2022-Sep-4: Twenty-third Sunday of Ordinary Time

 

Opening prayer

Heavenly Father, send forth your Spirit to enlighten our minds
and dispose our hearts to accept your truth.
Help us to listen to one another with openness and honesty,
eager to learn from the talents and intuitions that you have given each of us. Never let differences of opinion diminish our mutual esteem and love.
May we leave this meeting with more knowledge and love for you and your Son.
In the unity of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

The theme of the liturgy 

The theme is Human limitation in understanding the true purpose of God's divine plan.

Wisdom 9:13-18b

This passage explains most clearly why humans cannot divine, predict, forecast or even understand what God plans or will do. Put plainly humans cannot fathom God's intentions or plans because humans always see things through the filter of their own limited lives and ultimate death. Thus humans project their worries and temporal concerns upon any question or divination that they attempt about God's intentions or the timing of his will to take action. 

The author also points out rather pithily that humans barely understand the workings of natural things on earth, to say nothing of trying to understand how God perceives and arranges things from the viewpoint of heaven.

In this story of King Solomon, he acknowledges his noble birth but is humble enough to ask for the gift of Wisdom from God. Man’s nature has its limitations, weighing down the heavenly aspirations of his soul. We need to humbly accept our limitations and be open to the Wisdom of God through the intercession of the Holy Spirit.

Psalm 90

Psalm 90 takes a full view of life including human frailty and divine wrath and a plea for divine grace. 

Psalm 90 begins Book IV of the Hebrew Psalter (Psalms 90-106) and is the only psalm tied to Moses (“a prayer to Moses, man of God,”) recalling his role in an earlier time in ancient Israel’s history and this formative character in the community’s story. Psalm 90 is such a lament from the community. The first part of psalm 90 (verses 1-12) contrasts God’s permanence with the brevity of human life. The remainder of psalm 90 (verses 13-17) moves towards lament where the community complains that they have been overpowered by God’s wrath on account of their sinfulness.

Philemon 9-10, 12-17

This is Paul’s shortest New Testament letter, comprising only 21 verses and 335 Greek words, yet it shows Paul's skill as a rhetorical counsellor and mediator. 

Philemon is a letter written when Paul between 55AD and 61AD when he was imprisoned in the Roman Empire. He addressed the letter to a powerful slave owner Philemon, a Colossian who became a Christian through Paul’s ministry (implied in verse 19b) and hosts a church in his home (verse 2).  One of his slaves, Onesimus encountered an imprisoned Paul, and became a Christian through him (verse 10). Although Paul would benefit from Onesimus’s continued assistance during his captivity (verses 11, 13; likely including participation in his ministry), he chooses to send him back to his legal master (verse 12), accompanied by this letter. Through skillful rhetoric, Paul exhorts Philemon to forgive Onesimus and receive him back not as a slave (an object that could be traded, abused and even discarded at will) but as a brother and dear friend (greek agapētos, verses 15-18) - in essence two people of unequal status are now to be reconciled as equals in the eyes of Christ -, and then return him again to Paul (verses 13-14, 20-21).

His aim was to help Philemon realize that Onesimus needed hope and dignity. Paul's message is about social justice, a call to erase human social distinctions borne not out of a command from Paul but out of true Christian love.

We too should examine our own communities to imagine what such transformations of relationships and status might look like in our church and in our various public offices and institutions.

 

Luke 14:25-33

In Luke 14:25–33, Jesus’ teaching takes a sobering turn as he uses hyperbolic emphasis to underline the demands of discipleship by forgoing attachment to family, property and life itself. Discipleship is a commitment and not just one more hobby or extra-curricular activity. Luke 14:26 is not advocating intense hostility toward kin and life, but, instead, is promoting the steadfast refusal to allow something less valuable to displace something more valuable. Or perhaps what Jesus means by hating family is to refuse to live by narrow, exclusive ideas of the family when it comes to meeting human needs and contributing to the wholeness of all human beings.

Jesus draws comparisons to two other initiatives: building a tower and undertaking a military campaign. Both of these require advanced assessment of available resources and capacity. 

One must be willing:

• to champion the cause of the poor and dispossessed;
• to view one’s calling as more expansive than the confines of the Temple or church;
• to sometimes buck traditions—and those who view those traditions as infallible;
• to live a life of relative poverty, unwilling to take bribes and to amass wealth on the backs of the oppressed and unaware;
• to struggle for the alleviation of poverty and a living wage for all at the expense of one’s own privilege; and
• to expand one’s conception of “family” to include neighbors far and near.

Hate (Greek miseo) in Jewish traditions is a form of discernment. For example, the wicked are said to hate discipline, justice, and knowledge, while the righteous  are said to hate wickedness, falsehood, and gossip