Keep My Word

April 2, 2009

Thursday of the Fifth Week in Lent

“My covenant with you is this: you are to become the father of a host of nations.” Genesis 17:4

“Amen, amen, I say to you, whoever keeps my word will never see death.” John 8:51

Piety

Prophets of a Future Not Out Own (The Romero Prayer)
It helps now and then to step back and take the long view.
The Kingdom is not only beyond our efforts, it is beyond our vision.
We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of the magnificent enterprise that is God’s work.
Nothing we do is complete, which is another way of saying that the kingdom always lies beyond us.
No statement says all that could be said.
No prayer fully expresses our faith.
No confession brings perfection.
No pastoral visit brings wholeness.
No program accomplishes the Church’s mission.
No set of goals and objectives includes everything.
This is what we are about: We plant seeds that one day will grow.
We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise.
We lay foundations that will need further development.
We provide yeast that produces effects beyond our capabilities.
We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that.
This enables us to do something, and to do it very well.
It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for God’s grace to enter and do the rest.
We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master
builder and the worker.
We are workers, not Master Builders, ministers, not Messiahs.
We are prophets of a future not our own. Amen

By Bishop Kenneth Edward Untener who served the Diocese of Saginaw from 1980 until his death in 2004 from leukemia. Thanks to Just Faith leaders Denny Cumber and Pequitte Schwerin for circulating a copy recently.

Study

The Old Covenant: Walk in my presence and be blameless. Then you will become the father of nations.

The New Covenant: Keep my word and never see death.

These words sound so easy. They roll of the tongue. They slip into our ears and weave their way along our synapses to the central brain. But, from the brain, they need to make the trip deep down in our hearts. From the heart, they need to travel inward and until they can take up residency deep in the soul.

Even from our soul, the words – and THE WORD – can not rest. They need to inspire our hands and feet so we can go out and mark up the world with our faith working and our actions loving.

Action

Keeping the Lord’s Word is especially challenging during the current global economic crisis. While world governments are spending billions to keep businesses afloat, sometimes they are not putting a commensurate emphasis on providing a preferential option for the poor. Pope Benedict XVI is speaking out to remind us and world leaders of that responsibility. The following story has been circulated on Catholic News Service:

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- In a letter to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Pope Benedict XVI urged leaders from the world's wealthiest nations to stabilize financial markets without excluding families and the poor.

In the March 30 letter, Pope Benedict emphasized that participants in the Group of 20 leaders' summit in London April 2-3 must find a way out of the global economic crisis but must avoid selfish or protectionist solutions.

The pope said the solutions must seek "to offer security to families and stability to workers and, through appropriate regulations and controls, to restore ethics to the financial world."

"If a key element of the crisis is a deficit of ethics in economic structures, the same crisis teaches us that ethics is not external to the economy, but internal, and that the economy cannot function if it does not bear within it an ethical component," said the pope.

Referring to his March trip to Cameroon and Angola, Pope Benedict also encouraged summit participants not to exclude Africa or cut development aid to developing countries.

Development aid -- including debt cancellation -- "has not been the cause of the crisis and, out of fundamental justice, must not be its victim," he said.