Twenty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time, August 24, 2025
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Gather
People will come from the east and the west
and from the north and the south
and will recline at table in the kingdom of God.
Most religious communities celebrate the presence of God one way or another, including many non-Christians. Christians call their sacrament the Eucharist, or Holy Communion. Quakers replace this feast with silence. In every case, a tacit recognition of helplessness empowers the celebration. We cannot do this thing called life alone. When we lose that edge, we quickly become lost, in spite of whatever industrious miracles we might accomplish and benefit from.
A cotton gin, automobile, radio, even an iPhone can only go so far, and then no further. When we replace the old with some new invention, we only prolong our foolishness and emphasize our isolation. Rather than bringing us together, we move further apart.
Here’s what Ron Rolheiser says:
At a certain point our differences, like a cancer that cannot be stopped, begin to make themselves felt and we feel helpless to overcome that.
But this isn’t despair. It’s health. As anyone who has ever fought an addiction knows, the beginning of a return to health lies in the admission of helplessness. It’s only when we admit that we can’t help ourselves that we can be helped. We see in the gospels where so many times, immediately after finally grasping a teaching of Jesus, the apostles react with the words: “If that’s true, then it’s impossible for us, then there’s nothing we can do!” Jesus welcomes that response (because in that admission we open ourselves to help) and replies: “It is impossible for you, but nothing is impossible for God!”
Our prayers for unity and intimacy become effective precisely when they issue from this feeling of helplessness, when we ask God to do something for us that we have despaired of doing for ourselves.
Although I only rarely celebrate the Mass, I’m thankful to know much of what that liturgical masterpiece includes. Rolheiser, who has been a priest all his life, calls it a celebration of helplessness. Beginning with our confession of sins, it moves into a plea for God’s mercy and then a joyful acclamation of God’s goodness, our God “who takes away the sins of the world.”
After praying the Lord’s Prayer together and offering a friendly peace to each other, we admit our helplessness and acknowledge God’s sovereign power to heal and strengthen every one of us.
Lord, I am not worthy
That you should enter under my roof,
But only say the word
And my soul shall be healed.
Like the Quaker silence, Rolheiser says …
The silence is an admission of helplessness, of having given up on the naĂŻve notion that we, as human beings, will ever finally find the right words and the right actions to bring about a unity that has forever evaded us.
The Eucharist is such a prayer of helplessness, a prayer for God to give us a unity we cannot give to ourselves. It is not incidental that Jesus instituted it in the hour of his most intense loneliness, when he realized that all the words he had spoken hadn’t been enough and that he had no more words to give. When he felt most helpless, he gave us the prayer of helplessness, the Eucharist.
Helpless, we can turn together toward God, who has created us and will take us home. When we discover this, whatever our loneliness and even despair, we come on our knees toward healing.
Our generation, like every generation before it, senses its helplessness and intuits its need for a messiah from beyond. We cannot heal ourselves and we cannot find the key to overcome our wounds and divisions all on our own. So we must turn our helplessness into a Quaker-silence, a Eucharistic prayer, that asks God to come and do for us what we cannot do for ourselves, namely, create community.
 (Isaiah 66, Psalm 117, Hebrews 12, John 14, Luke 13)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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