groupies

Hebrews 10:1-10; Ps 40 Here I am Lord, I come to do your will; Mark 3:31-35

We are all familiar with groupies.  Groupies are those crazed fans of music groups who lose their sense of reason and normalcy when they are around "their" rock star or "their" favorite musician.

We have seen it most recently with "Bieber Fever" and we are all familiar of the "Beetle Craze."

Strange how humans have that inert desire to group together and to find meaning in associating with groups or people.

Think about our local communities.  We have the Lyons club, the Rotary club, the KofC, Catholic Daughters, Altar Society, Guadalupanos/as and the list goes on.  There is the Friends of the Library group, the Gardening Club and more.


The bottom line is we like to gather, we like to belong, we like to find meaning in these place, these gatherings, these meetings of the mind.

In them we discover a place of comfort, a place of direction, a place of support, a place of importance.

Jesus in today's gospel invites us to another group.  He wants us to be his "groupie" but rather than losing ourselves in the emotional craze we are asked to invest ourselves in "the will of God."

Think about the will of God for a moment.  There are three parts of the will of God.

There is the universal will of God.  God has  a plan for all humanity and all of creation.  He wants to reconcile the created world to himself and he does so in Christ.  God creates us to know him, love him, serve him in this life and be with him in the life to come.

There is the circumstantial aspect.  These are those moments in our life that are beyond our control. This is where we throw up our hands because we can't make heads or tale out of the situation.  we find ourselves saying "Que sera, sera".

Here God invites us to surrender.  The words of Christ from the Cross come to mind, "Into your hands Lord I commend my spirit."  Surrender is a necessary part of living God's will n our life.  When we can not make sense of our life we look to God who brings meaning an purpose and we take him by the hand and let him lead.

The third aspect and the one that hits closest to home is the intentional or personal aspect of God's will. God invites us to invest personally in living our life according to his plan, no longer based on our whim.

God has given us the instruction manual or the game book so to say in the scriptures we read and the teachings his church.  We are asked to execute that on a regular basis.

We have to execute his will daily by being loving, merciful, forgiving.  We have to execute it by avoiding temptation and seeking to reach out to the least of our brothers and sisters.

We execute it by living the beatitudes and the corporal and spiritual works of mercy.

This is where we truly live out our identity as brothers and sisters.  This is the pattern for the groupie of Christ.

Go on and get crazy for Jesus.