I’m not sure ordinary people are still allowed in the White House. Gilded rooms catch the light, and polished coasters stamped with the president’s name glare back—ornaments in a palace that’s forgotten the hands that built it.

They were made to impress. But I don’t see gardeners, housekeepers, or farm workers in them. I don’t see families juggling two or three jobs, or migrants who have walked farther than many of us can imagine. In a country where SNAP benefits can be withheld for leverage and senators send back high-priced steaks for being the wrong temperature, these rooms feel painfully distant from the world most people inhabit.

That distance follows me into the Gospel. The scene shifts to Jerusalem, where the disciples stand before the Temple, taking in its massive stones and shimmering decorations. The Temple was meant to draw people toward God. But by Jesus’ time, it had become tangled with the demands of empire—Rome pressing down, local elites adapting to survive, and ordinary people walking into a holy place that made them feel smaller than the stones towering above them.

As I prayed with this week's Gospel (Luke 21:5–19), these images met in my mind. Jesus does not reject the Temple’s beauty; he grieves what has settled into its walls. And then he names the truth no one wants to face: “All this will be thrown down.”

He is not condemning holiness. He is calling the people back to what God builds to last—hearts, not monuments; communities, not displays of splendor.

Pope Leo XIV names this same tension with striking clarity. He writes that a “wealthy elite lives in a bubble of comfort and luxury, almost in another world compared to ordinary people,” even as a hidden culture grows indifferent to those forced to live in conditions unfit for human beings. His words expose the danger Jesus saw in the Temple: how power can hide suffering, and how beauty can distract us from the people God holds closest.

Jesus invites the disciples to see beyond appearances. He turns them from stones to human stories—fear, betrayal, fractured relationships, and uncertainty about the future. He names these realities not to frighten them, but to open a path toward hope.

“By your endurance,” he says, “you will gain your souls.”

This endurance is not stiff or cold. It is the quiet strength of love—the resolve that keeps moving when the world grows uncertain, that honors dignity even when systems forget it, and that trusts every person is a place where God desires to dwell.

Here the Gospel pivots. Jesus is not asking us to cling to stones or fear their collapse. He is reminding us that God’s dwelling place has never been splendor, but people—especially those at the margins. Endurance becomes holy when it keeps us rooted in compassion, in solidarity with those whose voices are ignored, and in the courage to walk with the ones who carry the heaviest burdens.

This passage is not about fear. It is about clarity and hope. It reveals where God chooses to dwell—not in rooms meant to dazzle, but in the steady courage of ordinary people. Migrants who keep walking. Workers rising before dawn. Families carrying more than their share.

Here, the Gospel confronts us. When we forget the dignity of ordinary people, we slip into a quiet cooperation with a pattern of dehumanization—one that lets power keep its shine and wealth keep growing. When migrants become statistics, when workers are valued only for labor, when the poor are blamed for their wounds, a lie takes root: that some lives matter less than others.

This is the force Jesus warns against when he says the stones will fall. It is the same logic that lets institutions thrive while people are forgotten, the same blindness that builds beautiful rooms while leaving human beings outside the door.

But the Gospel refuses that lie. It tells us that God is not found in places built to impress, but in the people our world is quickest to overlook. Migrants, neighbors, workers, families carrying heavy loads—they are not obstacles. They are the ones who show us where God is building something new.

The glow of empire fades.
The stones fall.
But the hope carried by ordinary people—migrants, neighbors, strangers, saints in work boots—keeps rising.

And that hope, humble and steady, is where God builds his home in a world aching for mercy.