G.K. Chesterton once wrote: We make our friends, but God makes our neighbors. We find a common theme running through the readings of today's liturgy. Ezekiel, Paul, and Jesus were each sent by God and were very unpopular with their neighbors.

Ezekiel was not your quiet neighborly type, content to chat, with you as you walked by the house as he watered his lawn. Ezekiel was not content with talking about the way things are; but rather, doing something about changing them.

Like Ezekiel, we find Jesus, active in proclaiming the word of God in speech and action, though his neighbors were astonished by his wisdom and puzzled by his power. He was the son of Joseph, the carpenter, a reputable and honest man, and his wife Mary, who was widowed very young; and abandoned by her only son who preferred running off with some wine loving fishermen, and Roman tax collectors.

Everyone in Nazareth knew all about him. He was just too much for them. They were content with what they knew and heard about him, but they never came to know him. He was so disturbed by their lack of faith that he could not work any miracles among them except for curing a few illnesses. But as for the illness of their hearts, he could do nothing but walk away.

The third example today is Saul Paulus of Tarsus. Once a Pharisee and bitter enemy of Jesus and all his associates, who later refocused his energy and convictions for Jesus. But it cost him.

The city of Corinth was the Big Apple of its time. Greed, lust, sexual perversity were its main attractions. Paul's message today is to those who have already changed their hearts from sin, but have now wrapped themselves in pride, self-righteousness, judgementalism, and hypocrisy. With such holier than thou attitudes they criticized Paul saying: He doesn't have the spirituality of an Apostle. He's only concerned with raising money for the missions, for building new churches. He has such a high opinion of himself; perhaps, if he only looked in the mirror, he's even physically repulsive to look at.

Ever heard people make comments like that or perhaps even yourself. What is it that makes us so scathing of other people's differences? A catechism teacher asked her class "If all the good people in the world were red and all the bad people were green, what color would you be?" One young student replied: "I'd be streaky." Honesty so often comes only from the mouths of children.

As a child learns to walk, first by crawling, then by standing, and finally by taking the first tentative steps, so do all human beings learn the essential lessons in life not by reading about them, or even thinking about them, but by doing them. We learn by our experiences. We act our selves into a new way of thinking. Too many try to think themselves into a new way of acting.

At the most fundamental level of our very humanness, it is our weaknesses that make us alike, and our strengths that make us unique. Acknowledging shared weaknesses thus creates a connectedness. From this central act of confessing and confronting one's own vulnerabilities and imperfections, begins the development of that characteristic most admired by the earliest saints - the sense of compassion. The recognition that the weakness of an other renders that person no different from myself.

To be human is to be fundamentally limited, yet at the same time to be capable of becoming more. When Jesus said: We must become perfected even as the Father is perfect, the translation might better read - fulfilled, completed, and finding our essence in God's I Am-ness.

We will grow in different directions with our different strengths, but our roots remain in the same soil as every other human being - the earthy humus of imperfection.

If we will admit that cutting through each of us is the reality that there is a crack in everything that God has made, not the least of all in each of us.