As I reread today’s readings, they seemed to be polar opposites. The first reading from St. Paul and the responsorial psalm are about God’s love and goodness. St. Paul writes to the Ephesians:   “…that you, rooted and grounded in love, may have the strength….and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.”

Then, the response to today’s Psalm is encouraging and hopeful: “The earth is full of the goodness of the Lord.”  
Right when I am feeling the fullness of God’s goodness and love, I immediately come to Luke’s gospel where he quotes Jesus: “Do you think that I have come to establish peace on earth?  No, I tell you, but rather division.”  This abrupt change in direction and tone of the readings left me disconcerted and full of questions. 

Nothing was coming to me as I pondered the pairing of today’s reading and I kept being distracted by this game/song we played with our children:  “One of these things is not like the others.”  The contrast in today’s readings is so glaring, nothing subtle about it.

Fortunately I remembered a term coined by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: “creative maladjustment”.  On September 1,1967, he included this paragraph as part of his speech to to the American Psychological Association:

But on the other hand, I am sure that we will recognize that there are some things in our society, some things in our world, to which we should never be adjusted…We must never adjust ourselves to racial discrimination and racial segregation. We must never adjust ourselves to religious bigotry. We must never adjust ourselves to economic conditions that take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few. We must never adjust ourselves to the madness of militarism, and the self-defeating effects of physical violence.”

Shortly after that, my husband Paul asked if I had seen the recent remarks given by the United Nations’ Secretary-General Antonio Guterres:  “We are locked in colossal global disfunction…our world is in peril – and paralyzed.” 

And the reason for the extreme contrast in today’s readings became evident.  While Jesus was all about love and inclusion, he was also about making our communities more equitable.  He challenged the authorities in his time and I believe he would challenge today’s reality in America that 1% of the population has about the same amount of wealth as 90% of Americans.   

Jesus did not want us to adjust and adapt ourselves to live in a world where one in six children are hungry; more than 100 million people are refugees; and climate change is so damaging our world and destroying people’s homes and way of life. I like to think that the Jesus in today’s Gospel is encouraging us to be “creatively maladjusted” to these realities. 

Individually we cannot resolve any of these pressing problems. But we can do something and I think that is why Paul is reminding us to be ‘rooted and grounded in love’.  Knowing and believing that, we can feel empowered to do something about these overwhelming issues. Being reminded of that will help us remain hopeful and give us the ability to see where and when we can make a difference.