The Eleventh Sunday in Ordinary Time
“The harvest is abundant, but the laborers are few…. Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, drive out demons” Mt. (9:37 and 10:8)
Blase Cupich, a Cardinal who serves as the archbishop of Chicago, gave a remarkable talk at a Catholic Health Association Annual Meeting.
In it, he highlighted the often-neglected transformative work done by the “religious women who have been singularly responsible for inaugurating, building and maintaining the Catholic health care system passed on to us today.”
He informed everyone, for example, that Mercy Hospital, established in 1852, was the first chartered hospital in the city of Chicago.
Cupich then told a story.
“In the early 1920’s, the knights of the bed sheets (the Klan) cooked up a scheme in Kokomo, Indiana to drive out the Sisters of St. Joseph who ran the local hospital. On July 4, 1923, an estimated 200,000 Klan members gathered in Kokomo.
200,000!!
Their purpose was to construct a “Klan hospital” to compete with the sister’s health care efforts and put them out of business.
As it turned out, however, a local real estate magnate and one of the Klan’s major benefactors ended up in the sister’s hospital emergency room. He was so pleased with the quality of care given by the sisters that he rewrote his will and named the sisters as the beneficiaries. The sisters used his money to buy Howard County Hospital, the very one founded by the Klan to put the sisters out of business!
Essentially Cardinal Cupich told a 20th century version of the mustard seed story – a small group of nuns who aimed their efforts at the poor and the marginalized and grew and grew because of it.
Then Cupich told another story.
“On November 1, 1930, a stocky, black-bearded young man entered St. Vincent Hospital in Billings, Montana. He was in agony, holding his left arm shattered in a car crash. Soon, he found himself being charmed by his nurse, a shy young nun. She was continually fretting over whether she had done enough for her patients, most of them a rough lot of cowboys and gamblers.
Her bearded patient was none other than Ernest Hemingway.
He later immortalized her as Sister Cecilia in the short story ‘The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio.’’’
These sisters were the ones who “cured the sick,” who were the “laborers for his harvest” in today’s gospel.
Jesus speaks to us today about little people doing little things.
And, in doing so, Jesus reminds us how much “little things” truly matter – how they are “seeds” that will grow into “shrubs.”
That’s the story of most of our lives. We’re little people doing little, ordinary things. We’re not particularly heroic. We’re not headlining the news. We’re not famous.
We’re just good people trying our best to be kind to the waitress who’s overburdened with demands. We’re just good people donating a little money we need for other purposes to those who are hungry and homeless. We’re just good people trying our best to get our kids educated and our mortgages paid off and our jobs taken care of.
Nothing spectacular. Nothing that will “make history.”
But what Jesus tells us today is that all that time you spend parenting, all that effort you give to teaching and coaching and passing on kindness and one encouragement after another, all those moments you spend praying for someone else, and all those words of wisdom you tried to pass on to another generation – all that, and so much more, is the “mustard seed” that grows into the “shrub” that becomes the kingdom of God.
Or, as Cardinal Cupich, puts it so well:
“These nuns awakened something new and vital in people that attracts and disposes others to the call of God.”
You and I are called to do the same.
Ted Wolgamot, Psy.D.
