Every year, as we start the novena to St. Maria Goretti, we pray for many things.  Most of all, we pray that all of us would become more and more like our Patroness, that we would grow in our love, our Faith, our purity, and our ability to forgive.  Every year, though, there’s another part of our prayer during the novena, that isn’t nearly as noble or altruistic, and that is that we pray for good weather for our annual Italian Festival.  The Italian Festival is a big deal at our Parish.  We invest a lot of time and money in food, and goods, and everything that is needed to put on a Festival for over two-thousand people.  The Italian Festival is not a fundraiser.  The goals are to have a good time, to celebrate our Patroness, to evangelize to those outside our community, and to break even and not cost the Parish anything.  Quite obviously, good weather is very essential to those goals.  And most of the time, in the past twelve years, the evening of the Italian Festival has been one of the most beautiful evenings of the entire summer.  St. Maria Goretti has taken good care of us!  I’m not sure what happened last year.

      The weather, we know, is one of those things many things in life that we can’t control.  We try so hard so much of the time, to prepare, and be ready, to plan, to save, and to invest.  And we are not in control.  We are not in control of the weather.  We are not in control of our bodies or our health.  We are not in control of our lives.  And if you think you are, you are deceiving yourself.  God is in control, even when it doesn’t seem like it.  We need the power of God.  All of us do.

      Today, in this Gospel double-feature, we meet two people who’s two stories come together, as they both reach out to Jesus, in this public square.  Jairus, an official of the local assembly, has come to realize how truly powerless he really is.  His young daughter is dying.  It is the worst fear of every parent.  And there’s nothing he can do.  Jairus takes an incredible risk in reaching out to Jesus, Who has already been labeled a subversive for breaking the Sabbath laws.  But when you’re little girl is dying, you take chances.  Jairus gambled on Jesus.  This woman is, if anything, even more desperate still.  She has lived for more than a decade ritually unclean, unable to be touched by her family, unable to participate in the life of the community.  This woman had probably been wealthy before, as she could afford doctors, but now, not only had the physicians made her condition worse, but she had also lost all her money.  Her energy, her hope, and her life are slowly draining away in a flow of blood, and she lives like a ghost, pale and unseen.  This woman, too, is powerless.  She is at the end of her rope.  Thank God, few of us know what this feels like!  Like Jairus, she clutches at Jesus as her last hope.  Remember, this woman was unclean, she wasn’t supposed to be touching anybody, let alone, a holy man like Jesus.  This woman risks every thing to reach out and touch the cloak of our Lord.  If she pays any price for taking the risk, it is worth the hope of healing.  The message of this Gospel becomes very clear, as God takes care of BOTH of these people.  In their powerlessness, they are rewarded for turning to God and allowing Him to do great things for them.  Miracles don’t happen when we make them happen.  Miracles happen when we let God do great things for us!

      Most of us are NOT in need of the kind of physical healing power that this Gospel is telling us about.  But all of us are in need of God’s power, His authority, and most especially His healing power for our souls.  We are wounded souls.  We go around day after, and we try so hard to take care of our wounded souls ourselves.  And it never works!  NEVER!  We are so powerless to fix up our souls.  We need God.  We need to be healed by God.  We need Jesus’ power and authority, not only over physical sickness, but even more over our spiritual sickness, SIN!  We cannot do it by ourselves.  You know who knows this?  Recovering alcoholics and drug addicts know this.  People in recover from addictions learn this in the first three steps of the Alcoholic Anonymous Twelve-Step Program:  “1. - We must admit that we were powerless over our addiction, that our lives had become unmanageable.  2. -  We come to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.  3. -  We make a decision to turn our will over and our lives over to the care of God as we understand Him.”  This is good advice not only for those suffering from addictions.  Isn’t it also true that these three steps are also very true for all of us who sin?  Circumstances in life brought Jairus and the woman in the Gospel  to an awareness of their powerlessness.  We all need that awareness.  We shouldn’t have to have a dying child or terminal illness, to realize just how much we need God!

          We are not in control of so many things.  We do pray asking God to give us good weather for the Italian Festival.  Even more, we pray for health and safety for all of us, as we navigate a world that is out- of- control because of our sin.  May we turn back to the One Who can save us!

God bless us this Sunday,  Father, Son, and Holy Spirit…AMEN !!!

St. Maria Goretti …Pray for us !!!