2LC19.   Genesis 15:5-12, 17-18.  God promised Abram, who was a simple, childless wanderer that his descendants would be as numerous as the stars in the sky.  Abram took God on his word alone, and it was “credited to him as an act of righteousness.”  To seal that covenant Abram brought animals for the sacrifice which God himself offered up in the darkness with “a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch.”  At that time God gave Abram and his descendants the Promised Land.  God showed his glory in creating his Chosen People, a spectacular work for Abram and as an example for those who put their faith in him.

Luke 9:28-36.  In Luke 9:22 that comes before this Sunday’s reading, Jesus predicts that he will “be killed and on the third day be raised.” In our Sunday’s reading Jesus, taking “Peter, John and James,” “went up the mountain to pray.”  There Jesus was transfigured before them with his clothing becoming a “dazzling white.”  Representing the Law and the prophets, Moses and Elijah “appeared in glory and spoke of his exodus that he was going to accomplish in Jerusalem.” I take exodus to mean his departure from human life in his offering himself up as a redemptive sacrifice for our sins. The apostles “saw his glory.”  As Peter was speaking impetuously, “a cloud came and cast a shadow over them.” “Then from the cloud came a voice that said, “‘This is my chosen Son; listen to him.’  After the voice had spoken, Jesus was found alone.”  In the transfiguration, Jesus was preparing the Apostles for his passion, death and resurrection. Without denying his humanity, Jesus wanted to assert his divinity.  After Jesus’ resurrection, the Apostles needed to grasp more definitively which the fact that Jesus was not only human but also God.  The Son of God was sent by the Father to become flesh to be the divine living word spoken humanly in Jesus.  The Father commands us: “Listen to him.”  He was love made flesh sent to his children in the flesh, calling upon us to be likewise love in the flesh as Jesus was.

Despite the fact that we are in the flesh, our death on the cross is to die to carnal desires, overwhelming by the grace of God our earthy, animal, bodily temptations.  His glory calls us to be and live as children of the divine, to be in the world but not of the world.

In Luke 11:29-32 those without faith demand a sign so that they must believe because the sign makes them believe. If one believes because they have seen, that is not faith but first-hand knowledge.  Abram and the three Apostles were believers who were given a sign of the glory of God because of their belief, not because of their unbelief.

Philippians 3:17-4:1.  For those who choose to live just as beings of this world with no regard to a life after this world, as in biological taxonomy ‘homo sapiens’, the highest species of animal in this world and nothing more, then “Their end is destruction.  Their God is their stomach; their glory is their ‘shame’.  Their minds are occupied with earthly things.”   1 John 2:15 says: “Do not love the world or the things of the world.”  For those of us who live in this world as people who are just passing through here, “Our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we also await a savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.”  He will take us up into his home, heaven, which will be our final, real and permanent home.  He will change our earthly body to be like his own heavenly body.  1 John 3:2 says, “Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we shall be has not yet been revealed. We do know that when it is revealed we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.”  This Sunday’s epistle reading continues: “He will change our lowly body to conform with his glorified body to bring all things into subjection to himself.”  What a joy it is to belong to our glorious God and not to a world where eventually everything rots.

1LC22.         Deuteronomy 26:4-10.   Moses reminds the Hebrews that in Egypt God Yahweh “heard our cry and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression.  He brought us out of Egypt with his strong hand” and “gave us this land flowing with milk and honey.”  Not only for the Hebrews but for all those who make themselves his, God provides for us now and forever.

Luke 4:1-13.   “Filled with the Holy Spirit, Jesus returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the desert for forty days, to be tempted by the devil.”  The Holy Spirit was putting Jesus in his humanity through a spiritually- growing and learning experience.  Jesus was still developing from being a carpenter in Nazareth to becoming a teaching, miracle-working Messiah who would be ready to give himself up to be the redemptive sacrifice on the cross.  Jesus in his humanity was coming more and more to entrust himself to the Holy Spirit who was enabling him to be more than a match for the devil and the trials of this world.  Humanity on its own is no match for the devil and the powers of this world but for God all things are possible.  It was Jesus in his humanity, empowered by the Holy Spirit, who repulsed the temptations of the devil.  Defeated, the devil “departed from him for a time” but only to try to tempt Jesus in other ways and forms later.  In this world the devil’s hatred for the goodness of God never stops.

Psalm 91.   “Be with me, Lord, when I am in trouble.”  “Say to the Lord, ‘My refuge and fortress, my God in whom I trust.’”  When we call upon the Lord, he hears us and provides for us in his own way and good time.

