Daily Office Reflection: Everyone Is Invited

Psalms 41, 52 * 44; 1 Samuel 24:1-22; Acts 13:44-52; Mark 4:1-20

Today's readings make clear that God's love for us is all encompassing and that all are invited into this loving embrace. The hard part of this good news is that we have to respond; we have to take this good news into the deepest part of ourselves and let it root there and become a central part of how we focus our lives in this world.

We celebrate four great women today in our Lesser Feasts and Fasts: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Amelia Bloomer, Sojourner Truth and Harriet Ross Tubman. I am not going to repeat their accomplishments here - look them up and read about them, for they were remarkable women, leaders for the rights of women. They were also faithful Christians. They are examples of good soil where the seed brought forth grain, growing up and increasing and yielding thirty and sixty and a hundredfold, despite the obstacles put in their way by those with authority and power in their day and age.

They understood the need to respond to Christ as the center of their lives work and that the good news of God in Christ was for everyone, not a select few determined to keep God's vision constricted and myopic. We see that narrowness of view in many places in our world and in our church as well. We can look at the United States Senators from southern states who narrowly interpret not only the Constitution but who they believe it is appropriate to sit on our nation's highest Court. We see that narrowness of sight in certain southern Bishops of TEC who, by their votes, want to restrict the House of Bishops (and in fact who can be a deacon and a priest) to their narrow vision of who can have good soil in their souls: as well as judge who can live in loving and blessed relationships and who cannot.

We are called to remember today that God's love is for everyone. To try and bind that love into a narrow and constricted vision is a willful blocking of the Holy Spirit's work that is alive and all around us, guiding us to a different world than the one we currently inhabit.

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Copyright 2009, The Rev. John F. Dwyer. All Rights Reserved.