Scripture readings for July 6, 2025, Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Is 66:10-14c Ps 66:1-3, 4-5, 6-7, 16, 20 Gal 6:14-18 Lk 10:1-12, 17-20 OR Lk 10:1-9
Want to have your expectations turned upside down? Just give a listen to Luke’s Gospel these days. Jesus told one follower not to say goodbye to his family and told another not to attend a funeral. “Let the dead bury the dead,” he told him.
And this Sunday, he tells his followers, as they head into the world, to take nothing with them — “no money bag, no sack, no sandals.” I’m sending you like lambs among wolves, he says.
Throughout this series of Gospel readings, we’re being cautioned, again and again: Don’t get, just give. Don’t save up, but surrender. Don’t load up, but let go.
Christ’s continuing message here is one of detachment — or, in a popular phrase of the recovery movement: let go and let God.
But wait, there’s more. This week we realize that when Jesus sends his followers into the world, they are not being sent empty-handed. They go bearing one simple message, one priceless word: “Peace.”
Jesus tells them: “Into whatever household you enter, first say, ‘Peace to this household.'”
Peace.
It is also the first word he will say to them after the Resurrection, when he appears in the upper room. And it is the great message he is asking them — and asking us — to carry into the world.
Carry no sack, no money, no sandals. Carry, instead, peace.
This is where it starts. It is his first word to those who wish to follow Christ. We’ll remember that it was also the first word spoken by Pope Leo XIV when he stepped onto the balcony after his election in May — and the first word he chose to transmit on social media just a few days later. Peace.
Are we getting the message? It’s worth asking ourselves this week: how well are we spreading that word? Whatever else there may be in the world today, there is very little peace. And that extends far beyond just the absence of war.
They are also the countless conflicts that erupt in our daily lives — between spouses, between parents and children, between neighbors and co-workers.
How often do we offer to people in our lives, with what we say or how we live, “peace”? How often do we make peace our mission and our message?
The writer Anthony de Mello tells the story of a man whose marriage was in trouble. He sought some advice from a spiritual master. The master told him, “You must learn to listen to your wife.” The man took the advice to heart and returned several weeks later and said he’d learned to listen to every word his wife was saying. The master smiled and said, “Good. Now go home and listen to every word she isn’t saying.”
Maybe if more of us did that — not just with our spouses, but with each other — it might be a beginning, a first step, toward making peace a reality. To listen that way means you don’t have the last word. In fact, it makes Christ’s first word the last word. Peace!
It means living with a kind of humility and attentiveness to one another that Christ asks of us.
It is a way of going into the world with nothing — except what really matters.
The detachment that Jesus is demanding isn’t just a detachment from things. It is a detachment from ourselves. It is separating from our own pride, our own ego, our own sense of entitlement, our own feeling that we always have to be right.
It is taking with us nothing but what we are — stripped of what we pretend to be, divested of what we own, all that we use to impress people. It is putting that aside and carrying forth just one message, in Christ’s name: peace.
Are we willing (as a famous song once put it) to give peace a chance? The day we can live that spirit and give it joyfully to others, we may not have a sack or money or sandals. But we will be wealthy beyond measure. And the world will be, too.
Deacon Greg Kandra is an award-winning author and journalist, and creator of the blog “The Deacon’s Bench.”