Romans 10:8-13.  “For ‘everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.’”  “For, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”  Salvation belongs to those who choose in heart and word to belong to the Savior.  Choose to accept the love that Jesus gives us from the cross.  His divine love is the only source of eternal life in a world that of itself can only give us a grave, buried below six feet of dirt.

 

1LC19.   Deuteronomy 26:4-10.   The nation of God’s Chosen People started as a small household that lived in Egypt as oppressed aliens that the Lord made into a nation of numerous people.  Moses said, “God ‘heard our cry and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. He brought us out of Egypt with his strong hand and outstretched arm, with terrifying power, with signs and wonder; and bringing us into this country, he gave us this land flowing with milk and honey.’”  For those who entrust themselves to God, who respect him as God over them, he uses his power for their benefit because they have given themselves over to belong to him.  They are his.

Luke 4:1-13.  After his baptism, Jesus “was led by the spirit into the desert for forty days, to be tempted by the devil. He ate nothing during those days, and when they were over he was hungry.”  Jesus is both truly human and truly divine.  In his divinity he is infinite and cannot experience a lack of anything, in other words, God cannot be hungry.  However, in his humanity Jesus was definitely hungry.  As the Israelites spent forty years in the desert in order to learn to be God’s People, so too Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert for forty days as a learning experience for Jesus in his humanity.  Jesus in his humanity needed to learn just as any human needs to learn.  He learned to be dependent on the Holy Spirit who filled him.  It was the Spirit who gave him the strength and wisdom to defeat Satan.  Without the Spirit Jesus in his humanity was no match for the devil, nor are we.  The temptations that Jesus experienced were genuine and real.  The devil knew well that he truly could tempt Jesus in his humanity but trying to tempt God would have been an absurdity.  As in the first reading, God used his infinite power to defend those who belong to him.  God would never allow Jesus to sin and will never allow us to sin as long as we live our lives in him.

Romans 10:8-13.  “For the Scripture says, No one who believes in him will be put to shame.”  Paul wrote, “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”  Only if we consistently put our salvation in the hands of the Savior will we be saved.  He will never fail us but we must pray always that we will not fail him.  We must always be a people who live only out of his provident goodness, never neglecting to go to him for our needs and as the source of our daily life.

8C22.      Sirach 27:4-7.    “So too does one’s speech disclose the bent of one’s mind.”   Our conversational speech often reveals the degree to which we have developed our moral character and virtue.  Our words reveal who we are in the depths of our being.

Luke 6:39-45.  “A good person out of the store of goodness in his heart produces good, but an evil person out of a store of evil produces evil; for from the fullness of the heart the mouth speaks.”  This Scripture screams at us, “What have we stored up in our hearts?”  Have we been living our lives in the bosom of the Holy Spirit or in the flesh of this world?  What is the life we have turned our hearts over to?  What makes our hearts tick?  Jesus also said in Matthew 12:34b, “For from the fullness of the heart the mouth speaks.”

1 Corinthians 15:54-58.  “Be firm, steadfast, always fully devoted to the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.”  Living our lives in the presence and power of the Holy Spirit is the “work of the Lord’.  God is our life from which flows the actions and work of our inner being.

 

8C19.   Sirach 27:4-7.  The Book of Sirach is one of the wisdom books of the Old Testament.  This wisdom helps us to see as the Lord sees and not be blinded or misguided by the way the world sees that makes what is bad to appear desirable and acceptable.  What we say reveals what we think, what the mind sees or believes to be the truth or reality.  Our reading says, “So too does one’s speech disclose the bent of one’s mind.”

Luke 6:39-45.  Jesus saw that all too often people criticized others but that they were guilty of far worse, showing that they were blind to their own guilt.  It is only natural to show partiality in judging ourselves generously and others overbearingly and negatively.  It is only by living our lives the God who sees fully and truly, can we be just as God is just.  Jesus says in our reading, “For every tree is known by its own fruits.”  Later in the text he says, “For from the fullness of the heart the mouth speaks.” What is the life or life-giving force of our hearts?  What fills our hearts that shows itself in our words, actions, emotions, facial expressions and attitudes?  Growing in communion with God whose Body we eat and whose Blood we drink makes Jesus the life of our hearts.  Living Jesus as the life of our hearts, begging him to be the Lord of our hearts, Jesus, with us working alongside of him, cultivates us to become the good tree bearing only good fruit. What joy it brings to grow more and more in the Lord!

1 Corinthians 15:54-58.  What we cannot do God can.  Sin and death have been crushed through Christ. “Thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.”  Know “that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.”

