Wednesday is the Feast of Saint Francis of Assisi./ We ask to live the words of his prayer:/ Lord, make us instruments of your peace,/ where there is hatred may we sow love./ We pray to the Lord.
We pray for the poor,/ storm-battered island of Puerto Rico,/ and for all those throughout the Caribbean who are heartsick with struggle and painful loss./ We pray blessings for all who are generous helpers./ We pray to the Lord. We ask blessings for our families and friends,/ mindful of those with health concerns,/ who struggle with depression or addiction,/ financial or relational problems./ We pray to the Lord. We pray again for our country,/ fractured and divided,/ lost in bitter partisanship and culture-war arguments./ We pray to understand that our job as Americans is simply to do good to other people./ We pray to the Lord. For the children we know and those we don't know./ For the children who suffer trauma and loss,/ who are without food,/ medical care,/ education,/ clothing,/ security or love./ We pray to the Lord. May Christians see their Sunday worship as an invitation to personal and communal transformation./ Inspire those who no longer worship or whose worship is weak and distracted./ We pray to the Lord.
Click on the wild fall asters above - the field flowers mentioned in psalm 103. Some thoughts about the psalm's verses follow. Verse 1: The psalmist begins with the little phrase, Bless the Lord, my soul. To bless means to extol, glorify, acclaim, celebrate, tell out! He's talking to his soul - his inner life, the center of his spiritual energies. Then he invites this invisible interior life to delight in God: calling to his energies, his breath, his knowledge and creativity, his powers of imagination, even his sighs.
Verse 2: Let us not forget God's benefits. The Latin word bene means good. Don't forget the many hundreds of good gifts given to me this day: this cup of tea, this breath of air, these hard working eyes, this fresh taste, this returned smile...
Verse 3: God forgives and heals. The psalmist uses the word infirmities, which is sickness. But sometimes the sickness is emotional or spiritual: sick with anger, resentment, complaint or negativity. Sometimes a whole family can be sick, or our lineage.
Verse 4: Israel didn't have a well defined sense of the afterlife. But for the Christian, perhaps this verse hints at Easter. "God redeems your life from the grave." Or maybe "grave" is used poetically to express the deadly things that can befall us on earth - the serious matters that can harm us, like the litany of addictions that are common today.
Verse 5: God renews our youth. I knew an elderly French nun whose convent was seized by Hitler's Black Shirts during the Second World War. The nuns had to sneak out at night to find something to eat. But she never soured and always kept a happy heart - joyful, awed and youthful.
Verse 6: God executes righteousness. There are Christians who love this word righteousness. I wonder if they think it means that God is like an inspector general. They hope God's righteousness is going punish all the people who are not like them. How we burden God with our own agenda! The second half of the verse tells us what it really means: God is on the side of all the world's people who are ripped off, pushed aside and ignored. There are billions of them.
Verse 7: God has revealed God's self to Israel throughout their long history. But you have a story, and I have a story too. And God is no less revealed through our own personal stories.
Verses 8-10: God is patient, like a mother who teaches her child to walk. What a delightful thought! God isn't an angry accuser. How did we ever get that so wrong - this idea of God "upstairs" filling out his report card, angry red check-marks on his clipboard list! This is called negative belief. Someone long ago invented negative belief because it's easy to control and manipulate people if they're afraid.
Verse 11:Fear God? St. Antony of the desert said, "I no longer fear God, but I love him." I fear only what can take me away from God.
Verse 12: God doesn't hold onto our sins, nursing a heavenly grudge against us, but hurls them as far as the east is from the west. Very neat!
Verses 13-14: The psalmist tells us twice that God's love is parental. God remembers that we are fragile and vulnerable. Think of how a good parent holds a newborn.
Verses 15-16: We come and go - like field flowers that last only a short time. As a seminarian I used to cut grass in a huge cemetery with graves going back into the 1800's - graves no one had visited in a very long time, the glorious headstones so worn, the names and dates erased.
Verse 17: God's kindness is extended to children's children, the psalmist says. God knows our lineage, the people we have descended from and those who will come after us. God has called each of us into existence and brought us to today!
Verse 18: Notice how the psalmist fine-tunes his thoughts: God's commandments are not something we think about, or memorize, or even pray about but something that we DO.
Verse 19: God's kingship is first. We're reminded of the prayer Jesus taught us: "Thy Kingdom come (but what does that mean?) Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." In seminary we often sang the hymn, The King Of Love, My Shepherd Is. Verses 20-22: We might imagine these verses are a great chorus of praise, the psalmist summoning all the angels and all of God's visible and invisible creation - this last call to hear God from our very deepest interior place. God, who is full of hope for us, and who holds us so carefully and closely.
Then Jesus began to talk to them in parables, "A man once planted a vineyard," he said, "fenced it round, dug out the hole for the wine-press and built a watch-tower. Then he let it out to some farm-workers and went abroad. At the end of the season he sent a servant to the tenants to receive his share of the vintage. But they got hold of him, knocked him about and sent him off empty-handed. The owner tried again. He sent another servant to them, but this one they knocked on the head and generally insulted. Once again he sent them another servant, but him they murdered. He sent many others and some they beat up and some they murdered. He had one man left - his own son who was very dear to him. He sent him last of all to the tenants, saying to himself, 'They will surely respect my own son.' But they said to each other, 'This fellow is the future owner - come on, let's kill him, and the property will be ours!' So they got hold of him and murdered him, and threw his body out of the vineyard. What do you suppose the owner of the vineyard is going to do? He will come and destroy the men who were working his vineyards and will hand it over to others. Have you never read this scripture -
The stone which the builders rejected,
The same was made the head of the corner;
This was the Lord,
And it is marvelous in our eyes?"
At this they longed to get their hands on him, for they knew perfectly well that he had aimed this parable at them - but they were afraid of the people. So they left him and went away. Mark 12:1-12
Jesus is up against religious leadership here and he is telling them this parable-story to let them know that he knows what they're up to. The parable begins, "A man planted a vineyard," which is to say, God gathered a people, Israel, who are uniquely his own. The story contains wonderful detail reflecting God's care: the vineyard has a protective fence, an in-house wine-press and a watch-tower.
But God expected that in time this people would be fruitful in justice. Instead, the tenants (Israel) turned on God and abused the leaders God provided to secure them. And then the story becomes particularly sad, because the owner (God) not allowing his plan to be frustrated or utterly thwarted, sent servants - prophets - one after another to secure this fruit of justice. But prophets make people uncomfortable and are more often than not, likely to be exiled, abused, killed.
Jesus is saying to his religious listeners: "Murdering God's prophets is in your lineage." We all have a lineage. We all come from a long line of ancestors. We all have a family story that goes way back in time. Some of it we know about, other aspects are lost to time. This parable caused me to think that our own family-story needs to be healed. Some of the dis-ease or the historical wound influences how we are as family even to today. In every family-story there are accounts of:
divorce
child abuse
sex abuse
suicide
domestic violence
alcoholism
drug addiction
abandonment
depression the bad spirit of ancestral: hatred, racial prejudice, anti-semitism, negative complaint
Victorious Christ ~ San Damiano ~ Assisi
What is there to do? I'd suggest consciously bringing it to Mass, and at the consecration and elevation of the bread and wine say, "Jesus please, your mercy, heal my family." You see, the stretch of Jesus reaches not only into the four directions, north, south, east and west, but also into time - past, present and future. We can entrust every wound to Jesus' timeless, healing, self-gift.
