First Homily - Mid-week Healing Mass, July 9

God’s Grace

“…My compassion grows warm and tender…for I am God and no mortal, the Holy One in your midst…” Amen. Please be seated.

Listen to how gently God speaks at the beginning of Hosea. He remembers Israel as a child — teaching him to walk, taking him up in his arms, bending down to feed him, holding him against his cheek. This is not a remote and austere God; this is a God on the floor, close enough to feel the breath of a child who cannot yet walk on his own. That is the God who is bending toward you.

And yet Hosea says the hardest thing too. The people cry out to God — and the prophet says he does not raise them up. There is a silence in this passage. And if you have ever prayed from a hospital bed, or in the dark at three in the morning, and heard nothing come back, you know that silence. You are not faithless for having felt it. It is right here in Scripture. God is not afraid of your unanswered prayers.

I'll tell you honestly: I have known that silence. When I was sixteen, I watched my father die of a cancer that spread through his whole body, and it took our family apart. He was only 57 years old. Recently I was told I have the same disease, and I am nearly the same age he was when he died. I have lain awake with that fear, and I have prayed into what felt like an empty room. I did not always feel God there.

But in today’s Psalm reading we hear “Restore us, O God; let your face shine, that we may be saved.” In Hosea, after the silence, something breaks open. God says: “How can I give you up? My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender.” And notice — the people had not changed. They had not earned their way back. God turned toward them because of who God is, not because of what they had done. That is grace. Grace is not a reward for being strong enough. It is love that comes for you while you are still weak, still afraid, still in the dark.

That is where my hope lives. Not in a promise that I will be cured, or that the pain will lift on my schedule. I cannot promise you that. My hope is in the God who does not let go — the one whose heart recoils at the thought of abandoning his children. The hope that holds when I do not know the ending, because it was never resting on the ending. It rests on him.

And hear what Jesus tells his disciples in the Gospel. He sends them out to the sick, and he says: heal them. Freely you have received; freely give. Whatever healing we know in this life, we did not earn and we cannot buy. It is a gift, and it is meant to be passed from hand to hand. That is what we are doing right here, today — receiving freely, and holding it out to one another.

If you came in today feeling that God had gone quiet, hear this before you leave: he has not handed you over. He is bending toward you still, arms open, closer than the silence. Come and receive. You are not alone, and you never were.

Amen