January 19th, 2014
Reflection on Lectoring
“Take
into your heart all the words that I speak to you, hear them well.”
- Ezekiel 4:10
Listen.
What do you hear?
Prayer is a two-way conversation with God. When you pray or talk to God, who does most
of the talking?
Who has the most important things to say?
Sometimes people think that God is distant . . . or what he is saying is obscure. . . or that
he is saying nothing at all.
That is not God.
He is always there. He is always
trying to talk to us. He desperately wants
us to hear. Our only job is to be quiet
and listen. To trust.
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First Reading - Isaiah 49:3, 5-6
The Lord Said to Me . . . .
“The
Lord said to me: You are my servant.”
In this week’s reflection on lectoring we talked about
the need to listen when we talk with God.
Apparently Isaiah was listening.
We also talked about the need to trust that God wants us
to hear and understand what he is saying.
Apparently Isaiah had a lot of trust.
How else could he believe that God’s servant would be “a light to the nations.”
In this conversation between God and Isaiah, Isaiah
recognized that God had formed him “as
his servant from the womb.” Jeremiah
also heard God telling him the same thing: “Before
I formed you in the womb I knew you” (Jeremiah 1:5). God gave both men a mission and a purpose.
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Second Reading - 1 Corinthians 1:1-3
Beginning to End
There are all kinds of conversations between God and his
creatures referred to in today’s second reading. The reading is all about calling.
Paul says he was “called
to be an apostle.” He tells the
church in Corinth that they are “called
to be holy.” He also tells them that
they are members of a larger church made up of people “who call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
First Corinthians is also a letter about
relationships. Paul brought the story of
Jesus to the Corinthians. He founded a
church that would celebrate that story.
He watched as disputes arose among different factions of that
church. He felt a sense of
responsibility requiring that he exhort them to stay focused. And throughout this letter, he lets his
hearers know how he feels.
The pagan environment of Corinth provided lots of
invitations for going astray, for losing focus.
During the next several weeks, First Corinthians will tell us a great
deal about the call to be holy and the need for unity in a relationship of
mutually supportive believers.
© George Fournier 2014