7C22.      1 Samuel 26:2, 7-9, 12-13, 22-23.    David’s reverence for what God thinks and does was the foundation of David’s relationship with the Lord Yahweh.   That was worth more than any position David held or thing he accomplished.  It is who we have become by the help of the Lord from which our actions flow that really matters.

Luke 6:27-38.  The development of religious faith in God’s people on earth began in the Old Testament.  That growth was built upon by Jesus to its culmination in the New Testament.    Our goal is to work with the Holy Spirit, as He enables us to mature in faith to be the “children of the Most High,” to be love or “merciful, just as our (your) Father is merciful.”  To the degree that we mature into the divine image of God to which God created us to be, “then our (your) reward will be great” in heaven.  In Matthew 5:48 Jesus said, “So be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect.”  God is the measure of all things.  “For the measure with which you measure will in return be measured out to you.”

1 Corinthians 15:45-49.  “The first man, Adam, became a living being, the last Adam (Jesus) a life-giving spirit.”  Genesis 2:7 says, “The Lord God formed man out of the clay of the ground and blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and so man became a living being.”  As a physical living being on this earth our science of biology sees us as the highest development of animal life on this earth.  By giving us the Holy Spirit to live within us, Jesus gave us spiritual life within us, which is far beyond our physical life, so that we could become God’s children, in his image and likeness.  Our daily goal is to develop and mature from our earthly being, which will be left buried in the dirt, to be a God-filled being that will rise to heaven.

7C19.    1 Samuel 26:2, 7-9, 12-13, 22-23.  Opportunities!  Should we take advantage of them despite the risks that might be involved?  In giving us opportunities what does the Lord want of us?  God had given David the opportunity to win the war of who is King in this world or the heavenly, moral war of who proves himself a son of God the Father and not a son of the ways of this world.  David acted out of a righteousness and love that was not of this world and it ways, but of God’s ways.  In whose eyes should we achieve victory: in God’s eyes or the eyes of people who think in the customary ways of this world?  By whose measure do we measure?  The real victory belonged to David because he chose to please God above all.

Luke 6:27-38.    The title of this Gospel should be: “Be love as God is love.”  It is by his measure of love that we should measure and not by any worldly measure. Jesus offers a way of thinking that contradicts the ways of this world: “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.”  In other words, love as God loves.  It is impossible for God to hate because the essence of God is love.  He must always be who he is.  Human hatred for God cannot make God hate in return.  At the point of one’s death he can allow us to live in our eternal hatred and go to hell because that was what we freely chose, even though it never was what he wanted. Hell is a state of being that those who choose it create for themselves by choosing to live without the only source of eternal goodness.  God never sends anyone to hell because he hates us, although we may have given him every reason to hate us. God acts only to help us go to heaven by helping us to become love as he is love.  “Be merciful, just as your heavenly Father is merciful.”  Nonetheless we have been given by God the power to reject his merciful love because God did not create a world of robots, since robots do not have the capacity to love nor become love.

Jesus said, “Stop judging and you will not be judged. Stop condemning and you will not be condemned.”  We leave to God what belongs to God alone.  Judging belongs only to God.  We can certainly recognize evil when we see it but must leave to God alone all final decisions.  We must pray for those who seem to have chosen to be evil to the end of their lives.  God expects the love that he pours into us to make us as he is: truly loving children of the loving God who is our Father.

1 Corinthians 15:45-49.  Paul writes, “It is written, The first man, Adam, became a living being, the last Adam a life-giving spirit.” Adam received life; Jesus gives life.  Because Jesus is not only human but divine, he is infinite love.  His love gives life that can never end, because his love can never die.  Jesus gives to those who choose to receive it, life that can never die because his gift of love to us can never die.  Paul ends this Sunday’s epistle with the words: “Just as we have borne the image of the earthly one, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly one.”  The image of the earthly one is a creature of the earth. In Genesis 3:19b, c, God says to Adam, “You return to the ground from which you were taken; for you are dirt, and to dirt you shall return.” (I deleted the word ‘until’ for a better flow.)  From our creation out of the dirt of this earth, our inheritance from Adam is to go back to that from which we came.  However, Jesus, by his death on the cross and resurrection to new life, has given us a spiritual life that has raised us up to a life beyond anything this earth can give.  In John 17:16, Jesus said, “They do not belong to the world any more than I belong to the world.” To those who have given themselves over to Jesus as the source of their life, Jesus’ love for us gives us the other-worldly spiritual life.  In John 17:26, Jesus said, “I made known to them your name and I will make it known, that the love with which you loved me may be in them and I them.”  Jesus’ life is in us when we live in never-ending communion with him.

