Tuesday of the Second Week in Ordinary Time
January 16, 2024
Today’s Readings:
https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/011624.cfm
Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, our first reading introduces us to David, whose thrilling and passionate story unfolds and echoes throughout the rest of biblical history.
In today’s passage, David is called in from the fields to receive, quite unexpectedly, Samuel’s anointing:
“The LORD has not chosen any one of these.”
1 Samuel 16: 10-12
Then Samuel asked Jesse,
“Are these all the sons you have?”
Jesse replied,
“There is still the youngest, who is tending the sheep.”
Samuel said to Jesse,
“Send for him;
we will not begin the sacrificial banquet until he arrives here.”
Jesse sent and had the young man brought to them.
He was ruddy, a youth handsome to behold
and making a splendid appearance.
The LORD said,
“There–anoint him, for this is he!”
Now, the passage doesn’t indicate which field David was in. But maybe he was out in proverbial “left field”, the place from which many human beings are called to do important things, to respond in courageous ways.
Most of us, like David, are just living our ordinary daily lives –relatively oblivious to grace – when the life-changing moments come. Those moments may not be as momentous as David’s, but they are big deals for us.
- We get a college acceptance (or rejection) letter.
- We get a job offer (or we get laid off).
- We get elected to a position (or we don’t)
Someone asks us:
- Want to go steady?
- Will you marry me?
- Have you ever considered religious life?
Young people, like young David, seem to meet a lot of these obvious directional points in their unfolding lives. But, in reality, we continue to meet them as we move to full maturity. Until the day we die, God is always calling to become deeper, more honest, more loving, more gracefully beautiful, more fully in God’s image.
Where have the pivotal calls and turning points come in your life? What are the junctures at which everything would have been different had you made another choice? What made young, innocent David ready when his first, and ensuing, calls came?
Here’s why:
David had an exquisite love and constant relationship with God.
And God loved him back, just like God loves us.
Every critical point in our life’s journey is charged with the power of God’s love. That power comes disguised in routine circumstances, like a parent calling his shepherd son home for dinner. But if our hearts are tuned to God, we hear the call deep within those ordinary appearances and we receive the moment’s anointing.
May it be so, until we meet the Beloved Face to face.
Poetry: Vocation – William Stafford
This dream the world is having about itself
includes a trace on the plains of the Oregon trail,
a groove in the grass my father showed us all
one day while meadowlarks were trying to tell
something better about to happen.
I dreamed the trace to the mountains, over the hills,
and there a girl who belonged wherever she was;
but then my mother called us back to the car:
she was afraid; she always blamed the place,
the time, anything my father planned.
Now both of my parents, the long line through the plain,
the meadowlarks, the sky, the world's whole dream remain,
and I hear him say while I stand between the two,
helpless, both of them part of me:
"Your job is to find what the world is trying to be."
Music: Anoint Me, Lord – written by Vickie Yohe, sung by Jonathan Matthews
Lavish Mercy 