A Lectio Divina Approach to the Sunday Liturgy
BREAKING THE BREAD OF THE WORD (Series 8, n. 35)
17th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C – July 25, 2010 *
“Responding in Prayer”
BIBLE READINGS
Gn 18:20-32 // Col 2:12-14 // Lk 11:1-13
(N.B. Series 8 of BREAKING THE BREAD OF THE WORD: A LECTIO DIVINA APPROACH TO THE SUNDAY LITURGY includes a prayerful study of the Sunday liturgy of Year C from the perspective of the Second Reading. For reflections on the Sunday liturgy of Year C based on the Gospel reading, please scroll up to the “ARCHIVES” above and open Series 2. For reflections based on the Old Testament reading, open Series 5.)
I. BIBLICO-LITURGICAL REFLECTIONS
Last Sunday in our spiritual journey as a worshipping community, we delved into one of the most beautiful characteristics of God: his hospitality. The loving God who has been incredibly hospitable to us deserves our own “hospitality”. One expression of our response to God’s hospitality is prayer. Today’s lectionary texts help us to focus on the meaning of prayer as a manifestation of trust in the loving, welcoming God. Prayer is efficacious because it is based on a personal relationship with our “Abba” – our heavenly Father - who desires our infinite good.
The Old Testament reading (Gn 18:20-32) is an intuitive, picturesque and “folksy” presentation of God as patient, kind and merciful – as one who could be engaged in a personal dialogue. Abraham could talk and bargain with God because of his solid relationship with him as a favored friend. The charming story of Abraham interceding for the people of Sodom and Gomorrah reveals a just God who is patient with human weakness, attentive to our needs, and kindly disposed to a friend’s prayer. Abraham’s dialogue with God teaches us that our own prayer must also be marked with candor and vehement trust.
This Sunday’s Gospel reading (Lk 11:1-13) offers tremendous insights into the content and quality of Christian prayer. Aelred Rosser explains: “The model Jesus provides his disciples, when they ask him to teach them to pray has become the Christian prayer par excellence. The Lord’s Prayer is the disciple’s prayer, and in providing it, Jesus shows us not only what to say but how to say it. We are to pray with persistence and boldness, confident that we are addressing an “Abba”, a very intimate word for “father”, who is eager to provide his children with all good things … All the petitions have their counterparts in the Hebrew scriptures. But the orientation of the Lord’s Prayer toward the future kingdom makes it special. Each petition looks ahead to that final day when the reign of God will be fully realized. The bread we pray for is the bread of the heavenly banquet. The forgiveness we pray for is what we need to belong to the eternal kingdom. The forgiveness we give is an ongoing response to the forgiveness we receive – as well as the condition that brings God’s forgiveness. The deliverance we pray for is what we will need when the great trial that precedes the end time is upon us. The Lord’s Prayer draws us toward triumph! (…) What follows makes it clear that God is different from the reluctant sleepy neighbor. We ask confidently because we know God is eager to give. We knock confidently because we know God is eager to open to us. And because we all know that a doting father will give his children even better things that they ask for, we can only imagine how eager the all-holy God is to favor our requests.”
The meaning of Christian prayer takes on a deeper hue against the backdrop of the Second Reading (Col 2:12-14). We approach the Father with radical confidence because we have been redeemed by his own Son. God brought us to life in Christ and with Christ. Moreover, his own beloved Son Jesus himself taught us how to pray properly. Our prayer is directed to our benevolent God who acts on our behalf. The heavenly Father loves us so much that he enabled us to die to our sins and rise to new life by immersing us into Christ’s sacrificial “blood bath” on the cross. Jesus removed the bond of our indebtedness when he died for our salvation. We share in his paschal mystery of death and rising through baptism. Christian prayer is thus an exquisite response to the loving God whose gracious initiative brought us to new life.
Harold Buetow exhorts us: “The sign of that redemption is baptism. The life of the baptized is called new because it is vital, liberated, emancipated. Jesus has removed our bill of indebtedness to God because of the merits of the cross. The true Christians are those who live out their baptism by their ongoing relationship with Jesus … Beginning with this Mass, let us always recite the Lord’s Prayer slowly, knowingly, and lovingly. God, in turn, will be ever more responsive than we have experienced good persons to be: our parents who give us daily care and love - towards to whom we can go at midnight if necessary - and loving people who had been good to us. God is like all of these – only more so, as Jesus shows us.”
Indeed, prayer is our response to a loving God who immersed us into his Son’s “blood bath” of grace and glory. But prayer is also our spontaneous cry to our heavenly Father in our deep need. It is a plea for help when confronted with crisis and difficulties. The present ecological crisis caused by the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico impels us to turn to God in prayer. As Christian disciples who trust wholeheartedly in divine benevolence, we pray intensely and proactively to survive and overcome this ecological disaster. May God reveal anew his saving power. May he save his beloved creation mired in today’s “oil bath of destruction”. Efforts have been made to plug the oil leak, but the havoc is massive and beyond human control. Care for the earth is a duty of our Catholic faith and Christian prayer that leads to positive, concerted action is what we need in this hapless situation.
