October 22, 2010
Friday of the Twenty-ninth Week in Ordinary Time
By Melanie Rigney
Brothers and sisters: I, then, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to live in a manner worthy of the call you have received, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another through love, striving to preserve the unity of the spirit through the bond of peace: one body and one Spirit, as you were also called to the one hope of your call; one Lord, one faith, one baptism;
one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all. (Ephesians 4:1-6)
Lord, this is the people that longs to see your face. (Psalms 24:6)
Jesus said to the crowds, “When you see a cloud rising in the west you say immediately that it is going to rain–and so it does; and when you notice that the wind is blowing from the south you say that it is going to be hot–and so it is. You hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of the earth and the sky; why do you not know how to interpret the present time?” (Luke 12:54-56)
Piety
Lord, I ask You to help me focus on the signs of Your presence in my life today instead of on what may or may not happen tomorrow.
Study
It’s just eleven days away, the voting for thirty-seven Senate seats, 435 House seats, and a variety of state and local offices. Prognosticators and office water cooler experts have spent untold hours jawing about the likely party shifts.
It all matters, of course, because it matters who we elect as our leaders. But sometimes, we get so caught up in talking about what’s going to happen in the future—whether it’s a Senate seat, the American Idol title, or the amount of snow that will fall in the coming winter--that we resemble the crowd Jesus castigates in today’s Gospel reading. They were so concerned with forecasting the future—in this example, the weather, based on their knowledge of historical patterns—that they missed other signs—the coming of John the Baptist; John’s identification of Jesus as “the son of God; the fact that Simeon, who had been promised Christ would appear in his lifetime, had died;" the list goes on and on.
The Lord doesn’t call us to live our days doing the best we can to predict what will happen tomorrow. Rather, He calls us to live, as Paul says, “in a manner worthy of the call you have received.” The call we have received is to live and love in Christ’s example. And we don’t need a handicap sheet or the Farmer’s Almanac to do that.
Action
Spend at least thirty minutes today living in the moment, rather than thinking and planning for the next hour or the next day or the next week.
