Today's response to the psalm is about as hard as any in the liturgical year.
You have forgotten God who gave you birth.
While we may be able to say that isn't true in a general sense, it may be true in a sporadic sense. If you are reading this blog chances are your general faith is in good shape. For most of us the real challenge is constancy, keeping God in our conscious mind all the time.
In today's gospel we have the famous young man. The gospel says:
The young man said to him, "All of these I have observed. What do I still lack?"
Jesus said to him, "If you wish to be perfect, go, sell what you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me."
When the young man heard this statement, he went away sad,
for he had many possessions.
Most of us like to think of ourselves as middle-class. It some how sounds better than rich. The bible never uses such a term. The Bible challenges us to see the world in starker terms; people are either rich or poor. Truth is, most of us are rich. We not only have what we need, but also a lot of things we merely want. We have so much stuff, we complain about the lack of storage space. There is an entire storage industry from "space bags" to condense our stuff, to rentable storage facilities to store our extra stuff.
I am afraid nothing will stop the insanity of both sides from now until the elections. But once the smoke clears, and the elections are done, the two sides are going to have to work together and hard choices are going to need to be made. In what way is this gospel going to be part of the discussion? Or will those of us who have more than we need, as today's psalm suggests, conveniently forget.
