What Makes Us Different - St. Mary of Magdala, an Inclusive Catholic Community

Helen Weber-McReynolds, RCWP, Pastor
Maria Thornton McClain, RCWP, Retired Pastor

God's Love Gives Us Hope: New Life Is Always Possible.

4/19/2025

God’s Love Gives Us Hope: New Life is Always Possible.

April 19, 2025
Easter Vigil
Helen Weber-McReynolds, RWCP
Genesis 1: 26-27, 31; Exodus 14: 15-16, 29, 31; 15: 20-21 ; Isaiah 55: 1-11;
Baruch 3: 9, 32-36, 38; 4: 1-2; Romans 6: 3-4; John 20: 1, 11-18

“I have seen the Teacher!” Jesus is alive! I have talked to him and he told me come here and tell you all—he is not dead, he is alive! This was the message of Mary Magdalene after her encounter and conversation with Jesus in the garden, the day after his execution. This passage is familiar to us here at St. Mary of Magdala, since we usually read it for Easter, and also for St. Mary Magdala’s Feast Day on July 22. But this account of the resurrection is NEVER read on Easter in the traditional Catholic parish lectionary- only on the Tuesday after Easter, when not that many people get a chance to hear it. Most parishes on Easter read the nine verses from John, Chapter 20, just before the passage we read, about Peter and another disciple running to the tomb after they had been alerted by Mary Magdalene that his body was missing. So those parishioners miss out on the truth that Mary Magdalene was the first to know the truth of Christ’s resurrection, and the one to communicate it to the other apostles. About Mary Magdalene Pope Francis has said, in his 2020 book, Let Us Dream: The Path to a Better Future, “The Lord first announced the New Life to women because they were present, attentive, and open to new possibilities. Could it be that in this crisis the perspective women bring is what the world needs at this time to face the upcoming challenges?” And the final document of the recent second synod of Bishops and other lay and religious leaders in Rome said this: “One woman, Mary Magdalene, was entrusted with the first proclamation of the Resurrection… It is important that the scripture passages that relate these stories find adequate space inside liturgical lectionaries.”

The point is that we Christians are people of hope—that we believe in resurrection, that new life is always possible, because the love of God for us is never-ending. And we believe that EVERYONE is included in this potential for eternal life—no matter their gender, sexuality, marital status, occupation, education, physical ability, or financial status. God loves everyone equally, and endows them with the potential to love selflessly, in other words with the potential to love as much as Jesus did when he gave his life for all of us. Jesus is the ultimate lover of all among humans—he was sent to live among us to show us his perfect example. And because God’s love is eternal, so is our possibility for conversion and renewal. And as we rise from our mistakes again and again, we can in the process be like Mary Magdalene, who proclaimed, “Jesus is alive!”

Marking Our Doorposts

4/17/2025

Marking Our Doorposts

April 17, 2025
Holy Thursday
Helen Weber-McReynolds, RWCP
Exodus 12: 1-14; Psalm 116; 1 Cor 11: 23-26; John 13: 1-10, 12-17, 33-35

           Our next door neighbor flies his American flag on his front porch every day. You who have been to my house have noticed that I fly a flag on our porch too - a beautiful rainbow flag that includes the whole spectrum, including black, brown, and white, and light pink and light blue. I think these flags make a lovely colorful contrast.

           I refer to our porches and their flags because we have all heard the three
stories in our readings many times before. They are the same every year. But I heard one new idea when I reflected on the reading from Exodus this week, about the Passover of God and the Exodus into freedom of our Jewish ancestors. The new thought I had was about the porches of the people in Egypt, or the doorposts and the lintels, anyway. The people were instructed to mark them with the blood of the lambs they were eating for their last dinner in Egypt, that “memorial feast.” That way God would pass over their houses and spare their firstborn, human and animal.

           Now you and I both know that God knows where we all live. But the Old Testament is written in a very symbolic, almost magical style, in some parts. The marking of the doorposts was left in as an important detail of the story. I was wondering why.