The following excerpt from Gary Smith’s gripping article will illustrate the enormity of the ecological situation in the Gulf and help us in our prayer of intercession (cf. “Gulf Spill: 7 Days in the Life of a Catastrophe” in SPORTS ILLUSTRATED, July 5, 2010, p. 68-74).
Day 1: (…) I awoke and left New Orleans behind, driving south into the bayou. Everywhere I turned, it looked like a war … On came the crude, approaching in 40-square-mile slicks a half-foot thick in some places, so dense that baby crabs and turtles were trapped atop, unable to break through. Seabirds plunged from the sky to feed on them, only to get mired in the sludge too … “This is the death of the Gulf of Mexico”, said Capt. Brian Clark of the marine division of the St. Bernard Parish sheriff’s office. “How can we clean up something that’s not fixed? It’s like mopping a bathroom floor while the toilet’s still spewing. I’m thinking, there’s a monster out there … a beast we’ve never fooled with.” (…)
Day 2: (…) In New Orleans that evening, an hour’s drive north of the impacted zone, a short 57-year-old woman with a big bowl of curly white hair … Ro Meyer, an artist and real-estate agent, was leading a funeral procession – for the Gulf and the birds and the fish – around the fringe of the French Quarter. She lives in a city of fatalists, she explained, people who revel in their capacity to eat and drink in the face of disaster, who came down from the rooftops when the water receded and partied on, and they haven’t yet grasped that this disaster is a different and darker one. Just the day before, she’d been listening to a CD of marsh sounds in her car when the quacking of ducks froze her. It’s a sound she grew up hearing at Thanksgiving, when the ducks paused on their long migration to the Caribbean and Central America, and suddenly it occurred to her that on the heels of the massacre of fish in the heart of their spawning season, the five million migrating birds arriving in the delta to rest this autumn and winter would splash down in a toxic dump. Right there, at the steering wheel, she began crying. (…)
Day 3: (…) It was time to see and touch the beast we’ve never fooled with. I boarded a Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries boat and headed to the front lines, out where men were trying to keep oil from coating and killing the marsh grass and cane whose root systems were the wetlands’ very glue, holding silt and sand together so it all wouldn’t wash away. And why did that matter terribly? Because every 2.7 square miles of marsh reduces the storm surge of every hurricane by one foot, the wildlife and fisheries pilot said. (…) The pilot killed the engines. Listen. No sound. No insects. No birds. And the fish? (…) The pilot took the boat closer to a cluster of marsh islands at the mouth of the Mississippi and pointed. Miles of white absorbent booms ringed each island, but in just over a week they’d been turned brown and bloated by oil, breached and broken by currents, and now they absorbed nothing. The marsh grass and the mangroves were greasy with oil, dying or already dead, awaiting time and tide to carry them and their underlying soil away. Unless the battle turns, said the biologist at the wildlife station at the delta’s tip, the fish – whenever they finally come back – will have nothing to come back on. (…)
Day 4: On the fourth day I saw what God saw. Two Black Hawks hoisted me, a few media crews, the governor of Louisiana and BP’s new big man, Bob Dudley, the one replacing Tony Hayward as crisis commander, into the sky to assess the battlefield. Suddenly we were looking down on the Grand Isle’s oil-puddle seven miles of now forbidden beach. Down on the isle’s main drag in mid-tourist season, so empty you could bowl on it. Down on the whitecaps, white no more, and on the stunning peacock plumage that about three million barrels of oil make on water: dull gray sheen giving way to iridescent blues and yellows and greens giving way to thick orange scum giving way to clotted pools, reddish brown like old blood. (…)
Day 5: (…) More than the stain on the Gulf, it was what was being done to make the stain go away that brought dread to Robert Barham’s stomach. It was Corexit 9500, a dispersant banned in Britain, with which BP was bombarding the Gulf to break down the oil, turning it into droplets under the surface that biologists feared small fish were mistaking for eggs or microorganisms and devouring. New chemical compounds were being created out there in the hot stew of oil, Corexit and tropical water, compounds whose toxicity to plankton and algae and larvae no one fully knew. “We have no idea what we’re doing to life out there”, Barham told me. “They’re conducting the largest lab experiment in history – on us.” (…)
