Reading Francis

Luke is the prequel to the Acts of the Apostles and my favorite of the four gospels. It’s written so beautifully that I had to put the Good News translation away and go back to a more traditional one that is true to its poetry.

There’s a lot, just in Chapter 1. Last week I read all 5 chapters of the letter to James every day to start the day, but tonight I had to quit about a quarter of the way through the first chapter of Luke because I’d already passed over too many rich themes and knew how much was to come. 

But just one thing for tonight.

Earlier this evening I was pouring out some frustrations at God, and I put it into something like a poem that’s too much for anywhere but this site. But part of my lament is that, to armchair quarterback God, we could really use a prophet to lift our eyes above the brokenness and idolatry of our world and reorient us to love as our essential calling.

So in the first story of Chapter 1 of the Gospel of Luke, we hear about a child to come who “will be filled with the Holy Spirit even from his mother’s womb, and he will turn many…to their Lord their God. He will go…to turn the hearts of fathers toward children and the disobedient to the understanding of the righteous, to prepare a people fit for the Lord.” (Luke 1:15-17)

That’s the prophet we need today. That child, who will be John the Baptist.