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For Sunday
Epiphany 6C
Collect
O God, the strength of all who put their trust in you: Mercifully accept our prayers; and because in our weakness we can do nothing good without you, give us the help of your grace, that in keeping your commandments we may please you both in will and deed; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
Amen.
Reading
Reflection
Jesus has been healing and teaching, collecting disciples and naming twelve of them “apostles”. And here we see him at his most resplendent. People are gravitating to him and the evangelist describes a kind of power and authority emanating from him so that people are healed by being around him. It is hard to imagine a more potent image of a messiah for the downtrodden and the frustrated.
Then Jesus preaches what scholars popularly call The Sermon on the Plain which shows a startlingly similar and contrasting vision than the sermon we read in Matthew’s gospel. Here, we get blessings which are followed by woes. And much like the Beatitudes, the blessings are for things we normally don’t see as good and the woes are for things we usually think are.
Today, let us be struck, not by the particular, but the universal. Which is to say, that laughing at something funny today will not cause us to mourn and weep in the afterlife. But it is to say that the Kin-dom is for the poor and the disadvantaged and we need to adjust our thinking.
Perhaps consider it like this. If you are renting your home in this world, understand that you own in God’s world. And those that own here, better get used to the idea that you are actually renters in God’s eyes.