Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
The Summer Lull and The Sound of Feet Returning
A few years ago, I watched someone I admired leave the Church. He didn’t do it loudly. There was no manifesto or public denunciation. Just a quiet slipping away, like the last low chord of a postlude no one noticed had ended.
We had sung in the same choir together. Served side by side. He had a voice that carried, not just in sound but in soul. And then one Sunday, he stopped showing up. A month passed. Then three. Then a year.
I never asked him why.
I think I was afraid of the answer.
There’s something painful in seeing someone step away from the table. You wonder what you missed. As a musician, you may even ask, did the music fail to reach. We know God speaks, but why do people not listen? We dare question, “Why, Lord, did this wrong transpire?”
And yet here we are—this Sunday—watching seventy-two others go out. Into towns. Into uncertainty. “Like lambs among wolves,” Jesus says. No money bag. No sandals. No guarantees. Just peace on their lips and dust on their feet. It’s one of the most paradoxical things He ever says. That to bear the kingdom of God, you must travel light. That the weight of glory is carried by the empty-handed.
I imagine the sound their feet made, walking out two by two. No fanfare. No safety net. Just trust. A lot like ministry.
And then they come back. It’s almost a passing line in Luke’s Gospel—but it caught me. “The seventy-two returned rejoicing.” They returned. That line hit me harder than I expected.
Because so many don’t. Or haven’t yet.
The prophet Isaiah, in the first reading, speaks of Jerusalem as a mother. A place of return. Of comfort. A city where you are held again—not because you’ve earned it, but because God refuses to let your story end in exile. “You shall be carried in her arms, and fondled in her lap.” That image is almost too gentle for modern ears. But it’s what the Church is supposed to be.
The Church is not a staging ground for perfect performers. It’s not a production house for polished liturgies. It’s a mother. A home. A place you can return to—even after you’ve walked into foreign cities and tasted the bitterness of your own wolves. And music—true sacred music—has always been a lullaby for the lost. A song that dares to believe we can come back.
St. Paul, writing to the Galatians, says something I didn’t fully understand until recently. “Far be it from me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.” And then this: “I bear the marks of Jesus on my body.” That’s not a metaphor, the great saint we celebrated last Sunday, that was his ministry. You don’t serve Christ without scars. You don’t go out without being bruised by the road.
But the marks are not the end.
There’s a rhythm in this Sunday’s readings: from being sent out to being gathered back in. From wounds to healing. From exile to embrace. It mirrors the rhythm of the liturgy itself: we are drawn in, fed, sent out, and then drawn in again.
Maybe that’s what music ministers and priests need to remember this week. That our job is not to perform but to midwife that return. This is especially true in the summer, when many of us must see our assembly go, only to return in a few months in a state that we will not know until their return. And when they return, to make space for the exiled to believe that Jerusalem is still open. That she still sings lullabies. That there is still joy when the seventy-two come home.
Even the ones who left quietly.
Even the ones who haven’t come back yet.
So I find myself praying, in the quiet moments between rehearsals, that the music we offer—however imperfect, however unnoticed—might be just enough to echo the sound of those returning feet. That it might carry further than we think. That the dust on our own shoes would be a testimony, not of how far we’ve gone, but of how often we’ve said: “Peace to this house.”
And maybe, just maybe, someone will hear it.
And turn around.
And come home.
Inspiration from across the internet.
→ I think that this “thing” is so cool that I have to share it
→ silly small laugh for you if you like Dune
