For Sunday
Proper 28C
Collect
Blessed Lord, who caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant us so to hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which you have given us in our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
Amen.
Reading
Reflection
We end the liturgical year and begin the next with the theme of trial, death, and transformation. And seeing how it happens the weeks before and after Thanksgiving, it just always hits different. Because we want to speak of gratitude and then we read Jesus talking about the destruction of the Temple and persecution. Come on, Jesus! Can’t we have these few weeks? Sorry, Friends! No can do!
Look at those last lines, though. Not even “a hair of your head” will go. Your endurance is the game. Perhaps we aren’t in this for the suffering, but for something greater.
At times of brutality and discouragement, when the sun begins to fade so quickly, our focus on the trouble blinds us to the possible, and we focus less on what we’re in it for and more on what we stand to lose.
Rather than sugarcoat it all and give the false impression that there won’t be any problems, Jesus gives us the reminder that none of this is the point — living is the point. And not just living, but eternal life, which is vibrant living in the Kin-dom! That is the point.
Our purpose, friends, is to live and love and despite what comes, we carry on with this as our work. Serving in Jesus’s Way of Love is to live in love and, in so doing, finding ourselves always alive to the very love of God.