Planning - Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time through Christ the King (Year B)

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18th Sunday in Ordinary Time (B) – Christ the King (B)

18th Sunday in Ordinary Time (August 4, 2024)

19th Sunday in Ordinary Time (August 11, 2024)

Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary (August 15, 2024)

20th Sunday in Ordinary Time (August 18, 2024)

21st Sunday in Ordinary Time (August 25, 2024)

22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time (September 1, 2024)

23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time (September 8, 2024)

24th Sunday in Ordinary Time (September 15, 2024)

25th Sunday in Ordinary Time (September 22, 2024)

26th Sunday in Ordinary Time (September 29, 2024)

27th Sunday in Ordinary Time (October 6, 2024)

28th Sunday in Ordinary Time (October 13, 2024)

29th Sunday in Ordinary Time (October 20, 2024)

30th Sunday in Ordinary Time (October 27, 2024)

All Saints / All Souls (November 1 / 2, 2024)

31st Sunday in Ordinary Time (November 3, 2024)

32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time (November 10, 2024)

33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time (November 17, 2024)

Our Lord, Jesus Christ, King of the Universe (November 24, 2024)

August 4 /Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOUR FOOD comes from? When I was growing up, my grandmother grew a lot of the food we ate. I’d watch her spend hours making each meal and loved her for it. But today, I couldn’t tell you how the pizza delivered to my doorstep came to be.

There is an important aspect in today’s Exodus reading that is different from John’s passage of the feeding of the five thousand, which we read last week and is the prelude to this week’s Gospel pericope. In the miracle of the loaves and fishes, someone had to put in work to turn the earth’s barley into bread. But the

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manna from heaven is a complete and total divine gift—no labor involved. If you read the 15th and 16th chapters of Exodus, you will see that God does not want the Israelites to work for food, only for them to remember who has fed them in their need.

Jesus says to those seeking more bread: “This is the work of God, that you believe in the one he sent.” The Eucharist is memory in the form of food, a gift given freely, not as reward but as relationship with the One who gives it. Our work then is only to remember who has fed us and respond with faith and love to God’s heavenly gift. —DM

August 11 /Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

“THAT’S IT. I’M DONE!” I’M SURE we’ve all felt like Elijah at some point: exhausted, afraid, tapped out, questioning our choices, catastrophizing the situation, and feeling sorry for ourselves or just plain “hangry.” Then there’s the sadness, anger, or depression that no snack or nap can fully heal.

As ministers, we naturally want to give our time and energy to others, often at our expense. So it’s even more important for us to let ourselves and one another “feel our feelings” when we have nothing left to give and to seek care from those who can help us restore our physical, emotional, and mental health.

Feelings are promptings from the Holy Spirit. Like Elijah’s

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angel, they are messengers prodding us to pay attention to what our bodies need and to rest and give ourselves over to sleep. These too are acts of faith in God who neither sleeps nor slumbers. Of course our spiritual health needs nourishment, and the Eucharist is the heavenly food for our soul. But Jesus’s table ministry and Elijah’s restorative angel show us that corporal and spiritual care for ourselves and others are necessary for the mission.

Whether it is healing of mind, body, or spirit, Christian selfcare always involves and leads back to the community, for healing is for blessing. So listen to your angels! Eat, rest, and keep going. —DM

August 15 /Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary

THE HOLINESS OF THE HUMAN BODY is central to today’s solemnity. Mary’s assumption “body and soul into heavenly glory” (Pius XII, Munificentissimus Deus) shows us that our earthly bodies are sacred and worthy indeed to be clothed with eternal life. We need not reject our bodies to recognize ourselves and one another as holy. We can assert that our faith is concerned with both the temporal and spiritual realms. Because of the Incarnation, God’s grace given to humanity overflows

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precisely through our human bodies and beyond their earthly existence, whether before birth or after death.

In Mary’s assumption, humanity receives a foretaste of what is promised to us in Christ’s resurrection, a gift first given when God entrusted himself with the frailty, power, wonder, and glory of the human body. With Mary and Elizabeth, we rejoice today in what God has done and has promised to do for all generations. —DM

* = BILINGUAL Find

August 18 /Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time

THE RESTAURANT SIGN READ, “WE HAVE no Wi-Fi. Talk to one another.” Next time you’re dining out, take a look. Couples gaze at their phones instead of each other. Kids play on tablets so parents can eat in peace. But even without the lure of technology, we still often eat alone together. Around communal tables meant to create new friendships, strangers come and go as strangers. Fast food describes not only the food but how we relate to those who serve us: get in, get out.

