Where is God?: Homily for Tuesday, February 20, 2024

Readings for Today. Listen to our other podcasts.

So shall my word be that goes forth from my mouth; It shall not return to me void, but shall do my will, achieving the end for which I sent it.

Where is God?

This first reading from Isaiah is, I think, so, so beautiful, and says so much about what it means to be a person of prayer. “Just as from the heavens the rain and snow come down and do not return there till they have watered the earth, making it fertile and fruitful, giving seed to the one who sows and bread to the one who eats, so shall my word be.”

I don’t know what our relationship is with the Word of God, how often really outside of the context of Mass we hear the Word of God, but the Second Vatican Council document, Dei Verbum, on divine revelation, encourages us to pray with the scriptures, to actually pray with the Word of God, so that as we prepare perhaps to read it, maybe even just reading the readings we hear at some other point during the day, we ask God before we do so to speak deeply into our hearts, to speak to us in some way, to give us the message that he intends for us on this particular day.

It further seems to me that this reading from Isaiah helps us to realize something else quite significant about our lives. We, at least I, I shouldn’t say we, I don’t know, maybe you’re better at it than I am, but I know that I have a tendency to compartmentalize my life.

There’s the religious me that comes to church, that prepares for homilies, that does the things that are part of what I need to do as the priest here at St. Albert the Great, but then there’s the other parts of my life, the parts of my life that either seem so ordinary that I don’t feel I should look for God, because they’re just ordinary, or those parts of my life that I think are, well, just relaxing, but what if I saw every aspect of my life as an invitation to grow in my relationship with Jesus?

It doesn’t mean that we aren’t really human. I don’t mean it that way, but it does mean perhaps what I suggest when couples come in and say we would like to get married, and I always ask them a question that kind of throws them for a loop. They’re not expecting it.

They don’t know what to make of it, and I say, the question I ask is this, when did you get a sense that the person you wish to marry would lead you both to eternal salvation? See, because marriage is a vocation, right? It’s a call, so on some level God should have some place in this relationship, and once we are a couple is married, how is it that your partner, for those of you who are married, leads you to a deeper holiness, leads you to greater relationship with Jesus?

How is it that the way we make even what seem to be small decisions are ways that we really can make them in the context of what it is that God wishes from us on this day at this time? Isaiah lived in a time, quite frankly, where the book is divided into two major sections, the book of woe, w-o-e, not w-h-o-a, and the book of consolation. It was, here are all the horrible things that are going to befall you because you’re not faithful to God, and here are all the ways that God will console you if you follow his will. God is sending forth in your life today and in mine his tremendous, powerful, and loving word. Let’s ask the Lord for the grace so that that word does not return to God empty.

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