Reflection for Sunday – August 10, 2025

Sr. Joan Sobala, SSJSunday Readings Homilies

Readings: Wisdom 18: 6-9; Hebrews 11: 1-2, 8-19; Luke 12: 32-48 
Preacher: Sr. Joan Sobala

When I was 17, I had an absolutely certain but limited horizon for my future. Graduating from high school, my desire—my plan—was to enter the Sisters of St. Joseph in Buffalo.  

My mother said No!. My father said No! And what added insult to injury, the congregation said No! I was a reject! These authorities in my life all wanted me to have more life experience and a sense of my options before I entered,.They all promised that the next year, if I still felt that way, I could. 

Through a circuitous route of graced connections, I came to Nazareth College. One day in the spring of my freshman year, I heard the Angelus ringing at the motherhouse, and the thought came to me unbidden. “I’ll be living there in a few months.” 

One horizon had been replaced by another larger horizon, and here I am, by the grace of God, 67 years later. Over all these years, my horizon has continued to enlarge. 

Everyone reading this homily today has a horizon— the limit of our thinking, interest, experience or outlook— what our own personal God is like, our college experiences, first jobs, relationships that worked or didn’t. God is at the horizon. God is the horizon.  

Let’ s move on to the horizon of our Church. The Second Vatican Council laid out before us … 

… a new sense of belonging 

… a valuing of each other’s gifts of the Spirit 

… new ways of celebrating and appreciating the Sacraments 

 …understandable liturgical language 

…the companionship of our ecumenical and interfaith brothers and sisters 

It was a glorious time of belonging and becoming more deeply the community desired by Jesus, the Holy One. Not everyone ran toward this horizon, but many of us did.  

In the years since the Council, the American church has grown in numbers, conviction, and involvement in the things of God. At the same time, we have had a dwindling native clergy due to a pervasive me-centered culture and sexual abuse scandals. We find some of our churches painfully empty for weekend liturgies. People are choosing to forego church weddings and funerals as well as Mass itself. 

What can we say about the church horizon before us?  

For one thing, there will always be a horizon of Christian identity toward which we are moving. We may see growth in other parts of the world, but not in our patch. Yet, it is there for us, if only a glimmer in the distance. 

Sometimes we get closer to the horizon of our Christian identity by our own choice and effort. Thishappens when we stay the course, probe the Scriptures and the Church’s living Tradition and find them life-giving. We shape ourselves as disciples of Christ.  

Finally, we get closer to the horizon of our Christian identity when we realize that all of faith and life is not of our own making. The horizon holds unexpected and sometimes unwanted developments. We are shaped by others as disciples of Christ. In our lives and in our Church, we have to move toward the horizon, or else nothing else happens. 

In today’s Gospel, Jesus tells the story of the master who is so delighted to see his servants awaiting him in the early hours of the morning that he kicks off his sandals, puts on an apron and serves them a meal— frankly eccentric behavior for an employer and certainly not what the servants expected.  

In this story, Jesus tells us that over the horizon of the servants’ waiting was a new relationship with the master. Not promotion. Not praise, but a relationship unseen from the vantage point of a long night of waiting. God, for whom we wait in the long night of life’s challenges, offers us that friendship as well. 

The poet Stephen Vincent Benet gives us these thoughts to spur us on our way toward the moving horizon: 

God pity us indeed, for we are human and do not always see 

The vision when it comes, the shining change 

Or if we see it, do not follow it. 

Because it is too hard, too new, 

Too unbelievable, too difficult, 

Warring too much with common easy ways… 

Life is not lost by dying! Life is lost 

Minute by minute, day by dragging day, 

In all the thousand small, undaring ways… 

Always and always, life can be 

 lost without vision but not lost by death. 

Lost by not daring, willing, going on 

Beyond the ragged edge of fortitude 

To something more— something no man has seen. 

Let’s meet at the horizon if not before. 

Stephen Vincent Benet
Sr. Joan Sobala, SSJ
Latest posts by Sr. Joan Sobala, SSJ (see all)
Share