Day 6: I walked into a coffee shop at a Chevron station in Port Sulphur and looked around. In the corner sat a black man whom people addressed as Mr. Eugene. (…) Mr. Eugene was one of the five happiest people I’d ever met, and he’d lived for 94 years, he said, because he’d found a recipe. He worked all day catching minnows. He sang and laughed to himself on the water. He called to the pelicans and fed them porgy. He held no anger, not even toward the oil company that had made the big mistake. “BP’s nice people”, he said. “Accidents happen to anybody.” He made just enough money, selling minnows for 15 cents each, to go to Boomtown Casino on weekends and do the alligator dance to Jambalaya. All of that, linked together, was what kept an old man alive, he said, and to prove it he hooked his thumbs in the waist of his jeans, grinned and did a Jambalaya jig right there beside the marsh. But chains went both ways. When the oil shut down the fishing, the fishermen stopped buying the minnows, the old man stopped working, the old man stayed at home … and felt his memory going. “I can’t lose me memory”, he said. So some days, even though his chances of selling many minnows were slim, he went out anyway on Grand Bayou, which hadn’t been shut down by the authorities yet, and kept the ones he caught in a big basket underwater. A few days earlier he’d seen a pelican coated with oil sitting on a marsh isle, and he’d crept up to it. “It’s O.K., Honeydew”, he cooed, offering a porgy. “Calm down, Honeydew … I won’t hurt you.” He reached with a rag and tried to rub off some of the oil, then returned a few hours later to check on the pelican. Honeydew was dead. Mr. Eugene dug a hole in the mud with his bare hands, tucked the pelican’s head under its wings and buried it. (…)
Day 7: (…) Affluence is a funny thing. Once so many millions of people have so many millions of dollars at stake, even life-and-death issues are now resolved on the basis of what protects my money, right now – not the general good or the planet’s health. Money and fear will choke even the strongest to death … unless they take that step back, that breath, and see what money and fear are doing to them. I called Mr. Eugene a few days after I got home. He couldn’t help himself, the old man said, he didn’t want to lose his memory. He’d gone and caught 2,000 minnows, placed them in his bug underwater basket where they’d always lasted a good four or five days, and he was stunned, the very next day, to find every one of them dead. Oil had been sighted on Grand Bayou. It was just too much for him to wonder if that’s what had killed them all. All he could do was fall to his knees and cry.
II. POINTS FOR THE EXAMINATION OF THE HEART
Do we believe in the power of intercession? Are we called to the ministry of intercession? How do we carry it out?
Do we truly “pray” the prayer Jesus taught his disciples? Do we pray with confidence in our loving “Abba” who knows all our needs?
Is our prayer a loving response to God the Father who has brought us to life in Jesus Christ and forgiven all our transgressions? Is our prayer of intercession animated by the spirit of love with which the heavenly Father loves us and because we care for each other and for God’s beloved creation?
III. PRAYING WITH THE WORD
Leader: Abba! Father!
Hallowed be your name.
Your kingdom come.
Give us each day our daily bread.
And forgive us our sins
for we ourselves forgive everyone in debt to us.
Do not subject us to the final test.
O loving God,
we intercede like Abraham,
our ancestor in faith.
Reverse the ill effects
of the “oil bath of destruction” in the Gulf of Mexico.
The havoc is great and beyond our control.
Let us see you saving power.
Let us feel your healing hand.
Let us see your guiding light in this grim situation.
We humble ourselves.
We are sorry for all the wrong we have done.
Forgive us for causing this catastrophe.
Be our savior once again.
Show us your love.
And make us instruments of your love and healing,
of your justice and peace.
We wholeheartedly submit
to your holy, eternal and unfathomable designs.
We give you praise and thanks.
We trust in your wisdom and compassion.
We adore you for you are our Abba and gracious God,
now and forever.
Assembly: Amen.
IV. INTERIORIZATION OF THE WORD
The following is the bread of the living Word that will nourish us throughout the week. Please memorize it.
“God has brought you to life along with Christ, having forgiven us all our transgressions.” (Col 2:12)
V. TOWARDS LIFE TRANSFORMATION
ACTION PLAN: Pray that we may survive and overcome the present ecological disaster in the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere. By your acts of charity and justice on behalf of the poor and marginalized and by a simple lifestyle that favors the healing of Mother Earth, let your prayer for the coming of God’s kingdom impact today’s distressed society.
ACTION PLAN: That we may grasp more deeply the meaning of Christian prayer, make an effort to spend an hour in Eucharistic Adoration. Visit the PDDM WEB site (www.pddm.us) for the EUCHARISTIC ADORATION THROUGH THE LITURGICAL YEAR: A Weekly Pastoral Tool (Year C, vol. 6, # 35).
Prepared by Sr. Mary Margaret Tapang PDDM
PIAE DISCIPULAE DIVINI MAGISTRI
SISTER DISCIPLES OF THE DIVINE MASTER
60 Sunset Ave., Staten Island, NY 10314
Tel. (718) 494-8597 // (718) 761-2323
Website: WWW.PDDM.US