27 October 2023 - Friday of the 29th week in Ordinary Time – Luke 12:54-59

     Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth once stated that preachers of God's word should preach with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other hand.  Barth saw an relationship between the word of God and the word of the day, having relevance in the way we live out our faith in the reality of the modern world. God’s word and the reality of our day are intrinsically bound together in such a way that one always interprets the other.  The Second Vatican Council put forth in the fourth paragraph of Guadium et Spes that: "At all times the Church carries the responsibility of reading the signs of the times and interpreting them in the light of the Gospel."  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 were not able to discern the signs that Jesus put before them in his proclamation of God's kingdom.  In our own day, we are very technologically advanced, yet we so often miss the message that God is trying to convey to us. We are called to dialogue with the modern era and to infuse our world with our faith, yet we are also called to be true to the original message of Jesus and the message preached by the early Church fathers. We should never forget this connection. 

       I want to mention an interesting saint of the day, St Oran of Iona.  He arrived on the island of Iona on the western coast of Scotland with St Columba in the year 563, the first men to bring the Christian faith to the people of Scotland. They tried in vain to build a chapel on the island, but everything the built in a day would lay in ruins the next morning.  According to legend, Columba had a vision that the land required a sacrifice for the chapel to stand up. Oran offered himself as a sacrifice, to be buried alive so that the building would stand. This was not meant to be a pagan sacrifice, but a sacrifice to their faith and to build up the Church in Scotland. The chapel built over the place of St Oran’s grave still stands, a symbol of the faith of those monks who brought the Christian faith to Scotland.  Whether this legend is true or not, it is told to symbolize the many sacrifices that were made by the early Christians in order to pass down the faith to us.  The truth contained in this legend about St Oran speaks to us today.