Misalignment is Nothing New
Especially these days with the internet being truly global, there are scores of people who offer us all sorts of advice on just about everything. There are tons of sites telling us how to have the best physical and mental health ever. You can find directions about how to create any item from any cuisine imagined. Websites abound telling us how to repair nearly everything ever made, or with what we should replace the item. Investment gurus recommend the best way to make a lot of money and how to protect the money we make. The internet is a repository for most of what we know, which is very cool and provides a tremendous guide for all sorts of interests.
That should be both exciting and comforting. Yet, most of us seem very dissatisfied. What’s wrong? I think the problem is misalignment. Or, rather, the problem remains misalignment. Jeremiah was a rascal. He was certainly not shy about telling people what they were doing wrong. He must have been very confident that God was supporting him because Jerry’s message was never well received. In fact, we know that he was whipped and put in stocks, attacked by at least one mob, threatened by a king and ridiculed by just about everybody. He was arrested, beaten, accused of treason and thrown in jail and was thrown into a deep, empty well for good measure. On top of that, he was not allowed to marry (which was probably very good for any woman who unknowingly might have wanted him – his career choice didn’t seem promising) and his family abandoned him. As stinging as Jeremiah’s corrections were, the people ignored his counsel and persisted in going in the wrong direction. The wrong direction being the way they wanted to go, the way others had told them to go, not the way God wanted for them to go. And they suffered long and deeply because of that distrust in God, in their dismissal of God.
Prior to what we read in the Gospel today, Jesus had spent the entire night on a mountain, by himself, praying. First thing in the morning, Jesus selects His twelve new apostles and takes them down to a level place where an immense crowd has gathered. The crowd had travelled as much as 120 miles, as the crow flies, on foot, to find Him. And He begins to teach. The topic of the lesson is:
How to Attain What You Truly Want
By Aligning Yourself with God
Jeremiah concisely conveyed what God wants us to understand when he told his countrymen, “Blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord, whose hope is in the Lord”, and not somewhere else.
The Psalmist poetically said, “Blessed are those who follow not the counsel of the wicked, nor walks in the way of sinners, nor sits in the company of the insolent but delights in the law of the Lord.” Then the Psalmist reminds us that, “the way of the (misaligned) vanishes”. We have been given the most perfect way to stay in alignment with God. The way is found in the Holy Mass. Stay in proper alignment. Determine to come to Mass.