Today’s readings: Click on today’s date at http://www.usccb.org/bible/
Darkness in the marketplace, peace in the valley
Tuesday, March 3, 2015
Tuesday of the Second Week of Lent
Isaiah 1:18
Come now, and let us reason together, says the Lord. Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; they will be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.
We try.
Forty years after Israel was established as a state, President Jimmy Carter brought Israel’s prime minister and Egypt’s president together and they reached an agreement! In 1978 the two Middle Eastern adversaries shared the Nobel Peace Prize. Wow.
But the Palestinians were not represented. The Wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_David_Accords ) makes it clear that many groups didn’t think of this peace as their peace. And as we all know, thirty-seven years later wide-spread peace has not yet broken out in the Middle East.
The seventy-seven years since 1948 is just a drop in God’s bucket. Psalm 90, written thousands of years ago, says, “A thousand years in your sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night.”
Not so our lives: “Our days may come to seventy years, or eighty, if our strength endures.” When I am impatient for change, for healing, for wholeness in the world Jesus says stuff like, “The poor you will always have with you.”
But I know God weeps when we destroy each other. When we do not care beyond our own upturned noses. And Jesus announced his ministry by declaring a year of jubilee: “The spirit of the Lord is upon me … to proclaim the year of God’s favor.” All debts forgiven, all slaves freed, all land returns to its original owners. Shaken down pressed together, running over.
We can’t handle that kind of chaos, or so we say. So God’s desire to bring us together to “reason,” and to make our sin white as snow, is something we think we just can’t do. Sorry, Lord. I’m busy that day.
I notice how easy it is for me to be negative, about human nature. I’m glad God’s not. He knows that his word will not return to him void. And his patience outlasts our mountains, our oceans and our pretty-short physical lives.
Bring us home, bring us together, bring us through our own self-made hells into your heaven, Father. And for heaven’s sake, give us energy to live justly here and now, every single day.
http://www.christiancounselingservice.com/archived_devotions.php?article_id=1345
