31 July 2026 - homecourt disadvantage

 

Today's Readings

(Audio)

 

Jesus came to his native place and taught the people in their synagogue.

It first they seemed to be impressed by "the gracious words that were coming from his mouth" (see Luke 4:22). But it seemed that they wanted more than words. They had heard of the mighty deeds done at Capernaum and wanted to see him work similar wonders in Nazareth. But this initial demand issued not from genuine need, but rather from a sense of entitlement. They believed that as the place from where, as was thought, Jesus came, they deserved at least as much as anyone else. But Jesus was unwilling to give them spectacle that they didn't need just because they felt they deserved it. The fact that he was from Nazareth didn't imply anything special for them if they were unwilling to let him change their hearts. Jesus was intentionally provocative to those who presumed on God's mercy in this way.

I will treat this house like Shiloh,
and make this the city to which all the nations of the earth
shall refer when cursing another.Now the priests, the prophets, and all the people
heard Jeremiah speak these words in the house of the LORD.

The fact of the presence of the Ark of the Covenant in Shiloh was not enough to save a rebellious and unrepentant people from divine judgment through defeat at the hands of the Philistines. And neither the temple nor the Ark in themselves would be enough to turn the wrath of God away from the people in the time of Jeremiah unless the people listened and turned back, "each from his evil way". Thus the presence of God in the midst of his people is never meant to justify complacency. It is never meant to be presumed upon like magic that we can manipulate even in the midst of moral compromise. True mighty deeds of God come about when we realize the depth of our need for him. However impressive such deeds may appear to an observer, they are always even more transformative at an inner level.

Is not his mother named Mary
and his brothers James, Joseph, Simon, and Judas?
Are not his sisters all with us?

When Jesus didn't act in such a way that privileged the people of Nazareth merely because of their proximity they began to turn that proximity into a verbal weapon against him. We sometimes do something similar when we don't receive what we want from the Lord. We may reflect and comment on the fact that we've only ever seen ordinary things as a result of our proximity to him. We've lived near his Eucharistic presence for how long with nothing to show for it? Needless to say if we have nothing to show for our proximity to the Eucharistic Lord the fault does not lie with him. We need to differentiate between the depth of our need for God, which is easy to forget, and what we deserve or believe we have earned, which is easy to assume. This becomes all the more necessary the longer we have lived as followers of Jesus. We never enter a mode of being where we can simply coast and let the momentum carry us, where faith is no longer necessary. We want to be like Jesus himself, consumed with zeal for the Father's house, and not with complacency. It is better for him to purify the temples of our hearts than to allow us to grow forgetful of the purpose of those temples, which is always the right praise of God.

But I pray to you, O LORD,
for the time of your favor, O God!
In your great kindness answer me
with your constant help.

 

Vineyard - Help Us Our God

 

30 July 2026 - carry that waiting

Today's Readings
(Audio)

  

The Kingdom of heaven is like a net thrown into the sea,
which collects fish of every kind.

The part of this analogy that is taking place now is only the collection. The classification of good and bad will not happen until the end of the age. However, we tend to fixate on trying to figure out which is which right now. We often try to shift the motion of the gathering nets so as to avoid those whom we perceive as undesirable. We are often all too willing to take the task of throwing away of the bad upon ourselves. We attempt to create a pristine environment for ourselves within the net even before the boats reach the shore. No wonder that Jesus told so many parables about the impossibility these attempts and the futility of these efforts at preselecting only those qualified for the Kingdom. 

 

We learn this lesson from many of the parables of Jesus. We can't know with certain which are weeds and which are wheat until harvest. It is not possible to observe the action of the leaven when it is first mixed. The growth of the tiny seed goes unobserved at first and is not immediately identifiable with the large tree it may one day become. It is not until the last day that the sheep and the goats are divided. The wise and foolish maidens interact until just before the coming of the bridegroom. The point is not that we are meant to try to remain hidden. It is rather that much of what happens in the process of Kingdom growth is necessarily obscure to us. We are meant to be light and salt for the world. But none of us do this perfectly all the time. Even we ourselves can't have absolute certainty about whether we will be the good that is put into buckets or the bad that is thrown away. The reason we can't is that it is not yet the end and we can still change for better or for worse. One thing that is both certain and obvious is that none of us is perfect while this mortal life lasts. Thus we want to be and remain in the hands of the potter who will continue to help to reform and refashion us until we become all that he, the divine artists, knows we can be.

Whenever the object of clay which he was making
turned out badly in his hand, 
he tried again,
making of the clay another object of whatever sort he pleased.

