Musings while in church…

I went to church today with my mom and in the homily the priest began by remarking about the Democratic Presidential candidates giving a bunch of speeches last week before the Iowa caucuses. Then he said something about how a year from now we’ll be hearing another speech, but it will be an inaugural address by whomever is elected president. He then tied it into today’s Gospel reading of the beginning of the book of Luke by saying that Jesus had his inaugural address in this passage. The quick and dirty was that as the first act in his ministry, Jesus went into the temple and pulls out a scroll of the book of Isaiah and reads aloud this passage:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring glad tidings to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord.

After the priest had mentioned inaugural addresses I thought about this quotation from Isaiah and scared myself: George W. Bush could say the exact same thing at the beginning of a second term and it wouldn’t surprise me one bit. It would sum up his past actions and make clear his reasoning for the future…