The Good News is not always obvious in the Sunday readings. Today, Richard Young invites us to take difficult passages as a starting point to develop a greater appreciation for the faith as we work for a more just world.

June 14, 2026: Eleventh Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A
Exodus 19:2–6
Psalm 100:1–3, 5
Romans 5:6–11
Matthew 9:36–10:8

We Ain’t What We Was

I don’t like these readings. Where is the Good News in them? I know that’s not a positive way to start a reflection on them, but parts of them trouble me. For one thing, their very human authors display an obvious provincialism. In the Exodus reading, God is depicted as playing favorites, promising that the Israelites will be God’s “special possession, dearer... than all other people.” And in our gospel, Matthew’s Jesus tells the newly appointed apostles, “Do not visit pagan territory, and do not enter a Samaritan town. Go instead after the lost sheep of the House of Israel.” Of course, the overall image of Jesus that we get from the gospel writers is one with a much broader mission: to “make disciples of ALL the nations,” as we heard in our Ascension gospel last month. So a reading that suggests a more limited and discriminatory approach to evangelization is jarring, to say the least.

Some of us may also wince when we hear our passage from Paul’s Letter to the Romans. “While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” That is a dose of atonement theology I could do without. The very next sentence makes it worse: “Now that we have been justified by his blood, it is all the more certain that we shall be saved by him from God’s wrath.” We are then said to have been “God’s enemies,” but are now “reconciled.” If the compilers of the lectionary had begun that Romans 5 reading at verse one, instead of verse six, we would hear how Paul is actually praising divine compassion and the power of divine grace that makes it possible to “even rejoice in our afflictions.” He proclaims that “the love of God has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.” There is Good News here, but finding it requires looking at a few verses beyond the lectionary reading and a slog through Paul’s legalistic and pharisaic mind.

There is another uncomfortable element to Sunday’s gospel – one that highlights the exclusionary nature of all of the readings. Twelve men are given the title “apostle,” a word that means “one sent forth.” Of course, these Scripture passages come from an extremely patriarchal time – far more so than now. In biblical times, a woman would never be “sent forth” to do what is perceived to be a man’s job. Yet, some of the most effective evangelists throughout the church’s history have been women, and some have been strongly praised in the New Testament – praised by men, of course, since a literate woman was rare in that culture. Just to be aware of the fact that half the population had zero chance to have the title “apostle,” regardless of their abilities, is to open one’s consciousness to an overwhelming array of injustices, not the least of which is the failure of the institutional Catholic Church to acknowledge the priestly vocation of persons other than men. Women, transgender, and non-binary persons need not apply.

Those of us who identify as sexual and gender minorities have had enough of divine images that seem to support elevating one group of people at the expense of another, that present God as the Great Discriminator in the Sky – the one who affirms our own prejudices. We are also tired of a Pauline fall-redemption theology that tells of a god of “wrath” in opposition to a God named Love. Grace is far too limited in such thinking.

Perhaps the real gift in this Sunday’s readings is the challenge to make compassion and grace far less limiting – to extend it to our flawed faith ancestors. They did the best they could within a system noted for its fear of “foreigners,” its misogyny, and its ignorance about other cultures. Let’s be people of compassion and grace and forgive them for offending our modern sensibilities. Let’s take their words as a starting point to develop a greater appreciation for the faith we have inherited. Rather than yield to the temptation to toss aside their writings as outdated and theologically inadequate, maybe we should be thankful for how we have evolved from there. It’s likely that future generations will think the same about much of our own moral and religious assumptions. I hope they will celebrate their development in the faith and forgive us for our perceived flaws. Martin Luther King was fond of quoting an old preacher who said, “We ain’t what we oughta be. We ain’t what we want to be. We ain’t what we’re gonna be. But thank God we ain’t what we was.” Thank God, indeed!

I have changed. There was a time when I was comfortable with readings that used only male images for God. Now I’m disappointed when I hear a reading that’s NOT from an Inclusive Language Lectionary. As a very young person, I was okay with a cosmic Santa Claus, a god of rewards and punishments and blessings and curses, a god who keeps track of our mistakes and sees to it that our picnic doesn’t get rained on. But not anymore. I’m at this place in my spiritual development because I have had some advantages that have eluded others, but my faith is not “better” than theirs, nor is it better than the faith of those who wrote about it centuries ago. When Paul says that “the love of God has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us,” that applies to ALL of us, regardless of how Sunday’s readings strike us.

Finally, there is so much in that Romans passage about our alleged status as “godless” – as “sinners,” needing to be “justified,” “saved,” and “reconciled.” The word “sin” or some derivation of it occurs fifty-three times in that one letter alone! Paul seems to be obsessed with it, but he is simply trying to get his readers to rejoice in divine Love by creating a contrast between that Love and our own brokenness. The climax for that contrast comes a few chapters later (and perhaps this should be our second reading for Sunday): “I am certain that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present not the future, neither heights nor depths, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that comes to us in Christ Jesus, our savior,” not even our mistakes. As the late biblical scholar, John Shelby Spong, wrote, “If Christianity is to have a future, the paradigm must shift from being saved from our sins to being called into a new wholeness from our sense of incompleteness.” This is not a god of atonement, who sent the Christ to die for us “godless people,” a god from whom we have been separated by our sins. Ours is a Deity to whom, even in our worst moments, we are beautiful and loved beyond our imagining. I recently ran across this quotation from Martin Luther: “Sinners are attractive, because they are loved; they are not loved because they are attractive.” When we hear readings about sin in light of that wisdom, they are not so hard to hear.

I still don’t like these readings, but it’s surely a good thing for me to wrestle with them. Their authors were as imperfect as I am and just as in need of compassion and grace. If you hear these Scripture passages this coming Sunday, and they leave you cold, just breathe in gratitude, and say a prayer for the preacher.

Rev. Richard P. Young is a retired Catholic priest and mental health counselor.  He regularly presides and preaches at liturgies for Dignity/Dayton’s Living Beatitudes Community and has worked with several Dignity Chapters since the late 70s.  He once served for a term on the national board of DignityUSA and has attended all the national conventions/conferences since 1981.  He is married to former DignityUSA national secretary, Bob Butts.  Richard was honored with a President’s Award at the 2022 Dignity National Conference in San Diego and was the homilist for the liturgy at the 2025 conference in Dublin, Ohio.