Sabbath
Reflections through the
week...
Where is your story in the
Sacred Story today?
The reading from Isaiah
contains a challenge and
a caution. How do they
apply to you.
How is the passage from
Paul's letter to the
Philippians about the
Incarnation as an act of
love?
As a way of connecting
your story to God's story,
spend time in prayer each
day this week seeing
yourself as the various
characters in Luke's story
of the passion.
The Connected Stories
The Lord GOD has given me
a well-trained tongue,
that I might know how to speak to the weary
a word that will rouse them.
I had always considered this Isaian passage as a challenge to those who proclaim the Word of God. But the more I preach the more I'm convinced that this passage is as much a challenge to the hearer of the Word proclaimed as it is for the preacher.
The preacher approaches his task with the Word of God in one hand and, as Notre Dame professor Sister Catherine Hilkert, O.P., once told a gathering of priests and deacons, "with the newspaper in the other hand." It was her challenge to understand the story, the lived experience, of our hearers as well as the Word of God.
But would that also be true of those who gather to hear the Word of God proclaimed? For the nearly half a century I spent in the pew listening to Sunday homilies, I waited for the preacher to connect the Word to my story. I was putting the burden squarely on the preacher's shoulders. Needless to say, the last twenty plus years in the pulpit have altered that perception.
The preaching enterprise belongs to the people as much as it does to the preacher. The Sunday homily is not some game of "Russian roulette"! The members of the congregation will get out of the homily what they put into it. (Not unlike the entire liturgy!) The assembly consciously inserts their story into the Word proclaimed by the preacher. The focus, the images used by the preacher, are not meant just to sit there to be admired by or provide amusement to the assembly, but rather they are intended to pry open an entrance to the personal stories of those in the pews. It is NOT a passive experience.
On the contrary the Sunday homily requires the active preparation and particpation of the members of the assembly. Just as the preacher spends a good part of his week's work understanding the Scriptures for the coming week and searching for the images and examples to bring the Word into focus for the assembly, so too must the members of the congregation.
I bring this reflection to the Scriptures of Palm Sunday as an invitation to engage today's readings in that way: as a meditation in preparation for the Sacred Triduum. Before the celebration of the Lord's Supper on Thursday, sit with the Word of God proclaimed today and bring it to your lived experience, either past or present. There is no more critical time in the liturgical year to make that profound connection: God's story IS our story.
Christ Jesus, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
something to be grasped.
Rather, he emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
coming in human likeness;
and found human in appearance,
he humbled himself,
becoming obedient to the point of death,
even death on a cross.
