"Unlikely Weavers of Grace"

Unlikely Weavers of Grace

Watching a small American Texan town being steamrolled by raging and merciless flash floods, it is easy to conjure images of children looking to empty lots where their school playground used to be.  Or families looking for their children among the debris of buildings torn down.  Lives and homes are gone, leaving people wondering where to start cleaning up – or even, if it is worth it.

From my former hometown, Buenos Aires, I heard about this elderly couple who were thrilled to receive back from Italy their son, his wife, and their two children, one of them a eighteen-month-old, and who they were going to meet for the first time.

They worked hard to renovate two rooms and, because over there they are in the middle of a harsh winter, to keep the chill out, they decided to tape drafty windows.  The morning after, however, a visiting family member found them all dead. 

The family died by carbon monoxide poisoning from their water heater’s faulty vent.  Only the eighteen-month survived.  How’s the extended family going to cope with such huge – and largely preventable – calamity?

Of course – and thanks be to God – we may never have to go through such heart-wrenching misfortunes.  But, let’s be honest, we all have our small and sometimes large dose of heartbreaks and, from time to time, we all have come to feel that life is piling it up on us, almost without respite. 

It is part of human experience that the Psalmist’s cry, “Hear, O Lord, and have mercy upon me; O Lord, be my helper” so often visits our minds and hearts.  For so it is life.

Naaman, for all his successful career, was a sick man.  He may have wondered that if his gods had been so good to assure him of victory after victory, how come they did not shelter him from disease? 

Naaman had everything, but a good health.  A good health that the strength of his army, his clever strategic thinking, and not even money could secure.  And so, it is no wonder that Naaman may have given up hope.

In today’s gospel story, we don’t know much about those whose lives the disciples touched, other than they were in dire need.  It may have been health, it may have been the loss a beloved member of the family, or those whom life so often side-tracks, and market forces ruthlessly crash.

Both, Naaman, and those who were ministered by the apostles were healed with help from unexpected quarters.  And it is important to highlight that all of them, from Naaman to those who were healed were not “Jewish believers” – In fact, they were hostile to everything that Jewishness represented.

And yet, they were healed by the hands of people who otherwise they would have ignored -- or worse.

Naaman’s savior was a young slave girl, the chambermaid of Naaman’s wife.  Now, if anyone had an opportunity to get even with someone who had stolen not only her freedom but had yanked her out of her family it was this girl.  And yet, it was her who led Naaman to health and a brighter future.

I wonder what the Samaritans thought about those Jewish pilgrims coming back to their town.  In fact, where not those whom they heard asking Jesus to send fire from heaven to erase them from the face of the earth?

And, indeed, I wonder what the disciples thought about a mission to save “those people” who hours before were discards and rejects.  And yet, it was through these insensitive and reluctant disciples that healing and salvation reached the lives of so many.

What emerges from these stories is a pattern both sobering and liberating: hope and restoration so often arrive by means we least expect, and from hands we might never have credited with compassion or power.

In the face of devastation—whether from the violence of nature or the abrupt, silent perils of everyday life sometimes we come to discover that healing may arrive from an unexpected corner – from God himself mediated by ordinary people who choose to be better and to do better.

It is precisely in the unpredictability of rescue that a deeper lesson lies.  Isaiah, in addressing the returnees from exile promises a future of plenty among the present devastation of their homeland.  I wonder how many may have dismissed Isaiah as a charlatan.

The slave girl, stripped of her homeland, nevertheless chooses mercy over resentment, and her act of quiet courage alters a mighty general’s fate.  The apostles, sent to outsiders, discover that grace was not bound by tradition or tribe but only by their unbelief and hardness of heart.

But isn’t it that sometimes health and wholeness, grace and new hope comes from the people one may overlook, or from the places one may dismiss for being non-places, or from simple gestures that are too easy to ignore?  And yet, through all these seemingly and unlikely sources God’s grace overflows.

Being in need doesn’t convert us into freeloaders.  For even Jesus cried for help on the Cross.  Sometimes crying for help may open new ways to discover channels from which grace and mercy may flow in abundance.  Channels that, perhaps otherwise, may have been dismissed as irrelevant or invisible, or not good enough for our need. 

For sometimes, help may come through the kindness of a stranger, the wisdom of a child, the solidarity of those who, like us, have known what it is to lose and to long for wholeness.

Let me close with this thought,

Know that in God’s grace the threads of hope in human lives are often woven by the most unexpected hands.  First, let God use you as the golden thread of divine love in someone’s life, but most important, don’t dismiss the chance to be woven with God’s unique patterns of healing, love, and joy even if God often uses unlikely weavers of grace.

And, as always, LBTS!

Fr. Gustavo