Bishop Kemme: “Walk with Jesus to Calvary”
Bishop Kemme blesses the palms before Mass on Palm Sunday in the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Wichita. (Screen capture)
The faithful are reliving the sacred events of Holy Week in a way they’ve never known, Bishop Carl A. Kemme said in a Palm Sunday homily streamed from the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Wichita.
“We do so this year, unlike any before, because we have been wrapped in the human experience of anxiety, fear, uncertainty, distress, and worry, more so than ever before,” he said a few minutes after blessing palm fronds in the middle of the church.
Walk with Jesus to Calvary
Jesus is inviting all to walk with him to Calvary, now more than ever before, Bishop Kemme said, “to unite and join our sufferings to his perfect sacrifice, to join with him in our hearts and minds, hearts that are searching for meaning in our turbulent times, to take upon ourselves the mystery of redemptive suffering.”
He urged the faithful not to ignore Jesus’ request to join him on his journey to Calvary.
“I beg you not to ignore or miss the invitation from Jesus to be his beast of burden, to carry him to the Calvary of our lives; to be his Simon of Cyrene, to help carry his cross, to be his apostle John and his mother Mary, to stand beneath the cross with him; and in so doing to receive from our Savior, the abundance of graces that the Lord wants to offer us in this special and unique time of our spiritual journey.”
Participate in Holy Week from home
Bishop Kemme invited the faithful to observe and participate in Holy Week as best they can from their homes, their domestic churches, “where Christ dwells in your hearts through faith.”
He urged his flock to offer “this painful, physical absence” from Masses along with their spiritual communions, their worries, anxieties, and struggles as a pleasing sacrifice to the Lord.
Bishop Kemme also asked that the faithful offer their suffering as a prayer, “a prayer that God will certainly hear and answer, a prayer to God to heal our troubled world, and to bring us his peace.”
God is waiting for us to turn our lives over to him more completely and to surrender to his mysterious plan, he said, just as Jesus surrendered himself into the hand of the authorities that fateful week so many generations ago.
“If, indeed, we cannot now be with each other in person, let us truly be with each other and with God and Spirit,” Bishop Kemme said.
“God is close, he is close to our hearts. May God bless you and your family, our parishes, our church, our communities in our world, as we walk together in spirit to Jerusalem. Desire to be with Jesus for these next several days, in order to participate with him in his Paschal mystery”