This phenomenon of eating without connecting with the people around us isn’t limited to just our dining tables. Often we approach the Eucharistic table and those who gather with us

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around it with the same disconnection. We might not be buried in our phones, but we bury ourselves in private prayer, trying not to be distracted by those around us. We see the same faces or perhaps a newcomer, maybe say hello, but go no further to learn their names and their stories. And when it’s time to be fed with the body and blood of Christ, we overlook the members of that same body all around us.

At Wisdom’s table there is no Wi-Fi. Just the invitation to savor the Lord’s goodness found in the bread from heaven and in our companions who break that bread with us. —DM

August 25 /Twenty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time

IF YOU READ THE FULL ACCOUNT of today’s first reading from Joshua, chapter 24, it might make you think of the Easter Vigil. Joshua gathers the Israelites at Shechem, where the Lord first appeared to Abram. At that significant place and starting at the beginning with God’s covenant, Joshua recounts how God had been faithful time and again to the Israelites. From Isaac and Jacob, to Moses and Aaron, through the Red Sea into freedom and victory in all the succeeding conflicts and turmoil, Joshua tells how the Lord delivered them—and all at God’s initiative through God’s gratuitous grace. Only then, having reminded them of their ancestral history of salvation, does Joshua ask the

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people for their response to God’s saving action.

Year by year, at the Easter Vigil, we hear the story of our salvation and renew our baptismal vows with our elect who make them for the first time. Those vows lead us through the font to the altar where, Sunday after Sunday, through our “Amen,” we declare again that “we also will serve the Lord.”

Baptism and Eucharist—both are gifts freely given by God who, over and over, chooses to bless us without merit or payment on our part. The choice is not whether we will receive God’s blessings but if we will respond to God’s gifts with faith. —DM

September 1 /Twenty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time

JESUS CALLS THE PHARISEES IN TODAY’S Gospel hypocrites. If we read the verses omitted from the Lectionary pericope, we see why. The Pharisees routinely took the commandment to honor one’s father and mother and distorted it to justify a custom that did the opposite. They touted this as adherence to God’s law even though the financial practice it promoted nullified the law’s intent. Jesus was right: “This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.”

Perhaps this is why Moses and so much of Deuteronomy repeatedly instructs the Israelites to hear, take heed, and hand on to their children the commandments of God, which established right relationship with God and with one another. The

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Pharisees prioritized their interpretation of the law over God’s justice intended by that law and were more concerned with tradition than with doing what “harms not his fellow man,” as today’s psalm teaches. Ensuring that the laws we uphold today center those most vulnerable and in need is a good reminder on this annual World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation begun by Pope Francis in 2015.

In our zeal to follow the church’s teaching, let us always discern between what fulfills God’s desire for all humankind and what satisfies our own. That discernment is not always easy, but it is always necessary. —DM

Unbound makes thousands of hymns previously only available in text and tune collections available for individual download as a PDF with full accompaniment included. Visit giamusic.com/unbound

September 8 /Twenty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time

HAVE YOU EVER BEEN SO FRIGHTENED that your body shuts down? When fear turns to panic, a deafening “woosh” clogs your ears as your pulse pounds, your fists clench, and you squeeze your eyes shut. Physical danger isn’t always the cause. Often, we emotionally shut down when faced with the unknown. Tunnel vision keeps us from seeing a reality too hard to accept. Pride binds our tongues from saying the necessary words. And we choose a paralyzing status quo over change.

To “those whose hearts are frightened” and racing with anxiety, Isaiah says, “Be strong, fear not.” But we should be ready when God responds to our pleas because when God acts, things

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change, and not always gently. Streams burst, sands melt, and the parched ground cracks open. So too with the deaf man who could not speak plainly. Jesus’s healing method of fingers in ears and saliva on tongues was certainly far from non-invasive.

To change the world, change will be required of us first. For this, we must be open to the Spirit breaching the walls around our hearts and minds. But in God’s style of nearness, what we face is not something to fear but someone to love who has loved us first—Jesus. Being open is to be vulnerable to God’s love that will surely change us if we let it in. —DM

September 15 /Twenty-fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time

LOOK UP A 2010 TED TALK called “How to Start a Movement.” In it, author and entrepreneur Derek Sivers analyzes a three-minute home video of an outdoor music festival. A shirtless guy dances wildly by himself on the hillside as people around him sit and gawk. A few seconds later, shirtless guy is joined by a “first follower” who imitates his crazy moves. Sivers says that this first follower is key because he “transforms a lone nut into a leader” and shows “everyone else how to follow.” Moments later, more people join behind the first follower, imitating him imitating the leader. A minute after what began as an odd solo, we see dozens of people rushing in until eventually all the festival-goers

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are on their feet dancing with abandon, caught up in this new movement.

