15th Sunday after Pentecost
26th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Ezekiel 18:1-4, 25-32
Philippians 2:1-13
Matthew 21: 23-32

“You can’t conceive, my child, nor can I or anyone
the … appalling … strangeness of the mercy of God.”
-Graham Greene, Brighton Rock

Mrs. Turpin, the main character in Flannery O’Connor’s short story, “Revelation,” (published 1965) is grateful. She’s aware, after all, that God could have created things differently. She might not have been white or middle class, which, she thanks God, she is. She’s even grateful that her daily, sometimes distasteful, encounters with poor blacks and “white trash” remind her that “…one had to have certain things before you could know certain things.”

What she knows is this: she lives in a fair and ordered world, each person occupying the place he or she deserves and awaiting, in the life to come, a just and well-earned reward. If she weren’t such a mid-twentieth century model of Southern primness, she might be mistaken for a twenty-first century bourgeois Buddhist hipster, knowingly whispering, “karma’s a bitch,” in the presence of the unenlightened.

But there’s another thing Mrs. Turpin knows: the world is neither so fair nor so ordered as she would like. Life’s chaos and unfairness gnaws at her and she finds herself grasping for reassurance, often with disturbing results: Read more