In virtue of repeated exposure to these parables we have become, in a sense, scribes who have "been instructed in the Kingdom of heaven". We can now see the direction that all that came before was tending, the Old Covenant that Jesus himself fulfilled. So we bring forth the old to point ahead to Jesus. But we must also bring forth that which was unique to the message of Jesus, the new, the good news of what God did for us through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, and what he desires for us for all eternity. The new and the old are thus too halves that are only fully intelligible together. When we keep our Kingdom instruction in mind we are less likely to succumb to temptations to choose false alternatives, such as this one against which the psalmist warns:

Put not your trust in princes,
in the sons of men, in whom there is no salvation.
When his spirit departs he returns to his earth;
on that day his plans perish.

 

 Hillsong Worship - The Potter's Hand

29 July 2026 - now and then, here and there

 

Today's Reading

(Audio)

 

Lord, if you had been here,
my brother would not have died.
But even now I know that whatever you ask of God,
God will give you.

Martha seemed to mean that she knew Jesus had no limitations to expressing his power in a way the was preventative, that avoided evil in the first place. Neither did she assume that when he did not exercise this power in response to her specific circumstance that it necessarily meant his power was necessarily any less. But she she did seem to question the degree to which he cared for her and her family specifically. That uncertainty did not lead her to give up on Jesus entirely. She still recognized that God would give him whatever he asked. It was just that it had now become obvious that he wasn't always going to ask for what mattered to her. 

Jesus said to her,
“Your brother will rise.”
Martha said to him,
“I know he will rise,
in the resurrection on the last day.

Given the fact that Jesus could have saved Lazarus but did not do so Martha could only infer that it was not to be during her mortal life. To be sure on the last day, so distant from Martha as to be little more than dream, he would rise. But would it not have been the case that if Jesus cared for her, Mary, and Lazarus in their lives here and now, and not only in the future, that he would have already done what she knew he could have done to save him? If all things work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose why do some of those things seem to be obviously and entirely negative? It is not enough to say that the last day will more than make up for it, though clearly, it will. The point is that if the statement "All things" really means "All" it must include even those which seem to us difficult to square with divine providence. "All things" must even include the evils that we know that God, in the mystery of his wisdom, does sometimes permit. Yet sometimes we so surrender to that mystery as to assume that God is really indifferent to things that occur in this mortal life, to our daily joys and sorrows, caring instead only that things will be sufficiently good in the end.

Jesus told her,
“I am the resurrection and the life;
whoever believes in me, even if he dies, will live,
and anyone who lives and believes in me will never die.
Do you believe this?”

Jesus revealed to Martha what she had not dared to hope. She might have agreed that he would be the resurrection and the life on the last day, that at his voice those who slept in the tombs would awake to life, but she would not have been able to believe or imagine that he was the resurrection and the life now. Her grief had already made her abandon hope that she could experience life from Jesus in the way she desired until the last day. He apparently hadn't helped in the first place. So why would she imagine he might do so now? Indeed, from her perspective, it would have been almost unfathomable to imagine that he might he stayed away for a time just to perform this miracle. After all, wouldn't it have been better to save Lazarus in the first place and spare them the grief? If the purpose was only to restore him to a mortal life in which he must eventually die again one day would not sooner be better? Yet there was something greater that came about because of the choice of Jesus to do this. It was precisely the revelation that he was the source of life now, and not only later, and that by knowing him we could share in that life. It didn't always take the form of miracles, and when it did, they weren't always the ones for which we asked, but it remained available and possible nevertheless. It remains so now. We don't in fact have to wait for the last day to experience the gift of supernatural life from Jesus. And it is precisely this life within us that helps to anchor us as we navigate the trials and challenges of this life. Rather than giving up when God doesn't give us exactly what we want exactly when we want it let us so with Martha, "Yes, Lord. I have come to believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, the one who is coming into the world".

 

 Pat Barrett - The Way (New Horizon)

 

28 July 2028 - pro-seed with caution

 

Today's Readings

(Audio)

 

"Explain to us the parable of the weeds in the field."

This parable was not primarily about predestination. It is true that some of the plants we now see growing will prove to be from the good seed sown by the Son of Man. And yes, it is true as well that some plants will prove to be weeds fit only for burning. But the actual point Jesus made was that it is basically impossible to identify which is which before the harvest at the end of the age. Therefore this parable has more to do with dealing with this unavoidable ambiguity in the world in even in the Church herself before that time. 