Not all of Sivers’s analysis will relate to today’s Gospel passage. But his main point is a good reminder for those of us who serve in ministry leadership. If everyone saw themselves as leaders, that would be ineffective. Leaders are nothing without followers. We cannot confuse our role with that of Jesus, nor can everyone be a gutsy lone prophet out in the world. But all of us do need to be courageous first followers of Christ who show others how to get behind our leader and follow him to the cross. —DM

September 22 /Twenty-fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time

LAST WEEK JESUS LEFT US WITH this paradox: Lose your life to save it. He continues this week saying that to be first, one must be last. All their bickering about the wrong things aside, it’s no wonder that the disciples in Mark’s Gospel never quite understand Jesus when he talks this way. He must show them. However, we don’t have the benefit of seeing what Jesus did. We need to imagine it.

So think of a little child in a room full of adults. If you were to put your arms around the child, the first thing you would have to do is bend down and get at their level. To receive them into

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your arms, you need to lower yourself and make yourself gentle so that they do not run away in fear.

But before we think this is just a sweet lesson about children and avoiding pride, Jesus subtly hints at his true identity, saying, “Whoever receives me receives not me but the One who sent me.” In Jesus, God the all-powerful One has stooped down to our level so that all humanity might be embraced in God’s loving arms. If God has done this, then we, too, must bend and gaze eye to eye with love upon the lowly ones whom Jesus loves, for they are sacraments of God’s presence among us. —DM

September 29 /Twenty-sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time

TO REALLY UNDERSTAND TODAY’S GOSPEL AND Jesus’s overthe-top rant, read the verses of Numbers 11 that lead up to today’s first reading pericope. Moses was fed up. He had had enough of leading the people by himself and hearing them complain about not having anything to eat other than manna from heaven. The people wanted meat! God heard and answered. Moses would be given 70 leaders to share his burden, and for the people, God would send enough meat for all to eat for a month.

Now Moses was incredulous. Could God provide that much meat? God would have to slaughter entire herds and catch every single fish in the sea to feed everyone! And God responds: Just wait and see.

That’s the setup for Joshua’s complaint against the two elders who stayed behind and didn’t follow protocol. It’s also the Lectionary context behind Jesus’s hyperbolic rant. The sin here, or scandal (the word used at Mark 9:42 in Greek is skandalon meaning “trap” or “stumbling block”), is not the actions of the two outliers, the rogue exorcist, or the “little ones.” Jesus is outraged that any person who has experienced God’s abundant blessings would dare to limit what God could do with those blessings. His graphic language, then, reminds us who is truly limited when it comes to showing boundless mercy. —DM

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Si Fui Motivo de Dolor / If I Have Been a Source of Pain (camacuá) D-702111 Text: C. Maud Battersby; tr. de Hall, May / Music: Pablo Sosa

October 6 /Twenty-seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time

HOPEFULLY NO ONE IN THEIR HOMILY last week advocated for self-harm or mutilation as an actual response to human weakness. We do not interpret Scripture literally or use it to invoke violence upon oneself or another. Neither can this week’s Lectionary readings be used to imply, promote, or justify any form of misogyny, sexism, subservience of women, dominance of men, homophobia, transphobia, or abuse in relationships. The unfortunate reality, however, is that historically, and even still today, these readings have been used in this way. If you have any influence at all in how your assemblies will hear today’s readings, please do what you can to stop violence disguised as biblical fidelity.

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The reality is that someone in your assembly will experience hurt today. Let us acknowledge that pain and not ignore their suffering or anger, even if—especially if—it is anger with the church. Recognize that the church has been wrong in the past— think of its teachings on slavery, colonialism, degradation of women—and admit that there are no simple answers to many of today’s challenging questions.

If we do this, then with God’s mercy, the good news may be heard: God does not want us to be alone. God gives us one another. And as we learned last week, God’s blessings will go beyond any limits we have or cling to. —DM

DOES JESUS WANT US TO SELL everything we have to inherit eternal life? Or is this another hyperbole to get our attention?

Recall that in the first Christian community, “no one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they had everything in common” (Acts 4:32).

