Monday of the Twelfth Week in Ordinary Time
June 26, 2023

Today’s Readings:

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/062623.cfm

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Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, we begin a pilgrimage with the ancient believers who first received God’s call into a community of faith.

Today’s liturgy initiates a seven-week reading of the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible), starting with three weeks of Genesis.

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Walter Brueggemann, renowned Hebrew Scriptures scholar, writes that Genesis tells the story of two Divine calls:

• the call of Creation as God’s handiwork (Genesis 1-11)
• the call of the faith community as God’s witness (Genesis 12-50)

Gen. 1—11 concerns the affirmation that God calls the world into being to be God’s faithful world.
Gen. 12—50 concerns the affirmation that God calls a special people to be faithfully God’s people.
Genesis is a reflection upon and witness to these two calls. It is concerned with the gifts given in these calls, the demands announced in them, and the various responses evoked by them.

Walter Brueggemann – Genesis: Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching

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Our three weeks of readings, from Genesis 12 to 50, focus on that second call of the faith community and can offer us graced insights into our life in the Church and in the world.

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As Genesis 11 closes, the condition of the world is rather dire. The descendants of Adam and Noah had been wandering around the Middle East, finally trying to settle down in ancient Babylonia. There they decide to build a city and a tower which they think will make them self-sufficient enough to avoid a second flood. God isn’t pleased. God wants them to be faithful and depend on God not themselves.

So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth,
and they stopped building the city.
That is why it was called Babel,
because there the LORD confused the speech of all the world.

Genesis 11:8-9

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Then, in Genesis 12 (our reading today), God reaches into the scattered chaos with an astounding promise for two elderly, barren, and probably hopeless people. It is a call to renewed and deeper relationship, a call that God has been offering again and again since the beginning of time:

The LORD said to Abram:
“Go forth from the land of your kinsfolk
and from your father’s house to a land that I will show you.

“I will make of you a great nation,
and I will bless you;
I will make your name great,
so that you will be a blessing.
I will bless those who bless you
and curse those who curse you.
All the communities of the earth
shall find blessing in you.”

Genesis 12:1-3

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In prayer, we can take any scripture passage and separate its wordy threads to find ourselves. Each one of us, at least at some time in our lives, has been Abraham or Sarah – maybe a little bit alone, confused, feeling disconnected from God and neighbor. Or maybe feeling the weight of aging, tangled in familial labyrinths, or wounded from accumulated miscalculations in our life’s wanderings.

In whatever scattered chaos we may find ourselves, today’s first reading tells us to listen. God’s irrevocable promises are encircling and guiding us to renewed stability. Hearing God’s voice, “Abram went as the LORD directed him”. As we begin these weeks with Genesis, we are invited to do the same.

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Poetry: from Selected Poetry of Jessica Powers

    I love Abraham, that old weather-beaten
unwavering nomad; when God called to him,
no tender hand wedged time into his stay.
His faith erupted him into a way
far-off and strange.  How many miles are there
from Ur to Haran?  Where does Canaan lie,
or slow mysterious Egypt sit and wait?
How could he think his ancient thigh would bear
nations, or how consent that Isaac die,
with never an outcry or an anguished prayer?
I think, alas, how I manipulate
dates and decisions, pull apart the dark,
dally with doubts here and with counsels there,
take out old maps and stare.
Was there a call at all, my fears remark.
I cry out: Abraham, old nomad you,
are you my father?  Come to me in pity.
Mine is a far and lonely journey too.

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Music: The Yearning – Nicholas Gunn