Monday ......

Today is Monday, January 20, 2014.

Good Morning.

A thought for the day:
“We think we have God's plan for our lives all figured out, but it's God who does the choosing.”

The Church’s 1st reading for today: 1 Samuel chapter 15 verses 16-23


Samuel said to Saul:
“Stop! Let me tell you what the LORD said to me last night.”
Saul replied, “Speak!”
Samuel then said: “Though little in your own esteem,
are you not leader of the tribes of Israel?
The LORD anointed you king of Israel and sent you on a mission, saying,
‘Go and put the sinful Amalekites under a ban of destruction.
Fight against them until you have exterminated them.’
Why then have you disobeyed the LORD?
You have pounced on the spoil, thus displeasing the LORD.”
Saul answered Samuel: “I did indeed obey the LORD
and fulfill the mission on which the LORD sent me.
I have brought back Agag, and I have destroyed Amalek under the ban.
But from the spoil the men took sheep and oxen,
the best of what had been banned,
to sacrifice to the LORD their God in Gilgal.”
But Samuel said:
“Does the LORD so delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices
as in obedience to the command of the LORD?
Obedience is better than sacrifice,
and submission than the fat of rams.
For a sin like divination is rebellion,
and presumption is the crime of idolatry.
Because you have rejected the command of the LORD,
he, too, has rejected you as ruler.”

* * *

Does anyone not love hearing the story of Cinderella. There was always something magical about it. It was more than Walter Mitty or Lee Iacocca - small-town boy made good. It was more than Prince Charles and Princess Diana in all their regal splendor long before Diana's untimely death.
It was like the triumph of the poor and the oppressed over the powerful and the arrogant - the quintessential example of the first shall be last and the last shall be first. It was the divine reversal in action as if God had actually written the story. It was, in Reinhold Niebuhr's terminology, the “transvaluation” of values. Of course, when I was six years of age I didn't think all that. I just thought Cinderella was a neat story, and I loved everything about it: The poor girl down on her luck, her mean stepsisters and their mean mother, the nice fairy godmother, the pumpkin carriage, the horses, the ball, the fantasy evening that whirled by like a waltz - round and round and round she went - an evening we all dream of that's over before we know it. Then there was the glass slipper that fit only her foot. I loved it when the older sisters got theirs for being so greedy. A tragic story with a happy ending. I loved everything about it.
In this morning’s Scripture reading the reign of King Saul comes to an abrupt end. It’s not a happy ending but rather a tragic one. King Saul has been disobedient to his God and is now relieved of his earthly authority and power.
Our God does not delight in the disobedient but rather in the obedient.
God bless,
Father Pat



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