Monday of the Nineteenth Week in Ordinary Time

Lectionary: 413

Think! The heavens, even the highest heavens, belong to the LORD, your God, as well as the earth and everything on it. Yet in his love for your fathers the LORD was so attached to them as to choose you, their descendants, in preference to all other peoples, as indeed he has now done. Circumcise your hearts, therefore, and be no longer stiff-necked.

In today's first reading from the Book of Deuteronomy, we hear Moses urge his people to, "Think!" He wants us to stop, remember, and consider who we are as God's people. Our ancestry sets us apart and if we forget that our God chose our fathers and mothers, we are lost. 

Lost is one of the opposites of saved. 

Many people consider themselves saved but they have little knowledge and less connection to faith. They are as lost as Jesus's blind opponents who thought they could see. 

I have been reminded recently that I should occasionally try a dram of my own medicine. I have said of divorce, gay marriage, and abortion, "They're not going to go away. Deal with them." 

I suppose SBNR is also not going away. The idea that one can pick and choose one's own religious beliefs with neither a traditional religious basis nor a plausible system of how these beliefs intersect -- is not going away. Consumers rule.

So the better tact is to explain how the practice of religion can save those who feel lost and bewildered on a dynamic planet with evolving cultures and fluid systems.

 

Belief in Jesus begins with accepting the testimony of his disciples, those who heard, saw, looked upon, and touched the Word of Life. The skeptical might argue those eyewitnesses are long dead, but we can point to a continuous chain of generations, each one bearing witness to the next. 

The Spirit of God has insured the reliable transmission of that witness throughout the centuries. The Gospel is as pure as it ever was, and as relevant to our human predicament. We call this our "Apostolic Tradition." Initiated into that community of faith, we study, learn, and claim companionship with the patriarchs and matriarchs of our Jewish and Christian past. We stand beside them in church and often repeat the same prayers.

Accepting the teaching of Saint Paul and the testimony of the New Testament, we do not doubt that we have been grafted into Abraham's tree. 

Belief in Jesus integrates much of our experience, including the evils we have witnessed, suffered, and perpetrated. In his crucifixion we see how God converts the most heinous crime -- the killing of an innocent, good person -- into a blessing for the universe. If he were simply a victim of senseless crime, his death would be futile. But Jesus is the only begotten Son of God who loved us to the end. 

Despite his death, he remains with us, more human, more beautiful, more generous, and more powerful than we could have hoped for or deserved. By the same grace of his resurrection, our grief, failures, and crimes may become blessings. 

Unspeakable evils like racism, abortion, rape, murder, and ecological sabotage will be integrated into God's saving plan through the resurrection of Jesus. We can no more explain how that happens than we can explain quantum mechanics. But we can rely on God's grace with the same assurance as we're learning to put in quantum. 

Finally, belief in Jesus as we come to him through the Church, helps us to find our place and our mission in this endless confusion. If I cannot see where this is all going, I don't need to because I am sure that God does. I believe in the Father of Jesus who proved himself trustworthy in raising him from the dead. 

SBNR offers only the assurance of isolated personal convictions against a world of differing opinions and beliefs. They patronise one another with the assurance, "It's okay to be wrong since there is no right." Hidden in the darkness of one's own silence it might survive but it cannot bear criticism. It survives until that vacuum of ignorance disappears in a powerful ideology which kills, maims, and destroys disagreement. 

Fellowship with saints like Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross assures each member, "You are one of us. We're on this road together, and we know where we're going since our Head is Christ the Lord."