Tuesday of Holy Week
Today’s reading from Isaiah first spoke to me when I was doing a volunteer year of service down in Texas. It was this time of year, and I very much felt like my time of service was a waste. The effect on those I was serving was questionable, and it seemed like all around were people making terrible mistakes that we're wasting the effort and goodwill of all sorts of generous people. I missed my family and a lot of opportunities that required the money that I wasn’t making. I was broke and in debt. Reading these words of encouragement got me through: “Though I thought I had toiled in vain, and for nothing, uselessly spent my strength, yet my reward is with the Lord…”
None of us knows what results will come from our efforts to do good works in the world. They may bear fruit, but they may also be washed away by bad luck and random chance. Yet the Lord honors our efforts; who else besides our God are we really trying to please anyway? Whether or not our efforts are successful, the Holy Spirit can use our lives as material for transformation into something Holy.
Isaiah believed correctly that his mission was to guide the chosen people back to their homeland, to re-establish the Hebrew people as a Holy People, dedicated to the Lord. But God assures him that something even greater is happening. The new society he is building will be a light to all the nations. The whole world would be blessed through his work. God works like that in the little things that we do. Will our staying home have any effect on the outcome of this worldwide pandemic? No one really knows, but our efforts to exercise Christian charity by slowing the spread will surely be honored by God in ways that we couldn’t guess. The same goes for the creative ways we as Church are reaching out to offer our hands in service and our voices for justice. Will the world be a better place after all this? That’s for God to decide; for us, we only need to remember to follow Jesus’s number one rule: Love one another. Love will go out, God will work with it, and it will be enough. Amen.
Chris Nieport