We are quick to dismiss the rich man who couldn’t accept Jesus’s instruction—“Go, sell what you have, and give to the poor”—even as we justify why we are exempt from this mandate. Perhaps we’re more like the rich man than we think. We, too, have honored our commitments and avoided doing what is wrong but have lacked entrusting everything to God. We may

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have handed over our will to the Lord but not our way, deciding for ourselves the most reasonable path to the cross.

Despite the rich man’s inability to embrace Jesus’s terms, Jesus loved him for asking. As we’ve heard in various ways these last few weeks, all things are possible for God. What is needed is our desire to let God do what is impossible for us. With Thomas Merton, then, let us pray: “. . . the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you” (Thoughts in Solitude). —DM

Congregational Hymn and Song Selections from

Sing Yes! (kirk shore) ........................................................... D-686154

Text: Mary Louise Bringle / Music: John Kleinheskel

Unbound makes thousands of hymns previously only available in text and tune collections available for individual download as a PDF with full accompaniment included. Visit giamusic.com/unbound Find

IN MARK’S GOSPEL, THE LANGUAGE ABOUT the cross and what it requires is violent and unambiguous. Jesus will suffer greatly and be rejected, killed, and handed over. He will give up everything and be the slave of all. This is not John’s Gospel. Jesus does not gloriously commend his spirit into the Father’s hands. Mark’s Jesus fights to the end. He pleads for this cup to pass him by, and his last words, “Why have you forsaken me?” get no answer. The cross clearly involves real pain and suffering; it is not a metaphor.

Most of us, however, will never come close to experiencing that kind of physical torture, agony, or discomfort—and it shows

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in our easy-to-consume religious art and language. But spend time with a faith community whose people have known poverty, violence, or systemic generational racism. There you will see a Jesus with followers who know what suffering feels like in their bones. You will hear cries and groans that meld seamlessly into the music they sing and the prayers they offer. And you will discover the most generous, welcoming, joyful, and merciful communities you will ever encounter. For they know what rejection and anguish feel like and will give everything they have to keep anyone else from knowing that kind of pain. May this be so for us as well. —DM

AT THE EDGE OF JERUSALEM, AFTER misunderstandings, disappointments, and misguided requests by Jesus’s followers and would-be disciples, we finally find a worthy companion for Christ on the road to the cross. He was actually off to the side, so you would have missed him had he not been so disruptive and persistent with his cries. Though blind, Bartimaeus recognizes Jesus’s true identity, and the son of Timaeus knows what he needs from the Son of David. Not authority or power, not a seat at his right or left, not even eternal life, but mercy, a connection of heart to heart and eye to eye. For he knows that with the Lord’s mercy, there is fullness of redemption. Without

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family except in name or possessions save for a cloak, Bartimaeus casts both aside for what he desires most. His heart’s longing now fulfilled, Bartimaeus does not go his way as instructed by Jesus but follows him “on the way” to the cross.

All along this way, we have encountered a variety of people unable to see. The disciples were blinded by power and the rich man by possessions. Peter was misguided about Jesus’s identity as Christ, and the Pharisees couldn’t see the true purpose of the law. How blessed are we, then, to have Bartimaeus show us how to follow Jesus with joy to the cross. —DM

November 1, 2 /All Saints, All Souls

TIME IS A LITURGICAL SYMBOL CREATED by God and regulated by the cosmos. In each particular day or season, in each minute or hour, we encounter Christ who is at once timeless and present in this time. Less like “deadlines” confining the paschal mystery to a fixed date, our memorials are more like pings along our path. They remind us to pause, look up, and see the mystery that surrounds us every moment of our lives.

These dual feasts of our saints and beloved dead serve as annual prompts to recall who walks with us every day in spaces sacred and secular. At every Eucharist, we enter the eternal liturgy with the entire communion of saints. On each day of the year,

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in every nation, race, people, and tongue, and in every diocese, parish, and religious community, the People of God represented by that local church remember the holy women and men who have shaped their own expression of faith.

As we pause on these days to remember that we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us be more attentive to the ways we walk daily with the ancestors. Let our music and art, our name days and anniversaries, and the stories of saints of old and saints next door help us always to persevere in running the race that lies before us. —DM

November 3 /Thirty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time

ON THIS SUNDAY BEFORE ELECTION DAY in the United States, the Lectionary gives us a blessing in disguise. Today’s pericope of the greatest commandment is so familiar that we might miss the grace that the Spirit presents.

