“Praise
The Lord! Praise The Lord, O my soul! While I live I will praise
The Lord; I will sing praises to my God while I have my being. Do not put
your trust in princes, nor in a son of man in whom there is no help. His
spirit departs, he returns to his earth; in that very day his plans perish.”
Psalm
145:1-4 NKJV
The
advent of the election season is slowing making its way back into the American
mainstream, and it has already gotten ugly. Based on past trends we can
be pretty sure it will get much worse and much more expensive. Every
season we break new records in the billions of dollars we go through to elect a
president. Every season we pin our hopes on any one of these mortal
beings in the vain belief that they can actually do what they will certainly
promise to do. Regardless of party affiliation, none try to convince us
they are suited to be chief executive of this nation’s government. Rather
they try to convince us (maybe even themselves) that they are “anointed” and
are our next best hope, our salvation from a wretched past.
And
every election season, much to our profound disappointment, we learn they are
just as human, just as flawed as the one they intend to succeed. When
will we learn that the wisdom of this psalm, the entire Scripture, is
timeless? That mortals always – ALWAYS – “return to the earth” and take
their best intentions with them?
The
Scripture does not need to be rewritten to accommodate a culture. The
culture – ideally being taught and led by a faithful Church – needs to slow
down and stop grasping at straws for meaning. Indeed the Church herself
needs to take a good, long, and hard look at itself from within the wisdom of
the Scripture and measure its being and its life accordingly. And that
evaluation can be as simple as this: if a thing (or even a person) has become
popular only in our lifetime, its usefulness and relevance will fade soon in
favor of another thing – also in our lifetime.
There
is One, and only One, who is timeless and who has gone to great lengths to get
us to reconnect to one another and to Him through one another; that is the
power of the Church. From the beginning the Holy One has done little more
than to ask that we look after one another – even the stranger and the
foreigner – pay close attention to His timeless wisdom, and be a better
disciple tomorrow than we are today. “Do not turn to the left or to the
right”, The Lord told Joshua, “and you will find the Life I have intended for
you.” In other words, we do not need to make things up according to the
contemporary culture – for that culture will pass soon enough when we discover
it is only a ruse, a façade with no substance.
“The
Lord will reign forever … to all generations!” This we must know.
This we must believe, for this is the Only Life that will not perish.
Blessings,
Michael
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