Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time B.  July 2, 2006.  Our Lady of Grace 7:30, 11:30,

6PM.  Wisdom 1:13-15, 2:23-24.  2 Corinthians 8: 7, 9, 13-15.  Mark 5 21-43.

Archbishop Sarpong, the Archbishop of Kumasi in Ghana where one of our sister parishes is located, invited the group of visitors form Our Lady of Grace to his house for dinner last Monday evening.  He is a witty, intelligent and very happy man of 73 who loves people and is deeply committed to both the Catholic Church and to African culture, music and dance as a powerful way of expressing the one Catholic faith that we all share.  I have had the privilege of being in his house three times now.  When I asked him how he was he said, “I have many aches and pains.  At my age aches and pains are a blessing.  They remind me that I am still alive.”

The Archbishop began his talk to the visitors to his home by reminding us that his Ashanti people had been discovered and subdued by the British over a century ago.  He said, “Of course we knew that we were here in Africa before the British discovered us, but in their minds we only began to exist when the British found us.  It is almost as if the British finding us made us be real.  That way of looking at things always seems strange to Africans.”  The Ashanti people living in the middle of Ghana were well known for their fierce defense of their land and their people against British occupation and control.   I told him, “We are very much like you.  We Americans fought to be free from the British too.”   The old Archbishop shot back at me, “We are not very much alike at all.  You won your war with the British and we lost ours!”  In 1957 Ghana became the first country south of the Sahara desert to win its independence from European control.  The median age in Ghana is 19.9 years.  The unemployment rate is 20%.  78.5 per cent of the people in Ghana have an income below $2 a day.  Ghana ranks 138^th out of the 177 countries of the world in their level of poverty.  The United States ranks number 10, Norway ranks number 1and Ireland number 8.  English is the national language in Ghana; a very hopeful thing is that 74% of the people have basic reading skills.

On this Fourth of July Weekend we remember that it is a long road to freedom. Freedom from Britain was only the beginning.   We have become the country that we are only because generation after generation of Americans have labored hard to improve their own well being and the well being of American society as a whole.  The odds were against us. We should never have won our war of independence from Great Britain.  Britain was the most powerful country in the world.  Our war for independence was like the mouse chasing the cat out of his yard.  A small group of brave but unimportant men stunned the world on July 4, 1776 by declaring “ We, therefore, the Representatives of the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, in GENERAL CONGRESS, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the World for the Rectitude of our Intentions, do, in the Name, and by the Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly Publish and Declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be, FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES; that they are absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political Connection between them and the State of Great-Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved …, with a firm Reliance on the Protection of the divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.” 

It took a long and bitter war to make this Declaration of Independence a reality.  It took a civil war and much struggle afterwards to extend the right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” to the Black People of American and an amendment to our Constitution to give full political rights to women. It has been a long road to true freedom and prosperity and there is still much to do.

“A synagogue official came forward and said to Jesus, ‘my daughter is at the point of death.  Please come and lay your hands on her that she may get well and live… Jesus said, do not be afraid, just have faith… Jesus took the little girl by the hand and said to her, ‘little girl I say to you arise’. The child of twelve arose immediately and walked around.  Jesus said to the parents that she should be given something to eat.” With great power Jesus gave the little girl life. It was up to the parents to give their child something to eat.

On my recent trip to Ghana I read Thomas Friedman’s book The World is Flat.  Friedman says that when he was a child his mother would say to him, “Eat you food.  There are starving children in China.”  He said that he tells his own daughters, “Study hard.  There are people in China hungry to have your job.”  Friedman says that while a new global economy is happening all around us, the evidence is that American young people are not keeping pace with the rest of the world.  My observation is that Jesus gave our children life, are we giving our children something substantial to eat?  Freidman says, “We need a new generation of parents ready to administer tough love: There comes a time when you’ve got to put away the Game Boys, turn off the television, shut off the iPod, and get your kids down to work.  The sense of entitlement, the sense that because we once dominated global commerce  and geopolitics – and Olympic basket ball – we always will, the sense that delayed gratification is a punishment worse than a spanking, the sense that our kids have to be swaddled in cotton wool so that nothing bad or disappointing or stressful ever happens to them at school is, quite simply, a growing cancer on American society”.  Friedman says that the war on terrorism must not be our only concern, as important as it is.  If we do not turn ourselves and our children around in the areas of science, math, technology and hard work we will find ourselves dominated and controlled by the children of India, China and other countries of the third world where study and hard work are facts of life and advanced education is more readily available.

Jesus said, “the child in not dead, but only asleep.  Those standing around ridiculed him.  Jesus took the little girl by the hand and said, ‘I say to you, arise.’  Then he said that her parents should give her something to eat.”  Now, let us ask God in song for the wisdom and the courage to give our children, our grandchildren and all the young people of our land something substantial to eat so that the blessings of freedom and prosperity may continue to grow in our land.  The words to the song are in your pew.

“God Bless America, Land that I love,
Stand beside her, and guide her, thru the night with a light from above.
From the mountains, to the prairies, to the oceans, white with foam
God bless America, My home sweet home.”