Narrative Lectionary Key Verse for Today
“A voice on the bare heights is heard,
the plaintive weeping of Israel’s children,
because they have perverted their way,
they have forgotten the Lord their God:
Return, O faithless children,
I will heal your faithlessness. ”
NL Daily Devotion for Monday, June 16, 2025
by R. M. Fergus, Clergy Stuff
Our society is weeping. We, collectively, as a western culture, have forgotten God. Not in the Christian Nationalist ideological sense that we need some kind of puritanical literalist return to the strict purity of Old Testament law (which comes from a gross misinterpretation of said law, in my opinion.) We have forgotten God in the sense that we no longer center our spiritual relationship with God in our lives. We are driven by relentless messaging and media to believe we alone can force life to give us what we want, and we pursue it even at the cost of the wellbeing of our neighbors. While it can be easy to lament on behalf of those whose lives are being directly destroyed by the policies of our current administration, we also need to step back and be honest with ourselves about how our small, daily choices contribute to the climate that allowed this kind of crass power-grabbing to have risen up in the first place.
The prophet calls us to repent. To turn back to God. To wake up and be alive to God’s presence in all of creation. To glory and revel in that presence, and to be strengthened by it to take action to extend God’s radical welcome to one another—to all people and all that God has made. We cannot transform our faithless society if we are not willing to let God transform ourself.
Where is God calling me into transformative relationship today? What actions can I take to re-center myself in God?
