Things have gotten a little too complicated trying to do a scripture blog on Quaker Quaker AND  a separate one on my Catholic-Quaker blog AND on the one I do for our Westbury Monthly Meeting blog, which I call the Narrative of Scripture. I'm on blog overload. Plus there is the Thursday Bible Study my husband and I have going on here at home. We will probably start doing some extra-biblical readings from the early church "fathers" or other more contemporary commentaries. Too many going in too many different directions. So I thought I would simply copy here what I do on a daily basis - and that is follow the plans I posted here yesterday. Currently I am reading through Year Two of the OT plan and the NT plan, which repeats every year.  The comments I post here will likely make reference to the fact that I am a practicing Catholic as well as a faithful attender of Quaker Meeting, so that may not be something others can relate to, but I would love to know how others read and understand these passages.

Today the NT reading was Matthew 15:1-20: Jesus is trying to teach people - especially the REALLY religious people of his time, the Pharisees, that TRUE religion is what you DO from your heart, NOT what you do to obey religious laws that are fundamentally human in origin. "These people. . .honor me with their words, but their hearts are really far away from me." When I stand in Mass as we are getting ready to hear the Gospel, we always make the sign of the cross on our heads, our lips, and our hearts so that we remember that the love of God we have should be in our thinking, in our testimony to the world - on our lips -  and in our hearts. I usually add a cross on my leg too, so that I remember that the love of God MUST ultimately be expressed in what I do - how I walk in the world. The Catholic Church is an ancient institution. It has gone through every kind of human experience, and it is true that sometimes the solutions it has come up with to deal with problems lead some to be too focused on the "rules" - the "doctrines." I pray for those in leadership that they focus on what is core - how we live our lives and testify to the place of God in our lives.

The OT readings were three Psalms - 111 through 113.  They all focus on the happiness of those who truly follow the commandments of the Lord, the commandments he has given through his prophets, but especially those commandments that he places on our hearts. "How wonderful are the things the Lord does. All who are delighted with them want to understand them." The psalms all reiterate how those who do God's will and love his presence will be rewarded in this life, and I confess I do not see that this is always true in the material way the psalms seem to promise: "He provides food for those who honor him" (111:3). "A good person will never fail. . .he is certain to see his enemies defeated" (112:6-8). "He raises the poor from the dust, he lifts the needy from their misery and makes them companions of princes" (113:7-8). Certainly on an inward level he rewards his faithful, but the prosperity part does not always seem to hold. I think there is a tension, in the Old Testament especially, between the conviction that those who are faithful will always be rewarded by God in a worldly way - with prosperity or victory on the battlefield - and the realization that this is not always the case - Job's story. It is a debate that continues to this day with ministers out there who insist that God will reward faithfulness with prosperity and success in all things, and those who simply know it isn't always true. Sometimes the faithful die struggling for justice or even peacefully testifying for a justice that others in control resist with all the power they can muster.