Monday of the Thirty-first Week in Ordinary Time

Lectionary: 485

Rather, when you hold a banquet,

invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind;

blessed indeed will you be because of their inability to repay you.

For you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous."

Tomorrow is Judgement Day in the United States although most Americans are not expected to participate. Millions of qualified voters will let others make their important moral and ethical decisions. 

The question of mercy for God's favored people -- the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind -- is foremost on the agenda. Although the United States needs more workers and is failing to attract the best and the brightest, many people -- voters and non-voters alike -- will refuse to allow refugees access to our jobs, schools, markets, health care and opportunities. The consequences of this refusal will not be swift; they will not be devastating for the most privileged among us; they will be real. A nation of immigrants, turning to nativism, sabotages itself.

The Bible, Old and New Testaments alike, repeatedly remind us of the superabundant mercy of God. No nation has enjoyed that superabundance as much as the United States. We will celebrate Thanksgiving later this month; we should reread Lincoln's Thanksgiving Proclamation which detailed God's astonishing generosity to a nation torn apart by a brutal civil war. No history of the Second World War can fail to describe the overwhelming resources of the United States while it engaged in two enormous conflicts. One historian has said we did not so much defeat the enemy as overwhelm them. When Germany and Japan had better technology and more disciplined, battle-hardened troops, the United States had numbers. While the Soviet Union maintained its eastern European empire by suppressing dissent in its satellite nations, the United States created the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe. We are still capable of such abundance although we lack the spirit.

A democratic nation forestalls apocalyptic judgement days with periodic elections. If we choose wisely we can avoid the wrath of God.