“Have you ever played peekaboo with a little kid? It’s often entertaining not only for the adult, but for the kid it’s very entertaining. To them it’s amazing because you appear and disappear all of a sudden. I love to look at children and see how they see the world because it often gives us a glance of our own lives our own spiritual lives as well and how they develop oftentimes shows us a glimpse of how we continue to develop in our own lives. My niece is about 4 ½ and for kids when they play hide and seek it’s interesting. If they cannot see you they assume you cannot see them. If they are covered up there’s no way they think you can see them. Their whole world revolves around themselves. It’s very self-centered to the point that if they cannot see you they assume you cannot see them, but then they continue to grow. You take them to go play and for a moment they do not know where you are and they cry, they freak out, right? They start to use their own sight, rely on the sight of their parents that they’re with them. When they go to their first day of school it develops. They’re able to not see their parents to trust that they will come back later on. Maybe it takes a few days to get used to it, but sooner or later they no longer use purely their own sight that they have to see you to know you’re with them or they have to see you to know you will be back. They start to trust in a different way. Oftentimes in our lives we like to know why don’t we? The problem is not that we want to know why it’s that we need to know why. That’s what kills us. It’s okay to ask why. Why does this happen in the world? Why does this happen to me? But what really kills us what really eats at us is our insistence that we need to know it now that we have to know it.
In today’s Gospel Jesus says, ‘What can we compare the Kingdom of God to?’ He compares it to a mustard seed. We’ve heard this many times, a mustard seed.How do we see the Kingdom of God? Or how does the Kingdom of God come before us? How does God present himself towards us in our lives? It always goes by this principle this mustard seed principle that goes from the very small, the smallest to the very greatest and often very slow and a gradual process, but that’s life isn’t it? It’s often in the small, a slow gradual process that God works in all of our lives. We see it with our children as they start to develop. We see it in plants or the mustard seed, but it’s our insistence to know why at that moment that really I think is that tension we hold in our hearts, but how did God come into the world? God did not come into the world in a very flashy way. Some thought God would come into the world with flaming chariots coming down from Heaven, but how did God come into the world? He appeared in the world to a very small 14 year old in Bethlehem where no one else was looking and Jesus Christ came into the world in a very small way, a very slow gradual process. 32 years before he entered into his ministry until we see his life and ministry. A slow gradual process, but that’s how God works, but do we trust in it? We walk by faith and not by sight it tells us and so as children grow up we start to walk by faith and not by sight. We don’t need to know our parents are there. We trust and have faith that they will come. We do what we can and then we let go, but how often in our lives till today we still have to walk by sight, maybe not physical sight of seeing it right before us, but maybe in our imagination that it can be done in the future and when we can’t see that we despair. So do you walk by sight in your life? Does it bring you anxiety, sadness, worry? God doesn’t call us to walk by sight, but walk by faith and what is faith? Faith is doing what we can knowing it might be small, but then entrusting it to the mercy and prominence of God and doing that then we enter into the salvation of the world. We participate in it and that is what God is calling each of us to. Do you have the courage to do the small things in your life? The small nudges that you get from the Holy Spirit that you know you should do, but you don’t because you say, ‘It won’t really matter. What good would that do?’ Are you always looking at the big picture where everyone else is looking, maybe on the news? Again, God works not as we do. He usually works in the small things that turn great and is a slow and gradual process. Are we willing to participate with that? As you come before the Eucharist today where no one else would look for Christ in the ordinary bread that we will see the body of Christ. As you come before him, ask him for the strength to trust in Him to trust that the little things in your life mean something that as we sacrifice those times those anxieties or strengths as we sacrifice it to him we participate in his own sacrifice in the Mass and as we receive that in our lives it nurtures and sustains us so that we can go out once again and be that small symbol of God in the world so that us, just you like a mustard seed will one day, who knows like the great saints, will change the world. Amen.”