Of all weeks to have this collection of important, albeit difficult readings this Sunday! After one of the most hotly contested presidential campaigns in over a decade, after the election of one of the most controversial political figures in our country’s history, we sit ourselves peacefully, if not a little wearily, in our pew and listen to the prophet Malachi say, “Lo, the day is coming, blazing like an oven, when all the proud and all evildoers will be stubble.” Oh boy. To top if off our own Savior warns, “Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom.” Even at church we seem bombarded!
The days ahead will be fraught and I’m not sure what is ahead. I hope our Lord’s warning in this weekend’s Gospels are not literal warnings. Perhaps we will be called to protest at some point; perhaps we will be called to champion a new policy from the President-Elect. Either way, the Lord’s right: We have to persevere and our Catholic business of serving one another continues. There’s meatloaf to make and serve, liturgies to plan, children to teach, and medical mission trips to attend.
As I’ve written before, people on both sides of the political spectrum celebrate in our Church, as they should! Our political attachments are important to us, but it is my hope and prayer that as Catholic Christians we can be examples of bipartisan love, since our faith is represented in both our parties.
Besides, we’ve been here before. Seemingly radical groups of people were coming into the early Church with a new theology. I guess they were trying to “Make Ancient Palestine Great Again.” In the Church there was an early controversy: Should we baptize non-Jews? It seems crazy now but to the ancients this was a real concern. After all, Jesus came to the Jewish people. Was his covenant for everyone? Paul certainly thought so, but one of the early obstructionists to this new inclusive idea was St. Peter, our first Pope! As described in Acts 10, Simon Peter sees in a vision all manner of beasts and fowl being lowered from Heaven in a sheet. A voice commands Simon Peter to eat. When he objects to eating those animals that are unclean according to Mosaic Law, the voice tells him not to call unclean that which God has cleansed. Peter then becomes the first Christian to baptize a gentile. That is a great lesson in these heady times. Paul, though, who turned out to be correct about God’s will, waited for the authority of Peter before he acted on his own, and Peter is a powerful enough leader to know that he was wrong. I pray our saints, who had a contested relationship with each other be powerful models for us. So let us continue to pray for our country as we always do, and then it is back to work!
I’ll be seeing you,
Elliot