 

The fact is that attempting perfection in the sense of constructing an earthly Church consisting only of those who are perfectly pure is impossible. We may mean well, but even we still sometimes exhaust the soil to a greater degree than we bear fruit. We may simply be branches in need of pruning. But it is yet possible that even we ourselves may not be among those who will shine like the sun of the Kingdom of the Father. Since no one can have absolute certainty about himself while he yet lives how much less so regarding the destiny of others? No one can be excluded as worthless or without hope until the last day reveals it. We tend to be eager to go weed hunting in the world as a way to distract us from ourselves, people with boards in our eyes on the hunt for those with specs in theirs. It is a deeply flawed approach that not only won't benefit the Church or the world but will ultimately injure us and keep us from the growth that we still need.

The weeds are the children of the Evil One,
and the enemy who sows them is the Devil.

It is true that there is evil in the world that goes above and beyond mistakes and innocent errors. There is in fact a force hostile to God at work, trying to sabotage his works. We do well to remember this rather than approach life with a naive optimism, only to be disappointed when not everything is sunshine and roses. But while remembering it, we keep in mind that the evil we face cannot be identified with any specific individuals, even those who seem openly and directly hostile to us and to the plan and purpose of God. Our warfare is not finally against them, or any who are flesh and blood, but rather against the devil who has co-opted their freedom and is using them for his purposes. Our warfare requires love for our earthly enemies in order to defeat the spiritual powers who oppose us.

"To the contrary, “if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals on his head" (see Romans 12:20).

It is impossible to ignore the constant thread of salvation history in which God called his people back from their sins to himself. No one was ever so fixed in his position that an appeal might not win him back to the side of goodness, truth, and beauty. We see such a response from Jeremiah on behalf of the people, many of whom seemed to be weeds, but with whom he yet identified himself.

We recognize, O LORD, our wickedness,
the guilt of our fathers;
that we have sinned against you.
For your name's sake spurn us not,
disgrace not the throne of your glory;
remember your covenant with us, and break it not.

Jesus, too, only makes sense in when recognize that he came to offer us a choice, one which he ensures we have sufficient freedom to make. He did not come merely to categorize the righteous and the wicked. Rather, he came to invite all men to be saved and come to knowledge of the truth, just as his Father desired. How different the mission and ministry of Jesus would have looked if it was predicated on preaching to people only in order to seal an eternal destiny they could not control. He never told anyone they were so good, so well situated, that there was not work that remained for them to do. He never told anyone that they were too broken or compromised to change. Rather, he always made sure that speculation about matters known with certainty only to God never got in the way of the work that remained to be done. It is only in this context that the plea in today's psalm makes sense:

 

Let the prisoners' sighing come before you;
with your great power free those doomed to death.
Then we, your people and the sheep of your pasture,
will give thanks to you forever;
through all generations we will declare your praise.

Dan Feiten - Seed, Scattered and Sown

27 July 2026 - branching out

Today's Readings

(Audio)

The Kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed
that a person took and sowed in a field.
It is the smallest of all the seeds,
yet when full-grown it is the largest of plants.

The Church started so small that it seemed it could never make a significant difference in the world. Jesus may have possessed divine power and authority along with heavenly wisdom but he and his disciples did not seem positioned to effect much beyond the backwater of Israel let alone transform the world. Yet the Church did become a bush so large that the birds of the sky could come to dwell in its branches, just as God intended for Israel. It was through God's covenant promise to Abraham that all nations of the earth were to be blessed, and the temple was meant to be a house of prayer for all peoples. Yet the expansion of these blessings beyond the boundaries of Israel were always hesitant, halting, and incomplete during the times before the coming of Jesus. But one might wonder. If Solomon was as close as Israel came to fulfilling its destiny to be a light to the nations, drawing people from the ends of the earth to hear his wisdom, wouldn't whatever finally did fulfill that destiny be, by necessity, large and obvious? Yet it was precisely in the mustard seed of faith Jesus entrusted to the followers, and in particular to his Apostles that this promise was eventually realized. They were successful because they took Jesus at his word. They were under-resourced, outnumbered, outmatched, but they didn't let this stop them or even slow them down once the Holy Spirit sent them forth on the day of Pentecost. Even then, supernaturally equipped, it might not have seemed like what they had was all that much when faced with all the resistance of the world, let alone enough to address all the needs its brokenness. But by being faithful to the small seed entrusted to each of them they changed the world. The period of history that their efforts ushered in would be entirely unintelligible if not for these mustard seeds to explain it. 

