July 25, 2010
Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
By Rev. Joe McCloskey, SJ
Then the LORD said: "The outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is so great, and their sin so grave, that I must go down and see whether or not their actions fully correspond to the cry against them that comes to me. I mean to find out." Genesis 18:20-21
“And I tell you, ask and you will receive; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks, receives; and the one who seeks, finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.” Luke 11:9-10
Piety
Prayer is how we express our love affair with God. Adoration, contrition, thankfulness and petition are four attitudes of love. Love is a relationship wherein we are heard in our needs by each other. Piety is the expression of our love for God which takes the form of one of the above mentioned attitudes. I relate with another by the attitude of my soul in their presence. Closeness takes one of the forms above mentioned. When I am with another that I care about my behavior reflects how they look at life. The same can be said of us in our relationship with God. The disciples in our Gospel were aware of the prayer of Christ. They witnessed events in his life which reflected his relationship with the Father. He challenges them to love one another even as he has loved them. He tells his disciples that just as the Father has loved him, he has loved them. He went off at night to pray the night through. They knew the extent of his prayer life. They asked Christ to teach them how to pray.
Study
The Our Father is the greatest teaching on prayer that one can find. It teaches that God is father to all of us. We go from the ‘I’ to the ‘We’. We have to share God. He does not belong to just me. The ‘our’ of the Our Father brings us out of ourselves. We are not alone in our search for God. We say lots of names easily. When we are praying to the Father we are challenged to hallow his name. It takes work to make the name of God holy. It cannot be just a word that slips out my mouth trippingly without the involvement of my heart. It challenges me to reach God from deep within. His name is spoken with reverence. That means that I need to be thinking of God with all my mind and heart involved with all of my strength and with the best focus on God that I can muster from my heart. It can be a boring prayer because it has been said so many times. It is a prayer of involvement in the work of the kingdom. I do not just ask God that it happen. I am reminding myself each time I say the prayer that I must do my share to make the world a better place. Working actively to accomplish the plan of the Father for me requires of me that I pay attention to my responsibilities of life which are revealed by constant study of the plan of God for us. Heaven and earth need to meet in my study of what I can do. We ask God to be involved by praying for our daily bread. We ask forgiveness of those that we have hurt so that God might be free to forgive us even as we are a forgiving people. We pray for an end to our temptations which would keep us from doing what we can to make a better world.
Action
The acts that we are challenged to make in our prayer are expressed by Adoration, Contrition, Thankfulness and Supplication. The pneumonic to remember them is “acts.” The first reading from Genesis shares the bargaining of Moses with Abraham. The prayer of petition asks God to do something that breaks the chain of events that are the destruction of the world of Abraham. We need to bargain with the Lord. Praying for the end to the madness of our world should be accompanied by acts of penance to go along with our prayer. There are some things in life that need prayer, fasting and good works to capture the attention of God for the good we want for the world. Acts of gratitude are made for all the good things that the Lord has done for us. We show our thanks by prayers of gratitude furthered by the good things we do for the needy in our lives. How can we say we love the God we do not see if we do not love the neighbor we do see? Our prayer needs to be dominated by our acts of gratitude for all the Lord does for us. Action speaks louder than words. I need to offer to God sacrifices for the forgiveness of our injustices. It is hard to face the Lord when we have failed to meet the needs of our world by the good we can do. We need to give not from the extras of our lives, but from the essentials of our comfort. Time and energy in work for the needy are the best gifts we can give. If God gives us the best when we ask, how can we give less than our best?
