Tuesday, October 7, 2025
Memorial of Our Lady of the Rosary
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Ritual
In that first hardly noticed moment
in which you wake,

there is a small opening
into the new day, which closes
the moment you begin your plans.
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What you can plan is too small
for you to live.
What you can live
wholeheartedly,
will make plans enough
for the vitality hidden in your soul.
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To become human is to become
visible, while carrying
what is hidden
as your unique gift to the world.
I’ve always had mixed feelings about rituals. On the one hand, the words and order have been around for hundreds of years, and any changes have been authorized by the highest authorities. On the other hand, well … the same reasons as the first hand. Wouldn’t it be better to listen to the Lord and say what you hear, more or less spontaneously? And who are those highest authorities, anyway? Don’t they proclaim themselves and thereby lose their position? Jesus calls us to “humble ourselves,” and I know that’s hard to do when power beckons, and absolute power beckons absolutely.
As Joe says in his poem, “What I plan for is too small for me to live. What I can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough for the vitality hidden in my soul.” If the ritual comes from God, that feeds the vitality hidden in my soul.
Neither Jonah (at last obedient) nor the king of Nineveh (also at last obedient?) expected to be doing what they were doing on that fateful day. Jonah had to get back from his shipwreck and now humbled by three days in the belly of the whale, he heard Yahweh simply repeating his original instructions, and this time Jonah followed them.
But Jonah’s anger at the Ninevites had not slackened. So wearing God’s sandwich-board, the seafaring prophet walked from street to street shouting a warning which must have filled him with hopeful expectation.
Forty days more and Nineveh will be destroyed!
Forty days more!
Nineveh will be destroyed!
Yes! Come, o spirit of terror and night, fallen angel of revenge, lead these terrible people to death and destruction. Send them down to the pit forever!
Jonah didn’t say this, but he might be thinking it. God isn’t finished with him yet.
When God saw by their actions how the Ninevites turned from their evil way, he repented of the evil that he had threatened to do to them. He did NOT carry it out.
I scroll down from the Jonah 3, First Reading of today’s lectionary, knowing that the prophet still holds his stubborn grudge, and there’s the first line of today’s Psalm:
If you, O Lord, mark iniquities, who can stand?
With the Lord is kindness
And with him is plenteous redemption.
In the Lutheran church of my childhood the congregation gave full voice to our weekly communal Confession.
Almighty God, merciful Father, I, a poor, miserable sinner, confess to Thee all my sins and iniquities, with which I have ever offended Thee and justly deserve Thy temporal and eternal punishment. But I am heartily sorry for them and sincerely repent of them; and I pray Thee, of Thy boundless mercy, and for the sake of the holy, innocent, bitter suffering and death of Thy beloved Son, Jesus Christ, to be gracious and merciful to me, a poor, sinful being.
Rev. Neitzel then did his part in this ritual, speaking over us what Christians call the Absolution.
Upon this your confession, I, as a called and ordained servant of the Word, announce the grace of God to all of you, and in the stead and by the command of my Lord Jesus Christ I forgive you all your sins in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Pastor Neitzel’s declared publicly this announcement of God’s forgiveness, given in Christ’s name and authority to our penitent congregation as a group and as individuals within the group.
I’ll not forget these words, not ever. God imprinted them within me. This ritual, for me, came from God, and I’m thankful.
Blessed are those who hear the word of God and observe it. Alleluia.
(Jonah 3, Psalm 130, Luke 11, Luke 10)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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