6C22.    Jeremiah 17:5-8.    “Cursed is the one who trusts in human beings, who seeks his strength in flesh, whose heart turns away from the Lord.”  The people of Judah had put their trust in their leaders who acted as though they knew better than God.  They went against God’s leadership for his people.  The result was disastrous when the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem and carried the Hebrews off into slavery.  “Blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord, whose hope is the Lord.”  Anything that depends on what is earthly and not heavenly will go back to dust and dirt.

Luke 6:17, 20-26.    These are the Lucan beatitudes where what is blessed is set against what is cursed or woeful.  The blessed are those who put their faith in what is God-centered and valuable in the eyes of God; the cursed or woeful are those who put their trust in what the world considers worthwhile.

1 Corinthians 15:12, 16-20.    Paul is responding to the belief among some of the Corinthians who thought that “there is no resurrection of the dead.”  There were many who accepted the philosophy among the Greeks that the body imprisons the soul and so death frees the soul from prison.  And so for them resurrection meant to return to imprison the soul again in the body.  However, for us life in Christ means death to placing ourselves first so to rise in living God’s will, submitting ours to his, so to live in the eternal happiness that only God can give.

6C19.   Jeremiah 17:5-8 & Psalm1.  In whom or what is our life rooted: the things and people of this world or in God?  If it is in the things or people of this world, then we are “a barren bush in the desert,” cursed, worthless and doomed.  If it is in God, there we are like “a tree planted near running water,” fruitful and green.

Luke 6:17, 20-26.  Matthew’s beatitudes emphasize the spiritual; whereas Luke’s beatitudes center on one’s immediate earthly situation.  It may seem to people who have a worldly perspective on everyday life that what is important is what things and what friends you have that draw admiration from the surrounding world.  Being blessed in the sight of this world where in time everything will rot or simply pass away into oblivion is to be cursed by not having what endures through all time.  This world obscures and perverts what is truly valuable because its vision is myopic or short-sighted, seeing only what is near and physical and not what is spiritual and eternal.  It seems to this world that God sees things in a manner that is upside down and maybe even inside out.  However, God is the only measure of what is genuinely true and real.  The world’s vision obliterates the truth in order to have whatever pleases it.  For the world truth and reality only challenge self-interests and so must be disposed of.

1 Corinthians 15:12, 16-20.  Paul writes here to reassert that Jesus physically arose from the dead.  Paul is challenging the teaching that some were putting forth that Jesus’ resurrection was only the fact that he is remembered in peoples’ hearts and mind but that Jesus did not actually, physically arise from the dead.  This is once again truth and reality seen and rearranged through a worldly vision and not God’s.  Paul is clear to point out to the Corinthians that our faith is in a God who has power over death and other natural forces.  If Jesus arose only in peoples’ memories, that will be our fate too.  However, our faith is in the God who is eternal, on whom time has no bonds.  As he is eternal, he shares his never ending life and love with us, his sons and daughters over whom death has no power.

5C22.    Isaiah 6:1-2a, 3-8.    The people of Judah lived in great fear of the horrific terror of invading Assyrians.   Isaiah’s vision assures them that their God is infinitely more powerful that than any earthly force.  God is choosing Isaiah to be his prophet or spokesperson but Isaiah protests that he is totally unworthy.  God sends an angel to make Isaiah fit for the job.  As a result, Isaiah was able to say, “Here I am,” ”send me!”  It is God’s divine plan to use his human creatures as instruments of his divine will and so accomplish the result he wishes to achieve.

Luke 5:1-11.  After Jesus miraculously orchestrates the overwhelming catching of fish, Peter “fell at the feet of Jesus and said, ‘Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man,’”   Just as Isaiah had said, “I am a man of unclean lips,” Peter also recognized how undeserving and unworthy he was before the spectacular magnificent goodness of God.  In recognizing their own nothingness, they were putting themselves into the hands of the God who is everything.    They abandoned their sense of self-confidence to leave themselves open to live and act in the strength of God so to do what God had in mind for them to accomplish.  “When they brought their boats to the shore, they left everything and followed him.”  They emptied themselves, so Jesus could fill them with himself.

1 Corinthians 15:1-11.    Never to be the least because of the strength of the ego given him at birth, Paul declares, “For I am the least of the apostles, not fit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church.” “I have toiled harder than all of them; not I, however, but the grace of God that is with me.”  It is God that does the good work and we, by the grace of God, who cooperate with his working within us, accomplish his work.