God: Our Shield and Our Help

As we reflect upon today's responsorial psalm, Psalm 33, we might create a prayer out of that psalm as follows:

Upright is Your word, O Lord, 
and all your works are trustworthy!
You love justice and right;
Your kindness, O Lord, fills the earth.
Your eyes, O Lord, are upon those who reverence you--
(may each of us honor, adore, praise, glorify, and thank You all of our days).
Your eyes, O Lord, are upon those who hope for Your kindness--we not only hope for your kindness, we depend upon it, Lord--to deliver us from death--the death of sin or selfish ambitions that bring harm to ourselves and others.
We need You, O Lord, to preserve us in spite of famine--the famine that is draining us of selfless giving of ourselves to help others in need, of welcoming strangers, of using diplomacy, wisdom and and patience in the pursuit of the common good,of disciplining ourselves from greedy ambitions and the need to prove military strength and "be the greatest" of all nations militarily. May we, O Lord, heed your words to Peter in Gethsemane when he used the sword and you said to him: "Put your sword back into its sheath, for all who take the sword will perish by the sword" (Mt. 2:52). The psalm continues:
Our souls, O Lord, wait for You.
You are our help and our shield.
Your kindness, O Lord, be upon us, 
upon all who put their hope in you, not in any president or politician, not in any world leader, not in money or wealth, not in pleasures, not in power or control. No, Lord, in You alone!  May we put You, Lord, our God, back into the center of our lives, our politics, our families, our relationships, our churches. Only then, will we bear fruit that will last: LOVE, the love you showed us on the cross.

To God Give the Glory!

In today’s first reading we learn of Paul and Barnabas’ encounter with both persons who wanted to stone them to death and those, in another city, who were preparing to worship them as gods, following their intercession for a man crippled from birth. Because the cripple had “the faith to be healed,” Paul and Barnabas called upon the Lord Jesus to heal him. He was healed.  When Paul and Barnabas realized that the people were about to slaughter animals to offer sacrifice to Paul and Barnabas, they stopped them from such idolatry.  How easy for us to allow people to idolize us and for us to allow ourselves to be idolized or for us to divinize others.  It is the nature of the ego to want to be like God (compare Gen.32-4) when Satan said to Eve: Oh, come on!  God knows that you will be like Him if you eat of the fruit of that tree. You won’t die.).  On the other hand, it is also easy for us to demonize others and, unconsciously, use that to make ourselves look like a god, better than others and certainly holier than the person/s we are demonizing.

In the responsorial psalm of today’s liturgy, Ps. 115, we pray: “Not to us, O Lord, not to us but to your name give glory because of your mercy, because of your truth.”  Do I really mean that? Do I realize that whatever good another or that I do, is done because of God working through us?  Do I realize that when I am demonizing another, what I despise in that other person exists within me, that I am capable, in my worse moments, when I depart from God’s ways, of doing the very same thing I am upset about in the other person/s?

Before God, we are who we are!  In God, we all are redeemed, washed clean of our sins, in need of God’s mercy and made whole by God alone, as was the man crippled from birth!