joy beyond anything we can even speak of or imagine. “God will wipe every tear from their eyes. There shall be no more death or mourning, crying out or pain, for the world that was has passed away.”…

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by Bishop Thomas Gumbleton
Pax Christi USA Teacher of Peace

This Gospel that we hear today is really sort of a surprise because if you remember last Sunday, that scene in the upper room eight days after Jesus had risen from the dead and he came back and showed Thomas his side and his hands and so on — at the end of all of that, in John’s Gospel, he writes, “There were many other signs that Jesus gave in the presence of his disciples, but they’re not recorded in this book. These are recorded so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God. Believe, and you will have life through his name.”

That was the original end of this Gospel of John. It comes to a very decisive conclusion, and we might think, “Well, everything is settled. The disciples know exactly what to do. Jesus has given them a blueprint for how the church is to be, how it’s to function, and so on,” and yet, just the opposite is true. They don’t know what to do; they’re confused. They go back home to their families and then, on this occasion that we hear in this appendix to John’s Gospel, really gives a good description of the way things were. The disciples struggling to know, “Well, what does he want us to do? He’s gone now, he says he’ll be with us, but here we are without any guidance at all.” So they’re struggling, confused, trying to understand what it means to be a community of the disciples of Jesus.

Then in the midst of their confusion and so on, they decide to go back to their regular work. Peter, James and John and some of the others had been people who fish for a living, and then we hear this really extraordinary experience that they have of Jesus….

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