Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time, August 20, 2023
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
A house of prayer for all peoples
Jesus proclaimed the Gospel of the kingdom and cured every disease among the people.
Sunday. Sabbath rest, a day of joy waiting in the wings at church, as well as after, in our times of learning, lunch, naps, reading, walking.
Every other Sunday, Andi and Aki spend 90 minutes sitting at a table outside after church, praying, with a small sign inviting others to join them. Recently they spent two weekends at IHOP, which in this case stands for International House of Prayer, in Kansas City. At IHOP since Sunday, September 19, 1999, there have been prayer warriors and others who stand up for God 24 hours a day, every day. Worship and prayer fill their sanctuary every moment of every hour of every day – that’s … well, that’s 209,687 hours so far. And counting.
I will bring them to my house of prayer and make them joyful. My house of prayer shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.
I imagine many of those hours are filled with praise and thanksgiving, interceding for God’s blessing on all the people of the world. Paul ministered to Jews and Gentiles, Greeks and others, not making any distinction.
For God delivered all to disobedience, that he might have mercy upon all.
Jesus poured out his healing on a Canaanite woman and her daughter, not because of her ethnicity, but because of her determined faith.
O woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.
But it was who and what she had faith in that mattered the most. As Jesus said, faith the size of a mustard seed is all I need. But I must surmount the obstacle of my own self, thinking I can do the mountain-moving, or that I can force my way into Jesus’ presence.
God delivered all to disobedience, that he might have mercy upon all.
Paul warns me not to sin so that grace would abound. Because it will abound quite well on its own. Grace is God’s way of communicating and blessing us. I don’t earn it, and I can’t take it for granted. It’s God’s gift. Always God’s gift – to be specific, his gift of undeserved, unconditional and unending forgiveness.
In The Order of Things, James Schall S.J. tears me away from my endless endeavor to be good enough.
We are not to be made holy by our own powers, but we are to be holy nonetheless. The order of redemption is about being made holy, about its way that is not our way. Being holy means that our sins are also forgotten, forgiven—not denied, but acknowledged … Salvation is also about understanding how it is possible that we sin and how it is not possible that we redeem ourselves. (from Chapter 8, “The Order of Redemption”)
Fr. Schall recognizes our tendency to reject grace. But still, he says, “in any case it is worth the effort to seek to restore order once it is broken.” Thus he sets up a puzzle, and something of its solution – enough to make me want to read more.
That very effort will reveal something about the Godhead that we never could otherwise have expected, as Aquinas said in dealing with God’s mercy.
Grace, mercy, redemption, salvation, and forgiveness … receiving this theological full-meal-deal is what renews our hope every day. We cry out with joy, not fear, to God our Abba Father. Hour after hour, after hour.
(Isaiah 56, Psalm 67, Romans 11, Matthew 4, Matthew 15)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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