Fifth Sunday of Easter

Making Room

Living as a synodal church!  Those are the words on a magnet on the front of our staff refrigerator door.  It’s a daily reminder to us that the content of the listening sessions we conducted in our parish were only the beginning of our work.

What is synodality? Synodality means journeying together as the People of God. It indicates a way of listening to each individual person as a member of the Church to understand how God might be speaking to all of us. It’s about both listening and acting!

Our readings for this weekend remind us that we have inherited a tradition of seeing, judging (discerning) and acting from the Scriptures, from the stories recounted in the Acts of the Apostles.  Who were the persons being neglected? What was the need, a process of naming and discerning how the community was going to respond to that need?  And what would the community do to meet that need; how were they going to change in order to meet that need?

If we live as the early Christian community did, the apostles identified other leaders and anointed them to do what Jesus taught them to do—to attend to the needs of those being neglected, to reach out to them and do something about their situation. They were regular people, lay men and women, called into the service, anointed and blessed and commissioned to do the work. How can we all be in that chosen group, both men and women? How can each of us use our gifts in creative ways to meet the needs in our community? How can our priests and deacons call, delegate and send us into service? This is the call of this weekend’s Gospel—to fill those many rooms, to make room, to welcome all into the kingdom, on earth as it will be in heaven. All are welcome to the comfort of those many rooms!