13th Sunday in Ordinary Time
July 1, 2012

What would you like the people who hear your proclamation of the Scriptures at Mass do?

Should you put yourself in their place and think about how they might respond to the readings?

Advice on effective lectoring often focuses on how well the lector sounds.  Certainly, this is important.  However, just as important, is how well the people hear.

Here are two questions you might ask yourself the next time you proclaim the Scriptures:

   -  Are your hearers actively listening to what you are saying?

   -  Are your hearers making a connection between the reading and their own lives?

While lectors can’t take a survey of peoples’ responses, they can sense if their hearers are actively engaged.  Developing that sense takes time, but it can contribute significantly to effective lectoring.

Lectoring means more than just getting the words out.  It means caring that the words are really heard.

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First Reading  -  Wisdom 1:13-15, 2:23-14
No Man is an Island

Could God have created a world without suffering and death?  Perhaps that is what the Garden of Eden was meant to be. Perhaps it was humanity’s misuse of free will and the prompting of the devil that caused the expulsion from the garden.  Or perhaps utopia on earth was never possible anyway.

It may be that these questions are less important than the actual experience of suffering and death encountered by the people with whom you worship.

How your hearers understand the words, “God did not make death,” depends on their personal experience of death and on their answer to the question, “Why does God permit suffering?”

Today’s first reading can be read in less than one minute - not enough time to significantly broaden or inform anyone’s understanding of suffering and death.  However, when proclaimed with sensitivity, these words can offer reassurance that God understands the pain of his people - the people he created in his image.

Equally important, when the Scriptures are read with compassion, your hearers may truly come to believe that they need not experience suffering alone.

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Second Reading  -  2 Corinthians 8:7, 9, 13-15
No Man is an Island, Part II

Today’s first reading  encourages us to think about God’s justice in a world that was made less than perfect by the work of the devil and by humanity’s misuse of free will.  Today’s second reading examines a specific kind of justice that addresses disparities in the distribution of life’s basic necessities.

People have the ability and the free will to help each other.  It is a kind of reciprocal help that can equitably address the different needs of people as they change over time.

At every Mass, there are people who have needs.   As Paul suggests, the answer to these needs can be found close to home in a community of believers committed to equity and justice - not to an abstract concept of equity and justice, but to the kind of giving and receiving most powerfully demonstrated by Jesus himself.

Perhaps through this reading, your hearers may sense that their gathering together at Mass is more than just a casual meeting, and that they are members of a community committed to answering mutual needs.  Perhaps they may also come to recognize that their communal worship is a sign of their membership in a caring parish family.