 

The disciples didn't let appearances stop them. It was a little like the scene in Star Wars were Yoda explained that the appearance of size was not the deepest truth, and then preceded to lift the crashed X-Wing from the swamp unto dry land by his power. Our faith, it is said, can move mountains, which are larger still than X-Wings. However it can only do this if we don't take for granted what we have been given, but rather choose to place our faith in the wisdom with which Jesus has apportioned to us the gifts and opportunities that constitute our lives. The mustard seed is inherently something that doesn't seem that valuable apart from the fact that Jesus said it is valuable, and the promise he attached to when it is faithfully sown.

He spoke to them another parable.
“The Kingdom of heaven is like yeast
that a woman took and mixed with three measures of wheat flour
until the whole batch was leavened.”

The yeast is a small fraction of the recipe yet has a disproportionate effect on the resulting loaf. Just so, even when the Church is a minority in the world it nevertheless has an effect beyond what scale would suggest is possible. Especially now, in an age where the faithful are a remnant, rather than a dominant cultural, force this is reassuring. But we should remember that the initial presence of the yeast in the dough is hidden. It is meant to be mixed in with the other ingredients. It is only over the course of time that there is any evidence of the batch rising and obtaining to a higher destiny of deliciousness. Our own role in helping to address the challenges of our times is similarly often invisible at first. But it does require that we not keep ourselves entirely isolated from the world around us. We can't simply remained sealed in yeast packets. We must be unleashed if we are too have the intended effect, even if, at first, we seem to be lost in a much larger mixture.

 

 

Newsboys - Secret Kingdom

 

26 July 2026 - wise decisions

Today's Readings
(Audio) 

The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure buried in a field
which a person finds and hides again,
and out of joy goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. 

What is the one thing for which we would give everything? Is there anything so valuable to us that it would be worth sacrificing all that we have and all that we are in order to obtain it? For the person that found the treasure in the field this wasn't a question of 'should'. He didn't sell all that he had because he knew he was supposed to want the treasure and therefore forced himself to take the steps to obtain it. Rather, once he had seen the treasure he could do nothing else. He was so captivated by it, and perceived its value so clearly, that to part with all else that he owned was not a difficult choice. This may not be our own experience of Christianity. Indeed we probably can't always possess such clear intrinsic motivation. But the parable is meant to make us consider the worth of the things that we do value, things that we are loathe to let go, for the sake of obtaining the treasure present in Christ. The parable is meant to help us to recognize the relative lack of value that even the best things possess when compared to Jesus himself.

St Paul understood the value of the treasure. He wrote, "Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ" (see Philippians 3:8). We are wise when we trade that which we cannot keep in order to obtain that which we can never be taken from us. By contrast we are fools when we choose the things that moths eat and rust destroys instead of a Kingdom that will last forever. Treasure in heaven is the only kind truly worthy of the name. But, at a certain point, we actually have to be convinced of its value. It is true that we know that even if we gain the world we can only keep it for a limited time. But even so, we will not be able to lay down our lives for Christ if we don't recognize the value of the result, that "whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it" (see Matthew 16:25). The motivation that obtains the treasure is not something we fundamentally possess in advance. Rather it is a draw that comes to us inexorably from the beauty of the treasure itself. It is grace, not nature, that enables us to make a response that transcends the merely natural, and to set aside earthly treasures for treasure in heaven.

Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant
searching for fine pearls. 
When he finds a pearl of great price,
he goes and sells all that he has and buys it. 

Our translation seems to indicate that this merchant was looking to collect a variety of fine pearls. What, then, must he have seen to act in such a well as to rule out the possibility of attaining in others? He had seen, no doubt, many fine pearls by then. What must he have seen in the pearl of great price to decide it was the only one he would ever need from that point forward? We too have seen many good things. We live in this world looking for goods like possessions, choices, and relationships. But we see too that all of these are tarnished to one degree or another with imperfections. But in Jesus we meant to find one so good that we are willing to rule out other options in order to have him, or rather, to have him take hold of us. At this point, if we're still thinking, 'Yes, but I like my other possessions', or, 'I can't rule out the possibility that there are pearls that may yet be worth acquiring', it means we need more grace in order to see more clearly the value of what is on offer in the person of Jesus himself. This is the kind of recognition which is truly transformative, the purity of heart that leads to the vision of God. This is what John meant when he wrote, "we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is" (see First John 3:2).

When it is full they haul it ashore
and sit down to put what is good into buckets. 

