Homeless Person’s Interreligious Memorial 2023

Most Reverend José H. Gomez
Archbishop of Los Angeles

Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels
December 21, 2023

My dear friends,¹

Again we gather this year to pray for our neighbors who died without a home and with no one to pray for them.

Jesus once said of himself: “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man has nowhere to lay his head.”²

So we pray that our brothers and sisters will find rest and comfort in God’s loving arms, and that the home they could not find on earth, they will now have forever in heaven. 

And in the passage from the scriptures that we just heard, Jesus is calling us to greater awareness and compassion to our neighbors in need.

In this beautiful parable, the Good Samaritan is the man of compassion, that man who can see the common humanity of his neighbor.

Jesus asks us tonight to see with “new eyes.” He asks us to look at the “other” and see a brother or a sister. Whatever the color of their skin, whatever their nationality, their language or religion. Whatever their condition or their worldly status. 

The deepest human truth is that we are all one family, sisters and brothers created by God to love and to be loved. And we are called to be our brother’s keeper and our sister’s keeper.

So we need to bear one another’s burdens; we need to lift up our neighbors when they’ve fallen, bind their wounds, and find them a place to live. When one of us is suffering, we all suffer.

Jesus teaches us that the true neighbor treats others with mercy. And he looks each of us in the eye tonight and tells us: “Go and do likewise.”

My dear brothers and sisters, we are challenged tonight to reach across the boundaries that separate us from our neighbors, to recognize in each person, the spark of the divine, to see everyone as a child of God.

So, we pray tonight for all those neighbors of ours who suffered on the streets. We ask that God’s light shine upon them, and that he grant them peace. 

And we pray for ourselves, that God will grant us the courage to be good neighbors, good brothers and sisters, to see with new eyes and have a deep awareness and compassion for the sufferings of others.

May we always do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with our God. Amen.