Whenever most of us hear about the scribes or Pharisees, we automatically ascribe malice to their motives, setting up an “us versus them” dynamic. In that scenario, we’re in the “us” category with Jesus and therefore on the “good” side, while whoever debates Jesus is on the “bad” side.

Throughout Mark’s Gospel, and in particular this twelfth chapter, the scribes, Pharisees, Sadducees, and Herodians engage in

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verbal battle with Jesus as they plot to entrap him. So we on the “us” side are ready for a fight as soon as the scribe steps forward.

Yet it’s this very scribe who breaks the cycle. He praises Jesus’s response, treats him with respect, and, in an act of honor for any rabbi, builds upon Jesus’s answer to deepen his understanding of a core question of Jewish identity and practice.

In a society where it has become normative, expected, and popular to demonize “them”—whoever they are—can we break the cycle? What can each of us do to engage in respectful dialogue that seeks not to be right but to be enlightened even by those with whom we disagree? —DM

November 10 /Thirty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time

MANY LANDMARKS AND MUCH OF THE infrastructure we take for granted were built by persons enslaved and exploited by unjust systems. I think of the White House, of rail and roadways constructed by enslaved laborers, and of migrant workers harvesting the food I eat. And I’m sure we each know someone who has given their heart and livelihood to a church that does not support and love them back.

Those who sacrifice the most aren’t always the biggest donors. Power and wealth often prevent a person from giving themselves—the self that is everything they are when nothing else is left. But we cannot romanticize the widow’s act of sacrifice, giving all she had to a system that devoured those like her.

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Theologian Amanda Brobst-Renaud reminds us that “there is a difference between giving everything and having everything taken away.”

Last week, we heard, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.” That does not excuse us this week to overlook systems that hinder or take advantage of people’s freedom or agency. Imitating the widow means, in Sr. Thea Bowman’s words, that “you don’t bring him any feeble service.” To give everything is to bring “all that I am, all that I have, all that I hope to become.” —DM

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Congregational Hymn and Song Selections from

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Unbound makes thousands of hymns previously only available in text and tune collections available for individual download as a PDF with full accompaniment included. Visit giamusic.com/unbound

November 17 /Thirty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time

WE COME ALMOST FULL CIRCLE SINCE we began the Year of Mark, and today’s Gospel should sound familiar. The verses that follow this pericope were proclaimed on the First Sunday of Advent a year ago and continue Jesus’s exhortation to be watchful for signs of the Son of Man’s coming.

However, this cyclical pattern doesn’t bode well for humanity if, toward the end of the liturgical year, we’re where we first started. Celebrating the Eucharist Sunday after Sunday, shouldn’t things have changed by now? The last time we proclaimed this passage, the world was still suffering the aftermath of a global pandemic, and the tribulations of war, climate collapse,

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insurrections, and distrust just seemed to have escalated from there. As a disenchanted Gen Xer, I’d say the Violent Femmes got it right: “Third verse same as the first.”

If the Son of Man isn’t coming back soon, what can break this hopeless cycle? It’s right there in today’s readings: the elect gathered from the four winds, the ones found written in the book, the tender branches with new leaves. These are baptismal images describing those raised from the dead in Christ. They will shine brightly to lead the many to justice. For wherever hope is dimmed, God’s people are there like stars in the night to show the world that Christ is here. —DM

November 24 /Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of Universe

SEVEN YEARS AFTER WORLD WAR I, Pope Pius XI instituted the feast of Christ the King. Earlier that year, Adolf Hitler published Mein Kampf, and less than 15 years later, the Nazis invaded Poland, beginning World War II. Inaugurating this feast, Pius XI wrote: “[T]hese manifold evils in the world were due to the fact that the majority of men had thrust Jesus Christ and his holy law out of their lives; . . . as long as individuals and states refused to submit to the rule of our Savior, there would be no really hopeful prospect of a lasting peace among nations” (Quas Prima 1 )

In 2013, the United States bishops began using this day to rally

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for the protection of religious liberty, saying that Pius XI “had the foresight to realize that secularism could soon wage awful wars against the Church” (USCCB bulletin insert).

The combative, conquering language surrounding the origins and renewed context for this feast seems out of step with Jesus, who rejected the violence of earthly empires—“If my kingdom did belong to this world, my attendants would be fighting. . . . As it is, my kingdom is not here”—(Year B), invited criminals into Paradise (Year C), and stood with the least among us (Year C). Christ establishes peace with peace and reigns over all by his own submission. Should we not do the same? —DM