25 October 2019 – Friday of 29th week – Luke 12:54-59

      I remember visiting a patient in hospice in Tupelo.  He had been a Methodist minister in the Jackson area but had converted to Catholicism.  We were talking about the need for us pastors to speak about the topics of the day and what was going on in the reality of the world.  It was around the time of the Supreme court decision that recognized marriage between two men and two women.  The patient’s wife, who still attended a Methodist church, told me that her pastor would never preach on Church’s stance on topics such as gay marriage or birth control, since those topics were too controversial.  Along that same theme, Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth once famously stated that preachers of God's word should  preach with the Bible in one hand & the newspaper in the other.  Barth understood the relationship between the word of God and the word of the day, that they are intrinsically bound together in such a way that one should always interpret the other.  Today's Gospel from Luke addresses how some in Jesus' day could interpret the weather from the clouds and the appearance of the earth, but they weren’t able to discern the signs of God’s kingdom that Jesus proclaimed to them.  Jesus message is still applicable to us today.  We’re so technologically advanced, yet we often miss the message that God is trying to convey to us.  “The signs of the times” was an important theme of the Second Vatican Council, as it called us to interpret God's Word through the signs of our modern era, yet to also be true to the original message of Jesus and the message preached by the early Church fathers.  We have a lot of issues we are facing as a society, which are all the more difficult due to the fractured and volatile political climate we live in. It is important to take these matters to prayer, to see through the lens of our faith, and to reflect upon our Catholic teachings.  May we pray to the Lord today that we are able to authentically interpret his word through the signs of our times, while still being true to the truth and wisdom that speak to us through God's holy word across time and history.