Wednesday, April 29, 2015

A Thought for Wednesday 29 April 2015

“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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