A sign in front of a church near my house reads: “God created you on purpose and for a purpose.” That sign summarizes our two readings for today. Today’s picture is from the Sistine Chapel ceiling: God touches Adam and gives him the breath of life. What was his purpose? What is mine? What is yours?
Today’s Gospel
The daily mass readings are on a two-year cycle. Cycle A is mostly Matthew, with readings from the first part of Luke to finish the year. In recent weeks we have had Gospels toward the end of Matthew. Now, today, we pull back from Jesus at the end of his purpose in earthly life and return to the beginnings of his active ministry in Luke.
The setting is Nazareth. Jesus has found his way to cousin John the Baptist, who was preaching “Repent! Prepare the way of the Lord!” in the desert east of Jerusalem. He has stood in line and gone down in the muddy Jordan water as a sign that he, too, is committed to a purity of faith, so that the Messiah can come. He has struggled in the desert to determine what his purpose is to look like. He is home, now, visiting his mother and relatives in Nazareth. On the Sabbath, he stands up to read from Isaiah:
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring glad tidings to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord.
Perhaps he reads with a certain authority and strength in his voice. I imagine the scene as a hear-a-pin-drop moment. There is that stillness that comes when God inhabits the praises of his people. Jesus sits down and says, “Today this Scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing.”
The Messiah has come—not on a chariot of fire from the sky or with thunder and smoke. He comes as something stronger than the still, small voice that Elijah heard in the cave, but, still, NOT what people expected. “He came into his own, and his own knew him not,” another Scripture says.
It is interesting to me that Luke does not record people asking, “What glad tidings to the poor? How liberty to captives? How the oppressed go free?” He records people responding from a practical perspective, people asking in effect: “How can this be? Jesus is just a local boy…who is supposed to be a carpenter like his father.”
I Thessalonians
The theme of purpose is also on the minds of the Thessalonians in the first reading. I Thessalonians was probably the first book of the New Testament to be written. Still, it is more than 20 years after Jesus’ resurrection. People expected Jesus to return SOON…but he has not come. Some believers have “fallen asleep;” they have died. Since they have died before Jesus returns, does that mean they are to remain dead? Remember, this is early church, a couple of hundred years before the Nicene Creed will proclaim,
“I look forward to the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.” There is no doctrine to guide people’s wonderings. Paul reassures the Thessalonians: “For if we believe that Jesus died and rose, so too will God, through Jesus, bring with him those who have fallen asleep.” The picture Paul paints then is glorious:
For the Lord himself, with a word of command,
with the voice of an archangel and with the trumpet of God,
will come down from heaven,
and the dead in Christ will rise first.
Then we who are alive, who are left,
will be caught up together with them in the clouds
to meet the Lord in the air.
Thus we shall always be with the Lord.
My grandmother loved that passage and wondered how it would be to fly—to meet Jesus in the air. She, too, “has fallen asleep.” Yet she, too, like us, can “always be with the Lord.”
Pondering Purpose
Our faith does indeed teach us, “We are EACH created by God ON PURPOSE and FOR A PURPOSE.” Our first purpose is to be formed to live in the image of God—to become intentional disciples/holy/saints—to let God blow the wind of his breath into us, as he did Adam.
Then, there is a second purpose, to follow Jesus to bring the goodness of God within us into the world—like Jesus began to do when he read that scroll from Isaiah.
A friend called me recently to talk about “orthodoxy” and “orthopraxis.” Orthodoxy means right belief; orthopraxis means right practice. Her questions have stimulated my thoughts as I consider today’s readings. They go this way: I believe God created me on purpose and for a purpose, and I believe that purpose is linked to my own salvation/holiness as I learn to know and love God. That is my own individual faith journey, my orthodoxy. I take it seriously.
I also have a purpose to bring the goodness of God into the world. That comes from my orthopraxis—how I live my life.
I think about my grandmother. She spent her childhood and youth on a shanty boat in the Kentucky River. Her mother died when she was barely a teen. She spent the next ten years house-keeping on that shanty boat until her brothers and sisters grew up. Then she married, had six children of her own, and lived a sanctity “known only to God.” Yet, in that very ordinary life, she helped found (and populate) a country church. She supported her family as they moved to Oklahoma in the land rush—and helped establish her Church of Christ faith in Oklahoma, where it remains strong today. Back in Kentucky and best friends with a Catholic neighbor, she stood strong against religious prejudice when the Ku Klux Klan burned a cross on her neighbor’s lawn. In the days before nursing homes, relatives with no children came to her house when they could no longer care for themselves. Other relatives sent her their troublesome children, so their family’s warm, yet disciplined farm life could “straighten them out.”
And me?
God created me to know and love him—and to write, counsel, and teach. One way or another I’ve been doing all those things since early adolescence. Now it is clear that my skills and gifts need to be dedicated to a difficult topic: God’s way for us to handle decisions at the end of life. I start today to do a marathon of writing and praying for a part of that project which needs to be completed by the end of September. I ask your prayers for me, that God will show me the way to do it, and that I will follow God’s lead with will, heart, and mind. Pray that I may match my orthopraxis with my orthodoxy, and that both be in exact alignment with God.
And you?
Where is your challenge with the purpose God gives to your life today—in your beliefs and in your practice of your faith?
Prayer:
“Precious Lord, take my hand, lead me on, let me stand. I am tired. I am weak. I am worn. Through the storm, through the night, lead me on to the light. Take my hand, Precious Lord, lead me home.”
Words of this prayer are by Thomas Dorsey, ©1938. It is the first verse of the hymn, “Precious Lord, Take My Hand.”