There are many fish currently in the net. Some will prove good and some will prove rotten. But before the end of the age the final determination of which is which has not yet been made. That means we still have time. It implies that obtaining the treasure is not really a once and for all choice on our part, not what we call colloquially 'one and done'. If we have not yet recognized the full value of the treasure in a transformative way there is still time to do so. But if we don't take seriously what we have discovered there is the possibility of losing even what we have. The treasure in the field was obviously unearned. And even though the merchant had been looking for pearls he had no right to hope to find one so vastly superior to the others. It too was ultimately a gift of grace. So too for us. The only way to gain is on the basis of the gift we have been given. The only way to ultimately lose is to refuse it. As Jesus said, "For to the one who has, more will be given, and he will have an abundance, but from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away" (see Matthew 13:12). We know where the treasure is found, and the pearl of great price is in our midst. There is no need for us or for anyone to experience "wailing and grinding of teeth". Let us turn the eyes of our hearts toward the treasure that God never ceases to offer us.

having the eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints (see Ephesians 1:18).

Sonicflood - Open The Eyes Of My Heart

25 July 2026 - forecasted reign

Today's Readings
(Audio)

 

"Command that these two sons of mine sit,
one at your right and the other at your left, in your Kingdom."

When we look back upon this ambition of the sons of Zebedee we are rightly scandalized. We know where Jesus was heading. We perceive how insensitive it was to request worldly position, power, or privilege from one who was on the way to a cross. To make us realize this Matthew placed this event immediately after Jesus made one a prediction of his passion, one of several throughout the Gospel. It almost seemed like the brothers were pursuing an emergency backup plan. Humanly speaking, if Jesus wasn't going to be around to run the Kingdom himself, perhaps they could be the ones to ensure it continued in his absence. But was this not insensitive to the imminent destiny of one who was their friend and teacher? How could they only think about what would be left for them if Jesus was no longer present?

We ourselves are not so different from these two. However much we disapprove of what they did, it is easy to do so from such a great distance with the context supplied by the Gospel. Yet it is harder to recognize the times in our own lives when we try to co-opt Christianity for our own purposes, and the times when we try to salvage what we can when it does not meet the expectations we had when we began.

"You do not know what you are asking.
Can you drink the chalice that I am going to drink?"

When we pray we tend to ask wrongly, to spend it on our passions (see James 4:3). We often forget that Christianity is fundamentally about coming to share the self-sacrificial love of Jesus himself so that we can live forever in the mutual self-gift of the Trinity. Instead, we use Christianity as a way to advance our own goals and achieve our own purposes, which are sometimes quite noble and others less so. Sometimes we use it as a strategy for self-validation, as a way of proving our value to ourselves. We want to feel that we are in the right place and doing the right thing. Fine and good. But we must not twist Christianity to give tacit approval to what we have already decided. We must let it shape our values. We are meant to share in the rightness of Jesus, in his own righteousness. But this means we can no longer decide or define for ourselves what is meant by righteousness.

They said to him, "We can."
He replied,
"My chalice you will indeed drink,

It was helpful that they were motivated. From our perspective it is reassuring to see that Jesus can use even imperfect motivation to keep us on the path pursuing his Kingdom. If he could not, we would be in bad shape, because we rarely if ever experience motivation that is entirely free from self-interest and even self-deception. We might not always recognize it in ourselves. But the degree to which it bothers us when we see it in others is illustrative.

When the ten heard this,
they became indignant at the two brothers.

They all seemed to be asking how dare James and John express such naked ambition. And yet their own response demonstrated that they too were caught up in ambition, competition, and selfish desire. They might have expressed sympathy, recognizing the wounded place from where this request for James and John had come. They could have played a supporting role as Jesus helped them to see things more clearly and correctly. But instead they allowed it to divide them, just as the enemy intended. Yet Jesus would not let the enemy have his way by causing any permanent division among his band. To counteract it he helped them to see what was meant by truly reigning in his Kingdom.

Rather, whoever wishes to be great among you shall be your servant;
whoever wishes to be first among you shall be your slave.
Just so, the Son of Man did not come to be served
but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.

He tied it all back to what he came to do, the very thing that they wanted to ignore and avoid. In doing so he helped to prepare them for the truly glorious destiny which he did in fact have planned for them.

Truly, I say to you, in the new world, when the Son of Man will sit on his glorious throne, you who have followed me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel (see Matthew 19:28).

There was no way to true glory that didn't lead through the cross. Jesus came, not to go to the cross so we could reign on earth, but to lead us to the cross ourselves so that we might reign with him in heaven.

 

 Newsboys - He Reigns