OXYGEN

09 Sep – Tuesday in the Twenty-Third Week in Ordinary Time; St Peter Claver, religious, priest, missionary

St Peter was a Jesuit from age 20. He ministered, physically and spiritually, to slaves when they arrived in Cartegena, converting a reported 300,000, and working for humane treatment on the plantations for 40 years. He organized charitable societies among the Spanish in America. St Peter said of the slaves, “We must speak to them with our hands by giving, before we try to speak to them with our lips.”

- Patron Saints Index

____________________

1 Cor 6:1-11

How dare one of your members take up a complaint against another in the law courts of the unjust instead of before the saints? As you know, it is the saints who are to ‘judge the world’; and if the world is to be judged by you, how can you be unfit to judge trifling cases? Since we are also to judge angels, it follows that we can judge matters of everyday life; but when you have had cases of that kind, the people you appointed to try them were not even respected in the Church. You should be ashamed: is there really not one reliable man among you to settle differences between brothers and so one brother brings a court case against another in front of unbelievers? It is bad enough for you to have lawsuits at all against one another: oughtn’t you to let yourselves be wronged, and let yourselves be cheated? But you are doing the wronging and the cheating, and to your own brothers.

You know perfectly well that people who do wrong will not inherit the kingdom of God: people of immoral lives, idolaters, adulterers, catamites, sodomites, thieves, usurers, drunkards, slanderers and swindlers will never inherit the kingdom of God. These are the sort of people some of you were once, but now you have been washed clean, and sanctified, and justified through the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and through the Spirit of our God.

____________________

Luke 6:12-19

Jesus went out into the hills to pray; and he spent the whole night in prayer to God. When day came he summoned his disciples and picked out twelve of them; he called them ‘apostles’: Simon whom he called Peter, and his brother Andrew; James, John, Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew, Thomas, James son of Alphaeus, Simon called the Zealot, Judas son of James, and Judas Iscariot who became a traitor.

He then came down with them and stopped at a piece of level ground where there was a large gathering of his disciples with a great crowd of people from all parts of Judaea and from Jerusalem and from the coastal region of Tyre and Sidon who had come to hear him and to be cured of their diseases. People tormented by unclean spirits were also cured, and everyone in the crowd was trying to touch him because power came out of him that cured them all.

____________________

.. Oughtn’t you to let yourselves be wronged, and let yourselves be cheated?

A moral theologian once posed this question: Imagine a group of schoolchildren being held hostage by a terrorist, and you are given a gun with one bullet in it. You are told that either you kill the terrorist and save the children, or the terrorist will kill the children. What is the morally right thing to do?

In today’s first reading, St. Paul asks the Corinthians a curious question. “Oughtn’t you to let yourselves be wronged, and let yourselves be cheated?” he asks. What sort of question is that? Why should we allow ourselves to be wronged and cheated? Because when we are wronged and cheated, we will have lost only material possessions. Whereas when we wrong others and cheat others, we will have lost something far more valuable – part of our soul.

As Christians, we believe in the Resurrection of the Body, one of the core tenets of our faith. This teaching tells us that even if our bodies die, we will still live, and our actions taken with our bodies determine what state our soul will be in when we die. It is therefore better to die a good person, than to live as a bad person. In the larger realm of things, material possessions, including our own body, are neither good nor bad, but they can help us to become good persons or bad persons depending on what we do with them.

My friends, let us remember that our main purpose of our existence is not to have a happy existence on earth, good as it may be, but to cooperate with God’s grace in making us worthy to enter into Heaven. Jesus wants us to go to Heaven. The question is: do you?

(Today’s sharing by Daniel Tay)

___________________

Prayer: We pray for all people leading immoral lives, idolaters, adulterers, catamites (boys in sexual relations with men), sodomites, thieves, usurers, drunkards, slanderers, and swindlers, that they may hear the call of Jesus through us to “Repent, for the kingdom of Heaven is near at hand.”

Thanksgiving: We give thanks to the Lord for sending us on a mission to cooperate with Jesus to save the world.

____________________
Upcoming readings:

Wed, 10 Sep – 1 Cor 7:25-31, Luke 6:20-26
Thu, 11 Sep – 1 Cor 8:1-7. 11-13, Luke 6:27-38
Friday, 12 Sep – 1 Cor 9:16-19. 22b-27, Luke 6:39-42; Holy Name of Mary
Saturday, 13 Sep – 1 Cor 10:14-22, Luke 6:43-49; St John Chrysostom, Bishop, doctor of the Church

____________________
To subscribe to this mailing list, send a blank e-mail to this address:
Godismyoxygen-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
To unsubscribe to this mailing list, send a blank e-mail to this address:
Godismyoxygen-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
____________________