Potential Homily Stuff for yooLord 2023.09.03

Thoughts for Homilies and private Bible Study

Readings for September the 3rd, 2023

Jeremiah 20:7-9

The Lord knows everything, most unlike us in that respect. 

Sometimes we fall so deeply in love with what Christ called "what our Master is about" that we sell all we have to buy a field within which is buried a Pearl beyond value (how that knowledge came to us is perhaps best glossed-over).

We "drank the Kool-Aid" before we realized how much more it might cost us, and God in Infinite Wisdom knew we would pay even more, even if it makes us look like chumps. Perhaps "violence" is a misinterpretation, but outrage certainly is not. We might be tempted to turn our backs on such a Loving Father, yet we still know "The Way" is mostly all that we truly seek, and can't bear *but* to continue upon our paths, if only for the happiness of our Father and our siblings who are also of God but might not know so much as we do. The desire for the Kingdom of God upon Earth burns within us so  compellingly that even our right to free will is obscured by our remembered intent matching God's own.

The Second Reading is from Rom 12:1-2

It looks to me here that Paul is merely reiterating Jeremiah and Christ in Paul's own poetic speak. 

The Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ according to Matthew 16:21-27

If God Himself had to lay down his life upon a crucifixion cross for His death to make the Earth more like He'd intended for it to be, maybe some of us will as yet be required to do the same.

But wouldn't that blow out of the water the belief that Christ died for us once and for all so that we would not have to pay as well? I think what Christ was getting at here is the dying to self, laying down some of our own plans and dreams in deference to God's plans and dreams for us His children, we lambs, regardless of our apparent talents and desires.

Chumps, literally, rule.