“Give
thanks to the LORD, invoke his name; make known among the nations his deeds. Sing
to him, sing his praise, proclaim all his wondrous deeds.” This is the first verse that we hear in
today’s psalm. This psalm of praise
recounts the wondrous deeds that the Lord has done for his people, the nation
of Israel.
I think that for a lot of us, Ancient
Israel seems so distant and faraway. We
hear about the story of Abraham in the first readings this week, about God
promising to make a great nation of Abraham and his descendants, of God
speaking to Abraham in a dream. And we
celebrate some great saints this week from the Early Church Fathers who passed
down the faith to us – St Irenaeus, St Cyril of Alexandria, and St Peter and St
Paul. Through these readings from
Genesis and through the lives of these saints, we hear about all the struggles
that went on in Ancient Israel, of the persecutions and the heresies that the
Early Church Fathers battled. Many of us
think all of this is so faraway and so far removed from our reality. Yet, our US Conference of Catholic Bishops
felt the need to recognize a second annual Fortnight for Freedom this year, in
which we recognize the importance of having the freedom to live out the values
of our Catholic faith. The fact that the
bishops feel the need to declare a Fortnight for Freedom a second year in a row
should tell us a lot about the reality we face today as modern believers, a
reality that is not really that removed from Ancient Israel and the Early
Church.
So how are we witnesses for our faith
in our modern world? How are proclaiming
the wondrous deeds of the Lord to all the nations?
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