          Then I thought, what if marking the doorposts was more about the people making a declaration for themselves. What if it was a sign of unity they were making with one another. “We are in,” it was saying. “The people in this house have decided we are ready to follow the law of God, and forget about the law of the Pharoah. We have negotiated and now Pharoah says we are released. So before he changes his mind, we declare—we are God’s people! We refuse to live in slavery one day more. We are posting the sign agreed upon on our porch. We are leaving—tonight!” It may have been a mark to stand for solidarity and encourage one another. It may have been a flag of faith and freedom.

        In our other two readings, we hear how Jesus led his friends and followers toward a new Passover and a new Exodus, past the bondage of the Roman empire and corrupt practices that had developed in the temple leadership. He led them toward inclusion of everyone and unselfish love, toward protecting the earth and everyone in it. He led them toward the ultimate flag of freedom—the empty burial clothes in his tomb.

Challenging Oppression

4/13/2025

Challenging Oppression

April 13, 2025
Palm Sunday
Helen Weber-McReynolds, RWCP

Luke 13: 31-35; Isaiah: 42: 1-9; Philippians 2: 6-11; Luke 19: 28-42

           In the reading before the procession this morning, we heard Jesus refer to Jerusalem as the city that kills prophets. It is said that the prophet Zechariah was stoned to death in the Temple courtyard on the order of the Jewish King Joash. Tradition has it that Isaiah was sawn in two by King Manasseh. And the prophet Urijah was captured and executed by King Jehoiakim. You can probably intuit why these messengers of God’s word met with such opposition and persecution. They all urged the people of God to repent and rebuked them for disobeying God. They brought to light corruptions by both the religious and civil leaders of the city that was the center of Jewish life. Rather than reform their practices or return to the spirit of God’s law, they chose to eliminate their opposition, and in appallingly cruel, violent ways, to make examples of them.

           When Jesus entered Jerusalem on what we now call Palm Sunday, he was doing the same thing these earlier prophets had done. He came to challenge the Jerusalem hierarchy, to point out their legalism and greed, and how they were ignoring and even persecuting widows and orphans, to collect taxes and bolster their own power. Jesus protested the coziness many Jewish leaders had developed with Jerusalem’s Roman occupiers, to avoid persecution themselves, often at the expense of powerless, poor Jewish peasants. The Jewish leaders were acquiescing to the Roman Empire’s representatives, cruel, arbitrary, dictators, who seemed to have no respect for principals of caring for the most vulnerable or distributing wealth fairly to all.

           Sound familiar? We find it easy to identify with what Jesus and his disciples were going through, this Palm Sunday even more than others. Americans in 2025 understand, perhaps more than ever before, the domination of someone trying to replace a benevolent, participatory government with a type of empire. Our chief executive and his cronies are trying to create a dictatorial authoritarian system based on white male “Christian” nationalism. And they are using cruel, arbitrary, violent methods, methods which target people because of their skin tone or native language rather than because they have committed any kind of actual crime. We have seen students accused of terrorist sympathizing for supporting the dignity of Palestinian humans. We have seen people deported, called criminal gangsters, because they happened to have tattoos. We have seen voter suppression measures of every sort imaginable, more and more blatant every day. The rule of law seems to count for nothing any more.

           The people who paraded with Jesus through Jerusalem were celebrating a leader they knew would challenge the oppression which was crushing them. They thought their expectations were defeated by an empire which executed Jesus a week later. But Jesus proved them wrong by defeating even death, achieving resurrection and endowing his followers, even down to us today, with the Spirit of divine love and the strength of the promise of eternal life.

           People in the United States are pushing back more and more loudly on the anti-democratic orders of the Trump administration by speaking out and marching in the streets. The “Hands Off” protests of the past week were examples of political resistance to imperial ways of domination. Our protests planned for this afternoon have been postponed, but not cancelled. I have faith they will be successful. We as Americans are challenging the destruction of our democratic form of government, and the brutal suppression of the ways we celebrate the beauty of our diversity by
the current administration. As followers of Jesus we believe we also are endowed with the spirit of divinity, and the power of our resurrection movement. Not only do we believe in the rights conferred by the Constitution, we believe in what is right and loving and just. Let our belief in a God who loves all the same, without exception, motivate us to make this the law of our lives.