This past Friday evening I was returning from a 4 day silent retreat at the Sacred Heart Retreat Center in Sedalia Colorado.  Sedalia is in the foothills of the Rockies just south of Denver.  It’s always a bit daunting when you see that mile marker at Goodland—milepost 17—and you know that the mile marker at I 435 in Kansas City is 410.  And it is straight as can be!

It grew dark somewhere around Salina, and not long after that out to the south I saw 2 combines working in the dark with their headlights illuminating the soybeans that they were harvesting.  It has been a tough year for farmers to get the crops out of the field.  So these farmers knew they had just a little more time before a rainy spell settled in.  Farmers are always paying close attention to find the best opportunity to get those crops out of the field because they never know when the rains will come and stay, or the snow will fall and not go away, or a hard freeze will come and cause the beans to fall to the ground.  So they do what they can to collect the harvest while the time is ripe.

In the scriptures today we are reminded of God’s desire to gather us to Himself.  This time of year we hear scriptural images of the end of time, the final harvest, a time when all will be revealed.  In Mark’s gospel, Jesus says that the Son of Man will send out the angels and gather his elect from the 4 winds. Mark is using a common Hebrew Testament image, how God is going to gather his scattered people back together to give them all that they need to live.  God will go out and get his chosen ones, those who have been faithful to him through trouble and calamity.  In Dt 30.4 I will gather you once again from where God has scattered you. Is 11.11 says I will assemble the outcasts of Israel and bring back the remnant of Judah. In Is 27.12 God will start his threshing and you will be gathered one by one, people of Israel.

In that same Spirit, God has gathered us today from the 4 winds, the north, south east and west.  It is interesting that our mass begins with…..you guessed it, a Gathering Rite.  Our welcome, sign of the cross, penitential rite, and Gloria are meant to gather us, unite us in mind and heart for the celebration of the liturgy.  When the priest says “Let us pray,” his role to collect all the prayers and needs we have brought with us to this celebration of mass.  In the old rite we called this prayer the “collect.”  We lift up all we are to God, we place our needs upon His altar of sacrifice; in so doing, our hurts and pains, joys and sorrows are sanctified.  And it is urgent that we do this.  For not a one of us knows what will be the day of the hour for us or for our family.  So it is essential that we gather and lift up to God what we have and who we are.  This lifting up can be done all throughout the day.  There is a special grace, the grace of sacrament that we access in this communal worship.  Our lives are sanctified when we lay our hurts and pains on this altar of sacrifice.

We don’t know the day or the hour.  Today could be the day that God surprises us with an awesome blessing that we haven’t anticipated.  Maybe this week is when we find out that we’ll have to deal with a serious illness.  We don’t know.  What we do know for certain is that God has gathered us so that we can become holy, warts and wrinkles, sins and shortcomings.  This is what we offer today.  God brings us together to help one another in time of need.  God calls us as a parish family to multiply our joys through one another.  God has called us, each one, to this banquet.  God has gathered us in the sacred place.  God wants us to experience his harvest of blessings for our lives.